Thomas Roche's BOILED HARD

Pulp fiction publisher Hard Case Crime recently relaunched in a new partnership with UK publisher Titan Books. For about a year, Hard Case was on a hiatus made necessary by Dorchester Publishing’s demise as the longest-running mass market format only paperback publisher in the country. Dorchester, the HCC line’s publisher, decided to dump the mass market format in favor of an ebook focus with selected titles being brought out in the larger trade paper format (if they’re successful). Publisher Charles Ardai found that untenable, since the Hard Case idea was entirely founded in the mass market concept.

As Hard Case gets up to speed again, Ardai makes an appearance over at Huffington post, where he talks about the birth of Hard Case Crime and how the cover aesthetic of the series sums up the content — probably better than any other line out there. He also takes the opportunity to share the next seven covers from Hard Case Crime, including Robert Silverberg’s Blood on the Mink, Christa Faust’s Choke Hold, Lawrence Block’s Getting Off, Joseph Koenig’s False Negative, the long-awaited unpublished Donald E. Westlake novel The Comedy is Finished, Max Allan Collins’s Quarry’s Ex and The Consummata, which Collins wrote from his friend Mickey Spillane’s unfinished manuscript (a sequel to The Delta Factor.)

Speaking of Spillane, he rather famously blurbed Hard Case when it started and his book Dead Street was posthumously published by them. The story won’t be new to anyone who’s been following Hard Case, but it’s still a good story. Here’s Ardai on how the Mickster’s first novel I, the Jury spawned the postwar noir paperback form and later inspired the Hard Case concept:

Back in the 1940s and 50s, there was an explosion in the popularity of paperback crime novels, triggered mainly by the success of Mickey Spillane’s first Mike Hammer opus, “I, The Jury” (You think Harry Potter’s huge, or “The Da Vinci Code?” Hammer had them both beat. At one point, seven of the 15 best-selling books of all time were Spillane novels). To cash in on Spillane’s success, competing paperback lines sprang up, each trying to outdo the others with lurid, sexy, painted covers and titles like “Say It With Bullets” or “Kiss My Fist!” The pulp fiction style sold millions of books and remained popular for several decades before finally petering out from a glut of material and the changing tastes of readers.

Flash forward half a century: graphic design genius Max Phillips and I are out drinking on a cold winter night and one of us asks the other, “Why doesn’t anyone publish great-looking, fun books like that anymore?” The other hoists his glass and says, “Why don’t we?” And Hard Case Crime is born.

[Link.]

 

If Roger Zelazny’s best science fiction and fantasy novels are strikingly Chandlerian, was there ever a Zelaznyesque crime novel? Not until the surfacing of The Dead Man’s Brother, a “lost” manuscript probably written in 1970 or 1971.

That’s when Zelazny was at the height of his powers, the same general era that bore a long string of excellent science fiction novels and some stunningly innovative fantasies like Jack of Shadows, probably my very favorite Zelazny book.

The Dead Man’s Brother was discovered by Zelazny’s agent Kirby McCauley, and somehow ended up with Hard Case Crime — the perfect home for it. I’m going to guess it ended up with HCC both because the publishing world outside the science fiction community never seemed to quite “get” Zelazny, and because Trent Zelazny, the elder Zelazny’s son, is a huge fan of noir fiction. (He’s also quite an author in his own right.)

Whatever the provenance of Brother‘s happy home, it couldn’t fit anywhere better than right where it is. The Dead Man’s Brother is about an art-thief-turned-art-dealer who gets mixed up in a plot involving the CIA, the Vatican, and a rebel movement in the jungles of Brazil. Do you need to know anything more? Nope, because the second you pick it up you’ll blink, look around, and wonder how two or three hours have passed. You will have slurped the damn thing down and I only hope, for your sake, you haven’t been reading on public transportation. If you have, you might want to check if you might have gotten rolled, and also investigate which city and/or state you’ve ended up in. It’s that good, that hard, that fast, that impossible to put down.

Does it work? Hell’s bells, does it work! The Dead Man’s Brother is a fast-paced, gorgeous piece of crime fiction that would have fit as easily beneath the pulp cover Hard Case put on it or the weird photo-covers they put on mainstream international thrillers in those days. And wherever it had gone, it would have been rhapsodic poetry, cover to cover, and that’s what it is today. If crime is your poison, this is one of the best. It’s quick, hard, brutal, and uncompromising. But there are other authors who can do that…some as well, or almost as well, as Zelazny. What The Dead Man’s Brother brings to the table that is absolutely unique is the Zelazny feel…dour, world-weary, erudite, clever, unimpressed by human foibles but in love with the arts and the good life and the wicked twist of a phrase or a sentence that nobody seems to be expecting.

