Category: books

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FOR LOVE OF IMABELLE (aka A RAGE IN HARLEM) by Chester Himes

Chester Himes
For Love of Imabelle
1957 (1971 reprint, Dell Publishing Co.)

I’m convinced that most crime fiction stories could be re-written as comedies with little to no change to the plot. Both forms find their meat in irony, bad judgement, mismatched lovers, human weakness, and people who go to extremes to get out of trouble. Perhaps most obvious though is that both crime and comedy often involve an unholy mix of two types of characters: idiots and villains.

Put an idiot and a villain together and a powder keg can result. Maybe the villain manipulates the idiot. Maybe the idiot takes on the villain despite being outclassed in craftiness. Maybe the villain IS an idiot, but he’s still smarter than this other lowlife. What happens next might be funny. Or deadly. Or both.

That’s my theory, at least. Don’t test me too hard on it. I haven’t been thinking on it for twenty years. In fact, I didn’t think about it much at all until I read this brilliant, sleazy, violent, and often laugh-out-loud pulp novel from Chester Himes. It’s all about dangerous men, one shady woman, a city full of predators, and one hopeless fool at the center of it all.

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Bob Armstrong’s VANILLA SLIM: AN IMPROBABLE PIMP IN THE EMPIRE OF LUST

Bob Armstrong
Vanilla Slim: An Improbable Pimp in the Empire of Lust
2006, Carroll & Graf Publishers

Bob Armstrong’s brief career as a pimp is not the wildest story ever told. It’s crazier than what most people do, but Vanilla Slim was no Iceberg Slim. He didn’t see violence. He didn’t commit violence. He was nice to his girls. He didn’t confront some truly dark side of himself. He didn’t make enough money to roll around in a show-off car. He wasn’t dangerous. That’s all according to him in this first-person account, at least.

When the law eventually came down on him and Armstrong went to jail (he begins the book pondering his holding cell and all its glorious sights and scents), even that wasn’t too bad. He didn’t do serious time. Even the law could see that this Vietnam vet who was closing in on 60 merely misbehaved a little, even with drugs out in the open.

Or that’s how the wind blows in San Francisco, at least.

So why the hell did I blaze through this book in couple of days? Why did I get hooked? Why did I sit on the barstool next to this guy and take in every word he said?

I guess that’s because this is a bigger story than pimps and drugs and beautiful women and the men who pay $500 an hour for their company. This book is really about people who’ve missed the boat in life.

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Cody McFadyen’s SHADOW MAN

Cody McFadyen, Shadow Man (2006, Bantam)

I was looking for a good “summer book”. Something brisk and entertaining and who cares if it’s a little light on logical sense?

I picked this one and in my first few sittings I thought I’d made a mistake because it’s so damn bleak. After every chapter, I needed a hug just to feel better about being alive. 

As you keep going though, the silly things begin to pile up and up and then they start to come at you fast until the whole shebang takes the shape of an ultra-commercial thriller obviously intended to kick off a series (and if Hollywood is interested, it’s ready). Yes, it has harsh violence and grotesque crime scenes, but what’s more commercial than that these days? Who in the 21st century wants to read about someone getting beaned with a candlestick in a billiard room? No, we want serial killers raping and murdering as told in unsettling detail. 

THAT’S what we want to read on the beach–and I’m not kidding. 

I kept turning these pages, at least, though I’m not on a beach. 

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Ed McBain’s COP HATER

Ed McBain
Cop Hater
1956, Signet

The heat wave that takes over the city here is a primitive metaphor for the pressure that the 87th Precinct feels, from the press, from the public and from themselves, to crack the case of a shooter who’s popping off plainclothes police detectives brazenly in the streets.

That’s not a putdown.

This is a primitive book and it doesn’t ask for you to think of it as anything but that. Its meat is the investigation procedural, an almost journalistic account of how fingerprints are read and how two strands of hair and a blood pattern on a sidewalk can reveal ten facts about an escaped perpetrator. Its characters are mere side items. Guys with guns and women with secrets.

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Philip Jose Farmer’s TO YOUR SCATTERED BODIES GO

Philip Jose Farmer
To Your Scattered Bodies Go
1971, G.P. Putnam’s Sons/ Berkley Medallion

I love Philip Jose Farmer’s imaginative, often daring, outright scandalous short stories (see “My Sister’s Brother” and “Riders of the Purple Wage”), but I’ve never gotten around to reading his popular Riverworld series of novels.

The name put me off, I think. I hate the river. There are creatures in it. I’m sick of the river. Do I want to go to a riverworld? No, I don’t.

Also, does Riverworld have anything to do with Riverdance? I hope not.

But as the pile of unread books around me expands so perhaps will my tastes, so I decided to check out Riverworld finally and this first book in the series turned out to be a perfect read for my current state of mind as a middle-aged man who worries about death all day.

