A Leak In The Safe

Well, here’s the monthly round up of the strangest sounding micro press and self published books. Read the actual descriptions penned by the authors – this is all true – I couldn’t make up the name Tami Hotard, much less Dismas Latronum. 

Arrows by Buck Young (Sunpiper Media Publishing)

Pastor Stuart Kerr relocates his family to a little mountain town where he, his wife, and their children witness the divine coincidences of God and the lurking deceptions of evil. The children unknowingly are swept deep into the world of pornography in this harrowing yet uplifting story of the resilient and resourceful deliverance God gives to his faithfully unaware. (Religious Fiction)

by Brandy Lea Carter (Allwrite Publishing)

As a former lesbian, the Christian author dispels the myth that a woman can please another woman better than a man can. She shares her multi-orgasm techniques that encompass far more than just foreplay. (Love/Sex/Marriage)

The Dictates of Destiny by Royce Hall (Sid Harta Publishers)

From bizarre happenings in his life and close brushes with death, Hall comes to believe he is being watched over by a guardian angel for the express purpose of imparting a message of great significance on behalf of the Creator. This compelling read is told with pathos, candor, and philosophical wit. (Biography/Autobiography)

by Tami Hotard (Helm Publishing)

A well-intentioned reporter becomes a story chaser in love with the joie de vivre of one man, Pat O’Brien, inventor of the Hurricane cocktail. Surrounded by moral decay, addiction, and unreliable sources, the author, often inebriated herself, struggles to stay focused, and be as respectful as a noble savage can be. (Biography/Autobiography)

The Lost Epistle of Jesus by Evan Drake Howard (Xulon Press)

Nothing terrifies Judith Silva more than the prospect of a passionless marriage. She knows she must choose: Does she love Dismas Latronum, the passionate Zealot, or his brother Gabriel, the sensitive merchant? All three seem doomed to jealousy, rage, and despair–until they read an epistle written by an insightful Galilean Rabbi. (Fiction)

by Elizabeth MacDonald Burrows (Seaboard Press)

The author describes the journey of a modern corporate womans search for God, which leads her into the greatest heights of mystic vision–oneness with the Creative Principal of the Universe, known as Cosmic Consciousness. This work takes the reader beyond the portals of mortality to reveal an unseen kingdom that few on earth have experienced. (Biography/Autobiography)

by Jazz Catrell (Prioritybooks Publications)

Catrell pens a hard-hitting erotic tale about a woman conflicted between pursuing a coworker or maintaining her marriage. After she hires Travis, Jessica finds herself changing from upstanding and happily married to an oversexed, overheated, and hot between the legs adulteress. (Adult Fiction)

by Alan Grossman (Piera Press)

Set in a New York corporate world threatened by apocalyptic fire, this story focuses on a business tycoon and a "freak" janitor who compete for love from the same woman and for immortality. (Fiction)

This item is Not Returnable

Die, My Love, Kathryn Casey, Harper True Crime, $7.99

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – to me good books are all about CHARACTER. I don’t care if the characters in question are "sympathetic" or not, I just demand that they be interesting and credible, and nothing proves this literary maxim more than the genre generally considered the least literary, True Crime. In most True Crime there isn’t the standard intermediary of the virtuous detective mediating between the reader and the horrible deed, there’s just the victim, the institutions of justice, and most crucially, the criminal. The hook for True Crime is the inevitable question Who would do a thing like that? In the right hands, the reader can understand the person and their character, the flaws that brought them to cross the line, and, while not condoning it, can even begin to be able to conceive of the unthinkable.

Ann "Golden" Rule is the ruler and yardstick of this world, and it was really her encounter with Ted Bundy, a man she called friend until she learned he was a serial killer, that gave her the insight to elevate a True Confessions type scribbler into the triumphant author of the ground breaking The Stranger Beside Me and from there to a string of excellent and best selling True Crime, the latest of which Too Late to Say Goodbye: A True Story of Murder of Betrayal, is hitting the stores just as you read this. It’s the realization that even worst monsters are fellow humans that gives the best of contemporary True Crime its depth and fascination.

