Friday's Forgotten Books, August 06, 2010

REMINEDER: AUGUST 20th, books we loved when we were between 18-23, college age. What book did you read when you should have been reading THE ODYSSEY and THE HISTORY OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION?

ALSO CHECK OUT MY TRIP TO THE TRAVERSE CITY FILM FESTIVAL at Crimespree Cinema.

Liam José is one of the editors of CRIME FACTORY. His writing has appeared online at The Flash Fiction Offensive, Powder Burn Flash and Blink Ink, and in print in Rough Cut Magazine, Above Water, Farrago, Pelican and in a forthcoming anthology book of young Australian writers. He lives, eats and procrastinates in Melbourne.

Crooked Little Vein, Warren Ellis

Warren Ellis, comic book writer of ill-repute, decided, somewhere in the last unsettling decade, to tackle novels. Or ‘novel,’ to be exact. Ellis, as evidenced by his work on the funny-books like Transmetropolitan, Authority and Desolation Jones, likes ‘edgy’ subject matter. The kind that appeals to the cool kids, y’know, the ones who didn’t waste their youth socialising or dating. A large portion of Ellis work seems to be this very loud style of high concept thrown in your face followed by bad attitude.

That’s not to say that the man hasn’t produced some high quality work. On the contrary – many of his runs are considered essential, and not just by me, but by the comics community at large. His run on Transmetropolitan, particularly, is one of the things that really got me into comics. But much of his later work just feels like either shock value, retreads, techno-babble or a combination of the three.

Finally, in 2007, Ellis released his first novel (after writing videogames, screenplays and the aforementioned comics) Crooked Little Vein. See, he has a very specific audience, which is probably my biggest problem with the book: Ellis writes for the 4Chan crowd; the nerdy hipsters with an unearned chip on their shoulder; the smart kids who feel wronged in some way, and he
doesn’t write well for others.

Crooked Little Vein just feels off in its execution. Ellis is writing about perversion and fetish, as he often does, and he writes about it in a hilarious way. But there seems to be a central confusion to the book. He uses the lead character - the naïve Michael McGill; a sweet but down on his luck everyman P.I. - to draw in an uncertain audience; guide them with a reassuring hand through this freak show of sleaze and filth. But this gentle touch seems so unnecessary given what Ellis is writing about – Godzilla Bukkake? People whose fetish is injecting saline into their testicles?

The book flips between this earnest presentation and the ‘oh, I’m sorry, am I shocking you n00b?’ attitude his writing so often takes, and just begins to grate after a while. Anybody who’d be interested in this doesn’t need to be looked after in this world. And anyone who does, likely wouldn’t enjoy what they found. And this does become a problem. Ellis’ work is so witty, so much fun to trawl through and full of such great dialogue that it’s frustrating to not be able to invest in it more fully. Ellis molds his book around the generic foundations of a PI book, and for the most part, this works. He plays it safe for his first time in a book without pictures, and the fact that he’s delivered a very solid detective book with a chewy inside of his own brand of perversion is a badge he should wear proudly.
Crooked Little Vein works despite itself, and is a great fun, easy read when it’s not busy distracting you with its own cleverness. Here’s hoping Ellis realises he doesn’t have anything to prove with his next book.

Jeff Meyerson is a retired mystery book dealer, fanzine editor/publisher (The Poisoned Pen), longtime mystery reader (40 years) and member (along with Bill Crider, George Kelley and Rick Robinson, among others) of DAPA-EM, the mystery apa, for over 30 years.

Something From the Nightside, Simon R. Greeen
(Ace Books paperback original, 2003).

As I may have mentioned before, in the deep dark early days of mystery fandom (1978-1987) I edited and published a mystery fanzine called The Poisoned Pen, which had articles, letters and reviews covering various aspects of the field. One of the regular columns was "Mystery Plus" by R. Jeff Banks, covering those books on the fringe of mysteries, where mystery met science fiction or western or...whatever. e, the first in a series by British science fiction and fantasy writer Simon R. Green (who has written a half dozen other series, some of them still ongoing), would definitely have fit into Jeff's column. It seems to start out as a traditional private eye novel but quickly crosses into fantasy and even horror.

