Col Asks Some Questions

Colman Keane of Col's Criminal Library asked me some questions about my new crime novel, Lyme Depot, and more.

The interview is on his site, here.

Col gives Lyme Depot top grade

Prolific reviewer Colman Keane of Col’s Criminal Library gave my new crime novel, Lyme Depot, a five out of five rating.

“Fast-moving, populated with interesting characters and a clever plot as all the characters and story strands are expertly drawn together in a satisfying climax,” he said.

Read his review here.

R.I.P. Albert Finney

British actor Albert Finney died last week at age 82. He was a star of stage and screen for six decades.

His passing started me thinking about three of his excellent early movies.

Finney shot to stardom in 1960 playing the surly Arthur Seaton in the gritty, “kitchen-sink” film, “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.” The movie was adapted from Alan Sillitoe’s “angry-young-man” novel and directed by Karel Reisz.

International superstardom came to Finney in 1963 when he played the title role in “Tom Jones.” The saucy, happy-go-lucky movie directed by Tony Richardson was adapted from Henry Fielding’s 18th-century novel.

In 1967, he co-starred with Audrey Hepburn in the sophisticated  “Two for the Road." The film was written by Frederic Raphael and directed by Stanley Donen. I will have more to say about it in a future post.

Crimes in Southern Indiana by Frank Bill

Frank Bill’s 2011 collection of 17 short stories, Crimes in Southern Indiana, is a well-written bag of violent tales from the sparsely populated pockets of that state.

I had heard Bill’s book was brilliant, and it is, but it is also exceedingly dark and brutal.

Each of his stories rings true – unfortunately. Unfortunately because it is hard to think of modern America as still having places where so much ignorance, greed, jealousy, and lust can result in so much carnage.

Some of the stories focus on law enforcement in those areas. One piece is strangely psychological and almost hallucinatory. Another is about a mercy killing that is almost sweet in its sentimentality. Almost, but not quite – the killing is shocking.

The only hopeful thing to remember when reading this collection is these stories take place in several different eras and Indiana is a big state. Chicago is right off the upper west corner of it, and Louisville, Kentucky is right across the river from its southern border. In between are miles and miles of open country and farm land.

Readers picking up this book are in for a bloody ride. Frank Bill’s Crimes in Southern Indiana is noir on steroids.

(For more posts on books, check out Patti Abbott’s blog.)

Dana King Asks Some Questions

Dana King, author of Ten-Seven, his new Penns River novel, asked me some questions about my new crime novel, Lyme Depot, and more.

The interview is over at his site One Bite At A Time.

A Rage in Harlem by Chester Himes

The first of Chester Himes’ eight Harlem crime novels featuring New York police detectives, Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, was A Rage in Harlem, published in 1957. But these two men do not appear until about a third of the way into this book.

A Rage in Harlem is the story of Jackson, a ridiculously naïve man who lives with the sexy, seductive Imabelle, a woman with a shady past and who may or may not be in on a scheme to fleece the trusting, pious Jackson.

A man claiming he can change ten-dollar bills into hundred-dollar bills with some special chemically treated parchment takes Jackson’s life savings in an explosive opening scene. A phony U.S. marshal arrives, the con man and Imabelle escape, but Jackson is caught, frightened and further fleeced. To pay off the phony fed, Jackson steals a stack of money from the safe of his boss, the local undertaker.

This is only the beginning of a wickedly wild ride for Jackson. The ride includes recruiting the help of his twin brother, a drug addict, who makes a living dressing like a nun and selling tickets to heaven to suckers on 125th Street. Later Jackson will steal his boss’ hearse to make a getaway.

Into this stew come Coffin Ed and Grave Digger, who are both black, tough, savvy, and carry large, cannon-like .38s.

The story spins so fast and so unexpectedly readers will see why Himes was famous for his absurd story lines in the service of making points about life in the 1950s.

Chester Himes’ crazy, violent, funny novel is truly noir on many fronts. It lives up to the dark, cynical view of the world of the traditional noir. The twist is the hilarious way Himes tells his story, often while describing violence.

The humor is brutally dark and involves gun battles, knife fights, acid thrown in faces, and an ax. Here is an example from a passage in which the detectives persuade one of the con men to cooperate:

“Coffin Ed slapped Gus on the check with his open palm. Gus’s tight-fitting hat sailed off and he spun toward Grave Digger, who slapped him on the other cheek and spun him back toward Coffin Ed. They slapped him fast, from one to another, like batting a ping-pong ball. Gus’s head began ringing. He lost his sense of balance and his legs began to buckle. They slapped him until he fell to his knees, deaf to the world.”

