Review: Crimes in Southern Indiana by Frank Bill

Over the last year or so I’ve heard a lot about Frank Bill. This collection of hard, violent shorts has been getting glowing reviews by critics whose word really means something – pretty much anybody with any kind of gravitas and reputation in the crime fiction world has been lining up to give it the severed thumbs up.

Frank Bill has been compared with Donald Ray Pollock, whose Knockemstiff was one one of my favourite reads of last year. Personally, I think the only thing they share is a working class/blue collar/rural backdrop to the stories – their writing styles and their temperaments seem very much different. On the basis of my reading of this collection, Pollock is by far the warmer, more empathetic writer, Bill’s world view seems colder, more detached (though not every story has this kind of distance). That’s not to say that this is a bad thing, because it isn’t. Bill is a fine writer and this is a very fine collection, but there’s a detachment to his prose that isn’t there in Pollock – at least, in my humble opinion.

I’ve just thought of another trait that they share. Both writers have characters that appear in more than one story, either in cameo or as main players, although Pollock never takes it as far as Bill. A fine example of this happens in CiSI’s first three stories: Hill Clan Cross, These Old Bones and All The Awful. These stories could have been released as a novelette in their own right. Each is a separate story, but together they form a three act structure. In the first story we get introduced to two very nasty local criminals who stop their sons from selling drugs to their rivals. In the second the father of the rivals, sells his granddaughter to the criminals to pay for his wife’s cancer treatment. In the third the granddaughter escapes from the criminals’ farm and sets up a final showdown. In their own right each is a fine story, but taken together they work brilliantly. There are others in here that work just as well.

In a sense, the stories are served well by a bit of detachment. Bill’s world is a scary reflection of a small portion of Indiana – a world of methed-up killers, dog fighters, crazed war veterans, rapists, gang henchmen. Not a very nice mix. And there’s so much horrible shit going on in these pages that distancing the reader from it makes perfect sense. If you plunge the reader’s face in the shit for too long they are likely to become alienated by it, but a bit of detachment and distance acts as a buffer against the horrors. This distance is served well by Bill’s prose, which is a mixture of clipped sentences balanced with nicely nuanced metaphors and similes. And I don’t know of many writers who can do action the way Bill does action. It moves quickly, wastes no words, and is awash with bone shards and blood spray.

For those of you with the stomach for a relentless, but excellent, collection of grim tales then this comes highly recommended. Bill is definitely a talent to watch.

Review: Frank Sinatra in a Blender by Matthew J McBride

When a lot of money is stolen in a bank robbery that goes wrong (at least for the two-man crew who perpetrate it) P.I. Nick Valentine sees a chance to get his on the loot and become a wealthy man. So, along with a couple of low-life cohorts, he decides to find the money himself, which sees him and his co-conspirators run afoul of a couple of particularly nasty criminals. A lot of blood gets spilled along the way and Frank Sinatra does indeed end up in a blender!

FSIAB (as it shall be known henceforth) is a superbly written comic crime novel with a great protagonist and a pace that just doesn’t quit. In fact, all the characters are sharply etched, there are laughs-a-plenty to be found, and Valentine’s relationship with Frank Sinatra is a delight. I loved every second of it, and am eagerly looking forward to McBride’s next novel. Highly recommended.

Review: Sucker Punch by Ray Banks

Sucker Punch follows the story of Cal Innes about six months after the events in Saturday’s Child. Innes has given up the private investigator game and is instead working for his old friend Paulo at the boxing gym, doing any odd jobs that need sorting. One particular job involves babysitting a young up-and-coming boxer on a trip to LA to take part in a boxing tournament. Innes initially doesn’t want to go because he is addicted to Codeine – a by-product from his trip to Newcastle for Maurice Tiernan – and wonders how he will survive the trip without his fix. Plus, he isn’t all that keen on babysitting the young boxer, Liam, because his first impression of the lad isn’t an especially positive one. However, Paulo refuses to take no for an answer so Innes reluctantly takes his ‘holiday’. When he’s lands he meets a former boxer in a bar who tells him not to trust the fighter whose gym is being used to stage the competition. Innes asks the man to take a look at Liam and train him up for the competition. Liam is initially reluctant to meet the man, but when he does he’s impressed by the man’s knowledge and agrees to train with him. But  Innes realises that there are a few things about the man that don’t quite add up, and when the father of another fighter tries to bribe Innes to get Liam to take a dive the whole situation explodes into violence.

