Two American Books Born of Iraq

After an absence here, I am back -- but with a familiar topic: war.  I stepped away from reading war books, but a couple found me recently, and so I read them. I find this happens when the days get short.

Kevin Powers and Brian Castner both served in Iraq, Powers as an enlisted Army machine gunner and Castner as an Air Force (captain) explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) officer -- a bomb tech. Powers -- who has an MFA (and was a Michener Fellow in Poetry) has written a short, dense, harrowing, bloody novel, The Yellow Birds.  Castner, who has a degree in electrical engineering, has written a short, dense, harrowing, bloody memoir, The Long Walk: A Story of War the Life that Follows.  Together, the books make for a dismal and meaningful pair, two snapshots of warfare gone especially bad.

First, Castner.  The Long Walk is divided by alternating sections of the past and near-present time.  Castner recounts being briefed, while on duty in Saudi Arabia after 9/11, about how to turn off certain nuclear bombs that intelligence believed had been acquired by Osama bin Laden.  After the demonstration, Castner writes, "Now I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up."  His passion, it turns out, is heroic but unavoidably destructive.  For Castner, the work is physically damaging and psychically scarring.  A good deal, if not the majority, of the mental damage has physical roots -- traumatic brain injury (TBI) caused by proximity to scores (hundreds?) of explosions.

Because Castner alternates present and past, we learn about his present condition at the outset: "The first thing you should know about me is that I'm Crazy." This direct, straightforward sentence seems balanced, not crazy, but in often clinical language, Castner makes his case.  His descent begins naturally enough in Iraq.  Though full of rage and sometimes unhinged, Castner carries out his duty (after one false start), and his personal madness is masked by the madness of the war.  He vividly describes his desire to shoot mourning Iraqi women, his fascination with the hole in a dead man's head, the banality of strewn human remains.  His reactions may be crazy, but they also feel a lot like reasonable responses to unreasonable circumstances.

Back home, Castner is a well-meaning basket case.  He takes his sons to school, flies around the country as a civilian contractor (teaching bomb defusing), visits with family and friends.  He also bursts into tears at random moments, has anxiety attacks, imagines shooting people in the airport, finds no fulfillment in life.  He runs.  He runs a lot, trying to replace mental anguish with physical pain.  Yoga helps, too.

Castner arguably approaches his condition and experience like an engineer -- with structure and analysis.  By contrast, in The Yellow Birds, Powers continuously flexes his poetic capabilities.  His prose is rhythmic, sensory, adjectival.  Rivers and water and blood thread their way through the book, and the writing often has a sinuous quality.  Yet, ultimately I (first person, sensitive here to my subjectivity) found these qualities distancing my mind from the story, from the soldier's experience in Iraq.  Powers book has been very highly praises and was a finalist for the National Book Award.  It is worth reading, and at its heart, it tells a tragic story of the narrator's guilt and unraveling following the death (not a spoiler) of his comrade.  For me, though, the highly aestheticized telling of the story weakens its emotional impact.

Recovered -- and Refreshing -- Noir

I'm not a noir or Gold Medal Books expert, so it's hard to know if that moldering paperback with a lurid cover will be any good. You can bet on some authors -- e.g., Charles Williams -- but others haven't aged well or were never very good to start with. Fortunately, there are experts like Bill Crider and Ed Gorman, and imprints like Stark House Noir Classics.

And so, a single volume with two pretty great titles -- One is a Lonely Number (1952) by Bruce Elliott and Black Wings Has My Angel (1953) by Elliott Chaze -- found its way into my hands. Each novel tells the story of a man on the lam who falls for a dame. In its way, Lonely Number seems the more transgressive because the dame is a 14-year old with epilepsy. But antihero Larry Camonille is a nice guy who is willing to take the extra step to see that she gets the medical care she wants.

Black Wings is the longer, more romantic, introspective book. Kenneth McClure -- alias Tim Sunblade -- is smart, disciplined, and brutal. He hooks up with a mysterious, high-class call girl who likes it rough. He puts together a great heist, but this is a Noir Classic, so...

In today's era of heroes, series books, and good luck, it's refreshing as hell to read grim, nasty, feverish, morally unhinged novels of men and women who don't seem particularly destined to make it to a sequel.

The Other Jack Black Can't Win

Steven Martin's Opium Fiend led me to another great book -- You Can't Win by a different Jack Black (1871-1932). I was surprised that I hadn't heard about this book or encountered it before. It's a fun read and a detailed depiction of criminal, hobo, and prison life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Originally published in 1926, You Can't Win recounts Black's life from boyhood to career criminal to prisoner and then to ex-con reformer. From about the age of 15, Black led a rail-riding, transient life and easily fell into the career of a house burglar and safe robber. Black writes a fair amount about the code among criminals, the "Johnson" family who do right by one another. Black also has pride in his craft and a work ethic of sorts. He is once terribly chagrined when an ex-robber suggests he take a straight job.

The memoir has many interesting parts that are nearly lost history. Black became a habitual opium smoker -- in part to calm the nerves that come from house burgling -- and then a sick addict. Thus the book is an important source for Martin for his opium book. It was also championed and introduced in a later edition by William S. Burroughs.

The memoir also offers several portraits of prisons, jailers, and penal systems. Black does relatively well -- and reads widely -- in a Canadian prison, but no talking is allowed at all. For calling out to a friend, Black is put on bread and water. He also describes receiving two lashings at the start and end of one prison stint; the lashings are actually part of the Canadian judge's sentence. This is one of Black's more harrowing, character-forming experiences.

Black writes very well -- he's vivid, dramatic, thoughtful, and articulate. As an extra bonus, on occasion, he discusses criminal vernacular and the sources of various underworld terms, including bum, yegg, pegged, dan, and others.

Anyone interested in the last days of the Wild West, hobo jungles, and criminal history should read this book.

A Memoir of Addiction -- Opium Fiend

Not to be confused with comedian Steve Martin, expatriate writer (of guide book sections, mostly, apparently) Steven Martin has just published a really interesting, though at times esoteric, book, Opium Fiend: A 21st Century Slave to a 19th Century Addiction.

