Review of Cripple Creek by James Sallis (No Exit Press, 2006)

John Turner, an ex-soldier, ex-Memphis cop, ex-con, and former therapist, has retreated into rural Tennessee where he has been persuaded to work as a deputy sheriff.  His life has found a contented rhythm with his new partner, Val Bjorn, a local legal counsel.  However, that is about to change after Don Lee, the acting sheriff, arrests a man from Memphis for speeding and threatening behaviour.  In the trunk of the car is a nylon sports bag containing 200,000 dollars.  Shortly after, the man is sprung from the police station, Don Lee brutally assaulted and left in coma.  Seeking justice, Turner heads to the city, a place that still haunts him, where he violently confronts the gang responsible, but rather than securing closure he opens up a slow burning feud that threatens his new life.

Cripple Creek is the second book in the John Turner trilogy and although best read in sequence can be read as a standalone.  The three standout qualities of Sallis writing, in general, and which are all evident in this story, are his prose, his characterisation, and his atmospherics.  Sallis is a poet and his storytelling has a wonderful cadence, his style is all tell and no show.  The reader is dropped into Turner’s world of rural America and its inhabitants, its sense of place and social life.  Sallis has a keen eye for the human condition and the ways in which life unfolds.  He paints a picture of Turner as an enigmatic man who cyclically creates moments of contentment that unravel through his own follies; a man reflexive of his own propensity to reinvent and self-destruct almost without effort.  It’s a compelling mix.  On the other hand, the plot seems merely a vehicle for these explorations, and whilst interesting has gaping holes in it, especially with respect to police procedures: Turner is seemingly inured against the legal consequences of his actions and in Cripple Creek manages to kill a couple of people without anyone else batting an eyelid or even filling out a form.  If the plot was as skilfully composed as the rest of the tale, the book would be a knockout.  As it is, it’s somewhat of a flawed diamond.

Review of The Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse by Victor Gischler (Touchstone, 2008)

When the world started to go to hell in a handbasket newly divorced Mortimer Tate headed for the hills in Tennessee and a well stocked cave.  Nine years later, after spotting three men hunting, he ventures out intent on finding out what happened to the world and his ex-wife.  What he finds is a society divided into clans and regressed into the pioneer territory of the wild west.  After being rescued from the clutches of a mad man by a clone of Buffalo Bill, Tate is directed to a Joey Armageddon’s Sassy-Go-Go bar, a kind of cross between a saloon, bordello and trading store, where he swaps some of his stockpiled goods for Armageddon dollars.  He discovers that after the apocalypse his ex-wife had become a stripper at the club and had been traded to another venue.  Using his new dollars he sets off after her with his new sidekick, navigating through a treacherous landscape where there is no law, only the vestiges of some ancient decency and the power of dollars and guns.

The Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse is best taken for what it is, a slice of fun, often cartoonish and violent, apocalyptic noir.  Think of it as a summer action movie, not an art-house film.  The plot just about hangs together, although it sometimes uneven and teeters on the edge of collapse, the prose is workmanlike and the characterisation a little thin, but the pace and energy keeps the tale moving forward through a series of trials for Mortimer Tate, his sidekick, Buffalo Bill, and tag-along stripper, Sheila.  Moreover, Gischler does conjure up a reasonably coherent vision of a post-apocalyptic society that is part Mad Max and part Wild West.  Taken on those terms, the book is an entertaining and enjoyable escapist yarn.

Lazy Sunday Service

I've just been invited to take part in CityLab in New York in October.  It's been a while since I've visited, so I'm looking forward to it.  I'll need to stock up on some New York crime fiction.  Any suggestions?

My posts this week

Review of The Maze of Cadiz by Aly Monroe
Launching oneself into the void
Review of Laidlaw by William McIlvanney
Chasing ghosts

Chasing ghosts

‘There.’

‘What?’

‘Roll it back a bit.’

Stennings tapped at the keyboard.

‘That’s it.  From there.’

They both stared at the monitor.

‘There, did you see it?’

‘See what?’

‘The reflection in that window.’  Napier tapped the screen.

Stennings rewound the footage and played it again.

‘There.’

‘You think that’s him?’

‘Has to be.  Freeze it and zoom in.’

‘Well?’

‘It’s just a blob. Like some alien.’