Speaking of weird ’70s thriller photo-covers, I remember shelf after shelf in my grandparents’ house, packed with the half-trashy, half-snooty paperbacks that Zelazny was probably imitating. If it was published in the seventies and it had a cover with a .25 Beretta, a Gold Krugerrand and a tube of lipstick on the cover, that’s the genre Zelazny was aping here. He blew them all out of the water in a book he never even bothered to get published. Here, he skunks Helen MacInnes; he drop-kicks Alistair MacLean; he spanks Ian Fleming and sends him home crying. For what it’s worth, The Dead Man’s Brother even gives John LeCarre a wedgie.

But since I brought up LeCarre, it’s worth considering for a moment where international thrillers like The Spy Who Came In From the Cold deviate from international thrillers like The Dead Man’s Brother. I think it’s important, to me at least, in figuring out why Zelazny and LeCarre occupy very different niches in my pantheon of genre writers.

My one beef with Zelazny has always been that he never seemed to push himself in dealing with deeper themes. Though his life seems to have  had its share of drama — as does everyone’s — most of his work seems to only hint at a depth of inner experience.

Meanwhile John LeCarre is at times as brilliant a stylist as Zelazny, but LeCarre’s action scenes and incidences of physical jeopardy and emotional tension lack the intensity I crave in my crime novels. As an amateur student of British history, I find generalizations about the “English character” deeply distasteful, but there’s no escaping the fact that for my American tastes, LeCarre is usually if not always far too polite. If even the boneheaded Ian Fleming could be bothered to thrill at violence now and then, doesn’t it stand to reason that a competent writer like LeCarre, whose ideas reflect a bona-fide political existentialism at times, would bring an urgency to his violent scenes that matches or exceeds other spy writers who don’t seem to have a deep or wounded sense of life’s futility and beauty?

Sadly…not really. LeCarre has written effective scenes of menace, to my mind, in only two novels — the aforementioned The Spy Who Came in… and Our Game. He tried with Absolute Friends, but never got there because by the time on-screen violence occurs, the novel has long since lapsed into pedantry. Most of LeCarre’s works in the interim have been weak on the action and long on the slow.

Why I mention it here is that LeCarre’s works, on the other hand, feature the intensely powerful interpersonal and political themes that I always want from a stylist as evocative as Zelazny, but never quite get. In The Dead Man’s Brother, Zelazny unquestionably comes closer to those interpersonal insights and real-world intensity than he did anywhere else, with the exception of his brilliant early short stories and novellas.

It may sound like a strange observation, but I think if Zelazny had gone the direction that The Dead Man’s Brother seemed to have been taking him, there’s a chance he might have gotten there. Zelazny certainly had the brains and the balls to understand how the world works, on an interpersonal, geopolitical and historical level, and the humanity to care. The fact that he seems to have remained largely apolitical in his writing may not be an absolute of his personality, and it might have changed in the environment that ’70s crime novels would have represented. Not having known the man, I wouldn’t really know.

Anyway, back to The Dead Man’s Brother itself, with which I have no beef whatsoever — “deeper themes” be damned, it’s one of the best crime novels ever written.

The aforementioned Trent Zelazny, the Z-man’s son, speculates in his afterword that his father did not plan the book as his “breakthrough,” but rather just wrote what was in his brain. He says that at the time it was (probably) written, Zelazny was reading a lot of crime fiction, so it makes sense he would have headed this direction…knowing Roger Z’s writing, it does seem unlikely that he sat down and planned it out as a career move. From what I can tell, he wrote what he loved at any given moment…a habit that is in keeping with his visceral love of language.

If you’re an aspiring action writer, there is no better tutorial on how to write action scenes than reading The Dead Man’s Brother alongside Zelazny’s Damnation Alley. If you’re a science fiction or fantasy fan, it doesn’t get better than Zelazny’s writing in either genre, especially some of his his stunning early short stories and novellas.

But regardless of whether you give a damn about science fiction or Roger Zelazny, if you appreciate a crime thriller that punches you in the face so hard you have to go looking for your molars about six blocks over, grab The Dead Man’s Brother and see how it’s done.