Martin's initial addiction is for collecting. Since he was a child, he has collected various objects with varying degrees of obsession. He ends up living in Bangkok and after giving up collecting Southeast Asian textiles, he begins to collect antique opium accoutrements -- pipes, bowls, trays, lamps, various tools, and more.

At first -- and really throughout -- Martin has the passion of a collector. But of course, he dabbles in opium smoking -- first on assignment for an article and then to learn more about the objects that he collects. For years, he smokes (or really, vaporizes) opium casually and infrequently, but eventually the drug sinks its teeth into him. Martin does a great job detailing his addiction, his isolation from social life, his attempts to quit, and the psychological aftermath of kicking (at least provisionally).

Secondarily, Martin vividly depicts parts of Bangkok as well as Vientiane (Laos). He also offers a history of opium smoking and commerce (including the Opium Wars of the 19th century). While this book is a good historical resource -- and Martin runs a consultancy advising film and TV about authentic depictions of opium smoking -- it does not discuss present-day crime and law enforcement around opium, heroin production, smuggling, etc.

The Dead Man and the Pleasures of Limitation

Collins Ax (image from L & C Meeker)

For this post, I'm going to be more bloggy -- more ruminative -- but eventually I want to wend my way around to saying I've really enjoyed reading several titles of this pulpy, Kindle, horror-action-adventure series, The Dead Man. It's not for everybody, but it sure has its attractions...

Let me backtrack and first say, I like a good zombie movie. At their best, zombie movies have a compelling simplicity and purity. Characters fight for their lives against flesh-eating zombies. There isn't a lot of ambiguity. You can't reason with zombies, though you can outsmart them. In a semi-related way, I like a good junkie novel or movie. Again, everything is secondary (and far in the distance) to the need to fix. Characters have motivation and direction: toward the fix. In our chaotic, complex world, it's strangely refreshing to read about focus -- even when (or especially when) it's a dismal focus.

Certain genre rules provide focus and direction, too. I'd take a step back and say that confined, rhymed, highly structured poetry can be pleasing because of its constraints. I don't read much poetry, but I've seen a lot of free verse that runs too free.

So, back to The Dead Man series. Creators Lee Goldberg and William Rabkin have set up an episodic supernatural series (like an hour of television, for which The Dead Man was originally conceived). My knowledge of TV shows is thin, but The Dead Man set-up vaguely reminds me of The Fugitive. Our tall, dark, handsome, strong hero Matt Cahill is marginally on the run and he's also pursuing an evil supernatural figure, Mr. Dark (standing in, sort of, for The Fugitive's one-armed man). Matt goes from town to town (setting to setting) on his quest, and he usually hooks up with a helpful, beautiful woman.

And then there are a few supernatural rules and recurring events. Matt has survived sure death (buried in an avalanche for months) and now he can see and smell evil in people, which takes the form of festering, maggoty flesh and a terrible stench. These evil people appear normal to others, but for Matt, they are like zombies. A former mill worker and lumberjack, Matt also happens to travel with his trusty family ax. So basically, The Dead Man books -- all focused novellas of maybe 25,000 words -- have a lot of latitude but eventually dear reader is going to reach a point where there is mayhem and an ax. For now, it's working for me.

I started looking at these books with the idea of entering a contest to write a Dead Man book. Having once lived for many years in the shadow of the world's largest ax, hatchet, machete, and adze factory, I might just have an idea...

Return to Claude Lanzmann

A year ago yesterday, I spent ten hours in the basement of the Portland Art Museum watching the film Shoah in its entirety.  It was a character-forming experience, and I wrote a post about it ("War Crimes: the Film Shoah").  Now, a year later, I've read director Claude Lanzmann's memoir, The Patagonian Hare, which is a good accompaniment to Shoah -- and interesting even without the anchor of his great film.

Lanzmann, it turns out (and I guess I would know this if I were French), had a visible, significant, exciting existence even before Shoah -- and he is a passionate, though occasionally digressive, storyteller. Born in 1925, Lanzmann was raised (along with two younger siblings) primarily by his father, after his mother quit the marriage and family.  (Lanzmann reconciles with her and adores his stepfather.)  The Lanzmanns were non-practicing Jews -- and Lanzmann recounts that his first encounter with a rabbi only took place in the 1950s.

But wait... After seeing Shoah, one wouldn't expect Lanzmann to proceed in a traditional fashion -- and he doesn't.  The memoir actually begins: "The guillotine -- more generally, capital punishment and the various methods of meting out death -- has been the abiding obsession of my life."  Lanzmann then launches into an overwhelming ten-page reverie describing execution after execution -- by guillotine, by garotte, by axe, by a bullet to the neck, by bayonet training on live human targets.  Then Lanzmann catches his breath and writes, "You must understand that I love life madly, love it all the more now that I am close to leaving it..."

And so his life proceeds -- death and life, death and life, death and life.  Lanzmann and his family evaded deportation and fought in the French Resistance.  He went on to be a journalist and right-hand man to Jean-Paul Sartre (at the journal Les Temps modernes); he was Simone de Beauvoir's lover for many years (and they keep getting into dramatic, life-threatening mountaineering incidents); he first traveled to Israel in the early 1950s -- and to North Korea as well.  He tells a long, very French story about his passion for a Korean nurse -- and the utter weirdness and severity of North Korea.  Lanzmann supported Algerian independence and marched with rebels, but he later repudiated the new nation when it supported the destruction of Israel.

Lanzmann stumbled into film-making, first making a film called, Pourquoi Israel, after doing some French TV work.  He agreed to make a then-untitled Holocaust film for the simple reason that he wanted to spend time in Israel with a woman who became his wife.

The last 20 percent or so of the book (about 100 pages) then describes, in almost an abbreviated way, the making (and to a lesser extent, reception) of Shoah, which took 12 years.  Lanzmann describes how he met people and conceived of some of the segments -- such as the scene with Abraham Bomba, pretending to cut hair in a Tel Aviv barber shop, as he describes cutting the hair of women moments before they were gassed at Treblinka.  He also discusses segments and people who didn't make it into the film -- including a member of the Einsatzgruppen.

