They Should Have Listened to My Mother

Today is Mother's Day, and all week, I've been thinking about my mom. She was warm and smart and an incredibly good sport. She had a jones for cleanliness that was somehow never exhausted. ("A little soap and water never killed anybody." "I can't believe you can sleep in this filth!" "I didn't ask who put it there, I said, 'Pick it up!'") Despite daily setbacks, she never gave up on advising her five kids how to stay out of trouble or how to treat people. ("How many times do I have to tell you?") When we misbehaved, it wasn't because we didn't know better. I wonder if some crime fiction characters would have benefitted from her guidance.

Unlike some lawbreakers, professional robber and occasional killer Crissa Stone is capable of cutting her losses and walking away if there's serious trouble. ("I don't care who started it, I said STOP!") She's careful about the jobs she takes, and she doesn't kill when she doesn't have to. Mom would be appalled by Crissa's occupation ("Who taught you THAT? You didn't learn that in this house!"), but she would applaud Crissa's attention to detail, resourcefulness, and toughness, as well as her love for her young daughter and loyalty to Wayne, her lover and mentor (we won't tell Mom he's in a Texas prison). Her goal is admirable: a big enough score to get herself out of the crime business, reunited with her daughter, and Wayne out on parole.

Frank and Marquis, this is not my mom!

In Wallace Stroby's third series book, Shoot the Woman First (Minotaur, 2013), Crissa hooks up with a couple of guys she's worked with before, Charlie Glass and Larry Black, and Charlie's cousin Cordell, to snatch a duffle bag of drug money from Cordell's boss, Marquis Johnson, a criminal kingpin in Detroit. ("Where are you going, and who are you going with? Do I know them?") Events take a very bad turn. Crissa heads to Florida, to turn over Black's share of the loot to his family. This is not the straightforward handover Crissa might have hoped for ("Life isn't fair"), but I wouldn't have expected anything easy, given my experience with writer Stroby.

Stroby reminds me a bit of Elmore Leonard. His lyrical writing, characterization, and spot-on dialogue can put a spit polish on any old plot vehicle, but his plot never drives like it's old. This one careens like a bat out of hell, thanks to Frank Burke, an ex-cop with nothing left to lose, who talks Johnson into hiring him to recover his money. ("You can't find it? Well, if you'd put things where they belonged, you wouldn't have this problem.") Watching Frank methodically tracking down Crissa, whose sense of responsibility makes her linger in Florida, reminded me of that relentless semi driver after Dennis Weaver in Steven Spielberg's 1971 movie, Duel. A heckuvan original heroine, a villain out of your nightmares, and a pedal-to-the-metal look at good vs. evil and the role of fate in our lives. Whoa, Mama.

Let's let Mom have a crack at Paul Thomas's Death on Demand (Bitter Lemon, 2013). Four men get together six years ago for their annual boys' weekend. Two of them have soured marriages. A third, Christopher, complains that he can't just look in the phone book for a hit man to deal with his wife. ("If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all.") Three months later, Joyce dies in a hit-and-run accident, the first of a string of fatalities in Auckland, New Zealand, that runs to the present day. ("Always wear clean underwear in case you get in an accident.") Two weeks ago, Christopher is diagnosed with a fatal illness. Now, Maori DS Tito Ihaka, exiled to the boonies from Auckland Central, is brought back to re-open the investigation that got him into trouble in the first place. ("I will always love you. No matter what.")

Ihaka is "unkempt, overweight, intemperate, unruly, unorthodox and profane." In other words, he's a maverick like Ian Rankin's John Rebus. ("So what if John's mom let him do it? If John's mom let him jump off a cliff, would you want me to let you do it too?") Ihaka is also an absolute whiz at solving cases, much to the appreciation of enigmatic Auckland District Commander Finbar McGrail and DS Johan Van Roon, Ihaka's protégé and only cop friend. It rankles DI Tony "Boy" Charlton and DS Ron "Igor" Firkitt, because they hate Ihaka. There is prejudice against Maoris and and elbowing for position in the Auckland force. Like Rebus, Ihaka has a practical attitude about maintaining productive relationships with certain criminals and dispensing informal justice to those whom the law doesn't reach. ("You must think rules are made to be broken.") Women find him very attractive.