One of the new writers who successfully follows the Rule template is Kathryn Casey, author of She Wanted It All and now Die, My Love. Both books have the central character of a histrionic, narcissistic, amoral, immature, attractive, magnetic train wreck of a woman who ends up wounding everyone around her. You get to know Die, My Love’s Piper Jablin so well that you start thinking of her by her first name, and become sincerely grateful that you never met her. If there was ever a case of opposites attracting it was in her ill-starred marriage to her older professor Fred Jablin. He was a very organized, very conscientious, well, wonk, and she was a free spirit, artistic and spontaneous, but totally undisciplined. Whatever chemistry brought them together soon dissolved in the face of her wild spending, inability to hold a job, unfaithfulness, financial chicanery and total lack of guilt. Yet Fred tried to hold on to his marriage and the three children it produced, rationally exploring their problems, believing that his beloved logical reasoning could succeed with a person whose mental processes were as disordered as Piper’s. When he finally gave up, he used his powerful, disciplined methods to successfully get an alimony free divorce and gain custody of his children.

Piper was such a supreme egotist that she thought she didn’t have to work and expected to be constantly catered to. She considered herself a great Mom because she liked to play with her children like another child, even though she was unable to do the adult things like get them to school or the doctor’s. She felt unfairly persecuted when other people didn’t agree with her, and when that person was a judge that she couldn’t bully with her usual hysteria, a murderous rage against Fred was born, enabled by her similarly disturbed family. And of course a murderous plan conceived by the superior genius she considered herself to be could never be detected by those dolts the police, could it?

I always check a True Crime book to see when the trial begins. The later in the book the better, because trials are mostly about the lawyers and their competing scenarios, and often have little to do with the real crime and its perpetrator. If the rest of the canvas is presented clearly enough, the trial is just another detail and Casey gets that part of the formula right too, preferring a novelistic accumulation of history, biography and day to day details rather than sensational journalistic reportage of public events. The bad guys in mysteries are often inconsistently drawn plot devices who exist to surprise the reader when their identity is revealed, or stock serial killers who kill for overly conceptualized reasons. If you want to meet a real villain read Die, My Love because Piper Jablin is the kind of person who would do something like that.

Help – I can’t stop reading vintage noir books. Although that’s fine for some people, for professional reasons I have to read other kinds of mysteries, too. Oh, well, let’s see how long I can get away with it.

My latest is another great book from my new favorite publisher MILLIPEDE PRESS (and how come people I say nice things about never google themselves and write grateful e-mails to me? It’s only the people I say mildly negative things about that make the effort to get in touch and hector me – I guess it’s comment on the kind of person who googles themselves). It’s by FREDRIC BROWN and it’s called HERE COMES A CANDLE. It’s an amazing novel from 1950, at once an extreme period piece presciently expressing the anxieties of the fifties – atomic war, the irrationality of Freudianism, good girls/bad girls, Marxism, and the soul killing effects of prosperity at any price – combined with a post modern form which mixes the usual sardonic omniscient narrator with occasional passages in the present tense and first person, with the addition of astonishing sections where the plot is advanced via faux radio scripts, movie scenes, sports broadcasts, live television shows, drama fragments and, finally, a tabloid news story. Whew. It’s a brilliant trip, experimental yet totally noir – just when everything is beautiful it all goes to hell. While I love DAVID GOODIS, he can be a little operatic and melodramatic in spots, a miasma BROWN avoids through his ironic attitude. Yes, it’s life and death son, but don’t take it so serious, it ain’t nohow permanent, a philosophy most revealingly expressed in the brief essay " IT’S ONLY EVERYTHING" appended to the end of the novel. His cool attitude, however, prevents his prose from reaching the lyric heights of GOODIS’S hot riffs, and I didn’t really find too many killer quotes beyond this one:

Krasno shrugged. "Joe, every war up to now has been a war, but the next one won’t be; it’ll be something you can’t picture. It’ll end up with the few of you who are left living in caves and fighting wild dogs – if all the dogs aren’t eaten before it gets that far. And it’s going to happen, Joe. It could happen next week. Just read the papers."

Can I stop now? Heck no – I think I’ll read this great SERPENT’S TAIL edition of GOODIS’S BLACK FRIDAY (which I’ve read) AND SELECTED STORIES (most of which I haven’t) then maybe reread BROWN’S THE SCREAMING MIMI now that I’ve seen the truly bizarre and relatively unfaithful B-movie of the same title. And then there’s the new edition of Cornell Woolrich’s FRIGHT that’s coming out soon. Oh, well – maybe I’ll step out of the shadows someday.

YR PAL,

UBU

David Goodis and the Intermittent Noir Revival

The cruel tableau of dark shadows, femme fatales and hard men conjured by the word "noir" has become a cliche, the stuff of countless books, movies and television commercials, an easy mark, parodied as often as it’s played straight. But the original goods still have the power to shock and move, as anyone who has ever read James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice can attest.