In one moving scene, Lanzmann describes knocking late at night on the door of an elderly man in a small Polish village -- this is Henrik Gawkowski, the engine driver of the death trains at Treblinka, who appears early in the film.  Lanzmann is the first man to ever ask him about his experiences, and he welcomes and feeds Lanzmann, and they talk until dawn.  Henrik (as Lanzmann affectionately calls him) is "devastatingly honest," and this scene deepens one's experience of the film.

On many occasions, Lanzmann lied to government and private funders in order to see his film to its 9.5-hour, 12-year end.  But while seeking funds in the U.S., he could not answer one question: "'Mr Lanzmann, what is your message?' Each time, I remained silent, I was incapable of answering such a question; I still am.  I don't know what the 'message' of Shoah is.  I never thought of it in those terms.  If I had said, 'My message is: Never again!' or perhaps 'Love one another,' wallets would probably have sprung open, but I was a sorry fundraiser: of the budget for Shoah, not one single dollar came from the USA."

Time Travel : My 1995 Review of Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories

I've fallen down on the job -- again. In order to assure my few readers that I am slothful, not dead, I thought I'd make a quasi-reappearance with a reprint of my review of Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories, edited by Bill Pronzini and Jack Adrian. First, a short explanation...

A month or so ago, while searching for something else on the Web, I found a bibliographic reference to a review of mine that ran in the academic journal Studies in Short Fiction in the Fall 1997 issue (it ran two years after I wrote it). I remember writing the review but was under the impression that it never ran -- that it had fallen through the cracks of the editor's desk. Apparently it did run, and the text is available online (in CBS's FindArticles database). When I wrote it, I had been reading some -- but not a lot of -- crime fiction. So, like a good junior academic, I sort of feigned greater expertise than I had. I was eager to have some sort of publication in an academic journal -- if only to show that I was trying (it didn't do any good). Previously, I had published (and been paid for) a few general reviews that ran in The Daily Californian in Berkeley. Anyway, here's the review; please forgive my pretensions...

HARD-BOILED: AN ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN CRIME STORIES, edited by Bill Pronzini and Jack Adrian. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. vii 532 pages. $25.

This collection serves as a reminder that some of the strongest American writing of the twentieth century has appeared in the genre of the hard-boiled. It also demonstrates the range of the genre and the problems with identifying criteria that make a story truly hard-boiled.

With academic and general interest in American crime fiction continuing to mount, Hard-Boiled provides a selection of twentieth-century stories by decade from the twenties to the nineties. The best stories come from the twenties, thirties, and, in what may be a surprise to many readers, the fifties. The stories of the first decades are identifiably fueled by prohibition, depression, and gangsterism. The stories from the fifties illuminate the strong undercurrent of anomie, misogyny, and racism that colored the predominant cultural picture of postwar middle-class prosperity.

Many of the usual suspects appear in this anthology: Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes, two Cains (Paul and James M.), two MacDonalds (John D. and Ross), Mickey Spillane, Evan Hunter, and Jim Thompson. Editors Bill Pronzini and Jack Adrian have also searched for new and lost voices, as well as unexpected stories by writers now well known in the field. Of the latter, the best find is a story called "Trouble-Chaser" by Paul Cain, one of the hardest of the hard. Cain's only novel, Fast One, and his story collection, Seven Slayers, are minor classics, both recently reissued; "Trouble-Chaser," on the other hand, has not seen the light of day since its 1934 appearance in the seminal pulp, Black Mask. A Hollywood story, "Trouble-Chaser" compresses some of the genre's best elements into fewer than 20 pages: a booze runner, his hooking wife, a Hollywood studio head, his heroin-addicted, jealousy-stricken starlet wife, and a trouble-chasing, on-the-make hero whose wit matches his cynicism. The story accumulates three bodies, showcases two staged suicides, and ends tightly with a nice nod to the reader: our hero curls up with a book as he waits for the police to arrive.

Cain's story exemplifies with the strongest of the collection that the hard-boiled is at its peak when it is pitiless, plotted at breakneck speed, a touch droll, and well aware of its generic confinement to amoral entertainment. With the exception of Gil Brewer's grim, sketchy story, "Home" (1956), about a black man run down by a car, the stories driven by social issues fall flat. A case in point, Lawrence Block's 1990 story, "Batman's Helpers," follows Block's detective, Matthew Scudder, and his compatriots as they hassle immigrants hawking unlicensed Batman togs on the streets of Manhattan. The story ends with Scudder leaving the easy assignment after a day--a hard-boiled man with no stomach for leaning on the disenfranchised.

Strangely enough, Block's oddly saccharine story made its original appearance in Playboy. This late venue for the hard-boiled story stands as a reminder of the genre's targeted male audience, a fact most evident in the name of the genre's main vehicle of the fifties: Manhunt. The stories of Manhunt can be exceptionally brutal. David Alexander's "Mama's Boy" (1955), for instance, follows a narcissistic bodybuilding gigolo as he searches for, finds, and kills an older woman. Hard-Boiled's editors should be applauded for including this story, which displays the seaminess of the genre's best writing.

In spite of all my boy talk, two women wrote and published some of the finest stories in the 1950s men's magazines. Helen Nielsen does a fine job in "A Piece of Ground" (1957), a stark, almost archetypal rendering of the rustic undone in the big city. Leigh Brackett also appears with a story that is stronger than its title, "So Pale, So Cold, So Fair" (1957). Brackett's place in this anthology also draws the link between the hard-boiled and film noir: she co-authored the screenplay for Howard Hawks's adaptation of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep (1946) and nearly 30 years later scripted Robert Altman's version of Chandler's The Long Goodbye (1973).

Pronzini and Adrian's introduction provides a good thumbnail sketch of the genre's history. They do better discussing publishing history than literary genealogy. Tying the hard-boiled hero to Huck Finn, Ahab, and Natty Bumppo only goes so far. They also rightly confess the collection's limitations, and indeed several strong hard-boiled authors are absent. Nevertheless, the collection serves as both a useful introduction to and distillation of the hard-boiled.

