Saturday Snippet: Queenpin by Megan Abbott

Megan Abbot’s Queenpin charts the relationship between the legendary Gloria Denton, the city’s chief moll, and a young woman who she takes on as an apprentice (my review here). Abbott sure can write and her two principal characters are multi-layered and complex. Here’s how both are introduced.

I want the legs.
That was the first thing that came into my head. The legs were the legs of a twenty-year-old Vegas showgirl, a hundred feet long and with just enough curve and give and promise. Sure, there was no hiding the slightly worn hands or the beginning tugs of skin framing the bones in her face. But the legs, they lasted, I tell you. They endured. Two decades her junior, my skinny matchsticks were no comparison.
In the casinos, she could pass for thirty. The low lighting, her glossy auburn hair, legs swinging, tapping the bottom rim of the tall, better stools. At the track, though, she looked her age. Even swathed in oversized sunglasses, a wide-brimmed hat, bright gloves, she couldn’t outflank the merciless sunshine, the glare off the grandstand. Not that it mattered. She was legend.

Hell, I’ll admit it, I had a taste for the other from the start. Where would a twenty-two-year-old kid rather be? Setting the table for corned beef and cabbage dinner with her old man, forks scrapping, moths fluttering against the window, the briny smell from the kitchen sinking into my skin with each tock of the imitation grandfather clock? Or gliding my way through the fuzzy dark of the Tee Hee, vibrating with low, slow jazz, clusters of juniper-breathed men and women touching, hands on lapels, fingers on silk nylons, cigarettes releasing willowy clouds into every acid green banquette? Sure, it was no El Morocco, but in this town, it might as well have been. The place felt alive, I could hear it beating in my chest, between my hips, everywhere. Clock-out time and I never wanted to leave. I’d grin my way into a Tom Collins from Shep, the lantern-jawed bartender, and watch from the corner stool, watch everything, eating green cherries, the candied drink soaking into my lips, my tongue.

Tell me you don’t want to get to know these two feisty, scheming women?

Review of Queenpin by Megan Abbott (Pocket Books, 2007)

Every morning a young woman studies accounting at the Dolores Grey Business School, in the afternoons she cooks the books at Club Tee-Hee, a rinky-dink joint on the Starlite Strip owned by the mob. She soon attracts the attentions of the legendary Gloria Denton, the city’s chief moll, responsible for collecting the takings from the casinos, racetracks, and betting parlours, paying off the local law, and organising scams and take-downs. With the legs and figure of a twenty year old showgirl, but a poker face that’s now starting to show her age, Denton offers the young woman an apprenticeship, starting her off as a runner and educating her as to the ways of the world and the criminal underworld. The young woman takes to her new life like a duck to water, but despite her own misgivings she falls for a charming loser, and everything starts to fall apart. She’s suckered into a big money scheme, betraying Denton’s trust but at the same time binding them together in order to repair the damage and stave off retribution. Soon they are circling round each other, both unsure of where each other stands but determined to survive.

Abbott’s writing is in the best traditions of noir – dark, edgy, atmospheric, lyrical. The prose is excellent, the narrative taut, and the dialogue snappy. Queenpin is essentially an in-depth character study of two women and their evolving relationship, and Abbott excels at bringing both women fully to life and one is drawn fully into their worlds. My only quibble is that the book really fails to broaden out beyond the master and apprentice relationship to further contextualise them in the world in which they operate; it would have been good to know more about the nitty-gritty of their jobs, the grip of the mob on the city, the local politics and law, their personal histories, and so on (and hence a four star review; The Foreign Correspondent I reviewed on Monday was excellent at siting an in-depth character study in wider social and political contexts at multiple scales). Like Lucarelli’s The Damned Season I reviewed a couple of weeks ago, Abbott has pared the book back as about as far as it can go without losing the essential plot. As a result, the book is quite slight at 180 pages and I wanted more – much more - there and then! This is writing to savour and I didn’t want it to end. This is the first Megan Abbott book I’ve read and I’m looking forward to reading the others post-haste.

A poor hunt turns good

Last Thursday I had to travel into Dublin for a meeting. Since my pre-order splurge has still not arrived I went armed with a list of 15 books I wanted to read and took the opportunity to quickly browse in Murder Ink, Hodges Figgis and Waterstones. I managed to find only two of those desired, but I did manage to come away with four others, so I did feel somewhat sated.

One thing that strikes me about these covers is that they're all quite different, but with perhaps the exception of the rather generic Frost at Christmas, they're also very good and strong designs. There does seem to be a trend at the minute to have quite generic covers with 'atmospheric' tinted photos that bears no relation to the story (for example, Graham Hurley's The Price of Darkness that I reviewed recently), so these are a welcome change.





I'll be posting a review of Queenpin tomorrow and looking forward to tucking into the others in the coming days (although I'm saving the Frost book until Christmas).