Michael Brett: An Ear for Murder (1967)

I read this old private eye mystery by Michael Brett in a day, which I quite enjoyed, having struggled through a much longer crime novel which took almost a week. The book's protagonist is Pete McGrath, a tough private eye working in New York, but going to Las Vegas in the book. In the beginning, he's hired by a mysterious woman saying her husband has disappeared. She doesn't want to get to touch with the police, which of course makes McGrath suspicious, but a man has to make a living. Soon he stumbles upon a dead man, which is a given in any old school PI novel. McGrath has to find a sadistic killer who works with an axe or a machete, portrayed in the cover. 

I liked the book, though it's nowhere near great. It's a fast read, and everything flows quite smoothly. Brett makes McGrath a likable hero who can work his way out in the mean streets, but there are also bursts of sudden violence. Especially the scene in which McGrath cuts off an ear from a killer is gruesome. There's also lots of old school male chauvinism in the book, but what can you expect? It must be said, though, that McGrath also dates a young woman who works at the UN. 

Here's more about Brett in Mystery*File. 

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Out now: Dark Places and Little Tramps: Writings on noir, hardboiled, sleaze and other genres. 

Grover Brinkman

When I was doing my ground-breaking first book, Pulpografia, the encyclopedia of over 300 American pulp and paperback crime writers published in Finland, I noticed that some of the books that came out here weren't always published in the US. The first one I could identify was Bruce Cassiday's The Heister (Vain viisi tuntia in Finnish), a solid cop novel that Cassiday and his agent couldn't sell to American publishers in the mid-sixties, so it landed only here (and other Nordic countries, if I remember correctly). It's not a bad book, someone like Gary Lovisi should reissue it.

Some other books that I had difficulties with were four PI novels by one Grover Brinkman. They featured a half-Indian private eye Colt Youngblood (dig that name, will you!), with broads and bullets. Nothing remarkable here, it's no wonder the books didn't sell in the US. But still interesting to know about them.

Going through some old files I spotted a Contemporary Authors entry for Brinkman I've received from someone (as usual, I believe it was Denny Lien). It mentions "a four-part detective novel series published in Scandinavia". Brinkman also had an erratic, but long career in pulps and other fictionmags. See here for more details. Attached are two covers of Brinkman's novels, the other two are Chubasco! (Hirmumyrsky in Finnish) and Thunderbird (Ukkoslinnut in Finnish).

Grover Brinkman

Personal Information: Family: Born February 27, 1903, in Illinois; died March 17, 1999, in Columbia, IL; son of John (a farmer) and Sarah Jane (Friend) Brinkman; married Leona May Stricker, July 21, 1925; children: Gene H., Shirley Jane Brinkman McDannold. Education: Attended
Belleville College of Business. Religion: Methodist. Memberships: Lions Club.

Education:

Career: Okawville Times, Okawville, IL, editor and publisher, 1925-47; free-lance writer and photographer, 1947--.

WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR:

* Night of the Blood Moon, Independence Press (Independence, Mo.), 1976.

Also editor of This Is Washington County, 1968, and Grover Brinkman's Southern Illinois, 1976. Also author of a four-part detective novel series published in Scandinavia. Contributor to more than two hundred magazines and newspapers, including Life. Editor of Back Home in Illinois, a regional magazine.

"Sidelights"
Brinkman comments: "I work with my wife as a writing-photographic team; I sold my first piece of fiction to Grit at the age of sixteen; since then have been selling on the regional, national, and international level. I have more than a hundred thousand photographic negatives on file, the work of forty years behind the camera. In other words, I'm a working freelance and we make a living at it. I write fiction `just for fun.' "

W. Glenn Duncan: Rafferty's Rules

Lately I've been reading stuff that's been loaded on my Kindle, something I haven't been doing for ages. One of the books I've now read was Rafferty's Rules by W. Glenn Duncan. I think it was author Paul Bishop who said good things about the Rafferty series over at the Men's Adventure Paperback Series Facebook group some weeks ago, so I decided to give it a try.