Reading Reflections on the Kindle, Four Months In

I've been reading a fair amount -- but putting up notices on Goodreads rather than fuller write-ups on this blog. I've also been reading a lot about ebooks and ereaders -- manic and apocalyptic (e.g., Franzen), and I thought I would weigh in with my own personal experience as a reader and book buyer over the last four months (I bought my low-end $79 Kindle in October 2011).

First, a little context: I am not a book collector, but I own a lot of books. I have liked to surround myself with my books as, I suppose, a physical marker of my experience reading them. I do donate and sell some books (e.g., to Powell's) and I use the library, but I also keep books that I'll never read again. They take up space, and I've moved books several times. Next time I move, I plan to cull my collection. I like the book as physical object, and perhaps partially in response to the emergence of electronic text, I wrote about the cultural and social meaning of books and print in early and 19th-century American culture in a doctoral dissertation completed in 1997. That said, I'm not overly sentimental about books (and less so in recent years), nor excessively enamored of or repelled by technology per se. Okay, that's the context.

Since purchasing my Kindle, I have read 13 books in full, of which 2 were read on the Kindle: Charles Bukowki's Ham on Rye ($1.99 special) and George Pelecanos's What It Was (new book, 99 cents special). I have also read stories from several collections, including West Coast Crime Wave and Patti's Abbott's Monkey Justice. (I actually bought the Kindle so I could read WCCW, where a story of mine appears.)

I also started reading several novels -- and have left them unfinished at a much greater rate than I abandon print books. I also wouldn't say that I've abandoned these books -- I may dip back into them at any time, though with loss of continuity. I have also purchased many more ebooks than I am going to read. They don't take up space, and they are cheap; they are almost bought defensively so that I don't kick myself for not jumping on them when I had the chance. I've bought crime novels by McBain, Block, Disher, and others, usually for $1.99. I've downloaded a few books for free and never paid more than $2.99 or $3.99.

Generally, I continue to read from the printed page. That said, I read Ham on Rye and What It Was quickly on the Kindle, mostly at home, and stuck with them because they were particularly good books. I went on to read print editions (borrowed from a neighbor) of two other Bukowski titles. I guess the bar is higher for me to get through a book on Kindle.

Here is a counter-example of sorts. I recently read (in print, from the library) Paul Barrett's non-fiction book, Glock: The Rise of the American Handgun. This was a good book, but not a great book. I could see myself forgetting about it on the Kindle, but its insistent presence in my house (with a cover picture of a Glock) kept me at it. I haven't dipped into Kindle Singles or novellas -- but I like the idea of a shorter long format. Glock would probably be fine as a 30,000-word ebook -- longer than a long article but not puffed out to book length.

My Kindle has also been valuable for travel and short reading breaks while running errands. Recently, I stood in an hour line at Disneyland -- and I read McBain on the Kindle to pass the time. The Kindle is small and seems sturdy; I often carry it in a coat pocket without a Kindle cover.

So, that's my middle-of-the-road take on the Kindle as a reader. If I were a publisher or were opining in my semi-capacity as a commercial genre fiction writer, my take might be a bit different. If I were writing as a citizen-consumer concerned about competition-antitrust, I would certainly raise some red flags about Amazon (and probably Google). I don't like that I've aligned myself so closely with Amazon -- but I don't have strong allegiance to Big Six publishers either. My views and experiences are sure to evolve, and maybe I'll report back. Onward...

War Reading Culminates with Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

The pattern isn't quite entirely clear, but it seems to me that in the winter months (and into spring) in the Northwest, I turn to reading about war. I've mostly read Vietnam War books. I've also read some big, fat epic war books in the last few years: The Naked and the Dead, Matterhorn, The Kindly Ones, The Thin Red Line (all, notably, novels). On May 29, 2011, I saw all of the Holocaust documentary, Shoah, in one day (9+ hours), at the basement/bunker auditorium in the Portland Art Museum.

For all this immersion in war -- mostly novels and memoirs -- I had never read a straight-up, big picture history of World War II. I had thought about it but hadn't tackled the matter. Then, last November, I skimmed the New York Times glowing review of Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945 by Max Hastings, and I thought this might be the book -- and I was right. Inferno is a mind-bending, fluid, deeply thoughtful and compassionate book. It should be required reading for somebody -- maybe candidates for high office.

Inferno is comprehensive to a degree, covering major inflection points of a very complex war. It is not exactly a precise military or political history. Instead, Hastings uses a huge amount of source material from everyday people -- a housewife in Germany, infantry soldiers, pilots, and so on. At the same time, Hastings discusses key civil and military leaders and their strengths and faults. Hastings also only superficially covers topics that are well covered elsewhere. He discusses the Holocaust only a bit, and while he writes extensively about the Allied bombing of Europe, he does not discuss Dresden in detail.

But bypassing a discussion of Dresden does not mean that Hastings avoids tough questions about the conduct of the war. He looks at a range of controversial topics -- the European bombing campaign, dropping the atom bombs -- and offers his views in a measured way that reflects deep historical knowledge. Through this analysis, the book helps provide some grasp on what cannot today be entirely conceived or processed. Hastings also corrects misinformation and helps readers (at least this American reader) better understand the roles of each nation and the context in which they went to war.

The original, UK version of Inferno was called All Hell Let Loose. It might as well just be called Fucking Madness. The amount of death and destruction is incomprehensible -- especially when set against other wars. Civilians and soldiers in Russia died in the tens of millions. More people died in Leningrad (with maybe 800,000 starving) than all of U.S. and British combat deaths combined. You can open Inferno on any page and find a startling statistic or story. The Manhattan Project cost $3 billion, but the B-29 Superfortress program cost $4 billion. The same day that the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, the Russians attacked Japan through Manchuria. That action alone -- two weeks of battle as the war wrapped up -- resulted in the deaths of 92,000 soldiers. And on it goes for 650 pages.