This was a decade before reading a suspect his Miranda rights became custom. Writing in the mid-1950s, Himes may have been recalling practices from the 1930s or 1940s. Also, not all the violence in A Rage in Harlem is slapstick, some of it just plain shocking.

The gruesomely violent and action-packed wind up to the story, however, is so funny any reader will feel guilty for smiling as Himes piles one garish moment on top of another.

For a 1957 novel, the dialogue is unusually frank in its use of expletives. Quite a few times, characters uttered “mother-raper,” which I suppose was the only way U.S. publishers could even suggest the term and keep the street flavor of the dialogue.

Chester Himes (1909-1984) wrote 20 novels and two autobiographies. I own six Vintage reprints of the Coffin Ed and Grave Digger novels and will be re-reading more of them this year.

(For more posts on books, head over to Patti Abbott’s page.)

Lyme Depot: A Drum County Crime Story

My country-noir novel

is available now at Amazon.

Please take a moment to check it out here.

Thanks!

Robert E. Howard’s Steve Costigan Stories

Fans of Robert E. Howard might wonder what took me so long, but it was not until last summer that I discovered his funny, fighting character, Steve Costigan.

Hopping around Amazon, I found a collection of 21 Costigan stories for 99 cents on Kindle. Now I am slowly working my way through the yarns.

So far, the stories feel like a combination of Popeye cartoons and the dark B pictures that used to play on TV on Saturdays when I was a kid.

Costigan is a merchant seaman who gets himself into fights and scrapes in every port.

The collection kicks off with Costigan in a Hong Kong saloon where he meets an old pal, encounters a beautiful woman and gets involved in the mystery of a missing jewel.

He and Bill McGlory, a guy he is either brawling with or palling around with, track the woman and get tangled up with a Chinese gangster. The trail leads to a fabulous compound which feels like a sort of maze as the sailors fight with guards and henchmen in dark mysterious rooms and closed-in courtyards that seem to magically appear out of Robert E. Howard’s pen.

In the next story, Costigan and his bulldog, Mike, are in a waterfront dive in Singapore when some tough, sporting types want Costigan to enter his pet in an organized dog fight with a notorious killer pooch. Costigan tells them to forget it, but someone kidnaps Mike and Steve fights his way through the city looking for the animal.

He offers a reward for his stolen dog and plans to raise the money by stepping into the boxing ring and winning the prize money. The fight is hilarious with Costigan battling but distracted with thoughts of who may have stolen his dog and worries about getting him back.

There is plenty of action and some very funny dialog peppered with cartoonish, phonetic seafaring words, and lots of 1920s-1930s slang.

The stories are fast, clever, and peppered with salty, but G-rated language, and funny observations as told in the first person by Costigan “hisself.”

By today’s standards, parts of the stories are either borderline to outright offensive. Howard was a writer of his time and I’ve got to believe he was not out to offend anyone, but to just tell a rip-roaring tale for the enjoyment of his readers.

Howard, author of the Conan the Barbarian stories, wrote about 27 Costigan tales from 1929 until about 1934. He died in 1936 at age 30.

For more on the boxing sailor, Steve Costigan, check out Paul Bishop’s post.

And for more posts on books, head over to Patti Abbott’s page.

An interview with author Dana King

Dana King is the author of 10 books and several short stories. His novels A Small Sacrifice and The Man in the Window were nominated for Shamus Awards. He’s written five novels in his Nick Forte series, and his fourth novel in the Penns River series came out January 21.

ELGIN BLEECKER: Dana, welcome to The Dark Time. Your new novel, Ten-Seven, just came out. Would you tell us about Penns River, your fictional small city in Pennsylvania, and about its police department, and what its detectives face in your new story?

DANA KING: Pittsburgh’s recovery after the collapse of the steel industry is remarkable, but it never really made it north up the Allegheny River. Penns River still has an economy that runs about as well as it did in the 70s and no real hope of things getting materially better. The new low-roller casino was supposed to bring untold riches; instead it brought a new way to siphon money out of the town, along with increased crime. The persistent poverty whipsaws the police between having more crime and less money for the resources to fight it. In Ten-Seven, an apparently random act of violence has repercussions out of proportion to its initial effect because there’s too much going on for the beleaguered cops to concentrate on anything.

