Friday's Forgotten Books, Friday, February 19, 2016

Todd Mason will be doing this next week. My review of HAIL CAESAR is right here.
KILLER, Dave Zeltserman (reviewed by Ed Gorman)

Before I say anything about Dave Zeltserman's  novel I have to note that a) Dave is a friend of mine b) the novel is dedicated to me and c) somebody not unlike me makes a brief appearance in the book.

Leonard March is a mob hit-man who turns state's witness to avoid a lifetime in prison. Despite giving evidence he serves fourteen years and emerges a much older man and not just physically. People familiar with his case are amazed that his former employers didn't manage to have him killed while behind bars. And only now, as he emerges from prison, is the public told of just how terrible a man he is. His photograph is everywhere. He is a pariah. He is even dragged into court on civil charges instituted by the loved ones of some of the people he killed. The press, loving a good story, depicts the victims as good citizens even though they were scum just like March. His prison counselor arranges for March to work quietly as a janitor at nights so he can pay rent on a seedy apartment and buy a few groceries.

Several times while reading Killer I forgot I was reading a novel. The book has the feel of an autobiography. Laid out in alternating chapters of present and past we see March at virtually every stage of his life. His father, his mother, his wife, his children are vividly and vitally portrayed here. His quiet father was a blue collar worker whose sixty and seventy hour weeks led only to a melancholy cynicism about the capitalist system. March's wife's death by cancer while March is in prison is especially haunting. She and the children spurned him after the DA's office revealed that he was a hit man. March in his early twenties was a street punk who, despite his self-denials, savored the deaths he visited on his targets.

All the mob tropes are here to be sure. Sleazy stupid parasites who do with pistols and knives what Wall Street and others do with computers and fancy boardrooms. Zeltserman makes you feel each death and there are plenty of them.

But what you take away from the novel is not the mob melodrama but the rich details of March's life. Zeltserman forces the reader to grant March his intelligence, his occasional eloquence and the remorse he feels but cannot understand. In some respects the man who took all these lives is even more monstrous because he's not a psychopath--as he reminds us several times--but a man who has convinced himself that he's just doing a job. His painful love for the children who have deserted him; the last time he spoke to his dying wife on the phone, her laughing despite her enormous pain, always trying to keep everything "nice;" the young waitress who comes to like this "crazy old man" until she finds out who he is--and is then horrified and angry--grueling, perfectly realized scenes . And then then are the shopping scenes where March buys a new bed, sheets, towels, etc. to make his tiny apartment tolerable--the homeliness of the shopping and the cleaning he has to do is the kind of touch that gives the books its unique truth. You don't find many hit-men scrubbing bathtubs and buying used furniture.

These are just a few of the indelible scenes that make the book so fresh and powerful. Killer is a major novel of crime and likely the book that will win Dave Zeltserman a much wider audience.

Sergio Angelini, CRY BLOOD and KILLER IN SILK, Harry Vernon Dixon
Joe Barone,  THE ELEPHANT WHISPERER by Lawrence Anthony with Graham Spence
Brian Busby, For My Country [Pour la patrie: roman du XXe siecle]Jules-Paul Tardivel [Sheila Fischman, trans],
Bill Crider, FORTUNE IS A WOMAN, Hermes Nye
Scott Cupp, WALKING WOLF, Nancy Collins
Martin Edwards, MURDER BY BURIAL, Stanley Casson
Charles Gramlich,  The Rat Bastards #4: Meat Grinder Hill, John Mackie
Richard Horton, NO SCORE, Lawrewnce Block
Jerry House, CATASTROPHES! ed. Issac Asimov, et al
Nick Jones, BANDITS, Elmore Leonard
George Kelley, THE BEST OF THE BEST 20 YEARS OF SF. ed, Garnder Dozois 
Margot Kinberg, BULLET FOR A STAR, Stuart Kaminsky
B.V. Lawson, MURDER SAILS AT MIDNIGHT, Marion Babson
Steve Lewis/Stephen Mertz, NEGATIVE BLUE, Carter Brown
Todd Mason, KEYHOLE MYSTERY MAGAZINE and SHOCK in 1960 (edited by Dan Roberts and anonymously,
J.F. Norris, THREE GREEN BOTTLES, Dominic Devine
Matthew Paust, BEYOND REDEMPTION, Gary V. Powell
James Reasoner, LARRY'S LUCK, H. Bedford Jones
Richard Robinson, A CONRAD ARGOSY
Kerrie Smith, THE SANTA KLAUS MURDER, Mavis Doriel Hay
Kevin Tipple/Barry Ergang, THE FIEND, Margaret Millar
TomCat, THE BATH MYSTERIES, E.R. Punshon
TracyK, THIRTEEN AT DINNER, Agatha Christie
Westlake Reviews, WHY ME?, Donald Westlake
A.J. Wright, Alabama Book Covers,  T. S. Stribling