The wake of World War II still ripples today, and this book directly and more often indirectly touches on that matter. A number of military and strategic points were made clear by the war, and these points should help guide policies today to some extent. Investment in the technologies of destruction were critical to the Allied effort, but weapons once built are usually ultimately used (as Hastings notes again and again). As a culture (and a society under totalitarian state duress), the Russians accepted a casualty rate far higher than the western democracies. To engage in large-scale mobilization and combat, the people of a democratic nation must believe that its quality of life could be so diminished without response, that the violent death of tens or hundreds of thousands or millions is a worthwhile price to alleviate that threat.

Anyways, if you have any interest in war or World War II, read this book. It has received high praise from many reviewers -- and that praise is more than warranted.

My Name Under Alfred Hitchcock's Photo

Today, I received my subscriber's (as opposed to author's) March 2012 copy of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine (and by the way, the publication vacillates about that possessive apostrophe; it's easier to just write AHMM), and my latest story, "Sheltered Assets" is included. This is my first story in AHMM, though I have had two in the sister publication, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.

Of course, rush out and get the magazine (or subscribe to it). The best place to find the print magazine used to be, alas, Border's. Now you have to find it elsewhere -- or buy it digitally. (As I understand, AHMM and EQMM are doing well with digital sales, and both magazines are starting to offer ebook collections.)

A few words about the story: it's my first published story to be set in New York City. I've written a couple of other New York stories, but they remain unpublished. I'm glad to have the chance to mine, vaguely, my year living in New York. This story also has a woman protagonist, a matronly society woman, who volunteers at an animal shelter. My previously published story, "Bridget's Conception" (in West Coast Crime Wave), also has a woman protagonist (a young, expecting mother). I don't want to give anything away, but I guess I should say that I just look at the world and think, women should be committing more crimes. The story has the economic crisis as its backdrop, and I'm especially proud of the title itself, "Sheltered Assets," which I hope resonates in several directions.

When I launched this blog (when my first EQMM story was published), I thought I would write more about my writing and the process, and I haven't done that, except to make a few publication announcements. I'd rather write about other people's books (and movies) in my legacy and phantom role of "critic." I don't have a lot of (or any) writing or publishing advice that can't be found elsewhere. But since I'm in a reflective and self-promotional mode, I'll give a short update: My first novel, Jailhouse Pale, remains unpublished. My agent received a fair number of kind rejections (and I felt like I got a fair reading from several notable editors), and he is planning to send it a few more places. I am now about half-way through writing a second novel, with the same heister protagonist. The new book has more complexity and higher stakes than the first, and I hope to finish it some time next spring or thereabouts. And after that, I've threatened to work on my drawing and painting instead.

Fun Bleak Fun: Scott Phillips's The Adjustment

Scott Phillips's new novel The Adjustment is really too new to be an entry in Friday's Forgotten Books, but this post is meant to be a preemptive strike: this novel shouldn't be forgotten or missed.

Phillips returns to his native ground of Wichita, Kansas, in this violent, amoral, darkly funny yarn of ex-serviceman Wayne Ogden's return to civilian life after World War II (that's "the adjustment" of the title). Wayne, however, had a somewhat non-traditional tour of duty in England and Italy, where he focused on pimping and black marketeering. He's quite proud of (and nostalgic about) his wartime activities:

"If you are a reasonably competent and ambitious individual with a bit of initiative and creativity, and a willingness to look at strict regulations as loose guidelines to be skirted when necessary or convenient, there is no better job for you than Master Sergeant in the United States Army Quartermaster Corps"; "The QM Corps gave me thrilling and lucrative work. Men needed the things I offered for sale. Women, some of them beautiful women, relied on my for protection and income, and the army relied on me to distribute whatever I wasn’t able to reroute and sell elsewhere. It was a good life, and by the time it came to its violent end I could see my sweet situation beginning to unravel."

Wayne maintains this wonderfully blithe tone throughout the book -- even when he is committing atrocious acts. Indeed, he seems reminiscent of some of Charles Willeford's great "blithe psychopaths" -- entrepreneurial (and thereby wholly American), funny, seemingly well-intentioned, and smarter than everyone else in the book.

Back in Wichita, Wayne becomes bored with his corporate job at Collins Aircraft as "a bag man and babysitter for an alcoholic skirtchaser" (the company boss, Everett Collins). He's also bored with domestic life and fears his impending fatherhood. Hi-jinx ensue, to say the least.

Interestingly, this book was published by a relatively small press, Counterpoint, which inevitably makes the book easier to miss. Phillips's first novel, The Ice Harvest (great stuff), had a Big Six publisher and was adapted into a so-so, too Hollywoody film. The Adjustment is a fine novel, but maybe its lack of moral compass and distasteful protagonist made it too commercially risky. Who knows, but I'm hoping this book reaches the audience who will dig it.

West Coast Crime Wave

I'm back and harried. I'll say more about West Coast Crime Wave later. For now, I'll just note that the e-book is out and available (now on Amazon and soon at other e-book outlets). The book features stories set in west coast locations written by west coast authors. I'm the Portland guy. As part of the promo, the publisher is highlighting different authors on its website. Today is my turn. The interview can be found at this link.

Death and Heroin in a Nameless City: The Scene

A Friday's Forgotten Book entry: A friend recently thrust a book into my hands -- The Scene by Clarence L. Cooper, Jr. -- and said that he had bought it as a naïve, suburban youth at a garage sale for 10 cents or a quarter. It had shocked and appalled him -- and he thought I might like it. He was right.

The Scene is something of a social/realist (or even naturalist) novel, masquerading (or, I suppose, passing) as a crime novel. The back jacket copy provides a pretty accurate synopsis: “This explosive novel sweeps bare the festering jungle of addicts, pushers, stoolies, prostitutes, pimps, killers, and cops-on-the-take to reveal that murky half-world of narcotics known as THE SCENE.” It also includes some honest cops, leaning on street dealers for a big arrest, as well as a nice, relatively clean-cut girl (who falls in love with a junkie).

The crime/policing plot keeps the story moving along, but the book is largely made up of snapshots of users, dealers, boosters, and so on. The nice, respectable people are a little flat as characters, whereas the junkies are harrowing and vivid. Several scenes depict characters who are “bogue” (there is a glossary in the back), which here means sick (or getting sick) from withdrawal. Check out, Rudy Black, who has a heavy habit, suffering from withdrawal in his jail cell: “He lay groveling on the floor, his body jerking uncontrollably, his eyes twitching, his mouth yawning until the bones in his face felt as though they were slowly breaking, the mess from his nose streaking and drying on his face in tight, slick bands. He crawled over to the toiled and threw up blood in it.”