Rafferty is a private eye working in Texas. Rafferty's as hardboiled as they come, yet he smokes a pipe - for some reason or another, this bugged me a bit. He dates an attractive woman, Hilda Gardener, who's also an antique dealer, and he also has a sidekick called Cowboy. There's something a bit too Spenserish in the set-up, and Robert B. Parker is one of those private eye writers who briefly turned me off the genre 20-plus years ago. I still can't stand him (or his books, to be precise).

Rafferty's Rules however turned out to be a piece of nice entertainment, no matter how much Spenser there is in the book. Rafferty is hired to take care of some bikers who kidnapped and raped a young woman who later turned out crazy. Rafferty says he won't kill the molesters, but goes after them nevertheless. The case turns out to be more than that, as is usual the case with hardboiled private eye novels. The story moves along nicely and there are good action scenes throughout. The Texas settings reminded me of Joe R. Lansdale's Hap and Leonard novels, but they are better. There's too much cute stuff here, such as Rafferty eating nice lunches with Hilda. There are several more books in the series that was originally published in 1987-1990, but I still won't go out of my way to find them.

Here's Kevin Burton Smith at the Thrilling Detective on Rafferty books.

Andy Straka: A Witness Above

I'd never heard about Andy Straka before, but I snatched his PI novel A Witness Above from the Brash Books newsletter, when it was free for a limited time. I read the book on my cell phone, which worked just fine.

A Witness Above stars Straka's private eye protagonist Frank Pavlicek, who's a former cop, fired from duty after shooting down a black kid, thinking the kid was armed. Pavlicek has retired from New York to his old haunts in Virginia. As he's training his hawk (something Straka seems himself to do), he stumbles upon a dead man, who seems to have a connection with Pavlicek's daughter. Soon Pavlicek gets a call of help from his daughter.

A Witness Above is a fluent, if not spectacularly original read. If you like hardboiled private eye novels, this should work for you. Straka's style is straight-forward and not overtly wordy, which at times suits me just fine. A Witness Above worked very well on the small screen of my phone. This is something one could read on a plane or in a train.

Arthur Lyons: The Dead Are Discreet

Arthur Lyons is one of those now forgotten private eye writers who brought some seriousness to the genre, following in the footsteps of Chandler's later novels and Ross Macdonald, shying away from Mickey Spillane's evangelist violence and Brett Halliday's light-heartedness. I don't think many read Lyons now, and there are no Finnish translations.

I'd read earlier one of Lyons's Jacob Asch novels and liked it a bit, so I decided I'd try another one. I'd found a used copy of a No Exit Press reprint of Lyons's first novel, The Dead Are Discreet (originally from 1974), and started to read it while we were at the summer cottage. I had to bring the book to town, since I didn't have time to finish it at the cabin. Jacob Asch is a grumpy and lonely man, in the normal tradition of the hardboiled private eye literature. In this book, his first outing, he tackles the early seventies' Californian milieu of Satan worshippers and other firm believers of the occult.

The premise is intriguing, but The Dead Are Discreet was a disconcerting experience for me. I like Asch's character and Lyons keeps the story moving, but the image of homosexuals as sick perverts was disgusting - and, mind you, also clichéd. It's very much of its time, and I don't think Lyons would make this kind of book any more (he's not writing, though, he died some years back).

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.

Robert Crais: The First Rule

I hadn't read any of Robert Crais's private eye novels with Elvis Cole, but I had heard good things about them, so I was curious when The First Rule from 2010 was translated in Finnish just this month. It stars Joe Pike, who was first Elvis Cole's dangerous sidekick buddy, but has now his own series of books. He's a former mercenary and he's also as tough as they come.

The First Rule is about Pike investigating the killings of his former colleague and friend and his family. It seems soon that there are bigger things at stake and the clues lead to the Eastern European mafia. Crais moves the story along smoothly, which is always an asset, when you're talking about a book like this. This kind of stuff is almost comfort reading for me. Pike is violent, but only when it's necessary. He's a vigilante, but he doesn't go about babbling about it, which makes the ideology easier to stomach and the character more believable. There are some moments, where I would've cut down the wordage, but all in all this a compact book, gripping and fast to read.

