Book review: the legendary last novel by the author of Get Carter

Ted Lewis was the author of Get Carter (initially titled Jack's Return Home), the inspiration for the Michael Caine classic crime drama. The hard-living Lewis died in 1982 at age 42, and the legend has been that his last novel, GBH, not Get Carter, is his real noir masterpiece. The problem is that GBH (which stands for the crime of Grievous Bodily Harm) went out of print in the UK almost instantly after it was published in 1980, and it wasn't published in the US. But now we can all find out if the GBH (Soho Crime, April 21, 2015) of legend is the real deal.

In GBH's two-track narrative, crime boss George Fowler alternates between his life in London, where he ruthlessly hunts for the traitors within his organization, helped by the members of his ever-shrinking trusted inner circle. The London chapters are called Smoke, and they alternate with chapters titled Sea, in which Fowler is now in a coastal town, where he is as alone and bleak as the the off-season beachfront.

The story is gritty, deep dark noir. Fowler's business is extremely nasty porn, and he's relentless, ultra-violent and increasingly unhinged in his pursuit of his betrayer. As the chapters alternate between Smoke and Sea, we learn how Fowler has come to the state he's in when he retreats to his luxurious, but empty, seaside house, and what the consequences will be of the choices he's made.

Lewis's prose is stripped down and searing. One aspect of it I wasn't crazy about is its purposeful lack of clarity. Names are given, but we don't know who they are for some time. We don't even know Fowler's first name for awhile, nor what his criminal empire is all about or why he's having various members of his organization tortured. I thought the story was more than tense and compelling enough not to need this element, which just seemed gimmicky to me.

Noir fans will want to give this vintage London crime drama a read. Some, maybe even most, may find that the clarity issue that bothered me adds an air of creepy suspense.

Notes: I was given an advance copy of the book for review. Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, BookLikes and other reviewing sites under my usernames there.

Books for the Ides of April

I know I'm not Thomas Paine, facing the American Revolution, but I can still say these are the times that try men's souls: the overwork and overworry of tax season. As she related on Saturday, Sister Mary Murderous has been taking refuge in a flood of good TV dramas. My zonked outedness at the end of the day and subsequent middle-of-the-night awakenings have cast me into reading one book after another. I mean, I must achieve a suspension of disbelief somehow, if not in sweet dreams, then in a work of fiction––and I'm not talking about our tax returns! The books below are all timely for the Ides of April.

Maybe one of these days we'll see a greedy Owen Laukkanen villain cheat on his taxes. So far, they've been too engrossed with kidnapping (The Professionals), armed robbery (Criminal Enterprise), and running a murder-for-hire operation (Kill Fee) to bother. In The Stolen Ones (G. P. Putnam's Sons, March 2015), we watch a criminal hierarchy involved in the despicable crime of trafficking women. The man at the top is called the Dragon. His financial demands and reputation for ruthlessness put tremendous pressure on Brighton Beach's Andrei Volovoi, whose truck drivers deliver the shipping containers of victims to their final US destinations. Like all of Laukkanen's villains, Andrei considers himself a regular American businessman. Andrei likes to think that any eastern European woman dumb enough to fall for the trap presented by the American dream deserves the box and whatever comes after.

Then one of Andrei's drivers kills a curious sheriff's deputy and Irina Milosovici, who speaks only a smidgeon of English, escapes from the truck's container. Her beloved younger sister, Catalina, remains trapped with others in the box as the truck drives away. [Note to self: Never be reincarnated as a Laukkanen criminal caught in the middle between cops and worse criminals, although Andrei rises––or perhaps the better word is "sinks"––to the occasion.] What ensues is one of the writer's patented three-ring circus thrillers that also examines a serious social issue. Point of view and setting get juggled between the scrambling bad guys, the separated but feisty Milosovici sisters, and an engagingly mismatched duo of good guys: Kirk Stevens, a veteran in the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and Carla Windermere, a hotshot FBI special agent. Tension in The Stolen Ones is already the high-wire sort, but Owen Laukkanen, crafty as usual, yanks and twists the wire. Put this guy on your thriller writers must-read list. I feel like I've popped a Xanax when I hear he's working on another.

