Jason Starr: Fugitive Red

I bought three new crime novels for Christmas presents for myself, and I managed to read two of them during the holidays (Tana French's The Witch Elm will have to wait, as I had to get back to work). Both were very good.

Jason Starr's Fugitive Red I read in a day. I started it late at night, but couldn't wait to get back to it the next day, and then I stayed up till two. This is vintage Starr, up there with some of his best work, trimmed, exciting, bursting with suspense and despair, with an ambivalent ending.

Fugitive Red is about a real estate broker who starts to flirt with a woman he meets online on a dating site. This leads to a nightmare he couldn't imagine and one he can't get out of. Starr writes about relatable characters - at least I felt I could relate to this guy, who keeps telling himself he can lose some weight if he wants to and who thinks there's a reward for him, if he just keeps on doing his thing. Wouldn't want to be in his shoes, though. Starr is the perfect embodiment of the noir sensibility of the fourties and fifties, but he doesn't retort to old clichés of hardboiled school, and the use of online social media is very believably mixed into the narrative. (Which is something you don't often see - not long ago I read a newish Finnish horror novel, and I thought it was set in the past, possibly in the early-to-mid-nineties, since no one used a smartphone!)

There's a bit of a news about Jason Starr I want to share, but you'll have to wait. (Someone might remember what I'm talking about, if he's been reading my blog for long enough. )

Jason Starr: Savage Lane

As I've said a hundred times before, Jason Starr is one of my all-time favourite writers: nasty, twisted, funny, fluent. He's very readable and catchy, yet there's nothing amiable about his book. At the same time you really care for his characters, they are not mere pawns in the game.

Starr's newest book Savage Lane marks his return to noir thriller and does it with a wicked punch. Starr treads the same ground as Gillian Flynn, but there's nothing to suggest he's just going after a trend. This is his territory, pure and simple. 

There's something different this time, however. Savage Lane is set in the healthy suburbs, not the seedy downtown and the facile city of his earlier novels. Savage Lane is about the not-so-healthy relationships born out of the shallowness of suburban life and the self-treachery of the people inhabiting the nice homes. Starr's stablemate, sociopathic liars, figure greatly in the novel, and Starr's use the unreliable narrator is matchless. The shifts in the narration and what they reveal about the characters is laugh-out-funny. The timing is perfect. Yet there's no crime almost halfway in. When it comes, it's almost a shock - and after we've gotten over it, we start to laugh. 

Savage Lane is actually a pretty savage book. It's Desperate Housewives meets Psycho. Megan Abbott is right saying: "Who but Jason Starr could render suburban vice pitch black, sneakily endearing and wickedly funny all at once? Like James M. Cain meets Tom Perrotta, Savage Lane shows, in grand style, how twisted the hearts of All-American families can be, and how those picket white fences can be dangerously sharp."

Read more about the book at the Polis Books site (they seem to be doing good work bringing out new noir and hardboiled thrillers, alongside the more traditional ones) and at LitReactor where Keith Rawson has some nice things to say about the book. 

Jason Starr: Twisted City

Jason Starr has long been one of my favourite writers, and I can't help but fall in love with his plots. I picked up his Twisted City that I hadn't previously read and showed the back cover copy to my wife, grinning widely and saying: "This sure sounds like my kind of book!" It says: "Times are tough for David Miller, a journalist for a second-rate financial magazine who hates his boss, is tired of supporting his girlfriend's partying lifestyle and recently lost his sister to cancer. But things are about to get much worse."

David loses his wallet in a bar after a failed attempt at picking up a woman, and some days later a woman calls him and says she's got his wallet. David goes to a seedy neighborhood and meets Sue, who seems to be a junkie. She's asking lots of money for David's wallet. David goes to a bank to raise money and when he gets back, he's attacked by Sue's maniacally jealous boyfriend. After that, things really go wrong. It's a hell of a ride for David, and while everything's pretty dark and hopeless for our hero, you can't but laugh at his tribulations. Everything goes worse no matter what David does, even though there's one chance he could make things right, but he blows it too. The end is really, really nasty.

Jason Starr writes and plots with ease, and he's deceptive. Every time you think you miss a hole in the plot, it gets explained. The book moves with a breakneck pace and there's no empty page. This is a brilliant noir novel, once again. It's a damn shame my efforts to get Starr translated in Finnish have proven futile, but I'm still trying.

I read the 2005 printing from No Exit with a pretty bland cover, but their new covers for Starr's backlist are so stupendous (see above) I'm almost thinking I'd buy the whole set.