‘Or a ghost.’

‘How hell did he avoid all the cameras? It’s like he was never there.’

‘I bet the owner would like to know that as well.’ 

‘If he ever wakes up.’




A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words.

Review of Laidlaw by William McIlvanney (Canongate, 1977/2013)

Jennifer Lawson has not returned home Poppies Disco in central Glasgow.  Her patriarchal father wants her found and turns to DI Jack Laidlaw.  Laidlaw is a walking set of paradoxes, a former boxer but hater of violence, a believer in fidelity yet a serial philanderer, a pragmatic, instinctive man of action and a reflective philosopher, compassionate one minute antagonistic the next.  He tells the father to go home and wait and that he’ll look into it.  Later that morning a young woman’s body is found in a park having been raped and murdered.  Laidlaw’s nemesis, DI Milligan is assigned to lead the main investigation.  Laidlaw is given the task of skirting round the edges, looking for angles the main team might have missed.  DC Brian Harkness, a fresh detective, is assigned to help him, warned to learn from Laidlaw but not get corrupted by his unconventional ways.  Laidlaw sets off to find the killer using a mix of guile, wits and street knowledge and contacts, happy to ruffle feathers to see what emerges.  He’s soon on the killer’s trail, but so too are others hoping to get to him before Laidlaw does.

Laidlaw is the first book in what many consider a classic crime trilogy.  First published in 1977, the book set out the blueprint for a generation of Scottish crime fiction detectives, both on print and TV: independent, contrary, hard, compassionate, world-weary, committed, reflexive and with a disastrous home-life; always a gamut of paradoxical traits.  It’s easy to understand the book’s reputation.  It’s a very engaging tale spun by a wordsmith and there’s very little to fault.  The style is all tell and no show, with nice prose and excellent dialogue.  The characterisation is keenly observed, with even very minor characters vividly drawn in just a few words.  The plot has a strong hook and a nice blend of action, feints, twists and dashes of philosophical reflection.  And McIlvanney spins a strong sense of place, time and social context.  Overall, an excellent read that is as much about the human condition as it is a crime story.

Launching oneself into the void

I'm reading Cripple Creek by James Sallis at present.  He's also a poet and it shows in his writing which has a wonderful cadence and is full of atmospherics and reflexive asides.  Parts of the story you could drive a tank through, but it doesn't seem to really matter.  I was particularly taken with his description of consulting:

The business card was for a financial consultant in offices just of Monroe in Memphis.  That consultant thing had always eluded me, I could never understand it.  As society progresses, we move further and further away from those who actually do the work.  Consulting, I figured, was about as far as one could get before launching oneself into the void.

Later on the sheriff says to Turner:

"Don't know if I ever told you this before, but there's times I feel flat-out stupid around you.  We talk, and you tell me what I already know.  Which has got to be the worst kind of stupid."

Seems to me that's what consultants do - tell us what we already know.  For a fee.  The void beckons ...

Review of The Maze of Cadiz by Aly Monroe (John Murray, 2008)

September 1944, the Allies have invaded France and Peter Cotton, a freshly recruited British intelligence agent, is sent to Cadiz in Franco’s Spain.  His mission is to find out what has happened to their agent there, who had been reporting on activity in the port but has gone silent, and to then shut down the office.  Cotton arrives first in a sweltering Madrid, then journeys by train to Cadiz where he checks into a dilapidated hotel, is greeted by a local cop and a resentful vice-consulate, and discovers his quarry has been dead for some time, fished out of the sea.  He starts to tidy up the affairs of the agent and close down the office, but gets drawn into investigating the circumstances of his death, all the time shadowed by the local cop who seems to taken a special interest in Cotton and his mission.  It soon becomes apparent that the local agent was involved in more than simply tracking German supply roots.