(Originally reviewed on Thomasroche.com, 04/25/2009)

Lawrence Block has had a varied and at times wacky career, displaying some odd twists and turns and a habit of always writing with almost terrifying professionalism. Even on those rare occasions when Block is not especially good, he still functions on such a professional level that his lieast interesting books are still compulsively readable. The relatively few less-interesting books of his that I’ve read seem a little like running Lou Reed through AutoTune…except, as you probably know, there is no AutoTune in writing crime novels. Block manages it anyway.

Some of Block’s more formulaic crime novels are less inspired than his earlier, more hard-boiled work, and it’s really not my cup of tea. But in my experience even the coziest of his novels never deviate from a simple and almost reflexive level of readability. They’re so piquant and yet so standardized that I’d think there was some sort of deception involved, if I didn’t know better. And I know better because I’ve read the colossally bland later entries in Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch series, in which it becomes clear that either a) Connelly is using a ghostwriter, or b) he’s phoning it in with almost insulting disinterest in the craft. Block never seemed like that, even when he was cranking out stuff that he must have gotten paid $50 for. He always pounded it out with a vengeance that shows an almost creepy competence with the storytelling process.

Viewed in that context, A Diet of Treacle, first published in 1961 as Pads Are For Passion under Block’s soft-porn pseudonym Sheldon Lord, is one freaky book, man, like, crazy. It’s one of those odd twists and turns that Block’s career took: a straight-up exploitation novel of the type that’s perhaps the purest distilled form of the divine trash that inspired Hard Case Crime’s branded look.

A Diet of Treacle is part of that genre that circulates as postcards hipsters snicker at in funky tchotchke shops in the Mission or on Christopher Street, not the sorts of things a sane person actually reads. Believe me, I’ve tried! But if you, like me, can pore in rapturous horror over the execrable prose, tight sweaters and John Waters melodramas in the novels of Ed Wood Jr. and get baked crispy to Reefer Madness, then the exploitation genre that birthed A Diet of Treacle is for you.

Perhaps more importantly, Treacle is one of the best examples of the weird and small sub-subgenre of “Beatsploitation,” which featured novels with Beat Generation themes. Trashy publishers were trying to feed off the same craze that spawned Gilligan’s chin-beard on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. Beatsploitation books are actually hard to get your hands on. That’s because the amazingly weird covers make them collector’s items.

Viewed as a trashy “exploitation vacation” from Block’s far more intense works (Mona/Grifter’s Game, The Girl With the Long Green Heart) and Hard Case Crime’s many high-quality sucker punches, A Diet of Treacle is an infuriating and annoying book. It can be cheesy at times…in fact, it is cheesy, most of the time. But it refuses to be the piece of crap that other exploitation novels often turn out to be. It’s packed with camp, and it holds a fascinating place in history. I mean…a beatsploitation drug-hysteria novel written by the great Lawrence Block? Like…whoa. For what it’s worth, this book is best read with On the Road kept in your recent memory.

Anyway, Treacle concerns a nice-ish kid and a not-so-nice-ish Korean War vet getting lost on the road to Crazyville, man, and getting mixed up with one bad man who’s, like, out there, man, I mean like BEAT, you dig? Horse, man. The big H. Like, CRAZY. That’s about as authentic as it feels. There’s no real complex crime story, but at no point does the action slow down; it’s Block through and through, a fast-moving and breezy despite its dorky overblown exploitation elements. And there are plenty of those; it’s fairly silly, actually. But it never bogs down like a hell of a lot of crime novels. It’s an easy read, satisfying enough, and a transporting and inspired glimpse of an imagined seedy underworld that never existed outside of trashy novels.

If you’re interested in counterculture history, there are a lot of interesting references here. For instance, “Mexican Brown,” in modern times a type of heroin, is referred to as a crappy kind of marijuana. That seems like it was probably just an error on Block’s part — but who knows? I couldn’t find a reference for the slang term having ever applied to marijuana…but it’s moments like that — glimpses of historical underground and criminal mysteries — that absolutely make a book like this for me.

Overall, the portrayal of the drug culture from the era of the book is fascinating as a pop-culture artifact. However, the depth and accuracy seem to be  pretty weak. The big moral turnaround of the book is when a girl gets high on tea and suddenly goes nuts, having public sex with her druggie boyfriend in front of everyone at a downtown beat party, man. Like crazy. It’s fairly silly. It’s more than a little hysterical. But it’s never really bad enough to be funny, which works both for and against it.

