Friday's Forgotten Books, September 10, 2010

I'll be taking a week off on Friday, October 1 and Friday Nov. 5th.


Ed Gorman is the author of Stranglehold coming out in October. You can find him here.

Forgotten Books: Pity Him Afterward, Donald E. Westlake

Every once in awhile I get stoned just watching a literary master do his work. The last two nights I was flat out dazzled from beginning to end with Donald Westlake's 1964 novels PITY HIM AFTERWARD.

The story concerns an escaped madman who takes the identity of a man who is headed to a theater that does summer stock. While we see the story several times from the madman's point of view, we're never sure who he is. This is a fair clue mystery.

In quick succession, a young woman who works summer stock is found murdered in the house where the young, struggling actors stay. A part-time chief of police appears to find the killer.

Two points: writers owe their readers original takes on familiar tropes as often as possible. The madman here is no slobbering beast but rather a deranged and sometimes pitiful lunatic (the opening three thousand words are among the most accomplished Westlake pieces I've ever read). And the police chief Eric Songard is one of the most unique cops I've come across in mystery fiction. He works nine months of the year as a professor and summers as a police chief. The small town he oversees usually offers nothing worse than drunks and the occasional fight. Murder is another matter. Westake gives us a cop whose self-confidence is so bad all he can do is try and hasten the appearance of the regular cops from a nearby district. Meanwhile he has to pretend he knows what's going on. He could easily have gone to series. He's a great character.

As the story is told, we get a beleivable look at summer stock with its low pay, brutal hours, frequent rivalries. The payoff is that some of the actors will get their Equity card at the end of the nine week run and thereby become professional actors.

Then there is the telling. The craft is impeccable. Precise and concise and yet evocative because of the images Westlake constantly presents us. You also have to marvel at the rhythm of his language, watching how'll he'll shave an anticpated word here for a certain effect, add a word there for the sake of cadence. These sentences are CRAFTED.

There are so many great Westlake novels it's impossble to rank them. But given what he accomplished, I'd have to say this is one of his early best.

Mike Wilkerson was raised in rural, northwest Kansas and has resided in St. Pete, FL for the last eight years. He is currently hard at work on his first novel, a crime saga based in St. Pete. To read more of Mike’s work, check out his loosely maintained blog, Writing the Hard Way.

IN COLD BLOOD. Truman Capote

Little men who live openly homosexual lives and speak with pronounced lisps do not bring to mind images of horrific crimes committed. And when the new guard talks crime writing, either true accounts or fiction, rarely is the name Truman Capote mentioned. Yet it most definitely should be. In Kansas, his seminal work In Cold Blood is required reading and remains a constant source of fascination for this writer.

Considered by many to be the original “nonfiction novel”, In Cold Blood puts you inside the minds of two killers: Richard “Dick” Hickock and Perry Smith; their victims in the Clutter family and the tireless KBI agent in charge of the investigation, Alvin Dewey.

Herb Clutter was a man of devout faith and ran a large, successful farm outside the small town of Holcomb in southwest Kansas, near Garden City. Widely respected throughout Finney County, Clutter was a dedicated family man of four children (the two younger children, daughter Nancy and son Kenyon were still living at home) and a loving husband of his clinically depressed wife, Bonnie. Though likely considered pious by today’s standards- he neither drank, used tobacco or swore- he was nonetheless liked by all of his employees and known to pay good wages.

In steep contradiction, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith met in the Kansas State Prison at Lansing, Kansas and held very little belief in either God or their fellow man. Hickock, a smooth talking pedophilic psychopath with a penchant for passing bad checks, heard about the Clutters from a former employee of the farmer who claimed Clutter kept ten thousand dollars in an office safe. Seeing an opportunity for the perfect score, Hickock found in Perry Smith, the troubled loner of mixed Irish and Cherokee ancestry, his ideal partner; a born killer.

On November 15^th, 1959, following a whirlwind trip across the state, Hickock and Smith entered the Clutter home, robbed and then murdered the Clutter family with shotgun blasts to the head. Herb Clutter also had his throat cut beforehand. Their take: a diminutive amount of cash and a small radio. The response: a rural community gripped in the jaws of fear and speculation.

Although he originally claimed Hickock murdered Nancy and Bonnie Clutter, Perry Smith later recanted and admitted to committing all four murders in attempt to save Hickok’s mother despair (although Hickock is who proclaimed no witnesses would be left). Most chilling was Smith’s description of murdering Herb Clutter:

"I didn't want to harm the man. I thought he was a very nice gentleman. Soft spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat.”