Cain, Chandler and Hammett all reside comfortably in the mainstream literary pantheon these days, three crime authors that even the most highbrow academic can safely be caught reading. But the true noir afficionado craves a more bitter brew, with darker shadows, more fatale femmes and harder men. Publication and appreciation of the more obscure practitioners seems to be cyclical, an important upturn coming in the eighties with the founding of Black Lizard books, an independent publisher dedicated to the then almost forgotten pulp writers of the forties and fifties. Black Lizard’s editor Barry Gifford almost singlehandedly preserved the work of these men, some of whose books were so scarce that for a time he thought he was going to have to translate them from French (a language where they’d remained steadily in print) back into their original English in order to republish them. Authors like Jim Thompson and David Goodis, both of whom are now enshrined in the ultimate embrace of the literary establishment, a thirty-five dollar Library of America edition, would be largely unknown today if not for Gifford.

But, unfortunately, in America independence is more popular in theory than practice, and this noble, pioneering effort only survived for a short time. When its parent company went bankrupt, the Black Lizard name was sold to corporate conglomerate Random House and the noir eclipse began again. Because of the recent movies made from his books and his rather more straightforward twistedness, the new bosses kept Jim Thompson in print, eventually bringing out even his most obscure works, while letting David Goodis, Charles Willeford, Paul Cain, Frederic Brown and the rest of the gang disappear from bookstores. The original Black Lizard mission was abandoned in favor of stamping the label on disparate contemporary writers like Ruth Rendell and Andrew Vachss.

For me the most egregious loss was the works of Goodis – Random House has kept only one of his books, Shoot the Piano Player, in print, probably because of Truffaut’s marvelous film. Fortunately, a number of heroic, smaller publishers have stepped into the breach, and thanks to several recent re-issues I’ve been on a Goodis binge lately, immensely enjoying his characters’ long torments and hollow victories.

Hard Case Crime is an imprint of New York’s Dorchester publishing, and while you’ve got to give them credit for bringing out superior vintage pulp like Day Keene’s Home is the Sailor, it seems to me that they’re trying a little too hard to be the new Black Lizard, and their publication of modern pastiche like Stephen King’s execrable The Colorado Kid (in his after word King says most people will either love or hate it and he’s half right) hasn’t filled me with the enthusiasm for Hard Case that some of my noir friends exhibit. They should be commended for bringing the world Goodis’s The Wounded and the Slain for the first time in fifty years, and it was a treat to finally read it, but at the same time it’s far from his best work, facile Freudianism and clumsy Jamaican dialect tempering the usual Goodis goodies.

To me an outfit called Millipede Press out of Lakewood, Colorado better embodies the old Black Lizard, exhibiting more vision and less calculation in their inspired genre straddling line of novels of terror and madness. Certainly they’re spot on in their Goodis reprints. Nightfall is a relatively early book, a riff on the more famous Dark Passage, full of trademark elements like a missing fortune, an ambiguous woman and a decent guy with an ugly, inescapable past. It’s elegantly done and vintage Goodis, but Millepede’s other title, Street of no Return, is the best of the bunch. It’s a circular tour through hell, the story of a skid row bum known as Whitey who one day recognizes a sinister figure and decides to follow him, initiating a series of events that reveal his tortured, secret past, land him in the middle of a race riot, grant him a tantalizing glimpse at redemption, and then dump him back on skid row, bottle in hand.

Although I usually mistrust such comparisons, Geoffrey O’Brien’s comment that "…if Jack Kerouac had written crime novels, they might have sounded a bit like this," seems to me to have a lot of truth in it, as Goodis shares Kerouac’s lyric yet conversational prose, subterranean cast and essentially tragic vision. As the Hollywood noir movies were directly and indirectly informed by European Expressionism colliding with American realism, so Goodis’s work presents a gallery of tormented characters whose screams, bitter laughter and sexual conflicts are a mixture of Edvard Munch and Edward Hopper:

That first time you saw her, the way it hit you. And the way it’s been coming back tonight, hitting you, hitting you. All right, for Christ’s sake, cut it out. But I wonder if Firpo is still alive and sometimes at night he wakes up and remembers the way Dempsey hit him.

Goodis wasn’t really a mystery writer, but a crime novelist as strong and individual as America has ever produced, and, for the moment anyway, we’re luck enough to have a new selection of his work. Get ‘em before they fade back into the shadows – noir has a way of doing that.