Hard Case Crime 2.0

As reported by Patti Abbott, James Reasoner, and Gerald So, Hard Case Crime has made a deal with Titan Publishing to resume publication of books starting in 2011. And the titles they have on tap--new Christa Faust, new Quarry novel--is something that'll make the next year seem longer than it'll really be.

The Hard Case Crime books are great products: smaller paperbacks, wonderful art, easy to fit in the back pocket. Plus they look awesome on the shelves. But I have to say that I'm just as excited that the new deal will also include some ebooks. That, to me, is the icing on the cake.

Now, if we could get more audio versions...

Congrats to Charles Ardai and the entire Hard Case Crime family for inking this deal. We readers are really, really happy!

Book Review: The Valley of Fear by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Tell the truth: if you go see the new Sherlock Holmes movie today and Robert Downey, Jr., appears in only half the film, you’d demand your money back. Am I right? I wonder if the readers in 1915 wanted some of their hard-earned cash back as well.

The Valley of Fear (1915) is the fourth of four Sherlock Holmes novels written by his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The Valley of Fear was published thirteen years after the third novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles, and only a year after the completion of the fourth set of short stories, His Last Bow. Instead of setting The Valley of Fear (Valley) in the then present, Doyle told yet another story of the early days of Holmes and Watson.

Like many of the tales, Valley opens with Holmes and Watson mulling over some intellectual problem. Holmes has received a cipher from an informant in Professor Moriarty’s organization. Unfortunately, the informant, Porlock, fears his discovery and has called off the solution to the cipher. Undeterred, Holmes and Watson deduce the book from which the coded message emerges. Once translated, the message is a warning that one Mr. Douglas of Birlstone Manor is in danger of being killed. No sooner does the dynamic duo read the message than MacDonald, from Scotland Yard, arrives at 221B Baker Street. He’d like Holmes’s help with a peculiar problem: a man named Douglas from Birlstone Manor has been killed by a shotgun blast to the face.

Well, how’s that for coincidence? Holmes and Watson accompany MacDonald to Birlstone Manor and then stumble into a traditional British mystery of manners. How else to describe the chapters that follow? Holmes is all but reduced to mere spectator as various members of the household are questioned and cross-examined. Holmes asks a question here and there but, frankly, I forgot he was in certain scenes. Sure, at the end, he blurts out a seemingly esoteric question and you remember why he’s so good but it comes at the end of the sequence.

Needless to say, the truth emerges and all because of Holmes. Like the first Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, Holmes reveals the killer halfway through the novel. Again, like the first book, Valley then throws the reader across to America of the 1870s and we basically get a novella that has nothing to do with Sherlock Holmes or the first half of the story. Well, it does have everything to do with the killing of Douglas but it isn’t until the Epilogue--when Holmes returns to center stage of his own book--that we are told how everything fits together. It was rather unsatisfying.

That’s not all I found dissatisfying about Valley. For this fourth novel, Doyle all but ret-conned his Holmes chronology with the inclusion of Professor Moriarty. When it came time for Doyle to kill off Holmes in “The Final Problem,” he invented a nemesis worthy of Holmes. It was in this story, set around 1891, that Watson first learns of the dreaded Napoleon of Crime. If you take “The Final Problem” as gospel, then The Valley of Fear belongs in the apocrypha. The reason is that Valley takes place before “The Final Problem” and Watson is fully aware of Moriarty. It’s almost as if The Valley of Fear takes place in some alternate universe.

Okay, so Moriarty is in the Valley of Fear. Except that he’s not. He makes no appearance at all in the novel. His existence is hinted at by Holmes, explaining that nearly all nefarious activities in London all have their genesis with Moriarty. We even get a fun little story of how Holmes infiltrated the professor’s inner sanctum. Clever, fun, but, in the end, not too important in this novel. Even at the conclusion of the novel, when one of the characters is murdered off-screen, Holmes attributes it to Moriarty’s influence. It’s seems a stretch.

Now, as to the second half of the novel, if you take it alone without the framework of the larger novel, it’s dang good. It tells the story of John McMurdo and how he came to work in the Vermissa Valley in Pennsylvania. It’s a coal-mining town and it’s controlled by the Ancient Order of Freemen. These guys are bad ass. They extort, assault, and murder. They’ve got the town in their grip and no one has the stones to stand up to them. McMurdo has an interesting backstory and he assimilates himself into the gang with ease.