EB: I am curious to know how the series began – the conception that lead to the first novel, Worst Enemies. Was it the location? Was it Detective “Doc” Dougherty? Or did you start with the killer and his crime?

DK: Worst Enemies began as an idea to put a twist on Patricia Highsmith’s classic Strangers on a Train. I’d not read the book, nor had I seen the movie; I just knew the premise. All my previous stories were set in and around Chicago but I hadn’t lived there in a while and wanted a location I knew but where I could also make the stories about more than the featured crime. I grew up in the three small towns that make up Penns River and went back often to visit my parents, so I took a page from the “Write What You Know” school and placed the story there. Ben Dougherty (pronounced “DOCK-erty”) was my anchor, the one person who saw the town the most like I did, as he’s been away for quite a while (in his case, in the Army) and was able to place his love for the place in perspective. I chose the name deliberately to anchor myself there: my father’s first name was Benjamin and my mother’s maiden name is Dougherty.

EB: I have a clear mental picture of Penns River, its neighborhoods and people. But you never wrote any long descriptions. It was all subtle suggestions, brief impressions. When describing a person or place, how much is too much, how much is too little, and how do you know when you’ve got it just right?

DK: Everything is subordinate to the needs of the story, so all descriptions have to be proportionate to how important they are in relation to the story. If something matters for the story—say a character needs to have brilliant blue eyes—then I’ll describe them. That’s not to imply I never make digressions from the main thread. Not at all. But when I do digress to set a mood or to build a character in the reader’s mind, then whatever I choose to describe is critical to that story, even though it’s smaller. I rarely worry if the description is too little, as I only want to give enough for people to form some image for the movie that’s playing in their heads. I know it’s too much when I’m editing and start to feel antsy for things to move again. When in doubt, too little is almost always better than too much.

EB: Your Penns River cops sound like real people. I think I can even detect a regional accent. Do you recall specific people when composing dialogue for your characters? And once you hear it, how do you get it down on paper?

DK: It’s a writers’ joke, but I listen to the voices in my head. Most of my dialog comes from me putting myself in a situation and transcribing how I think that conversation would go, making adjustments for character differences along the way. The first draft is very close to a transcription of what goes on in my head, so much so that I sometimes have pages with no tags or attributions as my fingers try to keep up with what I’m hearing; delineating each character’s method of speaking takes place in edits. I still have a fairly pronounced Western Pennsylvania accent and I can call up voices from my past pretty easily. I think it also helps that I was a classically trained musician so I have an ear for tone and rhythm that is helpful here.

EB: Thanks, Dana, for taking the time to discuss your new book and your writing.

Dana King’s Ten-Seven is available here.

His web site is here.

And his blog is here.

Three Hours Past Midnight by Tony Knighton

Tony Knighton’s 2017 book Three Hours Past Midnight checks all the boxes for a crime novel. It has a cool resourceful anti-hero, scary, relentless bad guys, tough savvy women, dirty cops, crooked politicians, a good mystery, plenty of action, and a sprawling urban setting.

The main character is a professional thief who is so deep in the shadows hardly anyone knows his name – including the readers of this noir story. He is a man known as a top professional, which is why a former city cop hires him to break into a sleazy politician’s townhouse and steal the contents of a safe.

The thief easily lets himself into the home, finds the safe, then surprisingly, chops it out of the wall and drops it out a side window where the ex-cop picks it up, puts it in his vehicle and drives away. The two will settle up later.

But when he arrives at the meeting place, he finds the ex-cop shot dead and the safe gone.

If he is to maintain his reputation, the thief cannot let this go unanswered. He spends the rest of the night moving about town, hunting down the guys who killed the ex-cop and took the safe. The thief wants to do more than just find and punish the culprits, he wants the money from the safe and he wants to know why they killed the man.

The crazy, tangled and violent journey of the thief is an exciting ride as he tracks down the safe and the thieves. And to complicate things, he is being tracked by someone willing to kill anyone in his way.

The story takes place in and around Philadelphia, a city Tony Knighton obviously knows well, perhaps from his day job. He is a lieutenant in the Philadelphia Fire Department.

Three Hours Past Midnight is a fast-paced, intriguing whodunit, and I look forward to reading more of his work.