The first of the Peter Cotton series, The Maze of Cadiz is a spy tale in the Alan Furst mode - understated realism as opposed to a capital T thriller.  Peter Cotton is a young ex-soldier sent to Cadiz on his first mission as a British agent.  He’s somewhat naive, yet oddly worldly; independent and self-sufficient but a little lost in a foreign landscape haunted by civil war politics and conscious of the larger war going on around them and their fragile diplomatic position.  Monroe does a good job of creating an atmosphere of sweltering heat, slow pace of life, and underlying political tensions and poverty, in the process evoking a well realised sense of place.  The prose is nicely written and evocative.  However, whilst the first third of the story is engaging, the unfolding of the plot is overly linear and lacks tension and intrigue, and it’s not clear why Cotton has been sent on a mission that is clearly more suited to someone with more in-field experience and knowledge of Spain, or a small team.  Moreover, the characterisation is quite thin beyond Cotton and Raminez, the local cop, who adds a bit of colour.  The result is a tale of where the reader is firmly placed in Cadiz, but does not quite fully believe what is happening there.  Nonetheless, it’s an enjoyable read, due mostly to its atmospherics and prose.

Lazy Sunday Service

I've just about had my fill of business books about big data, so I made a start into Victor Gischler's Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse last night.  It's the usual Gischler mix of mayhem, violence and rich black humour set nine years after the world imploded to leave what's left of American society regressed into a wild west civilization inhabiting a tattered modern landscape.  It's good, noirish fun so far.


My posts this week:
Review of Graveland by Alan Glynn
More for the pile
Yet both were Glasgow
Review of Dead Man's Time by Peter James
How do you tilt?
Guarantees and promises

Guarantees and promises

‘The stupid, old bastard.’

‘He didn’t know he was going to die, did he?’

‘Of course he knew he was going to die!  We all die.  That’s life’s only guarantee.’

‘But he didn’t know he was going to die just then.’

‘So?  He promised me the house; will or no will.  He owed me that much.  I was the one that stayed when they all left to get on with their own lives; I was the one that looked after him and the house.  Now those feckers want it sold.’

‘Paul.’

‘Don’t Paul me.  It’s not you that’ll be homeless.’




A drabble is a story of exactly one hundred words.

How do you tilt?

In The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver quotes from Tommy Angelo's 'Elements of Poker' about when a player overplays and overbets their hand due to a loss of perspective, termed tilting.  It got me thinking a bit about myself, and also about fictional characters, and the ways in which I, and they, tilt in encounters.  Here's the various ways that Angelo tilted when he played.

"I knew all the different kinds.  I could do steaming tilt, simmering tilt, too loose tilt, too tight tilt, too aggressive tilt, too passive tilt, playing too high tilt, playing too long tilt, entitlement tilt, annoyed tilt, injustice tilt, frustration tilt, sloppy tilt, revenge tilt, underfunded tilt, overfunded tilt, shame tilt, distracted tilt, scared tilt, envy tilt, this-is-the-worst-pizza-I've-ever-had tilt, I-just-got-showed-a-bluff tilt, and of course, the classics: I-gotta-get-even tilt, and I-only-have-so-much-time-to-lose-this-money tilt, also known as the demolition tilt."

I know I've tilted in most, if not all of these ways, and also witnessed them in others, in meetings.  In fact, I'm sure colleagues would tell you I'm permanently tilting one way or another, tic-tacing between them seeking an even keel. 

Review of Dead Man’s Time by Peter James (Macmillan, 2013)

Brooklyn, 1922, and a young Gavin Daly is woken by a drunken gang of men who murder his mother and drag away his father, who is never seen again.  On the dockside, waiting to board a liner that will take Gavin and his sister, Aileen, to live in Ireland with his aunt, he is given his father’s watch with an instruction to ‘watch the numbers’ and he vows to discover what happened to his father.  Fast forward to 2013 and Daly is aged 95 and has become a rich man through the antiques trade, but has never discovered his father’s fate.  The watch is entrusted to Aileen and is locked in a safe.  When Aileen is found trussed to a radiator and tortured, her house cleared of its valuables, including her father’s watch, Detective Superintendent Roy Grace takes charge of the investigation.  Having just become a father, Grace is suffering from a ‘baby head’ and guilt at not spending as much time at home as he’d like.  Livid at the death of his sister and the loss of his father’s watch, Daly starts his own parallel investigation using his wealth and contacts in the antiques trade to try and track down the culprits.  Slowly both investigations make headway, but Daly is one step ahead and he has notions of delivering a different kind of justice to that of Grace.  In the meantime, one of Grace’s old collars, Amis Smallbone, wants to exact revenge for twelve years in prison.

