Sinatra reading.
Starting out with a new feature this week: recent books that were missed. This is a hard time to get noticed with the dearth of print reviews. So send me reviews of recent books that never appeared on the radar as well as old forgotten ones. Here's one Dave Zeltserman read recently.
Dave Zeltserman's book, PARIAH, is out October 1, a follow-up in theme to SMALL CRIMES. Next up, KILLER. You can find him here.
MIXED BLOOD by Roger Smith can’t be considered a forgotten book, not with the hardcover version coming out last March and the trade paperback 
version being published this December by Picador, but this sledge hammer of a Cape Town crime novel deserves to be discovered by a much larger audience.
What got me interested in Mixed Blood was Smith and I both had movie deals announced for our bank robberies gone bad books within days of each other, and I thought it would be interesting to see his take on it. This being Smith’s first novel, and it taking place in an area I knew nothing about (Cape Town, South Africa), I wasn’t too optimistic when I bought my copy. Less than a page into it I was hooked as I found it a riveting crime novel with this compulsory vibe to the writing, the style reminding me of both Elmore Leonard and Richard Stark.
Mixed Blood has a lot of moving parts with the plot involving an American, Jack Burn, on the run after participating in a bank robbery that ends badly. He has brought his family to Cape Town, South Africa and a seqeunce of events caused by a home invasion from a couple of gang members and a very corrupt and desperate cop, send Jack’s, his wife’s and son’s lives spiraling out of control.
This is a very violent book, but unlike a lot of today’s violent hardboiled books where the violence is over-the-top and has a cartoonish, smirky quality, here the violence is played realistically and in an unsentimental manner. This is powerful stuff, depicting Cape Town as a violent city where life is cheap and there exists little hope for the lives trapped there by poverty and prejudice. Mixed Blood moves at lightening speed towards its inevitable conclusion with Jack and his family doomed by his earlier actions. Without a doubt this is one of the best crime debuts I’ve read in years. The writing has such a mature quality to it that it’s nearly impossible to believe it’s a first book. I’ve since been able to read Smith’s next book, Wake Up Dead, which is out next year, and it’s even better. Readers who love hard hitting, realistic crime fiction—the type of stuff that Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake excelled at—need to discover this book, because Smith’s the real deal, and one of the most exciting new voices in crime fiction I’ve come across.
Victor J. Banis is the author of
more than 160 published works in a career spanning nearly half a century. He has been called the "godfather of modern popular gay fiction" (Thomas Long, PhD). Learn more at http://www.vjbanis.comIsland Song
By Alan Chin
Zumaya Boundless, 2008
When it was first suggested to me that I write something for this blog, my mind went quite awhirl. Crime, she suggested? Oh, the choices available. Who, today, other than the occasional scholar, has read James M. Cain's Serenade, though in many ways it is his best work? But the very field of crime novels (perhaps the most American of all literary genres) conjures up so many delicious possibilities, so many reads permeated by Chandler's "scent of fear." Hammet's The Glass Key, perhaps? Is that really his "least interesting work," as some have suggested, or, as others have described it, "his most accessible?"
But wait. Not necessarily a crime story, I was told, which opens a still wider door. What of Maugham's The Summing Up, surely an elegant (if, as it turned out, several years premature) coda to the remarkable life of a man who still today remains an enigma. Or Forster's Maurice, whose essence is the mystery of one's own nature, and truly remarkable for having been written in 1914, so far ahead of its day that it dared not be published until 1971?
In the end, though, and not without great mulling about, I chose what might be considered, length notwithstanding, a "small" book, one which has not been around long enough to be described as forgotten, though I do think it has been unjustly neglected. Nor is it quite a crime story, though there are crimes in it. Violent crimes, yes, but more significantly, in my opinion, crimes against love, which surely ought to be heinous enough for any reader.
Alan Chin's Island Song is, for want of a better description, a love story, but it is so outside the boundaries usually pertinent to that genre that I fear I am starting off on the wrong foot by labeling it so. It could also be described as a "gay novel," but I don't think that label is any more appropriate, either. It is a novel about love, but of many sorts and of many aspects, and some of that love occurs between two men, but this is truly not the thrust of the story, only one element of it.
The novel begins on an eerie metaphysical note. An ancient Hawaiian shaman, known to everyone only as "Grandfather," and his grandson, Songaree, come to a small island in the middle of the night to perform a mystical ceremony, summoning the ancient island Gods, Kane and Pele. "Bring forth the Speaker," the old man chants. "Bring forth the Speaker."
The story's focus shifts to Garret Davidson. Two years after the AIDS related death of his lover in San Francisco, Davidson comes to Hawaii to write a book about his lost love. He wants only to be alone in the beach shack he has rented, to stare out at the endless ocean and heal his wounded spirit.
He has rented the shack, however, from Grandfather, who sends Songoree to serve as Davidson's housekeeper and man-of-all trades. At first, a bitter Davidson resists Song's ministrations, but the old Kahuna has his own plans for these two and in time they become entwined in an extraordinary relationship, a relationship increasingly resented by Song's surfer friends. Violence follows, vicious and sudden, like the bite of a great white shark.
