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.

Comixology on The Hunter

Interim here's a link to Comixology's post about the new graphic novel adaptation of Richard Stark's The Hunter.

Am trying to come up with something tomorrow

Haven't had much chance to blog this week, but I'll be posting something tomorrow, either about Jason Starr's Panic Attack or some films I've been watching: Bloodstone and 3:10 to Yuma (the remake). The latter was surprisingly interesting, but not always in the good way.

My text on I.G. Edmonds

I posted the entry for I.G. Edmonds from Pulpografia on one of my other blogs here. It's in Finnish, but if you're interested there are some links to English-speaking posts. Complicated, huh? This is a global world we live in.

Edit: I googled a bit and noticed this small thread on Edmonds on a newslist. It provides a pretty thorough bibliography for Edmonds - that has also a novel in German called Moerder sind meine Beute (published by Verlag Friedrich W. Loh in 1969), which sounds like it might be one of the Big Eye novels. There's also a mention of Djevelsk oppdrag, published by Magasinet für Alle, in 1966, which must be the war paperback that was also published in Finnish, The Devil Cheaters. It came out in Finnish in 1967, so the German publication must've been the first one. That explains at least something: you don't really expect Finland to be the first choice of an agent to sell a manuscript, as Germany is a vaster market area.

Friday's Forgotten Book: Floyd Smith's Action Girls

I can't tell you much about this book, since I can't find any info about it or its writer on-line. It was published in the Finnish sleaze series called Cocktail in 1974 and the original title is given as Action Girls. The Finnish title means "Girls on Desert". The writer is one Floyd Smith, on whom I can't find anything. Can anyone help? It's not very important, but I'd really like to know whether this was really an American paperback originally or is it a fake. You know, the Cocktail series had at least one book masquerading as a translation, while it was written by a Finnish writer. (I've written about that case here.)

Action Girls/Tytöt aavikolla is not much of a book. The narration is disjointed (the translation is probably abridged) and the plot doesn't make much sense. The head character is a young guy bringing dynamite to a archeological site in Arizona. On the site there are only the professor and his beautiful wife and all those beautiful girls working as internees. The young guy gets into a fight with professor just about everything, but he also gets to fuck all the young girls and eventually the professor's wife, too, even though she's a lesbian at first. The young guy (sorry, forgot his name already, and I don't have the book with me as I write) brings a friend of his to the site and there's a gruesome rape scene with the friend, but the attacked girl turns from a virgin into a sexually active omnisexual after the rape and helps the male friend in his further escapades. I can't help but wonder what the readers of this book were thinking. "Hey, that sounds cool, I'll try that one of these days"?

Action Girls/Tytöt aavikolla is also a bit of a crime novel, with the professor's secret being that he killed his cheating wife (an earlier one, that is) and buried her in the desert. Why's he then doing diggings in the site? It seems he can get a kick out of sex only if he's somewhere around the corpse - and he's also looking for the wedding ring that could identify the body. There's some shooting and fistfight in the climax and dynamite is also used, but in the end everyone -except the now dead professor - can indulge in free-wheelin' sex.

This is one weird novel. If it's an original American sleaze paperback and if you can find it, I'll recommend you take a look, but don't try to get a kick out of it and don't treat it as literature.

Here's a link to all the covers of the Cocktail paperbacks.

Robert Bloch's Shooting Star

Okay, this will be short and not very insightful. I read Robert Bloch's private eye novel Shooting Star (Ace 1958). It was reprinted by Hard Case Crime rather recently as a nice double book - and a good thing it was reprinted, since the original edition goes as far as $350 in Abebooks! The original also seems to be an Ace Double, so it's fitting the new book is also a double.

Okay, back to the book. This really doesn't seem to be going to be very short. As many of you probably know already from reading the book or reviews, it's a Hollywood novel, with a one-eyed private eye trying to clear a B-film actor's reputation so that a producer can put his old films into television. The cultural history here is very interesting and Bloch gives intriguing and authentic-looking glimpses of movie and TV industry - which he both knew from first-hand experience. The hero of the book, Mark Clayburn, is also an agent for pulp writers and a true-crime writer himself and Bloch gives a glimpse of that life, too, mentioning, at least, Anthony Boucher by name (I think some others, too, but I forgot who they were). I think I could've read more of the writer's life.