And it gets worse. I don’t think I’ve read a book with so much vomiting -- from withdrawal and after shooting up.

Cooper wrote a handful of other novels, several of which were reprinted by Old School Books. The Scene was published by Crown (Random House) in 1960; his subsequent books came out (mostly, I think) from pulp publisher Regency House. Wikipedia tells me that Cooper -- writer, ex-con, junkie -- died in 1978 at age 43 or 44. I’m going to keep an eye out for some of his other books.

Joe Gores's Dead Skip: Bay Area History and the Missing Parker Scene

Back to crime fiction (and a wannabe Friday's Forgotten Books entry, a day early). Joe Gores -- crime fiction writer, Edgar winner, Hammett aficionado -- died earlier this year, and I had never read any of his books. I started with his first DKA series book, Dead Skip (1972). DKA stands for Dan Kearny Associates -- a PI agency that repos cars.

At the outset, one of the repo men Bart Heslip gets clocked and put in a coma, and his buddy Larry Ballard investigates. It's a straightforward, procedural-oriented book -- with Ballard chasing down leads, following clues, pounding the pavement, and solving some riddles, along with his boss, the gruff Dan Kearny and his fetching colleague Giselle Marc.

I enjoyed the book, but it really shone in two (subjective) areas for me. First, the book is a great time piece of the San Francisco-Bay Area in the early 70s. We see seedy and fancy parts of San Francisco, and then the book rotates out to the East Bay -- my old stomping grounds. Ballard ends up in the dumpy burbs/burgs of Concord and Martinez, complete with a visit to the decrepit Contra Costa County jail. (I visited this jail a couple of times in the 1980s, but it was a newer version.) We also see a neighborhood gutted and gouged for construction of BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit), which began service in 1972.

I had this same experience of regional familiarity when reading Plunder Squad, one of the late first-phase Parker heist novels by Donald Westlake (writing as Richard Stark); Parker ends up in Concord and the Oakland hills. In one Dead Skip scene, Kearny knocks on a door -- and a big, mean man comes out to talk with him. Sure enough, it's Parker, set into this book. Gores does a great job capturing Parker's authority and expertise. It's a little gimmicky -- but really works. I felt like I had unexpectedly run into an old friend (a killer and heister, albeit) and found a lost bit of a favorite character.

Another War Documentary: Winter Soldier; and Some Books

As a semi-counterpart to Shoah (see previous post), I watched Winter Soldier (streaming on Netflix) -- a documentary containing footage of Vietnam veterans discussing their experiences in Vietnam -- as well as some boot camp stories, etc. The vets all participated in the Winter Solder Investigation (actually an anti-war event, not a government investigation), which took place in Detroit in January and early February 1971. The film includes some still photography from Vietnam, but it mostly shows men sitting at a microphone in a hotel conference room describing what they saw and did in Vietnam.

To say the least, this is a depressing film, but it should also be necessary viewing for anyone interested in the Vietnam War or warfare and soldiering in general. I've seen a lot of Vietnam War films (dramas) and read a fair number of books on the topic, but I had never heard of this film until recently. Apparently, its 1972 distribution was limited. It is also a testament to how powerful testimony can be (as in Shoah).

A few themes and details emerge, some of which are well-known but receive clear articulation here. First, there is a great deal of testimony (with supporting photos) about village destruction and displacement of civilians. It's absolutely devastating (and at least serves some contrast to destructive but more moderate and controlled activities in Iraq and Afghanistan). The dehumanization of the Vietnamese -- and the American soldiers -- also figures in much of the testimony.

I had intended this blog to be more about writing and books (mostly crime fiction), so in that spirit, I'll name a few somewhat related titles. Kent Anderson, who wrote what is probably the best Portland cop novel (Night Dogs (the protagonist is a Vietnam vet, too)), also wrote a Vietnam War novel that is worth reading: Sympathy for the Devil. (Anderson was a two-tour Green Beret in Vietnam.) On the theme of U.S. servicemen in Asia, Martin Limón's police procedural Jade Lady Burning (set in South Korea) is worth checking out. Karl Marlantes monumental Matterhorn (my post about that book is at this link) is now out in paperback and might be the best combat novel I've read. If you want to read something heroic -- and uncritical of the war, but still fascinating -- check out Charles Henderson's Marine Sniper (discussed here), a non-fiction account of Carlos Hathcock, the titular marine sniper.

War Crimes: The Film "Shoah"

Last Sunday (Memorial Day Weekend), I (and a neighbor and brother-in-law) spent most of the day and some of the evening in the basement of the Portland Art Museum watching the 25th anniversary re-release of the Holocaust documentary (though filmmaker Claude Lanzmann rejects the term "documentary") "Shoah." The total running time was about 9.5 hours.

The length contributes to the impact of the film, to the immersive nature of the experience; I was glad that I saw it all it once (it was screened in two halves, with a 45-minute break between). The film ultimately should be separated from the information that it contains. The facts and figures of the Holocaust go only a very small ways to representing the event.

"Shoah" in part creates its effect by what it is not: Lanzmann makes no attempt to explain political history. Few if any Nazi leaders are named. The film is limited in its scope -- there is no mention of France, none of Scandinavian countries, little of the USSR. There is no historical footage at all -- just interviews (survivors, perpetrators, witnesses) and location shots of Corfu, Polish villages, Warsaw, and extermination camp ruins from when the film was made (over 11 years, footage from 70s and 80s). There are a lot of sinister shots of trains, which provide continuity and transition. There are also shots of lush, bucolic countryside, where millions were killed.

Most of the film focuses on the minute operations and even physical dimensions of the murdering operations at Auschwitz, Chelmno, and Treblinka. There is a small section in Corfu -- a sunny, Mediterranean contrast to Poland. The Corfu Jewish community (of about 1,800) was rounded up in June 1944 (shortly after D-Day) and sent to Auschwitz by ferry, then train. It was, as the film discusses, a logistical challenge, but the train finally made it; only 5% of Corfu's Jewish community survived.