Doyle’s tale-within-a-novel is dark and grim. Valley has been called the first hard-boiled novel (take a look at what Hard Case Crime did with this novel) and with good reason. In one scene, the men who have just killed another victim gather in a bar to celebrate their success. They take turns with the bottle and also take turns mimicking the cries of their victims or widows. I was shopping for Christmas when I heard that passage and my blood got chilled. It’s the utter disregard of human life that was surprising and unsettling. I'd almost go so far as to say there are some serious noir elements in here, too.

I pondered what had happened to the author who brought us fun tales tinged with a dark edge of the 1890s. I remembered that Doyle’s son died in World War I but the novel was published before that. In addition, I thought the war’s atrocities might indicate where this darkness came from but that’s not it either since the publication of the first installment of Valley coincided with the outbreak of hostilities (and, thus, Doyle wrote it before the war started). It makes me want to read a biography of Doyle to find out if there was some personal tragedy that led to the darker material. It also makes me want to read the Holmes tales that were written and published after The Valley of Fear and see if the grim outlook continued.

Now, my stated goal is complete. I have read (or re-read) all four Sherlock Holmes novels in advance of today’s premiere of the new Sherlock Holmes movie. For those who may have missed the earlier reviews, here’s the list and the links. I’ll have my say on the film later next week. And I’ll also recap my thoughts on all four novels in a later post as well.

In the meantime, Merry Christmas!

4 December - A Study in Scarlet
11 December - The Sign of (the) Four
18 December - The Hound of the Baskervilles
25 December - The Valley of Fear

Book Review: Somebody Owes Me Money by Donald Westlake

As with most authors I read from Hard Case Crime, this is my first Donald Westlake book. In fact, HCC is now my standard for creating a list of Authors To Be Read. I know about Westlake only tangentially since he is such a large figure in crime fiction. I know he writes the Dortmunder books under his own name and the Parker books under his famous pen name, Richard Stark. I know his reputation as a comedic caper writer. So I approached Somebody Owes Me Money with high expectations.

And boy did Westlake deliver. Somebody Owes Me Money tells the story of New York cabbie Chester “Please call me Chet” Conway who is the self-described most eloquent cab driver in the Big Apple. He picks up a fare who leaves him not with a monetary tip but an inside line on a horse in a race. Fuming, Chet initially balks at the bet but then calls his bookie, Tommy McKay. I mean, thinks Chet, how can you not bet on a horse named Purple Pecunia? He does and the alliterative animal wins. Chet is now rich with $930 coming his way. He goes to Tommy’s house to collect…and finds his bookie dead on the living room floor, bullets having torn his chest open.

Then things really get out of hand. Like a good citizen, Chet calls the cops but during his conversation with the police, Tommy’s new widow shows up at the house, sees her dead husband, and starts yammering that Chet was the culprit. It was in this sequence that I got my first taste of Westlake’s humor with the widow ordering Chet to hang up while Chet tries to convince her that he is, in fact, talking with the police right now. The scene could have been played by Laurel and Hardy. I actually laughed out loud while driving my car, listening to the audio (more on that later). From there, Chet gets more and more in a pickle. The detectives don’t believe him, Tommy’s sister tries to kill him, rival gangs both think Chet is working for the other gang, and, to top it off, somebody takes a shot a poor Chet. He’s not having a good day, and all he wants—as he tells anyone who will listen—is to collect the $930 owed him.

The novel is copyright 1969, not quite old enough to evoke the 1940s or 1950s crime noir tradition but not quite new enough to evoke the later 70s or 80s vibe of Elmore Leonard. At the same time, Somebody Owes Me Money does not evoke what you normally think about when you hear the year “1969.” No hippies, no marches, no Woodstock. This is just New York City circa 1969 from a cabbie’s point of view. So you get the charming necessity of the characters needing coins for the public telephones while others casually carry around guns.