That said, A Diet of Treacle is only maybe the twelfth exploitation novel I’ve ever read all the way through, some of the others being Junky and Queer by William S. Burroughs, Killer in Drag and Death of a Transvestite/Let Me Die In Drag by the aforementioned Wood, and S is for Stud, rumored to be by Jim Thompson. (Incidentally, that total doesn’t include straight-up porn novels; if it did, the number would easily be well into the triple digits, which is a little scary when I think about it as a virtual pile of sleaze.)

I honestly have no idea if Block rewrote this thing for the Hard Case Crime publication, to make it match his level of expected competence now that he’s had a career to learn his craft. If he did, I can’t blame him. The results are pretty enjoyable, if not exactly good.

If Block didn’t rewrite Treacle before allowing it to be reprinted, and this is how it came blasting outta his brain near the start of his career, for low pay and probably without much editing?

That, then, is absolutely terrifying.The guy just cranked this stuff out when he was twenty-three? That makes me wanna lay on the floor and twitch. It may not be good, but it’s some of the most competent not-good around.

Public domain Federal government photo from Wikipedia.

In an article from the 23rd, the Christian Science Monitor‘s Randy Dotinga interviews Hard Case Crime’s Charles Ardai about the role of women in James M. Cain’s work, and The Cocktail Waitress, the unpublished Cain novel Ardai discovered in the papers of Cain’s agent. Hard Case Crime, recently relaunched in partnership with UK publisher Titan, will be publishing The Cocktail Waitress in Fall, 2012, says a Titan Books press release.

Now, the world of vintage noir fiction is a relatively small universe of complete obsessives; the fact that I’m completely flipping out over having a new Cain novel discovered seems like it should be more or less irrelevant to the mopes out there who aren’t all that sure if he’s the guy who wrote The Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep, or if maybe he’s the guy Humphrey Bogart played in the movie where he clicked two balls together.

But I’m off my nut, as usual. It turns out the discovery of an unpublished novel from the author of Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Mildred Pierce warrants fandangos from the mainstream. There’s been coverage of The Cocktail Waitress everywhere: The Guardian, USA Today, Media Bistro, Publisher’s Weekly, and points further afield like The Violent World of Parker, which said “What would we do without Hard Case Crime? Wither away and die, I suspect. (It then embedded a YouTube video of Sonic Youth’s “Mildred Pierce,” which pleased the cockles of my aging punk soul, spanking me back to a time when I drove up to Berkeley to see that estimable band, and discovered opening for them these guys from Seattle no one gave a fuck about.)

Oh and BTW, speaking of obsessives, here’s one of the Q’s from the CSM, and one of Ardai’s A’s:

Q: How are you figuring out which revisions to keep and which ones to take out?

A: There are some parts that are easier. For the rest, I’m going to be spending some time in the archive rooms at the Library of Congress going through correspondence, and I’ll go through all the primary source evidence I’ve got to determine what his intent would have been. I’ll be doing the work of a responsible editor to shape it into the best story it could be.

Oh, also, opening for the next Ardai novel:

Q: The book has multiple revisions of the ending. How will you figure out which one to keep?

A: There’s a good deal of variety, but the core events are the same in them. The last line does not change, nor should it.

…which is exactly the kind of teaser yours truly loses sleep over, obsessive as I am over Cain endings. Me, I’m not so good on what my psychiatrist likes to call the, like, the Delayed Gratification. I’d even venture so far as to suggest that Mr. Ardai might wish to reinforce the locks on the Hard Case offices, especially given the inspiration that could be drawn from a HCC novel I recently perused in my copious leisure time. That could be drawn, mind you. Could be. If one were, like, of criminal nature.

Ardai’s original email to the faithful says the acquisition was made “After more than 9 years of detective work and negotiation.” The great blog Pulp Serenade actually went so far as to track down and excerpt Cain’s comments about The Cocktail Waitress from a 1976 issue of Film Comment. The next day The Guardian quoted the same passage, proving either that information wants to be free or that, oh, maybe the world of vintage noir fiction is a relatively small universe of complete obsessives.

I’m on record as thinking that when it comes to writing, Cain is an absolute genius beyond all meaning of the word. He’s so damn good that the (in my opinion) not-quite-home-run Grand Guignol ending of Double Indemnity, the novel, doesn’t faze me one bit, especially since the brilliant novel’s dying lapse in brilliance was so beautifully remedied in the un-fucking-believably good screenplay by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler.

This is one of the absolute best screenplays ever written, without question, and for various reasons one of the weirdest documents in literary or cinematic history. It was rendered in a feat of truly inspired screenwriting accomplished by two masters against all odds when they weren’t busy plotting to kill each other. As I wrote of the screenplay’s closing moments, “This is classic America, A-list noir, the soul of the nation laid open and bloody with a tire iron.”

