JB

Anyway – Lee Child’s The Affair – read it, read it now. It’s alottafun!

The best book I will read this year is Peter Spiegelman's Thick as Thieves. 

    I've been a fan of his for years, having read his Shamus-winning series with private eye John March. Thick as Thieves is, a step up from those, as hard to believe as that is.

    Thieves tells the story of a group of high-tech con artists. Think of them as being a combination of Parker's crew and the Mission Impossible team. They're lead by Carr who took over from his mentor Declan, lost months before in another job. They're funded and helped by the mysterious and intimidating Mr. Boyce, and their targets are bad guys with lots and lots of cash - villains who can complain to no one when they're taken down and cash that, though it can be bulky, is often electronic. The heists must be well-planned and expertly executed. But there are problems.

    "On his apartment's balcony, Carr switches to rum. He puts his bare feet on the railing and tilts back in his chair, and his thoughts skid like bad tires."

    For one, Carr can't quite accept the events that lead to Declan's death. And the crew is not quite ready to accept Carr as the boss. Then there is the problem that Carr, as the story proceeds, isn't sure he can trust those with whom he is working, let alone that the plan he's constructed will work - what Declan used to call 'paranoid calculus', a neat phrase that captures the doubts that expand as the tension tightens. Not only does Carr need to pay attention to the ominous Boyce but also his near-albino hit-woman Tina. There's the handsome and volatile Latin Mike who is continually challenging him, good-old-boy Bobby who seems too casual for what is going on, computer-hacker Dennis who is described as being the color and thinness of a stalk of wheat, and then there is Valerie, the delectable, erotic and unfathomable Valerie, his lover who seems to be running schemes within schemes. Or is he just paranoid? He has to work with this crew but he can't find the ability to trust them.

    Spiegelman has a talent for describing an aspect of a character in few words, but words that tell all: "He's pink from heat and from drink, and there are damp circles under the arms of his blue button-down shirt. His blazer hangs over his shoulders like a drowned thing." Carr, in recalling his mother as she was dying, thinks of her knitting: "...the pieces she made that were neither scarves nor hats, but simply long, dark panels. He remembers too the streaks of gray that appeared, overnight, in her black hair, and how her collarbones became so pronounced - the bones of a ship, laid bare by a storm." But besides his subtle and tasty writing, the plot of Thieves will screw you ever deeper into your couch as the 'paranoid calculus' screws the worries and doubts into Carr's head. There are pivots and screeching halts that you will not see coming and there are times, I can promise you, that you are certain you know what is coming and you will be staggered by how wrong you were. Thick as Thieves (Knopf hc, $24.95 - signed copies available!) will be released in late July. It was originally set to come out in May (it was in our Spring newsletter) with the title Circus Time - a much better title, less ordinary and more fitting to the action in Thieves. That was another of Declan's phrases. I would bet that Circus was Spiegelman's title and some genius in marketing insisted it be changed to the more bland and trite Thieves.

    Ah well, don't judge a book by its cover or its title. But you can judge this book by its incredible quality, inexorable pace and deadly serious intensity and you will thrilled to have finish it.

    Damn - what a book!

    I hope he brings back Carr. I hope he brings back March, too. But, more than anything, I hope he brings out another book, and quickly.

 If you’ve not read George Pelecanos, you’re missing a writer who is great on many levels. First, there’s the writing, which is strong and understated in that Hammett/Macdonald/Block vein – nothing flashy or Chandlerian but solid and grounded in a way that propels the story along. Second, his books are set amongst the blue-collar denizens of DC. No politicians, no grand plots or conspiracies, just ordinary folks trying to get through life. And third, his people are often dealing with the terrible choices and mistakes they’ve made in their pasts.

        The Cut introduces a new character, Spero Lucas. Lucas was adopted by set of loving Greek parents. He’s a recent veteran of the Afghan war and happenstances have landed him a job as an investigator. He’s discovered that he’s good at finding things and, when he does, he asks for a cut of the value of the returned ‘thing’. He does his own work in between jobs for a defense attorney. The job that makes up the story of The Cut stems from one of those gigs.

        Spero is an interesting guy, very methodical, still numbed by the war but coping well now that he’s back in his neighborhood. We know, from the start for instance, that he’s adopted but we never do learn whether he’s black or white or any particular shade. And this abiguity is heightened by his ability to go wherever he needs to and to interact with whomever he needs to. He’s really an ‘anybody’, a guy you can foist your own thoughts and feelings on and that makes him immenently human. And as a Marine, he’s immenently confident and capable and can and will slide through his days making things work.