This is by no means an entry for the Friday's Forgotten Books meme, but take a look at the other entries here.

Michael Koryta's A Welcome Grave

You might remember I lost this book for at least a week and my reading experience was a bit ruffled by the incident, but it was still a very good book, a good example of the recent private eye fiction that doesn't have any of the noirish clichés of the private eye fiction that still marr the image of the hardboiled gumshoe in people's eyes. Very few of these books have been translated in Finnish, which means many have the wrong image of the new PI novels.

Okay, to the book. The setting is very intriguing and fresh: someone kills brutally the guy who "stole" Lincoln Perry's (Perry being Koryta's PI hero) girlfriend many years ago and married her. Lincoln Perry is the first suspect, since he's known to have  fought with the deceased. The wife knows the dead man had a son and someone should notify him about the death of his father. Perry finds the son quite easily, but in the middle of the night, in a gazebo somewhere, the son pulls the trigger and kills himself.

And then I lost the book.

And then I found it. (Or actually Elina, my wife, found it while cleaning.)

But I got back on the track. A Welcome Grave is one of those touching and tragic PI novels in the mould of Ross Macdonald or Jonathan Valin. The webs of history and family life are very complex in this book. At times I felt there was a bit too much dwelling on Perry's love life and he has a mildly weird sidekick (a trait I don't really like in new PI fiction), but I'm not really complaining. The climax is quite shattering and full of action. This would make a nice film. My only complaint is that Lincoln Perry is not as memorable characther as someone like Philip Marlowe or Dan Fortune. Maybe that's the point: the people around the PI are the story.

Oh, here's Koryta's website.

Where's my Michael Koryta?

I ordered some books recently from the web. One of them was A Welcome Grave by Michael Koryta about whom I've read good things. The book is one of his Lincoln Perry PI novels. I thought it was good - at least the first hundred pages. The premise was very interesting: Perry is asked by her former girlfriend to locate the lost son of her husband, who's recently been brutally slaughtered. Perry finds the guy, but then something weird happens.

Then I lost the book. I don't know where it is. I can't find it anywhere at our place. I've asked all the libraries and shops if they've seen it.

I guess I'll have to order a new copy.

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: The Murder Maze

Todd Mason will start hosting a series of blog posts from around the world profiling forgotten and overlooked films. I was going to say something about a movie I found recently cheap on VHS anyway, so I thought I'd take part.

City of Angels was a short-lived private eye show in 1976, which I'd never seen, but the moment I noticed the VHS cassette in a thrift store titled Murhasokkelo/The Murder Maze I knew it was bound to be interesting. I guess this movie, made from two episodes of the TV series, was never aired in the US, as it's not mentioned anywhere in IMDb nor in the Thrilling Detective listing for the series (see the link above). I notice from the Finnish Elonet database that this was released as late as 1988 (and also in 1991).

The original TV series, with Wayne Rogers as private eye Jake Axminster in the 1930's Los Angeles, was created by Roy Huggins and Stephen J. Cannell, who usually knew what they were doing, but for some reason or another the series never caught on. I believe this movie was made to cash in on some money from foreign rental markets. Kevin Burton Smith says in his Thrilling Detective entry for City of Angels that Wayne Rogers never felt like a real PI, as he was better known as one of the M*A*S*H* jokers. He also says Rogers never liked the show himself.

The VHS compiles together the episodes "A Lonely Way to Die", written and directed by veteran Douglas Heyes, and "The Losers", written by Roy Huggins himself and directed by Across 110th Street alumni Barry Shear. The joints are very well hidden, the plots are made to intersect and interweave, they just don't follow each other, like they usually in these kind of films do. The story gets close to the complexity of Chinatown, which was obviously the model for City of Angels. The setting is the same - obnoxious private eye, bullying cops, family secrets - and the mood is the same - the perverse 1930's, glamorous Los Angeles and Hollywood. The dialogue is good, getting close to the snappy remarks of a Chandler, even using "Be missing" that Chandler wrote in one of his letters he prefers to "Get out".