Bloch is a sure-handed writer, capable of making quick observations, and his dialogue is snappy at best. However, the book lags in the middle and I kind of lost interest - well, it's easy to lose interest with my kids around. But the first half of the book is very good, also with very acute social commentaries. It seems that Bloch could've written a more serious novel than the Ace Double format allowed him to. This isn't your typical private eye novel, though - the hero does get knocked out couple of times and there are nice babes around. I don't mind those clichés, but I minded more some of the sloppiness: one of the supposedly bad guys is suddenly revealed to be another supposedly bad guy's brother, which made me go: "Oh really?"

It was interesting to read this just after I'd finished a Toby Peters novel by Stuart Kaminsky. I can't remember the title now, but it also dealt with old B-films being shown on television. It was like I was given a lesson on the Hollywood history from the fourties and fifties.

I also give you the original cover for the Bloch book, and the Hard Case one, too, by Arthur Suydam. It's nice, all right, but I don't really think anyone had those kind of boobs in the early fifties, not even in Hollywood.

And no, I haven't still read the other novel of the double, Spiderweb, which seems to be more psychological suspense.

There's one problem with double books. Kauto or Ottilia took a photo of me reading the book and it looks like I'm a total moron reading a book the wrong end up!

Should I go on? This really didn't turn out to be very short.

Back from vacation: short notice

Just wanted to tell you that we are alive. Got back from out trip on Sunday and have been adjusting to normalcy for two days now. Will be blogging about some books I read during the trip. These include Robert Bloch's private eye novel that was reprinted by Hard Case Crime (oops, I forget the title.. it's not Hollywood Homicide, even though it could be) and Jason Starr's Panic Attack. (I also read one of Stuart Kaminsky's Toby Peters novels, but I'm not sure if that was interesting enough to blog about.) I also read Floyd Smith's sleaze paperback Action Girls (translated in Finnish as Tytöt aavikolla, 1974). If anyone has access to WorldCat, I'd be very interested to hear if they have the publishing info for this - I can't find anything on it. I'd say it was originally published in the mid-sixties, based on internal evidence.

I also read some Finnish novels, and I'm not entirely sure as yet whether I'll be posting about them here. And if I will, in what language?

Vacation; a notice on a post elsewhere

Starting my vacation tomorrow and heading off to a trip longer than a week, so won't be posting. Ottilia's with us for three weeks.

Here's a link to a longer post on an old Finnish sex paperback I just posted on one of my other blogs. In Finnish, that is.

I don't really know why I read this..

..but I was entertained by the idea. Just a basic novelization fodder which wouldn't work if it were not for the movie. Arnold's character, Eraser, isn't really described in any sense and you'll have to picture him in your head while you're reading the book. The love angle is pretty blandly narrated.

Some of the scenes containing violence border on sadism - this makes me think whether there's a difference between a written word and a piece of action cinema: the things that on screen only make me laugh (or sigh...) make me cringe when I'm reading them. Is this because we take the written word more seriously? Or is it because we have to picture the torture in our own mind? Or are we only accustomed to action movies being more and more violent - when the same things are described on page, we wake up to the notion: "Hey, this is pretty friggin' sick sadism!"

There's not much on Robert Tine in the web. He seems to be born in 1954 (or in 1955) and he's written mainly novelizations and tie-ins. Here's a list. In his early career in the mid-eighties, he wrote the postapocalyptic Outrider series as by Robert Harding, which I believe is a house pseudonym, shared also by other writers. If I'm wrong about this, please correct me.

Here's a link to the original cover.

Tuuli Rannikko's take on Conrad Hirst

During Kevin Wignall's visit to Finland the Kouvola Crime Fiction Festival we met the charming Finnish writer Tuuli Rannikko, who's been living in England for the last 20 years or so. She was very interested in Kevin's book, Kuka on Conrad Hirst? / Who Is Conrad Hirst? Earlier this week I received her short review on the book via Kevin:

Conrad Hirst was an interesting book, in a way a hardboiled thriller, on the other hand a touching description of a broken man. [The book's about] how futile are all our hopes and fears, how fate is laughing at us.