        This is supposedly the start of a new series. Great! Lucas is a young guy busy making his life up as he goes. Hard to say he’s having fun but he certainly feels as if he’s heading that way, and that’s fun for us. And I’m sure that some of Pelecanos’ earlier characters will show up in Lucas’ stories. He’s out looking over a crime scene and it is mentioned that just around the corner is the office of a different PI, Derek Strange. Lucas eats meals in various Greek restaurants and they’re probably the same ones from earlier books. If DC didn’t already exist, Pelecanos would have created it from scratch and we could walk the streets with his people.

JB: The title refers to the color of the German uniform that Bernie is manuevered into wearing. As he says, you can get down in the dirt but the gray doesn’t necessarily show it. And in the dirt is where the story exists.

This is by far the most complex of the Gunther stories as it shifts forward and backward in time with portions happening in 1933, 1940, 1946 and 1954 – though not sequentially. Bernie’s a little ‘unstuck in time’, explaining events in the past to interrogators in his present and the story and the action moves around from Cuba to Paris, to New York, to Berlin, back to Paris – well, you get the idea. It is a time of great fluidity with shifting aliances and politics and subterfuges. I must admit that I sometimes had a difficult time keeping up with the settings or the time periods as the chapters flipped from Berlin in 1954 to Berlin in 1946 and back to 1954, to Paris in 1940 - - - - .

Bernie is still the cynic’s cynic’:”Sometimes the future seems a little dark and frightening, but the past is even worse. My past most of all.” Who wouldn’t feel like that if one’s survived the trenches of The Great War, the terrors and horrors of Nazism, war in Germany and Russia, a Russian POW camp and interrogation at the hands of the CIA and Army – let alone working for Meyer Lansky. At one point, Bernie mentions that he was born in 1896. Think of what someone born in Germany would have seen by 1954!

Still, requiring more work to stay up with the story or not, the writing is superb. “Sandberger grinned. Probably he meant well, but it felt like seeing something unpleasant and atavistic toward the end of a séance. Evil flickering on and off like a faulty lightbulb.” Surely, Kerr is one of the foremost practitioners of the Chandlerian style of hard-boiled writing and he never disappoints. Nor does Bernie.

But we all know how this will end, don’t we? After all, it is a murder mystery and rumors have always surrounded Monroe’s death. The fun in this book is Collins’ laying out the events surrounding her death and then presenting an explanation of what happened. And he’s clear on this: Marilyn Monroe was murdered. It was not suicide or accidental.

Before you get to his ingenious ‘solution’, Heller will deal with Hoffa and Giancana, Sinatra and the Rat Pack, and DiMaggio, and will pay a visit to the brand-new Playboy Mansion in Chicago. It’s a book full of early 60s fashion, gimlets and the new bikini craze (it is LA after all). And while it is a great way to spend some hours (as all of the Hellers are), it is ultimately a sad story. From our view, nearly 50 years later, we know that it is just the start of a decade of horrors, of deaths and disillusion. And Collins’ allows as how this is the first of a trilogy about the Kennedys (oh boy).

“He had one of those faces you couldn’t have picked out of a lineup if you were married to him – young and unlined without a single distinguishing feature.”

I credit Bill with turning me onto an author who I promote as the finest writer of Chandlerian private eye fiction in the last thirty years: Loren D. Estleman. You can have Spenser. I’ve read them both and I think Amos Walker is the best. Besides having written 19 Walker novels (#20 will be released in December), Loren has written a slew of Walker short stories and this September will give us Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection. It’ll contain 31 previously published stories plus one brand new one written for this collection.

I’ve read the advance copy. It is a shameless tease, giving me just 16 of the pieces that will be in the final hardcover, but what gems they are – bright and clean and colorful, ready to be read and enjoyed and drooled over. “What the Glasscocks called a cottage would have housed Detroit’s homeless with room left over for all the corks on the mayor’s staff.”

It takes a real master to craft an entire little world within the confines of a handful of pages and, like Chandler or Hammett or Block, Estleman does it with the lively and polished style of fine artist with an eye and ear for the memorable line. “She was a five-by-five chuck with marcelled orange hair and round black eyes imbedded in her face like nailheads in soft wax.”

Sometimes, I like a book of short stories as a break from the unending parade of novels. Sometimes, I’m not sure what to read next and a few short stories from a collection can be a handy break. Not this book. I devoured these miniature marvels. I think you would, too.