Gabriel Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear

Now, this is what Dan Brown's books should be like! Swift and fast, full of action and exotic locales, not too full of overtly long pseudohistorical dialogue.

Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear is written by Charles Ardai, who's also the mastermind behind the Hard Case Crime and has penned three titles for the series. I really loved Songs of Innocence (if "love" is the right word for such a bleak book) and thought that Fifty-To-One was very good, if a bit overlong, so it's no surprise his new book is a great read. This has everything one can ask for in an adventure novel, down to a sword-fight - in a dark cave! Here's hoping we get zeppelins in later Hunts...

A good example of Ardai's skills is that when a certain beast walks into view and starts talking, it's believable and not just laughable, like it easily could be. There's just one thing that bothers me: if one recites Homer's lost epics, shouldn't he do it in ancient Greek and would normal contemporary Greeks understand what he's saying?

I was slightly disappointed in the first Gabriel Hunt outing, but I'm exhilarated to find out that the series is becoming something to watch. The book is accompanied by an extra short story by Ardai, but I haven't read that one, as yet.

James Reasoner's Gabriel Hunt

I'm a bit slow in this wagon, but I've tried to keep a vacation. I had some fun reading books that don't have anything (or at least much) to do with my work, and James Reasoner's first Gabriel Hunt book was one of these.

Everyone knows by now almost everything about this series that's just started and that's the brainchild of Charles Ardai, better known for Hard Case Crime, so I won't go into there. Ardai himself and other writers, like Christa Faust, David Schow and Raymond Benson, are writing other books in the series, and I'm hoping James gets to do another gig with Gabriel Hunt.

And I'm hoping he does a better job than the first book. There's absolutely nothing fundamentally wrong about the book - it runs along smoothly and it's written fluently - but I found myself thinking that there could be - should be - more sex and violence. I know that one of the ideas in the Gabriel Hunt saga is to bring back some of the innocence of the old serials and old pulp magazine fiction set in South Seas or the deep jungles of Africa or whatever, but I don't think they were really this clean. I was hoping this would've been more dirty (and by that I don't mean lewd) and more cynical. For starters, Gabriel Hunt is just way too clean - he's not a badass I kind of hoped he was. In days of old, he would've been a scheming bastard with a scar on his face. That what I saw in my mind when I first heard about Gabriel Hunt.

But I have hope. I find it a bit hard to believe that writers like Christa Faust, the author of the admirable Money Shot, or David J. Schow, one of the original splattepunksters, would write this clean a story. So I'm hoping that James won't hold himself back in another Gabriel Hunt he'll be writing - and that he'll set some of the events in Finland!

One more thing: The book is set in the present times, as in the 2000's, and not in the 1930's, as it might've been, but actually the book feels like it takes place in the 1980's. I don't exactly know why this is (but I kept seeing Romancing the Stone in my mind), but at least the characters could use computers and the internet. These guys - Gabriel Hunt and his brother - go for a shelf of books when they want to find out about an old Confederate flag, when one thinks they'd go Googling first and only then check the reference shelf. (Or maybe James Reasoner checked first there's nothing in the web about that flag.)

Don't go by my word only: here's Bill Crider, here's Horror Drive-In, here's Not the Baseball Pitcher and here's Scott Parker. Here's Cullen Callagher talking with James about the book. And here's Charles Ardai's interview in which he talks about his parents who survived the Holocaust during WWII. I believe some of that shows in his own entry in the Hunt saga.

The fiftieth Hard Case

Hard Case Crime is one of the most exciting publishers working now in the crime fiction. They have inspired a lot of people (including me) and the illustrated covers for their books started the vogue that's visible in the covers for such authors as Megan Abbott and Linda L. Richards and such series as the new Penguin reprints of Ian Fleming's James Bond. And some of the books... I remember the best Fade to Blonde by Max Phillips and Money Shot by Christa Faust, but their reprint line is also thrilling (and it will see Jason Starr's long-lost masterpiece Fake I.D.!), covering well- and little-known authors.

What's most exciting about them is that they've been up and running for quite a while now. The next month will see their fiftieth book, which is Charles Ardai's Fifty-to-One. Ardai is the founder and the head honcho of Hard Case Crime and he's written two books for the line under the Richard Aleas byline. I read Songs of Innocence and liked it a great deal - a private eye novel at its bleakest.

I finished Fifty-to-One late last night and I must say two things: the book entertained me very much and I was disappointed. There were some things that left me unsatisfied: the book is too long and the essential mystery is too easy to solve. It's also so obvious that it's a wonder the characters in the book don't come up with it.

I can understand where the length comes from, and it's partly due to the book's general idea: the book has fifty chapters, all named after Hard Case Crime books. It's a nice joke, but I thought there were some chapters that really didn't move things along. (I'm pretty sure Ardai knows this himself.) But Ardai writes smoothly, he has the genre settings down pat, and he has an energetic young woman as the hero, so I won't complain more. Also the setting is nice - Fifty-to-One is set in 1958 and Hard Case Crime is an actual publishing house working in the years of the paperback boom, doing books like Eye the Jury and Hot-House Honey. (Someone should write these and the current, real-life Hard Case Crime should publish them.)

Ardai says in his afterword that one of the chapters is written by Max Phillips, the co-founder of Hard Case Crime and the writer of Fade to Blonde. I'm pretty sure it's the chapter 27, called "The Peddler" (after Richard S. Prather's reprint novel), with the memorable character of Royal Barrone in it. The dialogue feels exactly the same as in Fade to Blonde. (Or then it's the chapter 28.) Is there a reward for this?

The book will have a gallery of all the 50 Hard Case Crime covers. Too bad my ARC didn't have that... Out in December, like I said.