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Joe R. Lansdale’s PARADISE SKY

Joe R. Lansdale
Paradise Sky
2015, Mulholland Books

Joe R. Lansdale is one of my comfort food writers, even if he pretty much never writes about anything comfortable. For over forty years now, he’s shown us dark, seedy underworlds, mostly around East Texas, but he can find ’em in other places, too. He gives us villains who freeze your veins. He tells us about the frightening outcome of real and sudden violence. He’s never flinches when it comes to exploring racism at its most hideous. He makes you look at it close so that you can’t ignore it.

He’s also got one of those great Texan voices that I love so much. It’s perfectly smoked barbecue. It comes off as simple with smartass quips galore, but it’s also wise. Paradise Sky pulls off that Mark Twain trick in which our first-person narrator is from a humble place and his grammar maybe ain’t perfect, but he’s a brilliant observer and a natural wit. He’s got the kind of smarts that can’t be taught in a classroom.

Paradise Sky is big and epic and the product of a writer who’s read exhaustively about its Old West setting. He knows exactly how you cooked food when you camped out for the night in the middle of Missouri in the 1800s. He knows all about the guns of the time and what each designs’ strengths and weaknesses were–and he makes you care about that because it’s all vital to our narrator, a black sharpshooter, the son of former slaves (and a slave of himself when he was very young), from the horse-and-saloon days.

Lansdale loves the Old West too much to lie about it. He also tells you about the ugly truths. In fact, he can’t stop talking about that. Lansdale breaks your nose and blackens your eye with it.

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L. Ron Hubbard’s SPY KILLER

L. Ron Hubbard
Spy Killer
1936 (2008 reprint, Galaxy Press)

In the middle of reading, I accidentally spilled beer all over my copy of this book and it’s just as well. These Galaxy Press reprints of L. Ron Hubbard’s early pulp fiction work ARE a little too spiffy. They could use some rough treatment to match the contents.

Also, while I have klutzed up some rare collectibles in my day, reducing $100 vintage, outta-print records or books or movies to $3 damaged goods with one spilled drink or false step, I’m not concerned about this one. My local Half Price Books has stacks of these Hubbard reissues for $2 each, which is also perfect. Pulp should be cheap.

Cheap and stained.

If you’re reading junk like Spy Killer, you should be fine with that.

The story of this 1936 novella is Goofball City.

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Will Clarke’s THE WORTHY

Will Clarke
The Worthy
2006, Simon & Schuster

Gotta admit, I am very NOT curious about what goes on behind the closed doors of college frat houses. It’s a bunch of rich young douchebags being the best douchebags they can be, right? And everyone’s too incomplete, immature and dedicated to being conformists to be interesting.

I’m prejudiced. I admit it. My knowledge of fraternities comes entirely from Animal House and having worked in two restaurants near colleges where the frat menace was real.

They weren’t more rude than any other group in particular; they were just more demanding and they always came in packs. They’d order cheap drinks and then guzzle them down in ten seconds. Every time you walk past them, they need another. They’re also more likely to do stupid shit, such as the time I worked in a place that had an all-you-can-eat special and a band of brothers of the toga showed up and ate and ate and ate until one of them vomited at the table.

Also, they were always seperate checks and you could barely tell them apart, as they tend to look, talk and behave alike.

So, I gave this novel, which is set entirely within the Louisiana State University frat bro world, very little time to win me over. I aimed to be strict and I aimed to be harsh.

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BUBBA AND THE COSMIC BLOOD-SUCKERS by Joe R. Lansdale

Joe R. Lansdale
Bubba and the Cosmic Blood-Suckers
2017, Subterranean Press

Joe R. Lansdale gave my favorite piece of writing advice ever when he said “Write like everyone you know is dead”.

Don’t have anything to prove. Don’t worry about what the people you know might think about you. None of that shit needs to be on your mind at all. No one can tell a writer how to be good, but you can tell them how to be free.

And clearly Lansdale follows his own advice because that’s the only way that a man in his 60s who’s been steadily publishing novels and short fiction since 1980 (if not a little earlier) plops out with a profane piece of pure nutzoid pulp like this.

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Terry Southern’s THE MAGIC CHRISTIAN

Terry Southern
The Magic Christian
1959, Grove Press

I know that we’re all supposed to hate Louis CK now–and I certainly agree with anyone who says that his admitted exhibitionist masturbation fetish stuff isn’t much fun to think about–but none of that changes how funny he’s been before. One of my favorite old bits of his is the one in which he wonders why more billionaires don’t use their resources to prank everyone.

“Buy every baseball team and make them all wear dresses.” Open up the world’s worst pet store, where every can of food costs $1 million and where the groomers tell you point-blank that they will have sex with your pets, and keep it open for decades just to confuse people.

The first time I heard it, I hurt myself laughing and, because I’m perpetually behind on my reading, I didn’t realize until this week that Terry Southern had the exact same idea way back in the 1950s when he wrote this still-hilarious novel. It’s about Guy Grand, a perfectly nice and fabulously wealthy fella who has money to burn and so he burns it by relentlessly fucking with the world.

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