This was my first Ihaka book, and I really enjoyed it. There are plenty of unusual characters, in addition to the complicated Ihaka, and their relationships and dialogue are very well done. The unspooling of this multilayered tale has an unpredictable rhythm, in that just when you think things are clearing up, Ihaka grabs hold of another thread, and you realize you were wrong. This book, the fourth in the series, can be read out of order, but I'll definitely be looking for the three earlier books: Dirty Laundry, Inside Dope, and Guerilla Season.

Whether you're a mother yourself or remembering your own mother today, I hope your Mother's Day is a wonderful one.

Review of Timothy Hallinan's Little Elvises

Little Elvises by Timothy Hallinan

Don't get me wrong. I'm an Elvis fan; a big fan, even though I'm not one of those people who make pilgrimages to Elvis's old stomping grounds at Graceland, or have an Elvis shrine in the bedroom. I love his movies (my fav is Jailhouse Rock), and there's nothing I enjoy more than crooning "Love Me Tender" or belting out "It's Now or Never" in the shower. So when I spied a book titled Little Elvises by one of my go-to authors, Timothy Hallinan, I was on it like a flea on a hound dog.

When the book begins, Los Angeles cop Paul DiGaudio is in an interrogation room stuffing his face with Halloween-size Tootsie Rolls, while he tells crook/narrator Junior Bender he knows Junior didn't commit the Hammer job. That job was a robbery in which the elderly Mrs. Hammer was pistol-whipped. Junior has an alibi and, besides, he's smart enough not to pack a weapon when he burgles, so he can avoid a robbery-under-special-circumstances charge. Junior's innocence doesn't matter to Paulie. Paulie is aware that Junior is a crimebuster for people "on the other side of the fence." (If you don't already know this, you can read Georgette Spelvin's review of the first Junior Bender book, Crashed, here.) Paulie's Uncle Vinnie is a suspect in the killing of Derek Bigelow, the kind of journalist who writes for The National Snoop, and Paulie is going to force Junior to help Vincent L. DiGaudio prove his innocence.

We've all noticed how American pop culture makes copies of anything original that makes money. Rina, Junior's 13-year-old daughter, wrote a school paper focusing on Philadelphia's Little Elvises, "who were churned to the surface in the wake of Elvis Presley." A few of them, such as Bobby Angel, could sing. None were as hard on the ears as Giorgio, yet he was so beautiful he was popular up until his disappearance in 1963. The man behind all the copycat singers with pompadours and tight pants who appeared on American Dance Hall and sold many records for a month was Paulie's Uncle Vinnie. This isn't good for Junior. The job Paulie wants him to do not only involves murder, it may involve the Mob.

Reading about crime is well and good, but when vivid writing makes laughs snort out of your nose, that's even better. It's one of the reasons I like Timothy Hallinan. Let's put Uncle Vinnie on the back burner while I show you Marge 'n' Ed's North Pole, a seedy motel at the north end of North Hollywood. Junior is divorced and he moves around a lot to thwart fellow criminals with a beef against him. This month's motel is a fantastic pick because no one would think Junior could sink so low. It's always Christmas at the North Pole and Junior is in Blitzen, where the cord to the blinkie-lights is glued to the outlet and "for good elves only" is engraved on the table. The carpet had been "a snowy white fifteen or twenty years ago, but was now the precise color of guilt, a brownish gray like a dusty spiderweb, interrupted here and there by horrific blotches of darkness, as though aliens with pitch in their veins had bled out on it."

There is no more 'n' Ed but there is a Marge, who has a cigarette screwed into a corner of her mouth and an economy-size jug of Old Igor's Private Stock vodka glued to one of her hands. She is smart enough to recognize that Junior, while not checking into the North Pole with a body in the trunk of his car, is not entirely law abiding. He's a mensch who might be able to find her daughter Doris. Marge hasn't heard from Doris in a few weeks, and what she saw when she stopped by the rented dump where Doris had been living with Mr. Pinkie Ring scared her.