After a difficult session with the calculator, take a break with the soothingly cynical company of an Italian crime solver. Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen, Donna Leon's Guido Brunetti, and Andrea Camilleri's Salvo Montalbano come to mind. Add to these Timothy Williams's Commissario Piero Trotti of the Polizia di Stato in northern Italy. The fourth series book is Black August (originally published in 1995 by Trafalgar Square Publishing; re-released by Soho Crime, January 2015). Trotti is a bit like Ian Rankin's Edinburgh cop, John Rebus, whose life revolves around his work, although Trotti's vice of choice is hard candy rather than the bottle. Like Rebus, Trotti is honest and efficient, but his methods are out of the Dark Ages. He alienates people and can't work on a team.

When the questore, who's read Machiavelli's The Prince, warns him to get out of town on vacation rather than join the Rosanna Belloni murder case, Trotti interprets this to mean the questore really wants him to investigate. This is convenient thinking. Rosanna, a retired headmistress whose corpse is found, battered beyond recognition in her bedroom, is an old friend whom Trotti met 20 years earlier when her student, Anna Ermagni, was kidnapped. With this book, you look at the nature of friendship, professional loyalty, and the mental health system, much more pleasant than checking your Form-1040 figures.

I'll tell you right off the bat, screenwriter Daniel Pyne's novel, Fifty Mice (Blue Rider Press, December 2014), isn't for everybody. For one thing, it's noir of the paranoid variety and deals with themes of reality, memory, identity, and fate. For another, it opens with the kaleidoscopic images and confusion of Jay Johnson's abduction off a Los Angeles Metro train, and what's going on in Jay's subsequent Kafkaesque situation only becomes clear to him and the reader over the course of the novel.

When Fifty Mice begins, Jay is 30-ish something and engaged to be married. He currently works in telephone sales, although he previously worked with data obtained from experiments run on laboratory mice, and he still hangs out at his friend Vaughn's lab. This brings us to yet another reason this book isn't for everyone. Laboratory mice have never been as sympathetic as they are in the tidbits Pyne throws our way. They are in about as much control of their tiny, tragic lives as is Jay, because the outraged Jay finds himself trapped in a Witness Protection program on Catalina Island, off the coast of California, an unwilling possessor of a new identity for God-only-knows-what reason. Jay is clueless, but the feds don't believe that for a moment. It will be to Jay's advantage to figure out, uh, something. After reading these reasons for not recommending this book to every reader, those who will enjoy this memorably original noir know who you are.

I still have some experimenting to do with my income taxes. I wish you the best with your own.

Review of Jean-Patrick Manchette's The Mad and the Bad

The Mad and the Bad by Jean-Patrick Manchette

I just finished a real binge of history reading and am finally back to mysteries. My first mystery read in about a month was a very forgettable old Golden Age mystery. The less said about that the better.

But then it was on to Jean-Patrick Manchette's The Mad and the Bad. Manchette, who died in 1995 when he was only in his early 50s, was said to have saved French crime fiction from the then-dominant fusty and formulaic police procedurals. Manchette's style is spare, violent noir.

I shouldn't like Manchette; I'm addicted to characters, but Manchette's characters are stripped down, serving a plot that rushes on as fast and devastating as a bullet. Several of Manchette's books have been made into graphic novels because the graphic novel style meshes so well with Manchette's stories. Regardless of whether I should like them, I do like Manchette's books, very much. Unfortunately, not all have (yet) been translated into English.

All of Manchette's books that are available in English are about contract killers. In Three to Kill, Georges Gerfaut, a company executive with a dull work and family life, witnesses a murder and is then pursued by the assassins. Georges decides to turn the tables on them––and his life. In The Prone Gunman, Martin Terrier is a hired gun who's had enough. He wants to retire, go back home with his savings and marry his old love. Be careful what you wish for.