There is also a section about the Warsaw Ghetto, built mostly around interviews with a Polish diplomat and courier, Jan Karski. He spent a few hours over two days visiting the ghetto, seeing bodies on the street and a scene that he described as not human.

But the Corfu and Warsaw parts seem almost like sidebars: the heart of the film is testimony from Jewish survivors who worked at the gas chambers and crematoria. The start of part II of the film includes about 20 minutes of a barber talking (while cutting a man's hair in a Tel Aviv barbershop) about cutting hair of women in the gas chamber a few minutes before they were killed. A Czech Jew named Filip Müller describes one of the Auschwitz gas chambers at length. Two survivors -- the only two -- discuss Chelmno, where 400,000 people were killed in vans in which the exhaust fumes were fed back into the vehicle.

Lanzmann also talks to a couple of Reich bureaucrats as well as a Treblinka guard. At one point, the guard corrects Lanzmann, saying that it is an "exaggeration" to say that as many as 18,000 people could be killed a day at Treblinka. Lanzmann insists that figure is in the court records, but the guard tells Lanzmann that, no, the most they could kill in a day was 12 or 15,000.

Lanzmann also interviews the Reich's assistant commissioner of the Warsaw Ghetto; he went on to be a publisher of mountaineering books. At one point, he says something like, "This topic has been discussed at length. We're not going to come to any new conclusions." And Lanzmann agrees, "No, I don't think we will." This is part of the point: to hear people discuss what they witnessed, but not to reach for any containable findings.

There is a good deal of overlap and repetition -- for instance, where a survivor's testimony is echoed by a perpetrator's testimony (e.g., about the "infirmary" at Treblinka, where older people were treated with a single "pill" -- a bullet to the neck). Lanzmann also continually takes the viewer back to the ruins at Auschwitz, back to Chelmno and Treblinka. The camp ruins function as magnets -- pulling Lanzmann and the viewer obsessively back to a place that must be seen but cannot be explained.

Hanging with David Goodis and Cassidy's Girl

I'm back for what appears to be about a once-a-month post. So it goes. A kind soul (Murlmeiner McStogheimer) sent me an extra copy of the NoirCon 2010 program, which takes the form of a pulpy 50s paperback, with an illustration of David Goodis on the cover. Goodis is basically the patron saint of NoirCon, which began as GoodisCon in 2007.

The NoirCon 2010 program/book has some great selections, including two chapters from Charles Willeford's unpublished (but later cannibalized) book, A Necklace of Hickeys; there is also a Woody Haut article about Willeford's library; and excerpts (with commentary by Francis Nevins) from Goodis's deposition when he sued United Artists TV, alleging that the show The Fugitive infringed on the copyright of his novel, Dark Passage (known for its Bogart film adaptation).

So, the little NoirCon 2010 book got me interested enough to read Goodis's 1951 novel Cassidy's Girl. (I had known a bit about Goodis, but had only read Shoot the Piano Player (aka Down There) and seen the Truffaut film adaptation (as well as Dark Passage).) The novel tells the story of Jim Cassidy, a well-meaning, alcoholic bus driver with an extremely unlucky past and a wild wife, Mildred. Cassidy falls in love with another woman, Doris, and then winds up on the run, wrongly accused of manslaughter. The story and characterizations are excessive and unbelievable, but nevertheless, they get under your skin. This, I believe, is the David Goodis experience: you descend into a chaotic but poetic world of dissolution, drunkenness, violence, and sexuality.

Goodis writes vividly, and occasionally his writing is peppered with strange, original, rhythmic descriptions. Here, for example, Cassidy and his friends sit in a dive drinking and talking: "...and then for a while it was quiet while all of them concentrated on their drinking. The interlude of quiet was like a strange lack of noise on the deck of a slowly sinking ship, with strangely unexcited people climbing into lifeboats. They were unaware of one another, quietly concentrating on their drinking." Notice the repetitions, the twist on the sinking ship trope, and finally, I would call out the adverbs -- slowly, strangely, quietly. Here the adage about avoiding adverbs is dead wrong. This passage also puts to rest decisive arguments about the necessity of sparse prose for noir effect.

Goodis is also known for his depictions of -- and male protagonists' obsessions with -- well-rounded women. Here is Mildred, in all her pulpy glory: "He [Cassidy] was seeing the night-black hair of Mildred, the disordered shiny mass of heavy hair. He was seeing the brandy-colored eyes, long-lashed, very long-lashed. And the arrogant upward curve of her gorgeous nose. He was trying with all his power to hate the sight of her full fruitlike lips, and the maddening display of her immense breasts, the way they swept out, aimed at him like weapons. He stood looking at this woman to whom he had been married for almost four years, with whom he slept in the same bed every night, but what he saw was not a mate. He saw a harsh and biting and downright unbearable obsession."

I've got more to say about Goodis, but I'll save it (if I remember) for later. I should note that the (Creative Arts) Black Lizard reprints of a handful of Goodis titles include a very illuminating introduction by Geoffrey O'Brien (now the editorial chief of Library of America and the author of the pretty fun book, Hardboiled America: The Lurid Years of Paperbacks).

The Bayou Trilogy and the Woodrell Revival

Several years ago, I’d hear occasional whispers, passing virtual mentions, that I should be reading this guy Daniel Woodrell. That he’d be right up my alley: crime, noir… and something else.

I read a lot of crime fiction -- that is, books that are marketed as such and shelved in the mystery section in bookstores and libraries. I have partially, but not entirely, forsaken books that are categorized by the categorizers as mainstream or literary fiction. Why? That’s another topic, but for now, I’m usually reading books whose plots involve murder, robbery, investigation, and so on.

So, I got on to Woodrell because of these genre markers, but I’ve stuck with him and have been evangelizing his works because of the “something else.” Woodrell has a following among crime fiction readers, but I could also see readers being disappointed because Woodrell sometimes spectacularly thwarts genre expectations (see my earlier comments on Tomato Red, his favorite of mine).