The sequel to Saturday’s Child is a different beast to its predecessor. For a start the novel is narrated solely by Innes, rather than alternating chapters between Innes and Mo, Maurice Tiernan’s son (who only appears in two violent cameos that bookend the story); Second, it moves at a more relaxed pace and has a less defined plot than the first novel; Third, Innes has changed from the man who appears in Saturday’s Child. He’s now a Codeine addict, and his alcoholism has changed from functional to barely functional. Plus, he’s angrier, much more bitter and less rational.

It’s this change in Cal Innes that makes Sucker Punch such a compelling read. It lacks the rocket-fuelled narrative and focus of the first book, so Innes himself has to take up the slack. He rails against authority, even when it’s trying to help him, has little respect for others and even less for himself. By the end of the novel, you can see the direction that Innes is heading and can only wince at the choices he’s made.

Although it isn’t as strong as the brilliant Saturday’s Child, Sucker Punch is still an excellent piece of gritty crime fiction. Ray Banks’ Cal Innes is a brilliant creation, with a superbly written narrative voice, a character who keeps the reader glued to the page. Highly recommended.

Review: Fuckin’ Lie Down Already by Tom Piccirilli

As the story begins, Clay, a New York detective, is pretty close to the end. His family have been murdered and he has been gut shot and left for dead by a junkie hitman hired by a mob boss who Clay was investigating. The problem for the junkie and the mob boss is that they didn’t finish the job. Despite the fact that his entire digestive system seems to be coming out through the holes in his abdomen, Clay packs the corpses of his wife and son in the family car and sets off on a journey of no return to get revenge on the men who’ve crossed him.

That synopsis pretty much sums up the entirety of Piccirilli’s tight, lean and gruelling revenge novella, which discards most of the set-up that would usually be put in place in the usual run-of-the-mill revenge tale and turns it into back story. As a consequence, what it lacks in characterisation it more than makes up for in velocity and ferocity, speeding along like an out-of-control express train. It’s a visceral tale, for sure – Piccirilli paints a grim picture of what is happening to the protagonist’s innards – but so cleanly and clearly executed that even the most squeamish readers will be riveted to their seats. It is superbly written and comes highly recommended.

Review: Dead Money by Ray Banks

Alan Slater is a double-glazing salesman whose best-friend, Beale, a man he doesn’t even like very much, is an addicted gambler with a booze problem and a very fast temper. When that fast temper gets him into more trouble than even he can handle he calls on Slater to help him move a body. So far so bad. But when the reason for the body is a large debt that he has racked up with an Asian businessman/gangster things go from bad to worse. And when Slater is told that if Beale can’t make his payments the debt becomes his the whole course of his life goes from worse to truly fucked.

As regular readers will know I’m a big fan of Ray Banks’ work – Wolf Ticket’s was in my Top 5 of 2012, and I loved Saturday’s Child – so I had high hopes for this. But, I have to admit, this one left me cold. It’s well-written, and once the story kicks in wraps itself up nicely, but it has one element that left me utterly cold, and that’s the protagonist himself. Slater has no redeeming qualities whatsoever (not to my eyes, anyway), the man is an utter prick. He’s a coward, cheats on his wife (who he seems to despise without any real reason), has nothing but contempt for everyone and everything around him (including, towards the end, his mistress); he doesn’t even help his mate out of any noble intention, or sense of duty, he just does it because he thinks that’s what friends are supposed to do. The problem with a character like this is if the plot doesn’t kick in before you realise how repulsive they are you have a recipe for disaster (or at least putting the book down unfinished). It’s a testament to Banks’ immense skill as a writer that I made it to the end without putting the book down. The storytelling generated enough grip, along with my own morbid curiosity, to make me want to see how far Slater is going to fall; the problem was that when the end came I didn’t feel in any way emotionally tied to his plight. Banks’ best work is the kind I will happily read again (Wolf Tickets, especially), but – despite its obvious technical qualities (tight prose, fine dialogue, tidy plotting) – my dislike of the main character was such that I can’t say the same for Dead Money. Despite this, I would still recommend it because it is very well written and you might not have the same issues with the main character that I have.

Review: Fierce Bitches by Jedidiah Ayres

Anybody who read my recent review of Ayres’ collection A F*ckload of Shorts will know I thought highly of it. And rumblings on the crime fiction grapevine suggested that his latest, Fierce Bitches, was a cracker. Reviews were exceptional right across the board. So I made sure to grab a paperback copy the moment it became available.