I read Three to Kill and The Prone Gunman years ago. I was excited to see that New York Review Books was coming out with The Mad and the Bad (2014; translated from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith). This was one of Manchette's earliest novels, and is doesn't have quite the spare, searing style of the later novels, but it'll do.

Julie is a young woman who's been living in a country estate home for the mentally ill for the last five years. As the novel opens, a limo comes up the long drive to the estate, and the redheaded Michael Hartog emerges. He's come to pick up Julie and take her to London, where she will be the latest in a line of nannies for Hartog's young orphaned nephew, Peter.

Why in the world would Hartog hire Julie? It's not a mystery. We quickly learn that Hartog has hired an English hitman, Thompson, to kill Peter and Julie, and make it look like an insane Julie has done the deeds. Why Hartog wants to do this is not explained; I suppose it must be because Hartog's vast wealth all comes from Peter's parents, who were killed in an accident, and Hartog doesn't want Peter to get any of it.

Manchette doesn't explain the "why" of the plot because he only has 163 pages to get right into some of the wildest, goriest, and just flat-out crazy action ever in a thriller. Thompson seems an odd choice for a contract killer. He is practically crippled by a bleeding ulcer and seems at least a soupçon more unhinged than Julie. He has also hired a pair of colleagues whom no discerning contract killer would want as associates. But it's all grist for this hallucinogenic swirl of violence.

Jean-Patrick Manchette

The Mad and the Bad isn't as good as either Three to Kill or The Prone Gunman, but it was a wild ride and nothing like anything else I've read this year––or expect to read anytime soon.

I want to mention one other thing about this NYRB edition of The Mad and the Bad, and that is its introduction by crime writer James Sallis, who is probably best known for his Lew Griffin series. This introduction reminded me of a story from college that a classmate told me. He was in a literature class, with the students and teacher in an intense discussion of the symbolism and deep meaning of Moby Dick. But then one guy, Mike, commented that he thought it was just a simple sea story. That probably sounds like a complete non sequitur, but stay with me.

In the introduction, Sallis writes:

Manchette's profoundly leftist, distinctly European stance may be something of a problem for American readers. Like many of his generation, Manchette was influenced by the Situationist Guy Debord, whose theories, elaborated in The Society of the Spectacle, were everywhere during France's 1968 insurrections. Situationists held that capitalism's overweening successes came only at the expense of increased alienation, social dysfunction, and a general degradation of daily life; that the acquisition, exchange, and consumption of commodities had forcefully supplanted direct experience, creating a kind of life by proxy; and that liberation might be found in fashioning moments that reawakened authentic desires, a sense of adventure, a ransom from dailiness.

And further:

For Manchette the world is a giant marketplace in which gangs of thugs––be they leftist, reactionary, terrorist, police, or politicians––compete relentlessly; one in which tiny groups of individuals, "torn to pieces by the enemy and sodomized by [their] own leaders," stay afloat by clinging to the flotsam. In his work he alludes to and parodies literary writers such as Baudelaire and Stendhal, juxtaposes the vulgar and the precious, enjambs depictions of quotidian life against scenes of such extreme and often implicit violence as to call into question all the myriad fictions of bourgeois, accepted existence.

Well, alrighty then. I'm glad I only skimmed Sallis's intro before diving into the book, or I might have been too intimidated, thinking that I was going to be challenged by a revolutionary political and literary manifesto. Instead, I was like Mike and Moby Dick. He read a simple sea story and I read a graphic noir thriller. I didn't experience the levels of meaning Sallis did, but this bourgeois got all I wanted from the book.

Oh, and by the way, Happy Halloween!

Today We Celebrate Our Ex-Spouses

No, I am not making this up. Today, April 14, is Ex-Spouse Day, when we're supposed to acknowledge our ex-spouses. I'm not sure whether this special day was created by Congress––always working hard to be seen as improving Americans' lives––or the Hallmark card company. I'm also not clear about how we're to celebrate, although getting out the old voodoo doll and poking fresh holes or offering fervent prayers of thanks that the marriage is over are no doubt appropriate in some cases. In other cases, maybe dinner is on the menu, so you can raise a glass to being friends instead of partners.