There's just the fact that the plots don't really click - as the story unfolds, we are disappointed that the two storylines don't connect with each other. And Heyes and Shear have two different directorial styles, I believe it's Shear who goes for more early seventies' type of stuff, with some New Wavish ideas, scenes getting on top of each other, dialogue overlapping and all. Heyes goes for more traditional narration. Some of the characters are also not very well introduced, as they are recurring characters from the show - it took me some time to realize the purpose of Jake Axminster's secretary. I should believe, though, that these two are some of the better episodes in the original series.

Dave White: When One Man Dies & The Evil That Men Do

I've said earlier that I really don't care about the recent private eye characters whose problems are worse than their clients. The major exception here is Reed Farrel Coleman, but on the whole I'd rather the private eyes would disappear if they turned sideways.

This didn't stop me enjoying Dave White's two novels, When One Man Dies (2007) and The Evil That Men Do (2009). In them, the private eye hero Jackson Donne suffers from many problems: he's only 28 and yet he's an alcoholic, his former colleagues at the police hate him, he's done nothing much to educate himself, he's alienated from his family and his girlfriend left him and died later from something Jackson Donne did.

In When One Man Dies Jackson Donne is having a drink and consoling himself for his ex's death, when an old, a bit weird but harmless man is run over by a car outsider the bar. Donne feels he has to look into the old man's death - he used to share drinks with the guy, after all -, but he runs into trouble when his old nemesis at the police force starts to investigate the same accident, only to do harm to Donne. Dave White spins an interesting story with many interlocking incidents, and even though the twists in the story sometimes feel a bit forced, it remains intriguing to the end. Jackson Donne's past mistakes in the police force are drawn into the center of the story, and it seems like he can never escape them.

The Evil That Men Do is the more powerful novel of the two and Jackson Donne is really deep in the story of his sister who asks Donne to check into what their old and ill mother has been talking about their granddad. Donne's PI license was taken out in the aforementioned book, but he decides nevertheless he can do this last favour to his family and to his dying mother. He finds out soon that there's a maniac on the loose to avenge something ancient to his family - but just what it is is clear only in the end, if even then. White tramples the ground between the plausible and the implausible, but manages to stay on the clean side with this.

There's one thing I didn't get accustomed easily: When One Man Dies is narrated both in Donne's first person narration and the third person narration in the other sections. In The Evil That Men Do Donne is being narrated through a third person narrative, which makes more sense. There are also scenes set in the late thirties, when White tells just what tragic happened in the past.

In the end feels like there can be no future for Jackson Donne. I asked Dave White if there are plans for other Jackson Donne novels, but he said he doesn't have a publication date for his next novel. I'm hoping there will be a new Donne book, if only to see what White does to make Donne rise from the ashes. (He writes in his blog, though, about a new manuscript. [Link above.])

Dave White is, by the way, a good example of how one can rise from the on-line ghetto of crime literature. The bunch of Jackson Donne short stories were first published in different venues in the web before White published his first book. And here's hoping he'll publish many more!

Two new private eye novels: Coleman and Winslow

I've been reading some new private eye novels, as I'm writing an article on them (my research ain't what it used to be and seems like I'll have to do only with some interviews, but such is life). There was a boom in private eye fiction from, say, 2005 on, at the same time new interest in hardboiled and noir came forth, but it seems like the economic depression and the publishing crisis almost made the boom diminish and many writers are now publishing with smaller outfits or doing self-publications.

Still there are new interesting books. Don Winslow and Reed Farrel Coleman aren't exactly new, but both bring fresh voices to the genre that's been deemed defunct several times after Raymond Chandler's death. This is the case especially with Coleman, whose Moe Prager books are very touching and moving, even though there's not much action and Moe Prager is a pretty ordinary guy. It's just that his life is full of mistakes, lies, secrets and agony. The private eye's tragedic life has become a bit of a cliché nowadays (look for example at Declan Hughes's Ed Loy books or Russel McLean's The Good Son), but Coleman makes the theme much more real than many of his contemporaries. The Moe Prager books form an epos, starting from the seventies, ending up in the present day, and the newest one, Empty Ever After, is just as good as any in the series. (It's maybe slightly better than the previous one, Soul Patch, which suffered a bit from Moe Prager's stream of consciousness; I thought those bits were unnecessary.)

