All Due Respect Issue #2 (18 page)

Plunder of the Sun
by David Dodge

A Hard Case Crime novel
reviewed by Lawrence Maddox

Gringo PI Al Colby, cooling his heels in Chile, is offered one-thousand dollars to smuggle a mysterious package into Peru, no questions asked. The money interests Al almost as much as his sickly employer’s beautiful nurse, Ana Luz. When Al discovers the package holds the key to an ancient Incan treasure, he plunges into a trek across the Andes to the ruins of a fabled fortress. This is a Hard Case Crime reissue, so you know
Plunder’s
Incan lore takes a back seat to greed, double-crosses and bloodshed in what could be called “adventure noir.”

David Dodge’s
Plunder of the Sun
, originally published by Random House, 1949, reissued by Hard Case Crime, 2005, is the second of three crime novels featuring expat adventurer Al Colby. Al is a decent guy and his style is laid-back; he’ll let the other guy strike first, but like a cunning counter puncher, Al will turn things around to his advantage. Al’s adversary is Jeff, a fellow expat and antiquities expert who wants in on the lost Incan treasure. Like the gringos hunting for Mexican gold in B. Traven’s
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
(which reminds me a lot of
Plunder
), the promise of quick wealth brings out suspicion and violence. Part of Al’s quest for the gold is his desire to buy the freedom of the beautiful Ana Luz, a
criatura
, or indentured servant, who is being forced into an unwanted marriage.

All three Al Colby books take place in Latin America, and Dodge paints his landscape like a local. In
Plunder
, Dodge puts his treasure hunters through their paces, trekking Al and his unfaithful companions across the Andes by train, mule, and foot, and finally, to the deadly
denouement
at Lake Titicaca. Dodge really brings Peru to life, and it’s no wonder; Dodge was a very successful writer of travelogues. Like Ian Fleming, Dodge came up with his detailed descriptions of his exotic locales by visiting them. His first two travel books,
How Green Was My Father
and
How Lost Was My Weekend
, are both detailed family excursions into Latin America, and were both published before
Plunder
. The heat, the dust, the lice-ridden huts of the poor cocoa-leaf chewing Cuzco Indians—Dodge makes you feel like you’re right there, digging for golden Incan statues while nervously watching your back.

Warner Bros made a so-so movie out of
Plunder
starring Glenn Ford in 1953. Dodge didn’t like it. He was much happier with Hitchcock’s adaption of his 1952 novel
To Catch A Thief
. Successful in his day, Dodge is largely forgotten by crime fiction readers. He deserves better. Randal Brandt is rectifying that with his excellent website
A David Dodge Companion
(
www.david-dodge.com
). It’s comprehensive, and Dodge’s daughter Kendal assisted his research.

Joyland
by Stephen King

A Hard Case Crime novel
reviewed by Steven Belanger

Joyland
is another first-person account by Stephen King, tinged with nostalgia and a healthy dose of regret, which succeeds because the narrator’s voice is so everyday that it’s like you’re listening to one of your good friends.

King has specialized in this sort of first-person narration for a long time—in
1922, Bag of Bones, 11/22/63, Insomnia
, “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption,” and “The Body,” to name a few.
Joyland
is a toned-down and muffled version of
The Shining
, of
Bag of Bones
, and of the nostalgia—tinged with getting-old sadness—of
The Green Mile, Insomnia
, and others.

How successful is it? If you’re
only
looking for some staples of Hard Case Crime—very harsh characters, nasty stuff done by nasty people, fast-talking men and faster-moving women—then not so much. King’s style is not hard-hitting, punch-in-the-stomach crime noir. But I read
Joyland
’s 283 pages in one sitting, and I liked it in a way that surprised me.

There’s nothing here you haven’t seen before, and the identity of the killer shouldn’t come as a surprise. It’s got to be one of two characters, really, especially after another finds his way to a hospital. I don’t think King thought this book’s fate rested upon its mystery.

Or its supernatural horror. Because, frankly, there isn’t any. The ghosts appear behind the scenes to the minor characters. You won’t see them.

What you will see is a broken-hearted University of New Hampshire student, Devin Jones, taking a job at Joyland to forget his woes. A fortune teller—whose fortunes are often Joyland babble, but sometimes not—tells Devin his life will be changed by two children, one a girl with a red hat, one a boy with a dog. One of them has The Sight. (That’s
The Shining
reference.) Devin later saves the girl and meets the boy.

You will also see that a young woman had been murdered decades ago in Joyland’s Haunted House. Devin and his friends (Tom Kennedy and Erin Cook; Erin is the scantily-dressed redhead on the cover) discover a series of murders, never connected by the police. Tom sees the ghost of the murdered woman—in an effectively creepy scene—and the summer ends. Though his friends go back to school, Devin stays, and befriends the boy and his young mother. (There’s
Bag Of Bones
.)