Fierce Bitches involves a small town, or more a collection of buildings really, called Politoburg, in the middle of nowhere in Mexico that belongs to Harlan Polito, a crime boss. The population of this town consists of Mexican whores (the Marias), gringos who work for Polito (sent out-of-the-way, to be called on when the boss needs them), and Ramon who runs the place by keeping gringos in line – making sure they don’t hurt the girls, keeping them supplied with booze, drugs etc, and breaking heads when needs be. Everything runs smoothly, or as smoothly as a town that consists of criminals can, until a robbery of a delivery occurs, leaving people dead and Ramon severely injured. In the aftermath of the robbery one of the Marias escapes with a nameless gringo and suddenly everything goes to hell…

It’s hard to know how to classify Fierce Bitches. It’s not strictly crime fiction, although crimes obviously occur during it (lots of them, in fact), I suppose you could call it noir, it’s certainly bleak enough, but even that doesn’t seem quite appropriate. It has many elements in the mix, but the best way to describe it would be as a cross between the hellish El Rey finale of Jim Thompson’s The Getaway and the biblical fury of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. One thing is for certain, it has an ambition that most modern noir novels will probably never come close to emulating. For a start, the use of language is certainly superior to many writers currently working in this field. Second-person narration is notoriously difficult to get right but Ayres absolutely nails it here. Also, the fractured timeline mode of storytelling is another skill that’s not easy to nail, but again Ayres manages it with aplomb. It’s an exceptional bit of writing that, despite only being novella length, feels much weightier than its page count and has certainly marked Ayres as someone who will probably rise to the top of the current crop of crime/noir writers sooner rather than later. I can see this being in my top ten or top five or whatever the fuck it ends up being at the end of the year.

Review: The Storm Without by Tony Black

According to the blurbs, Tony Black is apparently Irvine Welsh’s favourite crime writer. This is no small thing to have on your resume, that one of the most influential writers of the last thirty years thinks you’re the mutt’s nuts when it comes to writing crime fiction.

Black has made his name writing the Gus Drury series of books, all of which come with lots of critical acclaim, so he has a pedigree with this stuff. This Blasted Heath release isn’t one of those, this one is about Doug Michie, a former RUC officer with a past, who has returned to his old home town of Ayr. He’s barely back in town five minutes when he meets an old friend, and once more than that, Lyn, whose son has been arrested for the murder of his girlfriend. She doesn’t believe he did it. Doug takes it on trust and starts investigating. What he finds out leads him to old enemies, smuggling and council corruption. On top of which he has to deal with an alcoholic mother and ex-colleagues who aren’t exactly happy to have him back.

The Storm Without is a brisk read with plenty of style and a compelling narrator in Doug Michie. Tony Black’s excellent prose brings the rainswept streets of Ayr alive with nice little nuggets of description and he keeps the narrative moving along nicely. So far so good. But there is one flaw, one that takes a 5-star performance and turns it into a 4-star scrape. That flaw is the ending. Without giving away spoilers there is a rescue for a certain character, but the thing is we never find out how this happens or by whom or how the character gets found. Aside from a paragraph of a newspaper article explaining that it has happened there’s no further description to explain how it happened. Okay, I know they say show don’t tell, but if you can’t show something at least tell me how something occurred – I’d rather be told something than just be forced to accept that something has happened – without an explanation it becomes a deus ex machina and feels a bit rushed. This is a pity, really, because Black can really turn a sentence and he knows his way around a narrative and in Michie he has created a genuinely complex and likeable character. Despite the flawed ending, in my humble opinion, at least, this is still a fine read, but it could have been more than that. Still, Michie is a great character and I look forward to reading more from him and Tony Black.

Review: Saturday’s Child by Ray Banks

Drunken ex-con Cal Innes is making his living as a private investigator of sorts. He has somehow built a reputation for finding people who’ve gone missing and now seems to have turned that into a business. Although Innes does deal in divorce cases, he wants nothing to do with a pub landlady who wants to murder her landlord husband. He tells her he isn’t interested in that kind of work, tells her to give it more thought when she’s sobered up and leaves immediately. Then he’s contacted by the man responsible for putting him in prison – crime lord Morris Tiernan – and asked/told to find a croupier who has stolen ten grand from his casino. The trail takes him to Newcastle looking for a gambler with a taste for cash and a barely legal girl who just happens to be Tiernan’s daughter. Innes’ task is made harder by Tiernan’s psychopathic son Mo’ who has his own reasons for wanting the girl back, and by a brutal police officer named ‘Donkey’ Donkin, who wants to question Innes about the stabbing of the landlord. As Innes gets closer to the croupier and the girl things start to go really wrong. And after he’s beaten and left for dead, the detective is forced to take drastic action, including some eye-watering torture with a cricket bat, working his way towards an exciting and bitter climax.