Given that I don't have an ex-husband, I thought I'd celebrate the day by telling you about a pair of exes I've encountered in my reading.

Wade Chesterfield isn't a monster, but the ex-minor league baseball player is so irresponsible that his ex-wife had him sign papers relinquishing parental rights to their daughters Easter and Ruby, now 12 and 6. When their mother dies, the girls are placed in a foster care home in Gastonia, North Carolina. This isn't okay with Wade, who does love his daughters. He pulls the kids out of their beds in the middle of the night and they set off for Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. It soon becomes clear to Wade and the girls that the police and Brady Weller, a former cop who's now the girls' court-appointed guardian, aren't the only ones interested in finding them. Also on their trail is a scary ex-felon, Robert Pruitt, hired by a local crime boss who believes Wade stole a fortune from him. Pruitt is a very enthusiastic hunter, because he nurses a personal grudge against Wade from the days they played pro ball together.

Wiley Cash's This Dark Road to Mercy (William Morrow, 2014) is set during the race between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa to topple Roger Maris's home runs record in 1998. This thrilling competition we know now was tainted by Big Mac's and Slammin' Sammy's illegal use of steroids, and it's a fitting backdrop for this book of country noir. There's always a suggestion of menace lurking just around the corner. No matter how hard these people run or chase, they're still dogged by their pasts and at the mercy of fate. Twelve-year-old Easter, who is both heartbreakingly naive and cynical beyond her years, takes a turn narrating, along with Pruitt and Weller. Unlike a lot of hardboiled books, most of the violence in this one happens off stage. This isn't to say I didn't close my eyes when Pruitt slips on his gloves because I didn't have to be clairvoyant to see what's coming. I was pleased that Wade goes to bat for his girls, and his ex would be proud of him.

Mrs. T. Lawrence Lamb has long considered her husband an unimaginative plodder and money grubber. She sees him as cramping her artistic and intellectual style; an unsatisfactory husband any way she looks at him. But Thorne Smith makes it clear from the beginning of The Stray Lamb (originally published in 1929) that Mr. Lamb is no ordinary man. On his commuter train, he gazes at a "perky shred of an ear ... ornamenting a small sleek head" and wonders what it would feel like to tentatively, delicately bite it. On the outside, Mr. Lamb is one of the more sober of his community's citizens. On the inside, he contains "a reservoir of good healthy depravity that was constantly threatening to overflow and spill all sorts of trouble about his feet." This depravity is tapped after a chance meeting with a man in the woods, and Mr. Lamb wakes up to discover he's a black stallion. And this isn't all. He's soon experiencing the world through the eyes of a succession of animals. As we all know, when you do this you can't help but create havoc. Soon, Mrs. Lamb has had more than enough.

James Thorne Smith, Jr. died at age 42 in 1934. Under the name Thorne Smith, he wrote the Topper books and other charming and hilarious books about booze, sex and fantastical transformations. They deserve a spot on your shelf next to books by P. G. Wodehouse, Tom Sharp, Spike Milligan and Jerome K. Jerome.

The Perfect Travel Companion

I laughed when one of my friends wished she had somewhere to go, so she could listen to an audio book in the car. I know exactly what she means, though. Sitting in a moving vehicle for hours can be a treat if you have the perfect travel companion: entertaining enough to merit attention, but not so demanding as to make your head spin. While this also goes for the human in the seat next to you, let's focus now on books along for the ride.

Max Kinnings's Baptism (Quercus, 2014) is a minute-by-minute account of a London Underground train hijacking. Tommy and Belle Denning, religious fanatic twins, kidnap conductor George Wakeham's kids and thereby force him to stop the train in the tunnel between Leicester Square and Tottenham Court Road stations. The book is amazingly suspenseful. Initially, the 300+ passengers, with a few exceptions, don't know the train has been hijacked. Point of view varies among the Dennings; some of the Dennings' former associates; Wakeham and his wife, who is also on the train; MI5; and DCI Ed Mallory, the blind hostage negotiator. Unlike many thriller writers, Kinnings draws compelling psychological portraits of his characters. Graphic violence. Riveting; the hours will fly by.

