Donna Andrews: The Penguin Who Knew Too Much

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Reading this book is some of the biggest fun I’ve had this summer. I was laughing aloud by the end of the first chapter, and it only got better. I had never read the five time Agatha nominee (and two time winner) Donna Andrews before her appointment to sign books here in August, but then I picked up her first Meg Lanslow novel, Murder with Peacocks, and now find myself totally hooked. She has all the plotting skills and characterization talents of the best cozy writers, layered with lots of humor and many, many eccentric characters. Using the classic small town formula – proved to be ironclad from “The Andy Griffith Show” right up through “Murder, She Wrote,” where the sane town lion is surrounded by lunatics or incompetents who aren’t quite as smart as he/she is – Andrews places her main character, Meg Lanslow, smack into the middle of one of the most eccentric families in mystery fiction. read more

Alina Adams: Murder on Ice

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I think one of the reasons I enjoy Figure Skating so much is that the centerpiece event of any championship – National, International or Olympic – is not the men’s final but the ladies’ final. Women rule in figure skating, and in Alina Adams’ first figure skating mystery, she naturally focuses her attention on the penultimate event, the Ladies’ Final at Worlds. In real life, of course, Michelle Kwan has dominated figure skating for over a decade – in Adam’s novel, a fresh faced American dukes it out with a more cynical Russian, and the final result ends up being a scandal – did the American or the Russian deserve to win? That’s really the central question of the novel, and the judge who gets bumped off is kind of a bonus. If you are a skating fan at all, the whole set up will remind you of the pairs uproar at the last Olympics, where the Canadians were eventually allowed to share a gold medal with the Russian pair. read more

Kenneth Abel: Cold Steel Rain

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This is a beautifully written, moving, horrifying book – but it also has some problems. Abel is able almost as well as James Lee Burke to take New Orleans and make it live and breathe for the reader – and he is also skilled at various violent vignettes which stay around with you for some time after finishing the book (another James Lee Burke talent). He has an interesting main character, Danny Chaisson, a former DA who left his job to be the bagman for one of the most notorious political “fixers” in Louisiana – and in Louisiana, famous for its scandalous politics, that’s saying alot. Danny has lots of interesting psychological baggage and he’s an appealing character. The plot is sort of an amorphous one – much like the hot, humid, smoky New Orleans weather, parts of this plot seem to swirl in out of nowhere on a heat wave, and then swirl right back out. The book opens with the restaurant slaughter of five people – two of whom were Danny’s friends. For Danny, this is an irresistible draw into a heartbreaking case which ends up leading to a major gun supplier. Danny is tied into it in all kinds of ways that emerge as the plot moves along. read more

Ken Mercer: Slow Fire

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This is a knockout debut. It’s about ex LAPD narcotics detective Will Magowan, who has hit bottom and who has taken a job in tiny Haydenville, California, as their new police chief. The mayor, a little desperate, has reached out to Will as a kind of last resort because of a pervasive methamphetamine problem in town. The source can’t be found, and other things are happening that are seemingly unrelated—this is a mystery, however, so of course every thread ties together.

Really good writers can often get away with some over the top stuff merely because of the force of their narrative and their ability to create wonderful characters. I think if they were movie stars, this might be called “charisma.” Mercer seems to have this writing “charisma”. His character of Will is beautifully drawn with a heartbreaking backstory that Mercer teases out throughout the course of the novel (I’d advise you not to read the dust jacket). This book is absolutely as noir as it gets, except that you believe in Will himself. What’s wrong is everything else; no can be trusted, or be expected to stand up, or to be who they say they are—and if they do any of those things, it doesn’t end well for them. read more