Junior now has two detective job offers he can't refuse and he sets to work. Assisting him are his precocious daughter, Rina, Paulie and criminal pal Louie the Lost. They and the characters at the opposite end of the magnifying glass are so colorful they could stock a box of human Crayolas. For example, there's Popsie, the woman who answers Vinnie's door, with calves so muscled they look like "they'd evolved to hold the planet still while she walked." Vinnie's hair is dyed "a dead black that ate light without reflecting any" and he has a little soul patch that "clung uncertainly to his lower lip, like a misplaced comma." There's a neighbor who's "eighty, eighty-five, and so wrinkled it looked like he had enough skin for three people" and his hair is as "white as processed flour." There are people trying to stop Junior's investigation and a hired killer is so unusual and brilliantly drawn my stomach trembled. Somewhere in between Junior's friends, enemies and suspects is Bigelow's non-grieving widow Ronnie, who has lapis blue eyes and baby-fine blond hair twisted into a rope and held in place on top of her head by an inserted fork. She has a thing for bad men.

At its heart, Little Elvises isn't a purely comic novel, even though there are many funny touches and scenes that made me laugh. It's full of characters wounded by loss and bad luck. Musicians make music despite drug habits and poverty. Junior misses his daughter Rina and, during his investigation, he meets abandoned women who make him feel guilty about the divorce from his wife Kathy, whose current relationship with a hunter named Bill gives Junior little mental flare-ups of homicidal rage. At the same time, it's impossible to imagine Junior living the crime-free life that Kathy wants because he's not only good at being a crook, he gets off on it too.

I liked Hallinan's unusual protagonist, Junior. Being unconstrained by the law sure comes in handy for investigating crimes and dealing with criminals. I enjoyed Hallinan's riffs on the themes of love in its many guises, how the still waters of society and individuals run deep, the meaning of prejudice and the price of fame and survival. Hallinan obviously loves music and knows Los Angeles well enough to give us a criminal's-eye view of the city and its nearby desert. Sometimes I wondered if one of the two threads of Junior's investigations was about to get lost while he messed around, but that not only didn't happen, the suspense rose to a terrific finish. There are few better ways of spending a lazy evening than hanging out with resourceful Los Angeles burglar Junior Bender.

Note: Thanks to Read Me Deadly reader Bonnie Riley, who pointed out this book to me. I received an advance review copy of Little Elvises, published earlier this year by Soho Press.

Procrastinators of the World, Unite!

Today's date brings me joyous relief. Why? It's my day to talk to you about books, and it's also National Procrastination Week. I'm not sure exactly what about procrastination we're supposed to celebrate (naturally, I'll put off investigating until tomorrow), but I choose to think we procrastinators are granted a guilt-free week for getting caught up. We can yet again resolve to do things in a more timely manner. I'll do that later. Right now I want to tell you about a book whose review fell prey to my procrastination and then I'll mention a few other good books and the movies made from them.

Liars Anonymous by Louise Ure

If you grew up in the United States, you probably heard the story of the young George Washington and the cherry tree. His father finds his beautiful tree lying on the ground and asks George if he knows who chopped it down. George replies, "I can't tell a lie, Pa; you know I can't tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet." Rather than punish George for cutting down the tree, his father praises him for his honesty. We'll postpone debating the truth of this legend.

On Washington's birthday in February, my idea was to write not about an honest hero, but about Louise Ure's Jessica Dancing Gammage. Washington's birthday is past, but it's never too late for reading about Jessie. If there was a 12-step program for liars, like there is for alcoholics, prosecutor Ted Dresden says she'd be its "queen and founder and president." Jessie is honest enough with us, however, to begin her narration of Liars Anonymous with these words:

I got away with murder once, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen again. Damn. This time I didn't do it. Well, not all of it, anyway.

