Joe Gores: Interface

After reading for years praises for Joe Gores' 1974 novel Interface I decided finally to read it during the holidays. The book is a private eye classic, but not anything Chandler or Macdonald might've written. It's a tense novel in which the private eye is no hero. He works with the crooks, for the crooks, against the crooks. He's no tarnished knight.

The "he" of the novel is Neil Fargo, but he's not the main protagonist of the book. There's also one Docker, half-crazy and violent Vietnam veteran, who in the beginning kills two guys and steals an attache case full of drug money. This takes place already in the midst of events, as Gores doesn't give anything away for the reader. He also writes in a terse, behaviorist style that stays away from depicting what the characters are thinking at any given moment or what they are driving at with their actions. This made - at least for me - pretty difficult to get into the book. The rhythm started to feel easier in the middle of the book. There's a mesmerizing twist in the end, but even that's not very easily narrated.

I'd really like to read this in a good translation - it's never been translated in Finnish, I don't know why (some other books by Gores have been) -, but somehow I don't think that's gonna happen. Still, a very good book that comes highly recommended.

Joe Gores's Spade & Archer

I finished reading Gores's prequel to The Maltese Falcon yesterday. I was at it for quite a while, mainly because there was too much commotion around here with my daughter being with us and what not, but also because the book proved out to be a bit of a disappointment.

Gores emulates Hammett's style pretty well, with the emphasis being on the surface of people and things, but the story just won't get started. It's only halfway in the middle when I really got interested in what was going on, and even then I couldnt' follow the plot all the way through. There were probably one or two too many subplots. And the main baddie came almost out of nowhere and seemed just a bit too improbable. The ethos of capitalism's rotting greediness that is so prevalent in The Maltese Falcon is largely missing, even though Gores throws in a subplot about the Leftist movement in the San Fransisco yards in the 1920's.

Spade & Archer should've been shorter and tighter to really work, but there's much to like, too. The ending lines are great. On the left there's the cover for the Finnish edition that is just out.

Spade & Archer

Here's a review of a new novel, Spade & Archer, by Joe Gores: it's a prequel to Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon. The review is not positive in all accounts, even though Gores is a very good writer. He's not very well known in Finland - perhaps because his translation history here is random at best: his first, A Time of Predators, came out in Finnish, then Hammett in 1977, then, after over ten years' silence, one of his later books. The Hammett book made him seem like a pastiche guy, even though it's his only pastiche work. Before Spade & Archer, that is.

(Hat tip to David Gustafson on the PulpMags group!)