By the way, did you know James M. Cain attacked Ernest Hemingway’s writing in print, in response to comparisons of him with Papa? I remember him being particularly nasty in a letter reprinted in an ancient reprint of an editorial I dug up at the UCSC library umpteen years ago. One of the reasons Cain hated Hemingway, as I recall? The H-man used too many four letter words. Hell’s bells, could Elmore fucking Leonard make this shit up?

The excitement over this acquisition just goes to prove a fact that I’ve been thinking about alot, lately, particularly since someone just spent forty-five minutes interrogating me about the use of the “rude” word “douchebag” in the opening lines of The Panama Laugh. It’s the “relatively small universes” of “complete obsessives” that determine WTF the “mainstream” mopes think, when they finally come around and stop trying to burn us at the stake.

What I mean to say is that the people who determine the future direction of culture and thought are not in fact the Walter Huffs, who can be driven to murder by the promise of plenty cheddar and the love of a dame with an ankle bracelet.

No, the people who matter are the ones who are, to paraphrase Chandler, walk the mean streets but are not themselves mean.

The ones who build a better world — not one where misery doesn’t happen, but where it means something — aren’t the ones who think that cash and some dreamy fantasy of bullshit love will finally free them from the rot that grows from within.

The people I care about are the ones who walk the mean streets because they give a flying fuck what the hell that rot means…and what it means when the moon blazes bright overhead and then you and the chick with the anklet go and toss yourselves in. Or Edward G. Robinson fires up a match and lights a guy’s smoke and says, “You’re finished, Neff.”

Abdelilah Hamdouchi's The Final Bet, billed as the first Arabic police procedural translated into English.

Interesting piece in TheNational.ae, a United Arab Emirates newspaper, about the dearth of translators available to translate books from Arabic into English — whereas demand is rising. From what I can tell, there’s not really a thriving Arabic crime fiction scene, but it’s a UAE newspaper so that’s what they’re interested in.

Insofar as there is genuine interest on the English language side it is pretty obviously in response to Steig Larsson’s books being so successful. There was a scramble to secure English translation rights for Swedish crime writers after The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo hit the best-seller lists, and now I guess the English language publishing world is looking for the new fertile ground.

To my knowledge there is not a thriving Arabic language crime fiction scene, but there are a lot of Arabic speakers so there is unquestionably some. Soho Crime, over the years, has found noir fiction in places throughout the world that I never would have dreamed it existed. But in the Arabic world, the possibilities for noir fiction seem almost mind-bogglingly huge.

Yet so few books get translated from Arabic into English in the first place, partially because of there being relatively few translators — but ultimately I believe it’s because English language audiences are so unbelievably fickle and unpredictable in their reading tastes — and there is, of course, a resounding prejudice against Arabic-language anything in the English speaking world.

If English language publishing is genuinely interested in Arabic language crime fiction, it should view the Mediterranean Noir scene as a cautionary tale; there is a thriving subculture of Italian dark crime writers, and has been for years, yet the relatively large number of Italian Noir books translated into English at best seem to sell as much as your average midlist literary novel, not a best-seller. Anyway, here’s The National:

With Stieg Larsson and Jo Nesbo’s Scandinavian crime fiction continuing to sell millions, and Haruki Murakami’s forthcoming novel one of the publishing events of 2011, fiction translated into English has surely never been so popular. In Murakami’s case, the desire to get IQ84 into the eager hands of English readers as quickly as possible has been so great, the third instalment was translated by a completely different person from the previous two volumes.

An odd decision, but if nothing else it would seem to confirm that these are heady days for in-demand literary translators. Well, not quite. The Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize, now in its second year and due to announce a winner tomorrow, was set up specifically because a new generation of translators is finding it difficult to break through.

“It’s of course natural that publishers only want to commission very experienced translators, because it costs a lot of money and you want the best you can get,” says the founder of the prize, Briony Everroad. “But it means those starting out in translation find it almost impossible to stand out against that kind of competition.”

And Everroad should know – she publishes Nesbo during her day job as an editor at Harvill Secker. She founded the prize last year in the hope that it would redress the balance for those under 35. But what makes the prize unique amid the multitude of literary awards is that the entrants all have to translate the same piece into English. Last year, the original story was in Spanish. And intriguingly, this year the chosen language is Arabic.

[Link.]