Everybody Lies out

My newest book, the short story anthology Everybody Lies, is finally out. It's available here - and of course it's in Finnish and the actual title is Kaikki valehtelevat, which is the literal translation of James Reasoner's story in the book.

The book consists of some 20 criminous short stories from writers like Reasoner, Jason Starr, Kevin Wignall, Duane Swierczynski, Vicki Hendricks and Patricia Abbott. All of the stories came previously out in my mags Isku, Ässä and Seikkailukertomuksia (= Adventure Stories), that were self-published pastiches of old-time crime rags. All the translations have been edited and proofread carefully. It's a nice and varied collection of new hardboiled and noir writing, especially since almost none of these writers are available in Finnish at the moment. Most of the stories were translated by me, but some of them were translated by some of my talented friends, namely Antti Autio, Tapani Bagge, Sonja Lahdenranta and Lotta Sonninen. Thanks for them for the big help! 

The beautiful cover was envisioned by a friend of mine, Jenni Jokiniemi, who works as a designer. This was her first book cover, if I understood correctly. I hope to collaborate with her more in the future. 

Here's the table of contents. 

I'm actually doing another collection in the same vein, of the flash fiction stories I published in Ässä. I've been asking for permissions from writers, but not all have responded. If you read this and remember having received an e-mail or a Facebook message from, please do respond! 

Unused Finnish cover for Jason Starr's Fake ID

Can't believe I haven't posted this earlier.

Remember when I used to edit the noir paperback series for a Finnish publisher, with books by Duane Swierczynski, Christa Faust, Scott Phillips and others? Well, the story didn't end well, since the line was canceled after six books. The format was changed into hardcover, but that didn't help.

I'd already translated Jason Starr's excellent Fake ID over years ago and it was scheduled to come up next in the series, in hardcover. Ossi Hiekkala made this very nice cover illustration to go with it, but the book never came out, due to many reasons. I can't really tell you how sorry I'm for this.

Jason Starr's Tough Luck Redux

Jason Starr's Facebook status from earlier today: "Handed in screenplay MICKEY PRADA (based on my novel Tough Luck) for Michael Rapaport to direct."

This is great news. Here's my old post on Tough Luck.

Jason Starr: The Pack

As everyone who's been reading this blog for long, I'm a stout admiref of Jason Starr. He writes tough and bleak noir with warmth towards his sociopathic protagonists and antiheroes. He doesn't much revert to mere pastiche of noir clichés and I think he's one of the best examples of how noir can be meaningful literature, both as art and entertainment. It's a small wonder Starr isn't better known.

His later books have gotten more a thriller-like aura, with more pages and bigger issues. There have been talks about big movie adaptations (I seem to have heard about David Fincher buying the option to Panic Attack) and I certainly hope there will be a HUGE movie from his newest novel, The Pack, which I just finished late last night. It's a crime novel like all his earlier novels, but it's also a horror novel. It's also a social satire, in which Starr gets to depict his usual pathetic sociopaths and everyday psychopaths. The middle-class life that Starr writes about is full of anxieties, uncertanties and loneliness. When something bad happens, there's no one out there for you. You're always on your own. Except for a few lunatics, who pray on your bare soul.

In The Pack this theme gets very real, as the protagonist, Simon Burns, ends up in a pack of werewolves. They are very cool guys, seemingly getting along well with their masculinities, taking crap from no one, especially their exes and employees, and Simon, recently fired from his job and spending frustrating life as a stay-home-dad, feels suddenly a burst of new energy. The feeling is misleading, but I'm not telling you more. Starr puts some new twist to the werewolf angle and there's some nice irony in how the werewolf leader combines the utter masculinity and an urge to kill. Jason Starr talks about the theme more in Spinetingler's interview here.

But then again, there's some padding. I can't get away from that. There's too much telling about how someone feels or behaves and about the reasons for that behaviour. Fake ID and Nothing Personal and all the other early novels by Starr have no padding. Is this the price we have to pay to get bigger recognition for a great writer like Jason Starr?

Jason Starr's Tough Luck

As I said in an earlier post, I was going to write about Jason Starr's Tough Luck. As you probably know by now, I'm a stout admirer of Starr's work. He writes in deceptively simple sentences, but creates the looming atmosphere or paranoia, loneliness and utter despair in just a few lines. The greatest examples of his work are, I think, still two of his earlier novels, Fake I.D. (coming in Finnish under the title Väärä rooli, with a great cover by Ossi Hiekkala) and Nothing Personal. I hadn't read Tough Luck for some reason, but it's almost as good as those two books. Well, it could easily be just as good as them.