As with all books Hard Case Crime publishes, the book is blessed with gorgeous cover art and a gorgeous woman. That’s Abbie McKay, Tommy’s sister, who has arrived from Las Vegas with a single-minded purpose: find her brother’s killer. She first thinks Chet is the culprit and tries to shoot him but only winds up shooting a hole in his cab. For a man who, again, only wants his $930, Chet reluctantly agrees to help Abbie find the true killer. It’s a easy choice to make for Chet. Not only does he suspect that Tommy’s killer might give up the name of the guy from whom Chet can collect his, everybody now, $930 dollars, but Abbie’s dressed as she appears on the cover: mini skirt and go-go boots. What red-blooded man wouldn’t go wherever she went? In fact, when Chet brings her to his regular poker game, the reactions of the other men are hilarious.

The story is told from Chet’s point of view, all first person. That is a limitation because Westlake filters everything through Chet’s eyes. For example, in a third-person, multi-POV book, an author might jump into the head of the shooter as he aims for Chet. With the way Westlake presented everything, Chet gets shot and you don’t know by whom or why. But, by sticking with Chet’s POV and having him experience only things he witnesses, Westlake gives you a chance to examine the clues and evidence and see if you arrive at the same answer when Chet does.

Westlake puts Chet’s tongue firmly in his cheek all throughout the novel. At one point during his recovery, Chet is naked in bed and cannot get out of bed. Numerous gangsters and one detective stroll into the bedroom, all the while Chet is, well, in bed without clothes. He’s interrogated, he plays gin rummy with a gangster, he sleeps with Abbie but he only sleeps. It’s here that Chet thinks he’s like Nero Wolfe where everyone comes to him. And, as that section of the book progresses, every major character does, indeed, arrive at that apartment. It’s quite funny.

Chet is not some suave hero who fearlessly traverses through the events hardly getting scathed. Every time a gun is pointed at him, Chet does what normal people do: whatever the man holding the gun says. Which leads to a lot of prose passages that look and sound like this.

“Get up,” he said.
I got up.
“Put your hands on your head.”
I put my hands on my head.
“Don’t turn around!”
I stopped turning and waited.

On paper, it’s just straight action. But in the audiobook, it’s something else entirely. Stephen Thorne narrates this book flawlessly. His tone is pitch perfect as Chet, a man exasperated that everyone seems to think he knows something when all that he’s after is, well, “my $930.” Thorne adopts decent New York gangster accents for the various thugs and his voice for the detective—a calm, cool, dispassionate voice not unlike a father to his child who has just spilled milk—adds immensely to the scenes with the detective in them. Thorne finds the humor in the text and inflects his voice accordingly. Thus, the previous passage would look like this, with the italics indicating the added emphasis Thorne puts in the reading.

“Get up,” he said.
I got up.
“Put your hands on your head.”
I put my hands on my head. I started to turn around.
“Don’t turn around!”
I stopped turning and waited.

In film, stage, and TV, visual mediums all, it’s easy to break the fourth wall. Not so easy in books. But, late in the novel, when the true killer is revealed, Westlake breaks the fourth wall. And its hilarious. I can’t give it away here because I want you to read the book. Suffice it to say, the characters question the true killer’s identity because it didn’t hold true to form of a mystery novel. But, as I’ve said, the clues where there.

What I Learned As A Writer: Humor. Holy cow this book was funny, funniest book I’ve read in years aside from Don Winslow’s The Dawn Patrol. In Winslow’s book, much of the humor derived from the dialogue and the characters’ unique way of talking and seeing the world. With Somebody Owes Me Money, most of this humor is situational humor. It’s almost sitcom-ish, like a good episode of “Three’s Company.” Chet just shows up at Tommy McKay’s house to collect his—how much now? $930—and everybody else starts assuming Chet knows more than he does. Various characters even joke about it: “For someone who claims not to know anything, you sure turn up everywhere.” And no amount of logical explanation by Chet can totally convince all parties that he’s as innocent as he claims.

I make this point to demonstrate that Westlake, at least in this book, does not write jokes. There are some one-liners in the book but they come out natural and organic. I’ve read some books, not all crime fiction, where the author attempts to write jokes as part of the dialogue. It comes off stilted and unnatural. Not so Westlake.

Since most of the crime fiction I read is not the humorous kind, Somebody Owes Me Money was a breath of fresh air. I certainly got my money’s worth and it cost me a whole lot less than $930.