In Cold Blood is a psychological roller coaster of the criminal mind. Capote delves into the pasts of Hickock and Smith revealing men, especially in the case of Perry Smith, whose lives were short-circuited from the very beginning. The true brilliance, however, is the ability of Capote in seamlessly weaving together the lives of the Clutter family, Hickock, Smith and Alvin Dewey without once causing the story to feel tedious. And although you know who committed the murders and their ultimate end, you never stop wondering about what will happen next.

Whether you are a casual reader of literature or a crime fiction aficionado, In Cold Blood is a book which should be read, savored and for writers, studied. And most of all, like it’s extravagant author, never forgotten.

Mike Dennis can be found here.

Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, Horace McCoy

Where do you begin with a novel like Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye? Horace McCoy’s 1948 noir journey through an unusual criminal mind is at once spellbinding and aggravating.

Spellbinding because it’s an intense, hard look at a very different kind of criminal, and because it’s supposedly the granddaddy of all first-person-criminal novels, eventually bringing Jim Thompson face to face with his own hellish visions.

Aggravating because it’s not as easy a read as one might wish. You’re in for a slog through long, forbidding paragraphs and lots and lots of casual, throwaway conversation among the characters.

But beyond all this, the meat of the novel is as noir as it gets.

Paul Murphy, aka Ralph Cotter, is incarcerated on a prison farm, picking cantaloupes. The first two paragraphs, which take up the first two pages, deal with the overpowering odor in the barracks of “seventy-two unwashed men” and how it triggers a sense memory from his long-ago youth. These memories, we soon learn, are always with him, and they’re troubling.

With the help of Holiday and Jinx, two confederates on the outside, Murphy escapes and the three of them make their way to an unnamed city. Holiday is the woman in Murphy’s life. She sees to his every need, and usually lounges around naked under an open bathrobe. Jinx is straight out of the Hollywood School for Sidekicks.

Anyway, before you can say “all points bulletin”, Murphy is completely set up in the new city. He has a place to live, money in his pocket, access to a car, and a few shady contacts. Pretty soon, he’s plotting another job, this one a supermarket robbery. It doesn’t come off smoothly, and this brings on a sequence of events that lead up to a very choppy ending.

The ending notwithstanding, the novel moves right along as we follow Murphy through his odyssey of newfound freedom. One of the stops he makes along the way is the company of a bewitching beauty, Margaret Dobson. You just know that his involvement with her will come to no good.

What makes Murphy unique is that he’s a highly educated criminal. He’s a Phi Beta Kappa, in fact, and he takes an extremely dim view of the average stickup man. For him, people like John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson are beneath contempt, nothing more than mouth-breathing Neanderthals who happened to make a few lucky scores.

He also sees himself as far above the man on the street. There’s a telling passage in which he’s riding a bus, during which he observes that people who habitually ride buses are “cheap, common, appalling people, the kind a war, happily, destroys”.

Moreover, when he’s not slapping Holiday around or pissing off crooked cops, he’s tossing out words like propliopithecustian and integument and at least a half-dozen others just like them.

I told you it was a tough read.

Jeff Meyerson

Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (Random House, 1970)

The terms "future shock" and "information overload" are commonplace now, but in 1970 when Toffler's book came out it had a pretty big impact. As Wikipedia puts it Toffler's shortest definition of future shock is a personal perception of "too much change in too short a period of time".

Also Toffler argues that society is undergoing an enormous structural change, a revolution from an industrial society to a "super-industrial society". This change will overwhelm people, the accelerated rate of technological and social change leaving them disconnected and suffering from "shattering stress and disorientation."

I don't think any of us who had reached maturity (at least chronologically) by 1970 could argue that the changes since then have not been disorienting, to say the least. Just think in terms of popular culture - music going from records to tapes to CDs. The revolutions brought on by the advent of VCRs, DVDs, DVRs and especially hundreds of channels of television and the "24 hour news cycle" have arguably changed the world.

I worked at a job in the late 1960's where we often had to go down to the "computer room" where there was an enormous, room-sized "thing" turning out computer programs we needed to do our work. In the days where most people seem to have a personal computer the changes are amazing to behold. And please do not even get me started on cell phones.

As I remember it, Future Shock was also one of the first books whose mass market edition came out in six different colored covers, but I can't swear to this.

All in all it would be interesting to reread this book, which had a major impact on me at the time, and see how well Toffler did in predicting where we are now from where we were then.

Paul Bishop

Paul Brazill
Bill Crider
Scott Cupp
Martin Edwards
Glenn Harper
Randy Johnson
George Kelley

Rob Kitchin

B.V. Lawson

Evan Lewis

Steve Lewis
Todd Mason

Eric Peterson
James Reasoner

Richard Robinson
Kerrie Smith

Kevin Tipple

Kevin Tipple 2