Russel D. McLean's The Good Son

Private eye has seen a renaissance in the last few years. But the hero doesn't wear a trench coat anymore and he's not a wisecracking smartass, like Philip Marlowe or even Spenser. Instead, in most of the newer private eye books he's just as hurt as any of us. He's haunted by his actions and his thoughts. He can't be a hero anymore. I'm talking about writers like Sean Chercover, Dave Zeltserman, Reed Farrel Coleman, Dave White and Ken Bruen. There's lots of them around - private eye is all but dead.

Sometimes it feels, though, that the private eye's sadness and vulnerability becomes a bit too much. There's too much grief, too much sadness, too many broken lives. I mean, just how much can one man have in his own life? This is the case with Scottish writer Russel D. McLean's debut novel, The Good Son (Five Leaves 2008). It stars PI J. McNee whose life is a mess, mainly due to the fact that his girlfriend was killed some years ago and he hasn't gotten over it. He's a recluse and it seems no one really cares for him. His friends disappeared when he was thrown out from the police force. The Good Son puts him against some London gangsters, who show no mercy wanting something from McNee and his client, a man who found his long-lost brother hanging dead in a tree.

It's an interesting novel and the premise is intriguing, but the book is also flawed in many respects. First, there are several people in the book that I don't really buy. For example, McNee's client never feels like a Scottish farmer he is, even though McNee mentions many times that the man really looks the part. There are also some old school tough guys who I didn't find very convincing.

Second, I was a bit disappointed at how McLean tells important plot points, by narrating them through people who tell the stories to McNee. Some of them don't feel authentic and have some narrative conventions that don't fit in with the backflash structure. And this narrative device also makes McNee look like he's actually doing nothing to solve the mystery of the dead man hanging from the tree. (Which of course goes on to show how much of a loser McNee is.)

And I think McLean stresses McNee's personal grieves just a bit too much. Get on with it, for Chrissake! The ending especially has too much of this stuff.

But having said all this, I can say I enjoyed the book and am pleased to notice that it's been bought for an American release and that the same US publisher has bought also McLean's second novel, The Lost Sister (out in October).

And I'd really like to press a point here. Russel McLean has published lots of stories in the net, in publications like Spinetingler and Thrilling Detective. The Good Son was published in the UK by a small publisher, and now McLean is being published in the US by St. Martin's, which is a big (or biggish) publisher.

Similar things have happened with Dave Zeltserman, whose first novel was self-published and it became later Fast Lane, published in PoD by PointBlank, and who ran his own website, Hardluck Stories for short stories and to promote his own work, and Allan Guthrie who also published first through PointBlank. I'm sure I could come up with more examples (and I did, earlier today, but I already forgot who it was). Websites and PoD publishers and self-publications, not to mention e-publishing, which I think will be developing into something worthwhile in ten years, are the pulp magazines and paperbacks of today, a forum in which a writer can hone his skills and gather following and learn his trade. They are nothing to laugh about.

Tommi Aitio's review of Keikkakuski

Here's a quote from Tommi Aitio's very positive and knowledgeable review of Duane Swierczynski's Keikkakuski. It appeared in Kauppalehti on June, 23rd.

Älä ota kesäkissaa, hanki kesäkirja!

Kauppalehti luki puolestasi suven kiinnostavimmat kirjauutuudet - Duane Swierczynski operoi Jim Thompsonin, Charles Williamsin, Charles Willefordin ja Elmore Leonardin rajaamassa vaikutuskentässä, ja millä ketteryydellä!

Keikkakuski ei kenties luo kovan dekkarin perinteeseen mitään uutta, mutta tyylipastissina se on niin täydellinen, että sen soisi herättävän vaikkapa Tarantinon huomion. Virheetön suoritus, kerrassaan.