Woodrell has now gotten more attention because of the film adaptation of Winter’s Bone. He also recently won the Clifton Fadiman Medal for The Death of Sweet Mister (which I haven’t read) given to “a living American author in recognition of a work of fiction published more than ten years ago that deserves renewed notice and introduction to a new generation of readers.”

Mulholland Books has now reissued (well, later this month) what it’s calling The Bayou Trilogy (sometimes referred to as the St. Bruno trilogy for the fictitious town where the books take place). In these books, Woodrell skews closest to traditional crime fiction: cop Rene Shade investigates local crimes, while balancing family obligations and his love life.

The stories/plots per se aren’t quite so important: instead, Woodrell thrives on evocative and colorful characters, odd scenes, sharp dialogue, and just plain electrifying prose. You can open his books at just about any random spot and find a funny, original, insightful, vivid turn of phrase. I still laugh whenever I think of Big Annie (in the bucolic noir Give Us A Kiss) who puts on a shirt that our narrator describes thus: “The shirt proclaimed that she preferred Dukakis in the upcoming presidential pissin’ match” (funny, reflective of characters, a commentary on politics -- and just listen to that sentence).

Woodrell also seems to have bits of Flannery O’Connor running around his imagination. In the last book of the trilogy, The Ones You Do, there is an unforgettable villain named Lunch Pumphrey -- vicious, principled, and amusing at once.

It’s great to see the Bayou/St. Bruno books back on the shelves. Busted Flush Press also recently reissued Tomato Red. I hope that more readers and Hollywood interest have a liberating rather than a confining influence on Woodrell. In Give Us A Kiss, there are a couple of great scenes of the narrator’s time in the military, and Woodrell told me last October (I accosted him at Bouchercon, and he let me buy him a drink) that he might like to write something growing out of his time in the Marines. I’d like to read that book -- even if it’s not a crime novel.

Required FTC blogger disclosure: Hey, thanks to Miriam Parker, the super-cool marketing director at Mulholland Books who sent me an advanced copy of The Bayou Trilogy, when I lamented that I couldn’t find a copy of the middle title, Muscle for the Wing.

The Formal Blog... and then Goodreads

I've fallen off posting here -- partly because I have wanted to maintain a certain formality -- or at least some semblance of polish. But formality and polish are both (and with some reason) out of style. Meanwhile, I've been posting these blathering comments on Goodreads.

I find Goodreads -- a book-reading social network or "social cataloging" service -- a little hard to navigate. Also, reviews are between 1 and 5 stars, and I'm giving almost everything a 4 or 5. Basically, with a few exceptions, if I don't like a book, I'm going to put it down and not write about it or rank it. So, I would be better off with a different scale. I've also ranked books that I read years ago -- as well as books I've recently read. And anyone looking at my list can't really tell the difference.

So I could round-up what I've written on Goodreads, but you can also just check it out there (www.goodreads.com/douglevin). I guess the two best new (or semi-new or new to me) books I've read this last month were Dave Zeltserman's Small Crimes and Daniel Woodrell's Muscle for the Wing (now part of a new trilogy volume, The Bayou Trilogy, out next month from Mulholland Books); I'll write more about the Woodrell book (in a more formal post!) soon. Now I just have to hook up this blog to Goodreads and both of them to Facebook, and they can all talk to each other, while I read books, write, work, and saw wood.

A Shock of Recognition from Richard Selzer

I've been gone again nearly a month... idly reading, writing a bit, working. I've read some good books, but a "Readings" selection from the March 2011 Harper's Magazine really got under my skin today. Part of the effect -- pleasure, recognition, nostalgia, sadness, and fear -- was turning the page of the magazine and unexpectedly finding the piece: an excerpt from a new book, Diary, by Richard Selzer. It begins:

"Yale's Sterling Memorial Library is chock full of loonies, of whom I am one."

Selzer goes on to describe shushing, rescuing, and defending the library loonies. And then he muses about falling asleep at the library and the chance that he might die there, "with my head resting on the desk, half-hidden behind the partitions of the cubicle.... It's as happy as death can arrange itself to be."

Selzer is a marvelous, mysterious, introspective writer. He was a surgeon, whose writing first grew out of his medical practice and then wandered elsewhere.

But this reading experience was personal -- a mirror biography of sorts. I remember well falling asleep in my carrel, head on desk, in the stacks of this very library. But to be honest, I am not so much Selzer as one of his library loonies. Or am I mistaken?

I pull a couple of books off my shelf that have been gathering proverbial dust for some time. I think they might be signed, but I can't remember. Sure, the loopy graduate student talks with Dr. Selzer, but would he foist books for signature upon the kindly man?

They are inscribed, and there I am again in the cavernous library being unknowingly ministered to by his warm conversation: "For Doug, To remember our visits at Sterling Library[...] Richard"; and "For Doug, my friend and colleague To remember our many visits at the Yale Library[...] Richard."

Image: Sage Ross, Wikimedia Commons

"Hardboiled Academics" Postscript

Last Friday, I had another piece up on the Mulholland Books website -- this one entitled, "Hardboiled Academics." The piece was built around my discovery that there are (and have been) a lot of crime writers with academic/scholarly backgrounds. Why is this and how does this background influence crime writers? In retrospect, the path from academia to crime fiction makes sense: people like to read; they read through school; they keep going to school; they take up writing because they like to read; and so on.

I pitched the idea to Miriam Parker, the marketing director at Mulholland, and she liked it, so I wrote the lead-in section and then asked a few other writers to share their thoughts. One passed, but Kenneth Wishnia and Bill Crider responded. Miriam contacted Denise Mina and Megan Abbott, and they both threw in their two cents (or bob), and the piece was born. (And thank you to everyone.)

I would like to answer my own question, but I think I'll let my thoughts fester a little longer. A while back, I thought that my academic work had made me a better reader, and that I could bring these skills to bear when writing and evaluating my own fiction. Now I'm not so sure. I also have this idea that I can generate a certain beat in my prose after years of careful (or at least, slow) reading (and sub-vocalizing). I'm not so sure about that either. I'll think about it some more.