It’s been quite a while since I read a Peter James novel, so I was quite happy to receive an ARC of Dead Man’s Time, the ninth in the Roy Grace series.  On the plus side, it’s an enjoyable enough read, with a fairly complex plot that weaves an interesting tale.  James clearly knows his police procedures and the cop side of the story has the feel of authenticity.  The family and criminal sides of the story, however, felt uneven and overly contrived.  The whole Amis Smallbone subplot, for example, was unconvincing.  Whereas Grace, his partner and some of his colleagues were three-dimensional and engaging, many of the characters were flat and caricaturish.  The tale is told through workmanlike prose, and despite each chapter only being a couple of pages long there were too many redundant passages and repetition.  Overall, then, a reasonably entertaining tale, with a nice twist at the end, but somewhat uneven in its telling.

Yet both were Glasgow

I'm working my way through Laidlaw by William McIlvanney at present.  There are some very nice passages in a story teeming with contrasts and incongruities, just like the city:

He felt bruised with contradictions.  Where he had been was being mocked by where he was.  Yet both were Glasgow.  He had always liked the place, but he had never been more aware of it than tonight.  Its force came to him in contradictions.  Glasgow was home-made ginger biscuits and Jennifer Lawson dead in the park.  It was the sentenious niceness of the Commander and the threatened abrasiveness of Laidlaw.  It was Milligan, insensitive as a mobile slab of cement, and Mrs Lawson, witless with hurt.  It was the right hand knocking you down and the left hand picking you up, while the mouth alternated apology and threat.

McIvanney has an ear for dialogue and an eye for social realism and complex, layered situations and characters.  And he has me hooked into the story.

More for the pile

I headed back to The Book Lady bookshop again on Saturday and picked up two other books: Val McDermid's Trick of the Dark and Karin Fossum's Black Seconds.  I also bought six other books last week (two novels and four academic), and two other academic books this week so far.  I have no idea when I am going to find time to read them all.  I guess I'll just keep turning the pages.

Review of Graveland by Alan Glynn (Faber, 2013)

Ellen Dorsey used to be a frontline journalist who now writes longer, investigative pieces for a monthly current affairs magazine.  When an investment banker is shot dead in Central Park, given her nearness and curiosity she heads to the scene.  The murder re-ignites her old news reporter instincts -- she’s sure this is more than a random killing and she wants to uncover and break the story.  Frank Bishop used to be an architect before the financial crash, now he’s a store manager in an ailing mall.  To add to his woes he’s becoming increasingly concerned for the safety of his daughter, Lizzie, a university student who won’t answer and return his calls.  Craig Howley is second in charge of a private equity group, Oberon Capital, and is hoping to take control once aging, patriarch, James Vaughan cedes his position due to ill-health.  Vaughan, however, has other ideas and is determined to cling on to power, or at least retain being the puppet-master.  Ellen, Frank and Craig’s lives are about to intersect, with fatal consequences.

Graveland is the third book in a loose trilogy that all feature the well connected, aging and secretive, James Vaughan and the tentacles of Oberon Capital Group, and a handful of other overlapping characters.  As with Winterland and Bloodland, Glynn has written a well plotted, nuanced and layered political/financial thriller -- this time weaving together radical politics and Wall Street greed.  And although there are several intersecting plotlines and subplots, Glynn guides the reader effortlessly through them.  The telling feels polished, the prose and narrative thoughtfully crafted, and the style is all tell and no-show.  The characterisation is nicely realised, with each of the principal characters vivid, complex and three-dimensional.  Overall, a fitting end to the trilogy, that also closes off Glynn’s first book, The Dark Fields -- an enjoyable, cerebral, contemporary thriller.

Lazy Sunday Service

Another sunny day in Ireland.  We've now had a whole week of them.  For the first time in a few years we're actually having summer weather.  No doubt usual business will resume shortly so I plan to spend most of the day in the garden slow roasting with my head in Aly Monroe's The Maze of Cadiz.  Unusually, I actually have three books on the go at present.  The other two are Laidlaw by William McIlvanney and The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver.  They've become my outdoor, downstair's and upstair's reads.  Expect reviews shortly.  I'm a little behind with reviewing, so when I get too hot, I might wander in and draft a couple.


My posts this week
Review of Irregulars by Kevin McCarthy
A tanuple of drabble words
Review of The Deal by Michael Clifford
Cover for The Song of the Sea
Too slow on the draw