"This time" involves Darren Markson. When the airbag in the Cadillac he's driving in the desert near Tucson, Arizona deploys, it triggers a satellite phone call to Jessie, a HandsOn car emergency service operator in Phoenix. Markson tells Jessie that he's been rear-ended and he's going to talk to the guy in the other car. She hears him get out of his car. Three people speak briefly and next come alarming noises of a physical fight before someone disconnects the HandsOn call. Jessie is disturbed enough to do something illegal. She reactivates the audio connection to Markson's Cadillac and listens to sounds that she interprets as Markson's murder.

Jessie's call to 911 prompts a Tucson police investigation of the accident site. There is some evidence left by the collision but no cars or people are found. The police ask Jessie for help interpreting the HandsOn evidence. She leaves Phoenix––where HandsOn knows her as Jessie Dancing, and Mind Your Manors housesitting service knows her, falsely, as "a former nun and nondrinker, with an allergy to pet dander"––and heads to Tucson, her hometown. There, she is known as the woman who three years earlier was acquitted of murder. She immediately runs into problems.

The story about Markson that she tells Detective Deke Treadwell is undercut by Markson's wife Emily, who knows nothing about an accident and says her husband called her the day after Jessie says he was rear-ended. Markson said he was flying to a meeting in New Mexico and that he'd left his car in the airport parking lot. Jessie, an expert in lying, diagnoses a bad liar and resents being drawn into a subterfuge.

Det. Treadwell, former partner of Jessie's retired father, and her father are the only ones who still believe Jessie isn't a murderer. Other cops and attorneys in the DA's office resent her reappearance in Tucson and are suspicious of her involvement with the missing Markson. As Jessie explains, "Declared not guilty of a crime I had committed, I was not about to be railroaded into one I had not." She has no choice but to figure out what happened to Markson.

While Jessie is sucked into the spiraling violence surrounding Markson's vanishing, she tells us, bit by bit, about herself and the murder she committed. Jessie is the first of seven children. Her mother always kept her at arm's length and now she considers Jessie dead. After majoring in philosophy in college, Jessie had been working as a bartender when her very close friend Catherine died. That's when Jessie "took over her quest" and killed someone. She confides, "You would have thought those studies would have better prepared me to come to terms with becoming a killer, but the ethics of killing were still a muddle to me. If you take a life, does it change you? Yes, in a thousand shadowed ways. Is it worth it? Sometimes."

Jessica Dancing Gammage is an extraordinary character whose story deals with personal responsibility and the gulf between guilt and innocence. Liars Anonymous is full of action, but it's Jessie, the honest liar, and the story's ending that blew me away.

My husband and I are enjoying our own crime fiction film festival. Don't put off reading these outstanding books and watching their movies:

Prizzi's Honor

Richard Condon. Two mafia killers fall in love in Condon's black comedy, Prizzi's Honor. It was made famous by the John Huston film starring Jack Nicholson, Kathleen Turner and Anjelica Huston. Condon also wrote The Manchurian Candidate, an outstanding Cold War conspiracy thriller about thought control and political assassination. It was made into a great 1962 movie with Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey and Janet Leigh, and filmed again in 2004 with Denzel Washington, Meryl Streep, Liev Schreiber and Jon Voight. Watch them both and see if you agree with me that the earlier one is better.

High Sierra

W. R. Burnett. In Little Caesar, crime's a hoppin' in Chicago during Prohibition. Cesare "Rico" Bandello has killed a cop and is climbing organized crime's career ladder before he's forced to run for his life. Edward G. Robinson and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. star in the classic 1930 movie of the same name. Who hasn't seen Humphrey Bogart, Ida Lupino, Alan Curtis and Arthur Kennedy in John Huston's 1941 High Sierra? Burnett wrote the noir novel about a Palm Springs, California heist before collaborating on the movie with Huston. In 1950, Huston filmed Burnett's The Asphalt Jungle, which stars Sterling Hayden, Jean Hagen and Sam Jaffe in a caper story about a jewelry robbery.