Tough Luck is not about a sociopath, like Fake I.D. or Nothing Personal are; the main characther, Michael, is a basically normal young guy (barely in his twenties), who's just had a bad luck all his life: his mother has died, his father is suffering from Altzheimer and was an asshole to begin with, his few friends are losers and bullies, his future is totally unclear, he's working at a fish store and he smells like fish all the time. His demise starts with a Mob guy coming in to the fish store and asking Michael to place some sports bets for him. The Mob guy loses every time, but he just won't pay and Michael has to dig out the money himself. So go his savings and probably his studentship at the college. And then comes Rhonda, the woman of Michael's dreams.

Starr doesn't write your basic noir thrillers. Rhonda is no utter babe with big boobs and a vicious attitude, and there are almost no guns in sight, except in two crucial, but pretty short scenes. There's actually very little violence in Tough Luck and the relieving humour is largely absent. Starr also makes no knowing winces to the noir aficionados. Yet there's always the feeling for the underdog, the depressed, those hungry for love and acceptance, which they, in Starr's world, will never get. The last lines in Tough Luck, after everything's seemingly alright again, are a tour de force of ambiguity. We just know Michael didn't lear anything from his troubles, but we sympathize and empathize with him just because of that.

Jason Starr's Panic Attack, part 2

Will try to say something about this. I've been working almost all day (save for dropping at a thrift store earlier today) and I'm getting a bit tired, but, hey, I promised!

Jason Starr, as you probably know, is one of my favourite authors. He is one of the few American writers, crime or mainstream, dealing with depression, codependence problems, unemployment and male anxiety. He writes about sociopaths and psychopaths and makes them very much alive and not some near-mythical creatures à la Hannibal Lecter. Starr's also a true noir author who doesn't have to retort to pastiche, bringing up old hardboiled clichés (he also doesn't have to use gory violence to make his point). His books Fake I.D. and Nothing Personal are, for me, the ultimate noir experience.

His new novel, which is just out, Panic Attack is a very strong foray into a insecure world of a psychiatrist who doesn't realize his life is a mess: his wife doesn't love him, his daughter hates him. And now his house is being broken into, in middle of the night. What does he do? A peaceful man with many problems, some he doesn't know about, shoots the perpetrator. Not once, but ten times. A public hunt begins: can we live in peace with this kind of vigilantes running loose? The psychiatrist's life is torn apart.

And that's only the beginning. Enter Johnny, handsome, skilful, young, a conman. He's the ultimate sociopath in any literature. And you don't know he's dangerous when he's near you. He was the best friend of the man who got shot and he wants revenge.

Panic Attack is a very frightening novel with many truly chilling scenes and I liked it just as much as any Jason Starr book. There's just one problem. The book is too long. I don't really know why this is, but Starr's books have gotten longer in the past few years. I was a bit worried about it when I read his earlier novel, The Follower (which also was very chilling), but now I have to say it out loud: if Starr's books get any longer, they are on the verge of become "telling, not showing". In Panic Attack, Starr goes elaborately through people's emotions, when a simple passage or a piece of dialogue might suffice. Sometimes it takes away some of the enjoyment of the irony he uses depicting his characters and revealing something new about them.

But even that being said, I remind you once again that Panic Attack is a very good novel. Do check out also Fake I.D. that was out recently from Hard Case Crime.

Jason Starr's Fake I.D.

Cullen Callagher's very thorough and thoughtful review of one of my all-time noir favourites, Jason Starr's Fake I.D. I couldn't agree more with Cullen.

I had a chance to pick up the No Exit edition from the Finnish Academic Bookstore at their sale for five euros and read it and fell in love with it and have been following Jason's career ever since. Then, some years later, I read somewhere that the original UK edition (for long there wasn't any other) is a collector's item and, sure enough, when I checked Abebooks, there was only one copy for something like 50 euros. (Or maybe even 80.) At the time I'm writing this, there are only the new Hard Case Crime copies in Abebooks. Which means: More power to Hard Case Crime! I think this is one of their most important books, reprint or original. And it's obviously been so rare that it's practically an original.

As some of the followers of this blog might remember, I've translated Fake I.D. and finally next Spring it will see its Finnish publication.

Jason Starr's Panic Attack

Jason Starr has for long been one of my favourite authors: poignant, funny, full of satire and wit and anger. Here's a chapter for download from his forth-coming novel, Panic Attack, which will hit the stores next August. I have the book, but haven't had time to read it yet. I'm soon getting the book on historical fiction writers out of my hands (cross my fingers) and I think I'll be able to concentrate a bit on recent crime fiction.