Ray Banks is one of those writers who seems to be unable to write a bad book. His sense of pacing is immaculate and he uses language the way Mo’ Tiernan uses a Stanley knife – cutting through to the meat and bone of the tale, trimming away the excess flab. He uses a technique that I first noticed in the brilliant Wolf Tickets – having two different narrators give their voice to different parts of the tale – and much as it does in that novel it works beautifully. Innes provides a bitter, tragic commentary on his part of the journey (showing a true alcoholic’s eye for self-delusion, along with a lot of submerged fury). Mo’ Tiernan provides a funny, frightening and foul-mouthed counter-point. Both voices are superbly written and utterly unique. The story moves along at an incredible pace, never once dragging, and as first parts of a series go Saturday’s Child is one of the finest. Another absolute cracker from somebody who has become one of my favourite writers over the past year or so. Can’t wait to get started on Sucker Punch.

Review: Death on a Hot Afternoon by Paul D Brazill

As regular readers will know I recently reviewed, and really enjoyed, Paul’s 13 Shot of Noir, which if you haven’t already bought it you should do so immediately. So another day another Brazill ebook. Does Death On A Hot Afternoon live up to the high standards set by 13 Shots? Well, see below and find out…

Luke Case is a middle-aged hack working for a Madrid magazine run by local who fancies himself as a patron of the city’s art scene. One afternoon, he is chatting with another hack, Nathan, who starts telling him in a roundabout way about a murder he committed many years before – one he’s been on the run from ever since. The whole afternoon gets boozier and when Case ends up drinking with Lena K, a young Torch singer who seems to have appeared from nowhere on the Madrid scene, he finds he might have the chance of enjoying a very nice evening with her and a friend! But the evening takes a turn for the worse and leaves Case wondering just who this Torch singer is and what it is that she wants.

As witnessed in 13 Shots, Brazill has an excellent writing style and a lovely turn of phrase and you can witness it here in spades:

People fired sharp looks at me like bullets from a machine gun.

Along with some clever dialogue:

“Well, a cliche to me is like a red rag to a bull. I avoid them like the plague.”

Case, for all his seediness, makes a great narrator and protagonist even if he seems to be attracted to trouble the way iron filings are attracted to magnets. The build-up is beautifully done and then – slam – the pay-off comes quickly and the rug has been pulled from beneath Case and the reader. It’s a lovely and controlled bit of storytelling. I’ve heard some folks complain that it’s not long enough. I can understand what they mean (great characters, not wanting it to end etc), but I thought it was the perfect length – in and out and no messing about.

Highly recommended.

Review: A F*ckload of Shorts by Jedidiah Ayres

Jedidiah Ayres is unknown to me, which is one of the reasons I picked this collection. 2013 is going to be a year where everything I read on Kindle will be new crime stuff (new to me, at least). And all my paperbacks will be literary fiction I’ve not read before. But I digress. This isn’t about me, it’s about Jedediah Ayres and A F*ckload of Shorts.

I’ve seen Ayres mentioned on Twitter a few times and also on a few blogs I read, and all the mentions have been positive. That and the fact that it was published by the excellent Snubnose Press was enough to make me pick up this collection of shorts. And I’m glad I did because for the most part I really enjoyed it.

Ayres’ stories tend towards the grim and mostly reside in crime fiction territory, although there are a few exceptions to this. The humour is sick and twisted, which is a good thing, and his imagination throws up some very dark shit. At its best (the linked stories Mahogany & Monogamy and Fuckload of Scotch Tape; Hoosier Daddy, The Whole Buffalo and Viscosity) it works incredibly well, mixing extreme black comedy with noir tropes to create something fresh and new – not something that’s easy on the well-trodden noir path. Overall it’s a really strong collection, but I have to add that The Adversary, despite being well written, felt too long and I found myself skipping and speed reading through it, but that’s just me – you might love it.

This collection comes highly recommended.