John Taylor is a private eye in London when Joanna Barrett shows up at his seedy office to hire him to find her daughter, Cathy. It seems Cathy has disappeared in the Nightside, a world under (and bigger than) London, a land where it's always three o'clock in the morning and things are very definitely not like they are in our world. Taylor was born and grew up in the Nightside, escaping to the outside world five years earlier. He has a power, it seems, to find things and people, even those who don't want to be found, and he's ready to go back into the Nightside (along with his client) to find Cathy and bring her home.

Along the way we get a tour of this world (think Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, but darker) and meet some of Taylor's friends (like Razor Eddie and Suzie Shooter aka Dear God, It's Her, Run!) as well as some various nasty things who want him dead.

By now you should get a sense of whether or not this might appeal to you. It did to me and I'll be picking up and reading the rest of the series. There are ten books to date with two more planned. I've also picked up (but not read as yet) the six books in Green's Hawk and Fisher series, about a husband and wife team of City Guards in a corrupt city-state fantasy world. As in the Nightside series, magic works there.

Ed Gorman is the author of TICKET TO RIDE, SLEEPING DOGS, THE MIDNIGHT ROOM and other fine books.

Forgotten Books: Death of a Citizen by Donald Hamilton

It is worth noting here that even though Ian Fleming had been publishing the James Bond novels since the early '50s, Bond was not yet well-known in America, since none of the motion pictures had yet been filmed, nor had President Kennedy yet mentioned his affection for them to the press. In a very real sense, Helm predates Bond in the American imagination, and as critic Robin Winks has noted, stands up as a better creation, book for book, than Bond ever has." --Robert Skinner Even today there are only a few contemporary novels that shock me. Too much of our era's shock is too calculated for my taste; I always see the hand of the puppeteer. I recently picked up Donald Hamilton's 1960 Death of A Citizen and even though I've probably read it five or six times since it was first published it still has the power to startle me simply because of its brutality--a brutality the fits the narrator, Matthew Helm, a former WW2 assassin and special agent for our government. Now Helm is retired in the west with a wife and daughter and is trying hard to enjoy himself as a private citizen who isn't any more remarkable than his unremarkable neighbors. But at a party he meets someone who drags him back to his previous life and embroils him in the old games of treachery and murder. Hamilton is a master craftsman and an entertaining writer line by line. Helms is a complex character. There are times it's impossible to like him. There's a scene near the end of the book that is stunning in its casual callousness. And the final scene is unlike any I've ever read in popular fiction. It still stuns me. The books got dull as they got longer and the right-wing politics got to be inane. The movie adaptations were even worse. I've never been a Dean Martin fan--I always sensed he was spoofing most of his roles as both singer and actor--and the scripts are even lamer than he is. Not even an excellent B director like Phil Karlson could rescue the pictures. Death of a Citizen is in such demand that it goes for fairly big bucks on abe etc. Somebody should reprint at least the first six. As a postscript I should note that a bunch of writers (me included) got all sentimental about Hamilton and how he'd vanished. We assumed that he, like many paperbackers of the fifties and sixties, had fallen on hard times. There was talk of raising money and locating him so we could send it along post haste. Then one of us learned he was in Sweden selling off the family castle. He should have been raising money for US.
Joe Barone
Paul Bishop
David Cranmer
Bill Crider
Scott Cupp
Martin Edwards
Jose Ignacio Escribano
Glenn Harper
Randy Johnson
George Kelley
Rob Kitchin
B.V. Lawson
Evan Lewis
Steve Lewis-Dan Stumpf
Todd Mason
Terrie Moran
Eric Peterson
James Reasoner
Richard Robinson
Kerrie Smith
Kevin Tipple