L.A. Requiem by Robert Crais

L.A. Requiem by Robert Crais

At the base of Capital Hill in Burnaby, just east of the East Hastings junkietown sprawl of Northern East Vancouver lies a hidden gem of a bookstore, specializing in crime and science-fiction. According to the current owner it was once a haven for occult manuscripts as well, and the old owner was considered to be a wizard of some renown (!!). After the former owner moved on or passed away (I was never clear which), the new owner quickly tired of the sinister characters who would appear at odd hours with peculiar arcane requests. He sold off the occult collection en masse and refocused the shop on mysteries and sci-fi. I don’t know if I believe this little tale or not, but the store’s labyrinth little corridors and delightful stacks certainly carry with them the dust and odor of arcana and the occult.

LT, the Professor, and I visited this shop for the first time in sunny September. After he told me the above story, I asked the owner to turn me on to the best mystery novel I’d never heard of. Without hesitation, he presented me with LA Requiem.

LA Requiem tells us a tale of serial murder and police corruption in early nineteen-nineties Los Angeles. We’ve got police corruption, hardboiled noir, a bit of sleazy sex, and some hard choices. Good stuff, if you like the modern potboiler detective thriller.  

Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell

Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell

Winter’s Bone is a pitch perfect bit of rural noir set against the backdrop of the meth-cooking hillbillies of the Appalachian mountains. A young woman must go in search of her father, in an effort to prove that he is dead, so the bank doesn’t foreclose on her family home. Alone the way she visits an ever expanding web of distant relations, all of whom are secretive, slightly scary, and live out their lives by a different code than most of modern North America.

The language is tight, sparse, with highly believable dialog. A movie of the same name won several awards, I believe. While it was beautifully directed and very well acted, Mr. Woodrell deserves the lion’s share of the credit; Winter’s Bone is a superb piece of work. 

Rogue Island by Bruce deSilva

Rogue Island was the second (of two so far) books that we read as part of our “literature club” (so named just to give it a tongue in cheek distinction from the girls only alkie club to which a few of our members also belong.) Unfortunately, Rogue Island got us off to a bad start, which we’ve not yet recovered from.

On the shitty little Island of Rhode, in the town of Providence, assorted corrupt scumbuckets perform misdeeds. Our anti-hero newspaperman walks these dirty streets, checking noir detective clichés off deSilva’s list, looking for an arsonist. He gets double crossed, finds a little love, etc. etc.

All of this retread turf would be more interesting if I felt that deSilva were somehow offering a new look at a fifty year old formula, or a more interesting insight into the fading days of print journalism; but we get neither. The plot and pacing also get a tad wonky towards the end of the novel, when our hero runs off to nowhere in particular to wait out a few key events, which happen off screen. Then, just to further shred any sympathy we might have had for the broken-hearted narrator, he goes and gets with some random waitress.

I applaud DeSilva’s interest in the detective/noir space, and would probably read his next work, but ultimately, Rogue Island never took me anywhere I hadn’t already been, which made it feel forty years too late to really qualify as even a footnote to the genre.

Double Indemnity by James M. Cain
An honest man falls for the wrong woman, and they end up killing her husband for the insurance money. He’s an insurance man, an expert in sleuthing out insurance fraud. She’s a manipulative bitch who seduces him and cynically manipulates everyone in the novel. No one wins.

Double Indemnity is fast paced and fun to read through. Again, like the rest of Cain’s work, it’s not a crime novel in the way Chandler or Hammett prepared us for. This is more psychosocial drama than anything else.

Mildred Pierce by James M. Cain

Mildred Pierce is a housewife and a baker. When she kicks her husband out for infidelity her life begins. This novel is fabulously successful as a period piece and a look at feminism and class in the nineteen thirties.

Mildred takes a job as a waitress to support her family, including the petulant Vera, one of the least likeable children in literature. We get sex, love, betrayl, crime and a lot of knowledge about how to cook the books (hehe) of a diner.

Of the three James M. Cain novels I read in 2009, this was my favorite, because the texture of the piece and the tragedy of the deal were the best conveyed. Don’t expect gat wielding gangsters here; this is crime of a different sort, and social drama of a more realistic nature.