Finally, you’ll see that a beloved park employee dies, and his ghost is seen, though not by Devin or by the reader. Devin figures out who the serial killer is; the murderer knows he will, and tells Devin to meet with him or he’ll kill the mother and child. They meet, and Devin is saved in the nick of time, and soon the novel ends, and then ends again—a tactic King does well. (Remember how
The Green Mile
ended, then ended again?) It struck me as a little sad. Charles Ardai, the editor of Hard Case Crime, said the ending made him cry.

I’m a tougher, hard-boiled kind of guy, so I just got the sniffles and became wistful.

But this is a Hard Case Crime book by Stephen King, so there is a terror here. The real horror in life, King said in a recent interview, is the cancer that kills the main character’s—and King’s own—mother. It’s growing old. Going senile. Losing loved ones. These things are the horror of
Joyland
as well.

And the joy of
Joyland
for me is in its recreation of another time—a time we’ll never see again. It’s an evocation of our innocent past that maybe wasn’t so innocent—but it sure felt that way, didn’t it? King said
Joyland
was a revisiting of his love for the small carnivals during his own teenage summers. (Think of
Joyland
as Bradbury’s
Something Wicked This Way Comes
, minus the lyrical prose.) By remembering his summer freedoms, King invites us to remember ours, and to do so with, if not love, then at least a wistful appreciation.

Joyland
helped me remember the summers of my past with a smile, and it’ll probably do the same for you.

What else can you ask for as you grow older—as your hair thins and grays, and your bones get brittle? I’d rather look back and smile, than look ahead and frown.

The Twenty-Year Death
by Ariel S. Winter

A Hard Case Crime novel
reviewed by David Bishop

What’s more difficult than writing a crime novel? How about writing three of them, each in the style of a different master of the genre? This is the challenge that Ariel S. Winter set himself in
The Twenty-Year Death
, and the literary ventriloquism he displays is astounding. This 600-pager is split into three linked sections, which stand equally well on their own. The first,
Malniveau Prison,
is a Simenon/Maigret pastiche set in rural France of 1931. This is followed by the Chandler-esque
The Falling Star
, set ten years later and with a Hollywood backdrop. Finally, there’s
Police at the Funeral
, a spectacular riff on the ’50s noir world of Jim Thompson.

It’s to Winter’s credit that he keeps the author’s voices consistent throughout, and
The Twenty-Year Death
is a novel that strengthens as it progresses.
Malniveau Prison
is perhaps the least successful of the three sections, albeit only marginally—in places, the language feels slightly off-key, detracting from an otherwise evocative picture of rural France. Winter is on firmer ground in
The Falling Star
, and the mean streets of San Angelo, down which he sends his detective Dennis Foster. Winter’s everyman protagonist encounters corruption at every turn, in a satisfyingly complex plot reminiscent of James Ellroy’s LA, and one with a twisted family at its centre.

I’d reserve my highest praise for the final section,
Police at the Funeral
. Right from the beginning, there’s an extraordinary, inevitable feeling of dread hanging over the narrative, which you know won’t end well. Winter’s portrait of his protagonist, an alcoholic writer in hock to the mob, is pitch perfect—you can almost smell the desperation pouring off him, and the readiness with which he crawls back into a bottle at any given opportunity is genuinely unnerving. You want to shake him out of his stupor, while also knowing that it’s already too late. In the best noir traditions, his fate is sealed, and all the reader can do is watch.

Despite the unusual structure,
The Twenty-Year Death
is never a tricksy book. Winter is utterly respectful of his source material; and in putting these three very different writers side by side to tell the same, over-arching story, he also pushes at the boundaries of the genre, and demonstrates—in the right hands—just how incisive and devastatingly memorable it can be.

The Cutie
by Donald Westlake

A Hard Case Crime novel
reviewed by Mike Monson

The thing I most love about this Donald Westlake book is what I love about all Donald Westlake books: It comes off as completely unself-conscious and unpretentious.

Westlake wrote a fascinating, compelling story about criminals and crime and that is all that’s on the page. I never feel like he’s trying to impress us with his language and writing skills, with his plotting, with his worldview, with his characterization. He has figured out a great tale with interesting characters and great settings and he just freaking tells it. I was grabbed from the opening pages and could
not
stop reading until I was done. When the book was over the only thing I felt I’d learned about Donald Westlake was that he was a great writer, a great story-teller—that’s it. I like that very much in a book.

The book covers most of my favorite fictional territories. It’s the story of Clay, a combination fixer, muscle, and hit man for a major New York gangster right around 1960, or maybe just before then (that is the year the book was first published). In his daily life, Clay mixes with people in an urban criminal world from the lowliest junkie to the fanciest mob lawyers and the bosses—and everyone in between. Clay narrates, and he describes his life and the life of his fellow criminals with a refreshing, bare-bones, non-judgmental point-of-view similar to the Parker books Westlake wrote under the name Richard Stark.