There's a pleasing symmetry about reading a book involving a train while traveling by train. One of these days I'll devote an entire post to train settings, but in the meantime, let me tell you about I Married a Dead Man, William Irish's 1958 classic. Irish is one of the pseudonyms used by noir writer Cornell Woolrich. Woolrich was a master at creating an atmosphere of paranoia, and does he ever in this book about Helen Georgesson, a woman abandoned by her lover when she became pregnant. Helen is traveling across the country when she meets Patrice and Hugh Hazzard, newlyweds expecting a child. When their train crashes, only Helen survives. She decides to pass herself off as Patrice to Hugh's wealthy, grieving family, who have never met Patrice. Things get tough for Helen/"Patrice" when her old lover comes weaseling around.

If you like eccentric British characters, clever traditional mysteries, and witty language that makes you laugh out loud, Colin Watson's Flaxborough Chronicles are for you. In the first book, Coffin Scarcely Used, DI Purbright and Sgt. Love investigate a series of murders, beginning with unlikable newspaper editor Marcus Gwill, who is found electrocuted in his slippers, his mouth filled with marshmallows, and flower shapes burned into his palms.

All twelve books in this series are fun, but be sure not to miss Lonelyheart 4122, in which you'll meet lovely conwoman Miss Lucilla Edith Cavell Teatime, who signs up with a matrimonial bureau.

On the weekend before Christmas, robbers shoot two super-mall guards and disappear with a whole heap of money in Silvermeadow by Barry Maitland. Scotland Yard's DCI David Brock and Sgt. Kathy Kolla investigate the robbery, as well as the death of a young girl, which is tied into disappearances from the mall. I like the chemistry between Brock and Kolla, and I also like the information that writer/architect Maitland adds to his books. In this one, the fifth of the 12-book series (you don't have to read its predecessors to enjoy it), we learn about how malls are designed to encourage consumption.

Ruth Rendell writes the excellent 24-book series featuring Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford. In the 2013 book, No Man's Nightingale (Scribner), Wexford has retired from the Kingsmarkham police force. Mike Burden brings him in as a consultant when the controversial vicar, Sarah Hussein, is murdered in her vicarage. This isn't among Rendell's best Wexford books, but it's still very enjoyable to spend time in the company of Wexford; Burden; Wexford's wife, Dora; and Rendell's other meticulously drawn characters.

When I'm traveling by plane or train with my husband, we often work on a crossword puzzle together. We alternate between impressing and amusing each other with our right and wrong guesses. A good book après-crossword puzzle is Ruth Rendell's standalone of psychological suspense, One Across, Two Down. It features a no-good named Stanley Manning. Stanley is addicted to cross-word puzzles, and he can hardly wait for the mother of his long-suffering wife, Vera, to die so he can spend the inheritance.

Happy traveling, and happy reading!

The Wayback Machine: Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep

Those of us of a certain age (nope, even older than that) can remember rushing home from school in the afternoons to watch The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, starring an intrepid flying squirrel and his moose sidekick. It had a regular feature called Peabody's Improbable History. Peabody, the genius dog, had invented the Wayback Machine, and he and his boy, Sherman, would dial in a year and travel back in time, helping to unscramble history that had somehow gone awry. Today we will borrow the Wayback Machine to visit 1939 and the release of Raymond Chandler's first Philip Marlowe novel.

Chandler with Taki, his editorial assistant and critic

Raymond Thornton Chandler, widely considered one of the most influential writers of twentieth-century noir, was a bit of an accidental author. When he lost his job as an oil company executive in 1932, during the Great Depression, he started writing short stories for The Black Mask pulp magazine to support his family. In 1939, he cannibalized elements of several of his short stories and reworked them into his first full-length novel, The Big Sleep.