Jason Starr's The Follower

I've been a long-time fan of Jason Starr's work and consider Fake I.D. and Nothing Personal masterpieces. They are simply one of the best books of the 1990's. They are clearly hardboiled and noir, but there are no knowing hints to older genre work. There's also none of macho posturing that at times seems prevalent to the hardboiled literature. Or if there is, you can pretty much guess that with Starr the macho guy is on road to Hell.

Starr is very good at depicting sociopaths and narcists. His are heroes who think everybody likes them and everything succeeds for them. Same goes for the main male in his newest book, The Follower. Peter Wells is a nice-looking guy in his early-to-mid-twenties, working at a gym, having a load of money, buying a cozy apartment. He's empathetic and can converse with a girl for hours. Who wouldn't like the guy? You'll soon know there's no reason to like him. Starr's actual protagonist in the novel, Katie Porter, finds that out too late. And even before that her life is a mess, consisting of a bad job, having no money to live in New York and getting mixed up with largely emotionless young kids who learn their human skills watching porn. No Sex and the City here.

The Follower is, I think, Starr's longest novel to date, but that didn't trouble me at all, even though I was more at home with the brevity of Fake I.D. and Nothing Personal. I had to stay up till two in the morning to finish this.

Fake I.D. out in June 2009

Just heard from Jason Starr that his masterpiece, Fake I.D., will be out in June 2009. Here's the cover (and check out who's blurbing it...).

Jason Starr and Ken Bruen's Max and Angela series

Another installment in our series on new American (and British and Irish and Australian and what not) hardboiled crime lit (and actually another installment in our on-going series on books I read during the Summer, but have been too busy to post about or have just simply forgotten): Jason Starr's and Ken Bruen's three books about Max Fisher and Angela Petrakos, Bust, Slide and The Max.

Jason Starr has been one of my favourite authors ever since I read Fake I.D. Luckily that book will soon (well, some time next year) be available for the American audiences, since it's an American masterpiece, a piece of great literature while it's also a great crime novel. Also Nothing Personal is a personal favourite (might be even better than Fake I.D., since it has a larger scope than the rather solipsistic Fake I.D.), alongside other novels of him. From Ken Bruen I'd read only Rilke on Black (1997) on which I thought it lacked plot, but was nevertheless an intriguing book. I'd of course heard and read everyone praise him, so I started their collaborative series from Hard Case Crime with great expectations.

And they were met. The best of the books is the first one, Bust, in which Max Fisher, a sleazy business man, hires someone to kill his wife. You can't go wrong with a book that has dialogue like this (the hired killer calls himself Popeye):

Max kissed her then said, "You know, the only thing I'm worried about is this Popeye character."

"Why?" Angela asked.

"First of all, I don't like his name."

"What's wrong with his name?"

"Come on, it's a fucking cartoon character. It's like I'm hiring Donald Duck to kill my wife."

"You can't expect him to use his real name. I mean, he has to protect himself, doesn't he?"

"Yeah, but couldn't he come up with something better, more hitman-like. I don't know, like, Skull, or Bones, or something like that."

"You can't judge somebody by their name."

These people sure are not winning any Nobel prizes, but Max Fisher is right to be a bit suspicious of Popeye. The book has tons of great dialogue and a twisty plot - stuff I'm born to read.

Slide continues in the same vein and is equally hilarious and trashy, and the writers make apt jokes about serial killer novels - this guy is just as dumb as I've always thought killers usually are. He just doesn't realize it. Max Fisher stands up among Jason Starr's other sociopathic anti-heroes, when he sets up a drug business and starts digging into hip hop.

The Max that doesn't seem to be out as yet contains more cursing than the other novels in the series (and maybe any other novel I've ever read), but it's more slack in its plot and could've been better. I had some trouble imagining some of the stuff in the book, especially with Max Fisher, who rises to the highest rank inside the prison. Yeah, I know, Bust and Slide are not exactly realistic either, but they were more plausible. The Max seems at times to be a bit too long inside joke. But make no mistake - I liked this just as fine. I like cursing in novels. I don't know why that is, but I find it entertaining.

All the books have great covers, like Hard Case Crime usually has, but the cover of The Max (by Glen Orbik) really promises more than it delivers - even though Angela Petrakos does get behind bars in a Lesbian jail... (Maybe they are playing with the readers' expectations. Hope I'm not giving anything away with this.)