Woman in the Dark by Dashiel Hammett
This mini-novel is vintage Hammett, but there’s a reason that it isn’t as well known as The Thin Man or Maltese Falcon. His style is minimal here, terse and so unadorned as to be little more than a sketch of actions at some points. A damsel in distress appears in the night and a manly hero rescues her, which quickly turns things into a man-on-the-run tale. It’s not particularly interesting unless you really like the genre or the time period, but it would likely have made for a popular movie in the middle of last century.

The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper by John D. MacDonald

The second John MacDonald novel I read was every bit as quick, but a good deal less interesting than The Deep Blue Goodbye.

Travis McGee goes to a small community in Florida where a beautiful young woman is busy flushing her life down the drain. Investigations, fist-fights, drinking, and boat chases ensue. McGee nearly finds love but is thwarted.

Don’t get me wrong, this is still first class pulp ripoff-noir stuff. It’s just that first class tripe is still tripe.

Entertaining, fast, violent, and characterized by the same sorts of “look at the wreckage of our modern lives” observations as MacDonald’s other work. Great for students of the genre, largely already lost in the back lots of used bookstores for everyone else.

The Deep Blue Goodbye by John D MacDonald

The Deep Blue Goodbye is cool. It’s always fun when you get introduced to a new dirty pleasure you never knew existed. Thanks to friends B & HP in Vancouver, I’m now aware of John D MacDonald the way I’m aware of masturbation, s’mores, or clove cigarettes. None of them really do you any good, but they can be a great deal of fun.

MacDonald is most comparable to either Raymond Chandler or Elmore Leonard. This novel, starring his famous character, Travis McGee, takes place among the marinas, hotel rooms, and bars of steamy Fort Lauderdale and the Keys in the confusing, fading days of the late nineteen sixties. Hot babes, scuzzy criminals, and the wise cracking hero with a knight errant’s heart fill out it’s too short two hundred pages. This is pulp fiction at it’s best—deeply derivative noir soaked in the sunscreen and cheap gin of the Florida Keys.

For my money, MacDonald is closer to Chandler than Leonard. His dialog isn’t so cropped or trendy as the latter, and his plots and characters are more reminiscent of Chandler’s LA crowd than of the mean streets of Detroit.

There’s plenty of sex, a little bit of violence, and lots of fine quipping to enjoy here. I’ll not bother with a plot summary. If you’ve read the above, you already know the kinds of streets you’ll be winding your way along here.

Highly enjoyable, and I found this morning that MacDonald has about ten or twenty other paperbacks available at the local Half Price Books for about $1.25 each. I just bought them all.

Here’s to guilty pleasures! From MacDonald, through the mouth of McGee, a little bit that could almost be Updike:

“Bless them all, the forlorn little rabbits. They are the displaced persons of our emotional culture. They are ravenous for romance, yet settle for what they call making out. Their futile, acne-pitted men drift out of high school into a world so surfeited with unskilled labor there is a competition for bag-boy jobs in the supermarkets. They yearn for security, but all they can have is what they make for themselves, chittering little flocks of them in the restaurants and stores, talking of style and adornment, dreaming of the terribly sincere stranger who will come along and lift them out of the gypsy life of the two-bit tip and the unemployment, cut a tall cake with them, swell them up with sassy babies, and guide them masterfully into the shoal water of the electrified house, where everybody brushes after every meal. But most of the wistful rabbits marry their unskilled men, and keep right on working. And discover the end of the dream. They have been taught that if you are sunny, cheery, sincere, group-adjusted, popular, the world is yours, including barbecue pits, charge plates, diaper service, friends for dinner, washer-dryer combinations, color slides of the kiddies on the home projector and eternal whimsical romance with the crinkly smiles and Rock Hudson dialog. So they all come smiling and confident and unskilled into a technician’s world, and in a few years they learn that it is all going to be grinding and hateful and brutal and precarious. These are the slums of the heart. Bless the bunnies. These are the new people and we are making no place for them. We hold the dream in front of them like a carrot, and finally say sorry you can’t have any. And the schools where we teach them non-survival are gloriously architectured. They will never live in places so fine unless they contact something incurable.”