The setup, briefly, is this: Dying millionaire, General Sternwood, father of two beautiful out-of-control daughters Vivian and Carmen, calls in PI Marlowe to deal with a blackmailer. It is not the first time he has been forced to pay blackmail on behalf of Carmen. Previously a man named Joe Brody had "sold" pornographic pictures of the luscious 20-year-old to her father. That time, Vivian's husband, Sean Regan, had handled the transaction. But Sean has inexplicably vanished, so the General must grudgingly turn to an outsider for help.

I have seen and enjoyed the classic movie version, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, several times, but had never read the book. It is an entirely pleasurable experience. A lot of the dialog and descriptions that fly by too fast in the movie are wickedly funny and well worth lingering over in the book.

As Marlowe is leaving the mansion, the butler stops him to say that the older daughter, Vivian, wants to see him. He finds her in a huge suite, reclining on a chaise and drinking. She doesn't offer him a drink––or even a chair––before trying to pump him about why her father hired him.

"I don't see what there is to be cagey about," she snapped. "And I don't like your manners."

"I'm not crazy about yours," I said. "I didn't ask to see you. You sent for me. I don't mind your ritzing me or drinking your lunch out of a Scotch bottle. I don't mind your showing me your legs. They're very swell legs and it's a pleasure to make their acquaintance. I don't mind if you don't like my manners. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings. But don't waste your time trying to cross-examine me."

Then, as now, there were decency and marketing restrictions in Hollywood that required changes to Chandler's story and characters. The effect here was to make the movie even more confusing and ambiguous than the book. In one case, even the murderer was changed! While the rewrite hung together well enough, it weakened the story considerably.

One character considerably toned down in the movie was the disturbed and disturbing sex kitten, Carmen, played by the young fresh-faced Martha Vickers. I had to disagree with Marlowe in his assessment at one point: "She was a dope. To me, that's all she would ever be, a dope." He would learn better later. Chandler's Carmen is one of the more memorable and genuinely creepy fictional characters I have encountered.

After the success of this first novel, Chandler never went back into industry. He would go on to write seven more Marlowe novels, the last completed by author Robert Parker long after his death. Most have stood the test of time quite well, and several were made into movies––The Big Sleep twice.

Writers for the 1946 screenplay of The Big Sleep included Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winner William Faulkner, and Leigh Brackett, a science fiction writer whose haunting and elegiac Skaith trilogy, about biologically modified races on a planet under a dying sun, is a standout in the genre. The 1946 movie is very good––a classic, in fact. But if you haven't yet read the book, you're missing out on a whole new dimension of Raymond Chandler and his tough-talking, chivalrous Philip Marlowe. This is one of those very rare instances where the book and the movie enhance and enrich each other.

Breaking the Law for Labor Day

Pumpkin spice latte season begins

It's Labor Day. Kudos to the folks who decided the best way to celebrate American workers is to give them the day off. It's summer sales or a last trip to the lake. Tomorrow we say goodbye to beach reads and hello to books for fireside reading.

In honor of Labor Day, I've assembled some books whose characters work hard at breaking or upholding the law and flouting all sorts of workplace rules. These books will help you transition from the porch swing to the living room's upholstered chair.

Don't turn up your nose when you see "On Her Majesty's Supernatural Secret Service" on the cover of Australian Daniel O'Malley's The Rook (2012, Little, Brown and Co.). Don't you like Men in Black and Doctor Who?

The book begins when a woman wakes up on a London park bench. She's bloody and bruised and has no memory. Surrounding her are twitching corpses wearing latex gloves. In her pocket are several letters addressed to "You," one of which begins "The body you are wearing used to be mine." From the letters she learns the following: her name is Myfanwy (sounds like Tiffany) Thomas, she wrote the letters to herself because she suspected she was in danger and she's high up (a rook) in the Checquy Group, a secret agency that guards unsuspecting Britain from supernatural forces. Oh, yeah, and an unknown someone at work is trying to kill her. (This is counter to American workplace laws but the Checquy Group is a British agency so perhaps murder is allowed––if attempted politely.)