Island Song is not only about the love that gradually grows between Song and Davidson, however. There is as well a profound love between grandfather and grandson; the love that both of them have for their island traditions; the love of friends. Even the all-sacrificing love of a dog for his human partner. Most especially there is a love of nature, and of the mystical.
Wafting through it all, like the tropical breeze rustling the leaves of the palm trees, is the author's love for his idyllic island setting and for the interconnectedness that he sees lying beneath the surface of all existence: "All things begin within the density of silence."
Alan Chin has penned an uplifting read that transports one not only to Hawaii, but ultimately and far more importantly to the island that lies within, the island of the heart. What the author would have us understand is that it is on this island where the wounded and the unhappy—and isn't that at one time or another each of us—will find the healing, the peace, they seek. This is its song.
A beautiful book. The real crime here would be in not reading it.
Don
na Moore lives in Glasgow. Her first book is GO TO HELENA HANDBASKET.You can find her here.
ASHES BY NOW - Mark Timlin
Published: 1993
Setting: London
Protagonist: Nick Sharman
Series?: 9th
First Lines: 'That morning, one not much different from any other, I let myself into my flat, kicked off my shoes and opened the fridge to find out what was left there in the way of alcohol.'
Private Investigator Nick Sharman is contacted by 'Sailor' Grant - a man Nick helped to put away for rape and murder twelve years before when he was a young, enthusiastic policeman. It's a case that has preyed on his mind since then. And now Sailor wants Nick to help him clear his name. Edgy, tough, hard-hitting and exciting - this was my first Mark Timlin novel but it definitely won't be my last.
THE WALKAWAY by Scott Phillips
THE WALKAWAY was literally a forgotten book for me. At least, it was until recently. I had it on my bookshelf, right next to THE ICE HARVEST which I’m a big fan of.
But something about the follow up stopped me from cracking it open. Maybe it was because it was about Gunther. Really? Of all the characters to follow up with?
He didn’t seem to have any pull for me, not compared to all the other characters that had been drawn so vividly in the first book. More fool me.
One of the strengths of Scott’s writing is that he can take that and make you feel foolish. He invests character into every part that he writes, no matter how small, so that there is something there to return to and draw you in. At this point, I couldn’t imagine the book without Gunther.
It’s a complex book to describe, but a very simple one to read. It spans two time periods, one in the 1950’s and one in the 1980’s. The former is a deliciously messed up slice of noir; it has pimps, addicts, sleaze and violence. It has a sex lottery, and a sociopathic soldier who wants apiece of the action. In the middle of this, Gunther Fahnstiel fins himself trying his best to stop everything going to hell.
The 1980’s builds on this story, but is a separate narrative. Gunther got very lucky at the end of THE ICE HARVEST, but that luck didn’t solve all his problems. The end of the decade finds him living in a care home, fighting a losing battle to keep his memory. Through all of that, though, he is still trying to put things right. He knows that he has something out there somewhere that will bring back his wife and help his friends. He just can’t remember what it is or where he left it.
I can’t think of many, if any, books that manage to combine so many dark noir elements with a real heart and tenderness. This has some real heart of darkness stuff, make no mistake, but it boils down to a very simple and moving love story.
It tends to get billed as both the sequel and the prequel to THE ICE HARVEST. And sure, it is both of those. But that doesn’t really do the book justice, it stands alone as one of the best crime novels of this decade or any other.
Ed Gorman is the author of THE MURDER ROOM and many other crime and western novels. You can find him here.
Ed Gorman, In Dubious Battle
It's bracing to remember, in this time when mega-corporations control our lives, to recall a time when people fought back against those who enslaved them.
In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck, a novel I prefer to the preachy and over-calculated Grapes of Wrath, is set in a tiny California town where apple pickers are angry at the growers' association for cutting wages by fifteen cents. The year is 1936 and the forces of the rich and powerful are at war with the powerless workers. Mac and Jim are the lead characters and it is Mac who takes Jim to a meeting of the Communist Party, which wants to convince the workers to strike. They are joined by Doc Burton, a medical man who keeps the worker camp clean so that the cops can't close the place down because of sanitation violations.
Steinbeck's passion can be found on every page, in every detail. The camp and its people are depicted realistically. Steinbeck is not writing a tract. Some of the workers are here just to make trouble; others are stalking horses for the Communists. Others for the growers' association. The poverty, the despair and above all the rage are palpable. As is the sorrow.
For me Jim is the most interesting character in the book because he changes over the course of his experiences. He begins to see that the concept of "the working man's friend" is a lie. The Communists exploit the workers just as the Capitalists do. Doc has his vision of how things should be; Mac believes in political movements; but Jim finds no comfort. The misery he has seen in his years seems a brutal and irrefutable fact of life.
Steinbeck was long ago judged as second-tier to his enemy Hemingway. I never quite knew why. Good as he was, Hemingway could not have painted on a canvas this large and done it with such grace and power. You'll never forget the people you meet here.
Bill Crider