A Kiss before Dying

Ira Levin. This writer was a machine for turning out books that became movies. A Kiss before Dying involves a scheming psychopath who wants a fortune and decides that courting a rich family's daughters is one way to get it. Robert Wagner stars in the 1956 film that also introduces Joanne Woodward. Forget the 1991 remake with Matt Dillon and Sean Young. In the supernatural/horror thriller Rosemary's Baby, Rosemary and her husband Guy move into a new apartment house and when Rosemary becomes pregnant, she finds Guy and the other tenants increasingly spooky. Many of us are familiar with the movie featuring Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes. Like Rosemary in Rosemary's Baby, Joanna Eberhart feels like a fish out of water in the satirical novel The Stepford Wives. The other married women in Stepford, Connecticut are strangely docile. The Stepford Wives was filmed multiple times but the only version I like is the 1975 version with Katharine Ross. I've written before about Levin's neo-Nazi thriller The Boys from Brazil (here). I've yet to read or see Levin's Sliver, which is about voyeurism and obsession. I might take a pass on the movie unless someone can recommend it. The Rotten Tomatoes website viewers rated it a solid rotten splat, with only 12 percent liking it!

Fellow procrastinators, I hope you enjoy our week. Let's all vow to be better about being on time. Tomorrow. For now, I vote we curl up with a good book. I'm heading for the couch with Herman Koch's The Dinner. What about you?

Deciding on your style is one more good way to procrastinate

A Stranger and a Thief

This has been a peaceful day. Or maybe a better way of putting it is to say that I have made peace with what I haven't done and still have time to do before Christmas. Somehow time slips away, especially if I'm trotting the globe in my reading.

Based on its themes, Andrea Camilleri's The Potter's Field is a better book for reading at Easter than at Christmas but that's not to say I'd suggest putting it off until then. The Bible's New Testament states that temple elders used the 30 pieces of silver given them by Judas, after he betrayed Christ, to purchase the potter's field for a burial spot for strangers. In this thirteenth Inspector Salvo Montalbano book, a garbage bag containing the dismembered body of an unknown man is found at the place called 'u critaru (Sicilian for the clay field). The plot also employs biblical themes of betrayal, prophetic dreams, feuds, rains that mimic the Great Flood and sins of lust and murder.

There is often friction between Montalbano and his men of the Vigàta police precinct, but for the past few months Inspector Mimì Arguello has been unusually short-tempered and Fazio and Catarella are barely coping with him. Montalbano hasn't noticed. He's been too busy feeling his age, ignoring telephone calls, feuding with the press, walking on the beach and ensuring his appetite is satisfied. Now he has no choice but to pay attention to the murder investigation and unhappiness of those around him.

The Potter's Field was translated from the Italian by Stephen Sartarelli and published by Penguin Books in 2011. As usual with this series, the Sicilian food is mouth watering, Montalbano's "bullshitter extraordinaire" moments are entertaining, the characters are colorful and the plotting is good. It was awarded the 2012 International Dagger Award.

Camilleri's Sicily is a feast for the senses. The Tokyo of Fuminori Nakamura's The Thief isn't the city of jostling crowds and neon lights. It's the anonymity and gloom of subway stations and dark alleys. The narrator is a pickpocket (his name, Nishimura, is mentioned once) who has been stealing since he was very young. He is an expert at assessing wealth by apparel. Nishimura dresses to blend in with the crowd. He is never more alive than when he gets close to his mark and uses two fingers to lift a wallet. Then a quiver goes up his arm and the tension in his body leaks into the air. Sometimes Nishimura finds wallets he has no memory of taking in the inner pockets of his suit and he sees towers where there aren't any. (When he was young, there was always a tower in the distance.)

At one time Nishimura worked with a partner, but now he and Ishiwaka are just friends. He has begun a friendship with a nameless prostitute, whom he spots shoplifting in a store, and her nameless young son, who is beginning to steal, when Ishiwaka recruits him for a home robbery planned by a criminal called Kizaki. This is a bad mistake and Nishimura will need all the skills he can muster.