The Rook, first in a new series called the Checquy Files, is an entertaining hybrid of thriller, Monty Python's Flying Circus, X-Files and The Bourne Identity.

Now I've got movies and TV shows on the brain in addition to books. If you took Don Winslow's Savages and crossed it with a relentless chase movie, such as No Country for Old Men or Jaws (if a land shark rather than an ocean-going shark were pursued), you'd get James Carlos Blake's The Rules of Wolfe: A Border Noir (July 2013, Mysterious Press), sequel to last year's Country of the Bad Wolfes.

That book describes a Texas family's gunrunning and smuggling operations history but now we move to the present to find Eddie Gato Wolfe too impatient to earn the college degree necessary to join the family business. He heads south and winds up with a security job for a violent Mexican drug cartel run by La Navaja. Breaking a universal workplace rule, Eddie goes to bed with Miranda, the girlfriend of his employer's brother, El Segundo. Making it worse, when El Segundo discovers them, Eddie kills him. It's time for Eddie and Miranda to hotfoot it outta there into the Sonoran desert with La Navaja's men panting after them. The only question is which will kill them first: the desert or the chasers. Very vivid writing.

Kevin Egan's debut, Midnight (Forge, July 2), reads like Scott Smith or Cornell Woolrich reworked the movie 9 to 5.

In that movie, a lot of wild scrambling takes place at Consolidated Companies. In Midnight, New Year's Eve provokes scrambling in the courthouse offices of Manhattan Judge Alvin Canter. That's because Canter died of a heart attack in the morning of December 31st. Had he died after midnight, paychecks for law clerk Tom Carroway and secretary Carol Scilingo would have continued, because an administrative rule dictates they will serve out the remainder of the calendar year. Naturally, both of them really need the money. All they need to do is conceal the judge's death until the following day.

A desire to stay employed by getting around a quirky rule leads to excruciating desperation as one thing after another goes wrong. Beautiful use of courthouse setting. Riveting isn't a strong enough word.

Review of Tomorrow City by Kirk Kjeldsen

Tomorrow City by Kirk Kjeldsen

After a robbery goes spectacularly wrong, a young American ex-con flees to Shanghai and goes straight, until his past drags him kicking and screaming back into crime.

In a nutshell, that's what Tomorrow City is about, but that synopsis gives you little sense of the power of Kirk Kjeldsen's fictional debut. I read this bleak and beautiful book in one sitting, repeatedly brushing off my husband's reminders that we were late with "just a few more minutes, I'm begging you." It's not easy creating a criminal with whom a reader empathizes, but Kjeldsen pulls this off. His Brendan Lavin, a criminal with a conscience, joins the ranks of criminal protagonists such as George V. Higgins' Eddie Coyle, W. R. Burnett's Cesare "Rico" Bandello, and Out of the Past's Jeff Bailey.

Brendan's mother took to heroin when her husband abandoned her and her young child. Growing up, Brendan was good at getting into things, working "with the grace and efficiency of a vaudevillian escape artist on stage." He started robbing warehouses and 16-wheelers with a crew, but one job went wrong, and he was arrested and sent to Rikers Island. To reward him for his silence, his old mates sent him cigarettes and protection money. Now that he's out, Brendan considers them even. He's working hard, running a New York City bakery, but when he can't pay his bills, he decides to pull just one more robbery.

It's a disaster, and Brendan needs to run. He's always been a tabula rasa; it's as easy for him to slip into another identity as it is for him to slip into a locked house, safe or car. Brendan has heard that everything is like the Wild West in China, so that's where he goes.

For 12 years, life is good. Brendan is married to Li and has a little daughter, Xiaodan. In Shanghai, he can hide his bakery in plain sight, where he's unlikely to be spotted, and still do good business. Unfortunately, "unlikely" proves too likely, and Brendan's past becomes his present and what looks like his future.