Hurmehommat Keikkakuski kuvaa kohtuullisen suorasukaisesti niin kuin valitun tyylilajin ilmaisulliseen perinteeseen kuuluu. Perinnetietoista on myös Swierczynskin tapa pyöräyttää luku luvulta tarinaan lisää henkilöhahmoja ja narratiivisia käänteitä. Lopulta porukkaa on paikalla lähes hallitsemattomasti, mutta tällaiset dramaturgiset haasteet Swierczynski voittaa tapattamalla muutaman tyypin pois juonenkulkua häiritsemästä. Autenttinen pulp-kirjailija, siis.

More on Jarkko Sipilä's Helsinki Homicide

I got around to ask Jarkko Sipilä some questions on his newly-published book Helsinki Homicide: Against the Wall. It seems getting the book out in English has taken some activism.

"Only very few Finnish books are getting translated in English", says Sipilä. "That's a problem that doesn't seem to worry Finnish publishers very much, and we don't have many agents working here."

So Sipilä and his brother, who's living in the US and has been working in Wall Street, decided to put up their own publishing house getting Finnish crime novels out in English for the American audience. "If no one else does it, we'll do it by ourselves", says Sipilä. The new publisher is called Ice Cold Crime, which brings to mind images of Scandinavian winter and snow.

Ice Cold Crime is publishing next another book by Sipilä, whose work is strictly rooted in the police procedural and its hardboiled subgenre. Then they'll probably publish something by Harri Nykänen. Nykänen is slightly better known in the US, since the Raid TV series made from his novels was shown in some cable channels there.

The big problem promoting Finnish literature in English-speaking countries is that almost no one speaks Finnish. There's also the problem of getting good translations. Says Sipilä: "We asked for four translation samples and chose the best of them. We also had a proper copy editor who worked with the text and a professional graphic artist to design the books."

"This is of course taking the first steps, making connections, but we'll see how this works out", says Sipilä.

I might be making more posts on this topic to help Sipilä out. And I'd really like to see people spreading the word. If someone's interested in obtaining a review copy, I'm sure you can contact Sipilä through me, in a comment or an e-mail.

Edit: seems like your best bet to get the book is via Amazon, at least for now. For the Finnish readers, the book will be available in bookstores in Finland.

Short post on two crime writers I gave up on

The Italian Andrea Camilleri. Tried to read his first novel, La forma dell'acqua from 1994 (The Shape of Water in English), but couldn't warm to his style, narration or characters! Sorry, Peter!
The American Linda Barnes. Tried Snake Tattoo, one of her Carlotta Carlyle novels, but it was pretty boring and nothing hooked me. Second-rate Paretsky or Grafton, both of whom I haven't cared much for, so...

But I just started Stephen Greenleaf's Beyond Blame from 1985, which I found earlier today at a library remainder sale, and I'm really enjoying it.

Edit: here's a link to an earlier post about Greenleaf.

Stieg Larsson, the British crime writer?

The Rap Sheet posted the finalists for the Barry crime fiction award some days back. Great list, and congrats to Duane Swierczynski and Christa Faust (whose Money Shot, her novel on the paperback list, we are publishing next Spring with Arktinen Banaani). But what's Stieg Larsson doing in a list for British writers? Does Britain = the whole Europe, containing Sweden?

And what's with Åsa Larsson, in a list for best paperback originals? It's not an original novel in any sense, since it's a translation.

The cover for Reino Helismaa's western short stories

This book has been a long time coming - and it's not out for some time now. Perhaps in August. I'll let you know.

The book collects some ten of Finnish singer-songwriter Reino Helismaa's early western short stories, from the late 1930's and early 40's, and it will be published as a small paperback in a limited edition by the Finnish Western Society. The cover artist is Timo Ronkainen who delivered a great job! (I don't think I'll have to tell you who the editor of the book is.)

The book's title: The Village of the Outlaws and Other Western Short Stories.

Jarkko Sipilä's crime novel out in the US

Just noticed that Jarkko Sipilä, one of the foremost Finnish crime writers (and one of the most hardboiled), has a crime novel out in the US. The book is called Helsinki Homicide: Against the Wall and its original title was Vasten seinää (the English translation is literal). It was published in 2008. The book received the Finnish Whodunnit Society's annual award, Johtolanka (Clue), which must've been the trigger for the American deal.