Don Winslow's Boone Daniels is a different case altogether. He's not doomed or tragedic, he only wants to surf. To make some money, he works as a reluctant private eye from time to time. He first appeared in The Dawn Patrol, which I recently read and liked quite a bit, even though there was too much of Robert B. Parker in it. I don't really care for the macho posturing about the honour code and all that, even though Boone Daniels keeps his mouth shut about these things more than Spenser. I liked the bits about the cultural and geographical history of surfing in California. There could've been more action in the book, though.

Declan Hughes: The Colour of Blood

Irish writer Declan Hughes is one of those writers who have brought the private eye hero back to the pages of books and shown that private eye books - even those that form a series - don't have to be clichéd or pastiches of older private eye books, like many seem to think here in Finland. I'm hoping some of these new writers can make it to Finnish - alongside Declan Hughes one can mention Dave White, Michael Koryta, Ken Bruen (whose series with Jack Taylor is coming on television), Don Winslow, Ed Lynskey...

The Colour of Blood, which is part of Hughes's Ed Loy series, was my first Hughes and I can recommend it. With some reservations, though, but more on them later. Hughes belongs clearly to the Ross Macdonald school of the private eye fiction, as he deals with the generational evil, living without love, living without a father or a mother, feeling outsider all the time, just like Ross Macdonald did so deftly in his Lew Archer novels. Hughes just brings the themes to this day: the novel starts with a rich man's daughter being kidnapped - or that's what everyone thinks - and the daddy is being blackmailed with porn pictures of her daughter.

Declan Hughes and Ed Loy are linked to Ross Macdonald and Lew Archer also in that Ed Loy is invisible if he turns sideways. He has his own tragedies, but Hughes never dwells in them as much as, say, Russel McLean in his debut novel, The Good Son.

My reservations were largely about the fact that there were too many characters in the novel - it was sometimes pretty hard to discern them from each other. The book was also a tad too long, even though it's not very long, at some 300 pages. There was also some melodrama that I didn't feel was necessary, especially in the climax.

Nevertheless, this is a very strong book that shows private eye fiction is nothing to sneer about. It's also a strong indication that Ireland has produced many good crime writers in the last decade or so.

The Shamus awards

I notice from The Rap Sheet that the Shamus awards (given to the best private eye novels published during a year, mainly (or only?) in the US) have been given to books I've read or am reading at the moment. The Shamus for the best novel went to Reed Farrel Coleman whose The James Deans I liked a great deal (this machine is working so slow that I won't go looking for the post I made on it in Pulpetti, um, 1½ years ago). I'm just now reading Soul Patch, the book that won the first prize. It's wonderful so far, but it seems that Coleman had a stricter editor at Plume, his previous publisher. But more on that later.

The best first novel and the best paperback novel I both read, but unfortunately never managed to talk about them here in Pulpetti: I think I mentioned Sean Chercover's Big City, Bad Blood, but I know I didn't mention Charles Ard.. ehem, Richard Aleas's Songs of Innocence. Even though I thought it was great - a private eye book just won't get any bleaker than this. And Aleas writes with ease and keeps you turning the pages, even though you know the ending will be grim. I also liked Chercover's book, but it was a bit too long on the private eye's personal life even when it didn't seem to be important to the book and the plot - compare it to Coleman's Soul Patch in which Moe Prager's love life is essential to the plot.

Mind you, these are not average private eye novels in any way. There are still many readers (especially in Finland - since we don't get these books in Finnish) who think that the private eye genre is locked somewhere in the era and style of Raymond Chandler or that it's just some lone hero joking around and drinking booze à la our very own Reijo Mäki. All these three books bring fresh air to the genre that many thought was dead by the eighties.

(Which was nonsense in the first place. [Which I came to understand only later. {But more on that later.}])