Craig McDonald: Print the Legend

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Considering that it revolves around Ernest Hemingway’s 1961 suicide by shotgun, I suppose it would be indelicate of me to say that Craig McDonald’s Print the Legend blew me away, but in the noir spirit of the book I’ll say it anyway. Most of the action takes place four years later at a 1965 academic conference about Hemingway in Idaho, close to the scene of the crime. Slimy University of Michigan professor Richard Paulson, his spunky wife Hannah, Hem’s friend and fellow manly writer Hector Lassiter and shadowy FBI agent Donovan Creedy all come together with widow Mary Hemingway and a gaggle of fatuous academics to struggle for the great man’s legacy and shed light on his death. read more

Craig McDonald: One True Sentence

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Instead of proceeding chronologically with the events of his protagonist’s life, Craig McDonald has hop scotched around to different eras in his series about pulp writer and Hemingway pal Hector Lassiter. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s hard to see how he could have waited until his fourth installment, One True Sentence, to plunge into the teeming waters of Paris in the twenties, the “Moveable Feast,” the place, as Gertrude Stein said, “where the twentieth century was.” read more

Ed Lin: Snakes Can’t Run

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Bouchercon serves many purposes and offers many pleasures, but one of them is discovering new authors. Attending a panel composed of authors of whom I was already a fan—Theresa Schwegel and Barry Maitland—I encountered Ed Lin. I mentioned him to my pal Jim Huang, and he said, Oh, yes, S.J. Rozan is very enthusiastic about him. After reading his book, I can certainly see why. The mild mannered pleasant fellow on the panel at Bouchercon seems a far cry from the type of hard edged noir that he actually writes. read more

Arnaldur Indridason: Jar City

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I think one of the definitions of noir is that the reader feels no sympathy even for the victim of the crime. The whole noir universe is so dark and corrupt that not even the victim can escape corruption. Iceland’s Indridason brings a humanity to the noir genre in the form of his detective, Erlandur, a man who literally has pains in his heart from dealing with the bleak world he sees every day as a policeman. When the detectives are called to the death scene of an old man, apparently randomly murdered with a strange and apparently meaningless message left on the body, one of them says, “Isn’t this your typical Icelandic murder?…Squalid, pointless and committed without any attempt to hide it…” They all agree, except for lead detective Erlandur, who is troubled by the apparently meaningless note, and later by a mysterious photograph of a grave. read more

Charlie Huston: The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death

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This isn’t a typical read for me, but it’s an enjoyable one for those who enjoy this type of book. If you enjoy British village cozies, you aren’t going to like it, but if you like tough guy modern noir you’ll probably love it. It’s certainly original – Huston goes so far as not to use quotation marks, and he writes dialogue as it’s actually spoken which sometimes is a bit distracting. While he’s taken the artistic step of dispensing with quotes, he’s then stuck to hyper realism in the way the words are spoken. It’s an odd dichotomy. read more

James Ellroy and Otto Penzler (editors): Best American Noir of the Century

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What is noir? It’s such an overused and amorphous term that I’m tempted to answer, as Louie Armstrong did when asked a similar question about jazz, if you don’t know by now, don’t mess with it. But when I think about noir in the same way as other modernist movements like, say, Impressionism or Bebop, there appears the glimmer of an answer. Since the French critics coined the term after the fact, in the beginning for movies and then the hard-boiled literary work which inspired many of them, the people who originated noir had no idea they were doing so, followed no rules, wrote no manifestoes and joined no professional organizations. Still, it can be associated with a specific time frame shaped by historical influences, starting with the materialism and nervous, jittery doomed gaiety of the twenties, continuing with the grim thirties and finding full flower in the disillusionment of post World War Two America. Add to this psychological background the massive rise in literacy, and the profusion of cheap “pulp” magazines consumed by guys with a taste for short, brutal fiction and the time to indulge that taste because they were out of work or in the downtime of war. Anybody who could crank out such fiction fast enough could make a precarious living out of it, and in fact their fiction gained immediacy and power by emerging so immediately from the subconscious. The historical movement died with the pulps, it’s vitality withering, as is the case with many other things, at the moment it was named and codified. To me you can’t really speak of contemporary writers as being noir, but only of having noir tendencies in their work. read more