This isn't typical noir. It's not easy to convey its strangeness. It's as if it's narrated by an emotionally claustrophobic being. At the same time it's compulsive reading. Nishimura's voice is spare and cryptic, the pace is fast and unusual details are the usual. When Nishimura buys cigarettes and coffee at a convenience store, "the clerk bellowed, 'Thank you very much!' like he was insane." I enjoyed this story of an alienated thief whose main connectedness with other people is the moment at which he's lifting their wallets from their pockets. What does this say about the society in which Nishamura lives? The Thief was translated from the Japanese by Satoko Izumo and Stephen Coates and published in 2012 by Soho Crime. It won Japan's 2009 Oe Prize.  I will look forward to more from this young writer.

I'll tell you about James Church's A Drop of Chinese Blood next time. Have a very Merry Christmas.

Sympathy for the Devil

There's a theory that the reason why women supposedly read mysteries more than men is because women like the way mysteries set things to rights. I'm dubious about that, since the implication would be that men don't care much whether order is restored. Actually, now that I think about my husband's untidiness and talent for losing things, maybe there's something to the theory after all.

But I'm getting off track. My real purpose is to talk about a couple of mysteries in which things may not be set to rights. We don't see the story through the eyes of the good guys and follow along as they nab the criminals and restore law and order. In these books, we see things through the eyes of the criminal and we are meant to want him to get away with his crime–or at least to want it a little bit.

One of the first in that vein that I've read is Malice Aforethought, by Francis Iles (one of the pseudonyms of Anthony Berkeley Cox). We know who the murderer is from the very first line of the book, one of the most intriguing in crime fiction: "It was not until several weeks after he had decided to murder his wife that Dr. Bickleigh took any active steps in the matter."

Dr. Edmund Bickleigh is a bit of a milquetoast who is squashed under the thumb of his shrewish wife, Julia. He has played around for years, but now he's stuck. He's fallen in love, or at least an overpowering lust, and his inamorata will not consider marrying a divorcé. Bickleigh is convinced of his own genius when he comes up with his plan to rid himself of Julia by way of a more lethal (and far less legal) method than divorce. If only he'd listened to his wife's assessment of his talents! Things keep going wrong for poor Bickleigh and he comes up with ever-more elaborate and deadly schemes to cover his tracks.

This is a darkly satirical look at a village where all appears placid and respectable, while every deadly sin imaginable teems beneath the surface. Malice Aforethought was made into a 1979 four-part BBC miniseries and a 2005 Granada Television production shown on PBS's Mystery! series.

It's a big jump from the weekend tennis parties and dalliances of the Devonshire village of Wyvern Cross to an assassination plot against General Charles de Gaulle, but strap on your seatbelt, because that's where we're going. Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal is a gripping suspense thriller about a professional assassin, code-named the Jackal, who is hired by a right-wing group to kill de Gaulle, whom they believe has betrayed France by granting independence to Algeria.

We are led to identify with the Jackal through the book's descriptions of his lengthy, methodical and ingenious preparations for the job. We learn a lot about getting fake identification papers and passports, smuggling weapons, tracking a target and laying false trails. This is good educational stuff. After all, you never know when that kind of expertise might come in handy.

The assassination plot is revealed to the French authorities, but not the Jackal's real name or even a description. Now the chase is on. We're introduced to the men who are set on his trail: Claude Lebel, a French police detective, and Detective Superintendent Bryn Thomas of Scotland Yard, who becomes involved when the Prime Minister insists that Britain help foil the assassination plot.

In the cat-and-mouse game that follows, it's hard not to identify with the Jackal, even though he ruthlessly uses and disposes of people along the way in his mission. At the same time, Lebel and Thomas are so often just one step behind and we want their hard work to be rewarded too. The climax will definitely raise your blood pressure, and it's followed by a satisfying puzzle of an epilogue.

The Day of the Jackal was made into a 1973 film of the same name, starring Edward Fox as the Jackal. If you've never seen the movie, you're in for a real treat.

I was going to talk about another classic in the sub-genre of mysteries told from the point of view of the murderer, but then I remembered that we don't realize that's what's happening until the end. Can you identify this 1926 novel? If you need a hint, look down a few lines. (If you don't want to have the plot spoiled for you, in case you don't know this book and might read it later, you may want to avoid reading the comments on this post.)

Hint: The title of a book about the book is in the form of a question.