I'll try to get some more details from Sipilä himself.

In the meantime, have a happy Midsummer's Eve!

Edit: Here's some more info!

Anthony Neil Smith and Jonathan Maberry on terrorism

As I promised, I'll say some things about Anthony Neil Smith's and Jonathan Maberry's new books, Yellow Medicine and Patient Zero. Well, they are not new anymore, since these guys seem to be very active. Smith has been fiercely promoting his real new book, Hogdoggin', and based on his Facebook status updates, Maberry has a new book or a comic script coming out every month. (He just announced he's doing the novelization of The Wolfman, the coming film by Guillermo del Toro.)

Why am I putting the two books together? They both deal with international terrorism, the threat from Islamic infiltrators and warmongers. The results couldn't be much different from each other, but both books have cynical loners coming up with new courage to deal with terrorism. Anthony Neil Smith is a bit more ambiguous about the battle and its gains than Maberry, but there's always a bit of doubt in Maberry's hero, too.

Someone has said that in Patient Zero Maberry puts "terror" back in "terrorism". Well, that's about right, since the Islamic terrorists have invented a new virus - no: a prion (remember the mad cow's disease?) - that transforms people into empty-eyed, flesh-eating corpses. The US government sets up a secret group of some bad-ass motherfuckers to deal with these new kind of zombies, and the leader of the group is one Joe Ledger, a loner cop whose attitude towards life can be summed as: "I don't really give a fuck, unless someone I care about is in danger."

Maberry has no qualms in depicting all the terrorists as pure evil, scary one-track minded persons who cheat and lie. Given the book's genre, that could be just an advantage, but having something else, too, might bring some more life into the book. I also thought the book could've used some trimming - I was thinking if it might've been better if Maberry had concentrated only on the Americans trying to come up with an explanation, especially since the book is told both in Joe Ledger's first-person narration and the third-person narration (which is omniscient at times). If Maberry had sticked with Ledger, the result might've been a lot better.

That said, I found the book very exciting, especially battle scenes in which zombies are slaughtered by the dozen. Maberry handles that stuff very well and I found myself thinking: "Why isn't there more of this?"

Now, Anthony Neil Smith has something else in his mind in Yellow Medicine, his first book from Bleak House Books. Deputy Billy Lafitte, working somewhere in the back fields of Minnesota, has some trouble with his own life and with some other people's lives as well. In fact he's a shrewd manipulator and a liar in the best Jim Thompson sense. But take this pathetic anti-hero and put him in the middle of the terrorist plan to gather up money through drug trafficking in Minnesota (obviously as good place to start as any) and you'll find there's lots of courage in him.

In Yellow Medicine Smith spins a mean tale in which no one is taken prisoner and there's always some doubt in the back of the reader's mind: should we really believe in this guy's heroics and should we take a stand with him?

However, Yellow Medicine could've been trimmed a bit. Smith uses a technique that works fine in, say, the Coen brothers' Blood Simple: tell first what happens and tell only afterwards why it happened the way it happened. In Yellow Medicine the technique feels forced at times. The opening is great, though, in just this respect.

Both books would make great movies, by the way.

Weird Uncle Scrooge

See anything strange in this picture? (It's one of the Donald Duck paperbacks that features mostly European-made Disney comics. Donald Duck is huge here in Finland, which is a topic for another time. I'm loading this here only because Facebook's Add Photo function never works properly.)

Kaarlo Uskelan Vainovuosilta

(The original cover of a Finnish book that's being reprinted with my foreword.)

Tunnistaako kukaan tämän kannen kuvittajaa? Kirja on ilmeisesti jonkin sortin omakustanne (kustantajaksi on merkitty Ville Harinen, joka ei julkaissut mitään muuta); ainakin se on postuumisti julkaistu, koska kirjoittaja Uskela oli kuollut vuotta aiemmin eli 1922. Kuvassa on signeeraus, joka on ilmeisesti "Vo". Tuleva uusintapainoksen kustantaja Turbator aikoo käyttää alkuperäistä kantta.