Writer Kjeldsen is an assistant professor in the cinema program at Virginia Commonwealth University, although he lives in Shanghai. His love and knowledge of the city is evident, and his writing is cinematic and poetic. No matter how far a man runs, sooner or later Fate will have him twisting and turning in her hands, and I read Tomorrow City with that delicious sense of growing dread dear to us fans of noir. My only criticism is that I wish Kjeldsen's characters were more fleshed out; when you're reading this good a book of 200 pages, you wish there was more. Still, it's a wonderful debut, and I'm putting Kjeldsen on my list of go-to authors.

Note: I received a free review copy of Tomorrow City, published by Signal 8 Press in 2013.

Shanghai photo by Bruno Barbey/Magnum

Books Caught between the Tides

Summer takes on a predictable rhythm where I live. College students go home, but my own daughter and her friends attending out-of-town schools return and then drift in and out of our house like a tide. Between day jobs and night hikes, dinners at home and beach barbecues with friends, movies at the Fremont and downtown farmer's markets, sometimes my daughter and I find the time to bump into each other while we're reading.

In her older brother's bedroom, where we very, very gingerly borrow some books:

She helped herself to Philip K. Dick's Ubik. Her take: "A mind-blowing, original book. It was written in 1969, set in a future 1992, when the world has many mind-readers. A security agency called Runciter Associates provides 'anti-talents' to counter them. Joe Chip, an anti-psi, is on the moon when a job goes wrong. It's about reality and hallucination, paranoia, death, the nature of time, drug abuse. Dick does an incredible job of controlling what you know and when."

For me, David Corbett's 2003 book, Done for a Dime. Like writer Richard Price, who examines Dempsy, New Jersey; Corbett surveys the fictional cheap-rent town of Rio Mirada, California. Raymond "Strong" Carlisle, a black jazz musician, is found shot dead in his front yard. A disparate trio of Rio Mirada cops—Murchison, Holmes, and Stluka—investigate. It's fun finding elements of classic hardboiled writers Hammett, Cain, and Macdonald in this riveting noir book.

Most recent book read in the car:

Hers was John Grisham's The King of Torts. "You can't read too many Grisham books before they start blending together, but this one, about class-action lawsuits, is different. Clay Carter, a Washington, DC public defender, is talked into opening his own law firm by a guy named Max Pace, and then Pace feeds him one juicy lawsuit after another. Carter becomes ultra-wealthy, but he isn't happy without the woman he loves. You learn about class-action law and the lawyers who get rich bringing suit, and, if you didn't already know it, you learn that money doesn't buy happiness."

Mine? Robert Littell's head-spinning book of comic espionage, Legends. Brooklyn private-eye Martin Odum, a retired CIA spook, has assumed so many fake identities ("legends"), he no longer knows who he really is. In standard crime-fiction fashion, a beautiful dame—the Israeli daughter of an old Russian KGB agent—needs his help. Odum must find her missing huband so she can divorce him. The CIA warns Odum not to take the job, but does he listen? Are you kidding me?

Out on the deck, with a plate of cookies and a glass of iced tea:

My daughter sat down with End of Story by Peter Abrahams. "Suspend your disbelief for this one, which is filled with great characters, especially bartender Ivy Seidel, who dreams of quitting her job for a writing career. She begins teaching creative writing at Dannemora Prison in Upstate New York and is mesmerized by convict Vance Harrow, a highly talented writer, imprisoned for a violent crime. Ivy doubts Harrow's guilt and digs into his life before prison. The suspense becomes almost unendurable. "

Maurizio de Giovanni's I Will Have Vengeance, translated from the Italian by Anne Milano Appel, and set in Mussolini's Italy, was my accompaniment to a cookie and tea. Pensive Commissario Luigi Ricciardi has an unusual ability: he can "see" a homicide victim's final moments. He'll put this gift to good use investigating the death of famous tenor Arnaldo Vezzi, who is stabbed to death in his dressing room before a performance of Pagliacci. Vezzi was a narcissistic jerk, so there are plenty of happy suspects. For you murder-at-the-opera fans, another one to join such books as Donna Leon's Death at La Fenice and Robert Barnard's Death on the High C's.

I hope the rhythms of your summer find you relaxing with a good book.