The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett

This is the story of Ned Beaumont, a gambler and mob fixer in an unnamed small American city around 1930. Ned Beaumont is always called Ned Beaumont, except in dialogue, even in places where the reader knows it's Ned Beaumont and does not need to be reminded that he is Ned Beaumont, to the point where the reader may get tired of just hearing the name Ned Beaumont.

The fact that Ned Beaumont has no interiority at all - we never learn anything about his motivations or goals, other than some facile dialogue Ned Beaumont gives early in the novel about being a gambler and so Ned Beaumont must always push his luck at all times, to prove that Ned Beaumont still has it - makes Ned Beaumont even more of a cypher and less interesting than Ned Beaumont could have been, in this probably least of Dashiell Hammett's five novels.

Even the title is a letdown. It's explained at the very end: it's from a dream by what I think of as a minor character, though - since she's the prize Ned Beaumont gets to ride away with in the end - perhaps Hammett would disagree. But The Glass Key as a title has very little to do, even metaphorically, with Ned Beaumont and his struggles in wherever this is.

Ned - I'm going to stop the Hammett-parodying full-name thing now - is some kind of vague lieutenant or fixer of Paul Madvig, the boss of this unnamed town. For a long time, I thought Paul was the mayor - no mayor is ever named, and Paul is clearly in charge of the city and is working on an upcoming re-election for his slate, which seems like it would include him - but the end of the book seems to put the kibosh on that. So I suppose there is a mayor, but, like the name of the city, he's not important enough to be mentioned.

Paul is firming up plans for that upcoming election by aligning with one of this state's Senators, Ralph Bancroft Henry. Paul intends to marry the Senator's gorgeous daughter, Janet, but has been quarreling with the Senator's son, Taylor, who has in turn been carrying on an affair (rented apartment and everything - Hammett makes it clear as 1930 allowed that they were definitely fucking) with Paul's daughter Opal.

Now, Paul clearly was married before, and is clearly a generation older than his would-be wife (though not quite as old as the Senator), but his previous wife is one of the many, many things Hammett doesn't bother to mention or explain in The Glass Key, because he spent too many of his words typing Ned Beaumont one more time.

Also, Janet doesn't seem to like Paul in the slightest even before the events of the novel. She seems to be being given, almost as a bribe, to Paul for his support in the election, which is odd - when Paul and Ned talk, it sounds like the Senator Henry-Paul connection will help them both and be roughly a partnership of equals. So I had big questions about why any of this was happening in the first place, other than Janet is a hot patootie and Paul wants to jump her bones and her father's willing to let him as long as he marries her first. (Or maybe it's revenge for Taylor screwing his daughter? There's no hint of that in the book at all, but it's vaguely plausible. Paul does seem to be actually "in love" - in the hardboiled-novel way, which may just mean lust - with Janet.)

Anyway, Paul's re-election campaign is already having some hiccups because one of their gangsters is currently in jail for what sounds like vehicular homicide. Since Paul's voters are mostly respectable and honest, he can't just release the guy before the election, which is making the mugs think he's gone soft. This is a bit of a tricky thing, but it can be handled, and Ned is handling it.

But then Taylor Henry, the Senator's son, turns up dead just a couple of blocks from Paul's club. Ned chases after a bookie who fled the same night - who also, coincidentally, owed Ned a big payout from a horse-race that day - but the bookie is definitely not the murderer, and, even worse, it doesn't look like he would fit into a frame, either.

The rest of the novel wanders around that murder, as a mysterious person sends "questioning" letters - mostly implying Paul killed Taylor and that Ned is covering it up - to various people in this city, and the rival gang boss, Shad O'Rory, puts up a rival slate in the election and seems to be connected to the anti-Paul whisper campaign.

Ned gets captured and tortured by Shad's men, but it doesn't take. He runs around town, and back and forth to New York, doing various things that Hammett will show but never step back and let a narrative voice explain. He eventually finds out the truth of Taylor's death - it's not exactly a murder, and it's all a bit disappointing, but Ned Beaumont does get to leave town in the end with a hot dame on his arm, which has to count as a happy ending for him.

I was not terribly impressed with The Glass Key. I remember liking Hammett's books better the last time I read them, thirty or so years ago - this time around, I seem to like them each less and less. Only one to go, though - and The Thin Man, as I recall, is very different in tone and style.

(Note: I read this in the Library of America Complete Novels. I don't know if I actually recommend reading all of Hammett's novels - see immediately above - but, if you do, this is the best package for it.)

The Dain Curse by Dashiell Hammett

In some other world, this was the second of a long series of novels about The Continental Op, bringing Dashiell Hammett a steady income and some manner of fame and a continuing career. In our world, this is the last time we see the Op - Hammett wrote three more novels, more and more different from each other, then moved into screenwriting, and then seemed to give up the idea of working entirely for the last twenty-five years of his life.

But when we read The Dain Curse, we might as well be back in 1929, with Hammett and his main character coming off Red Harvest the year before, that unnamed private detective for the Continental outfit back in San Francisco and caught up in a few related cases over the course of a few months.

And it really is "a few related cases." Dain presents itself as a novel, but it's really three closely-linked novellas in a trenchcoat, or maybe a three-part serial. Each time, the Op solves the particular situation - and several people end up being murdered - but he doesn't untangle it all finally until the end.

The Op is first sent in to investigate the theft of industrial diamonds from the home laboratory of a Dr. Leggett. It turns out Leggett has a dark secret past: his current wife is the sister of his first wife, and there's a supposed curse on that family, the Dains. By the end of the first section, Leggett's daughter, Gabrielle, is the focus of the curse and one of the few main characters left alive.

In the second section, Gabrielle, who believes in the curse, has been caught up in a creepy religious cult headquartered in a renovated apartment building - with all manner of unexpected gadgets to cause various weird effects. The Op, this time hired by her guardian, comes in to keep an eye on her and ends up smashing the rotten cult when, once again, murder crops up.

Then we get to the back half of the book, the longest third section, where the Op is called in by Gabrielle's new husband to come to the usual corrupt small town, where they are honeymooning, and of course he finds one body immediately on arriving. Gabrielle is missing - possibly kidnapped, possibly fled as a murderer; different local officials have different theories - and the Op needs to find her and finally work out the details of this supposed "curse" before he gets himself killed, possibly by an amateur explosive device.

It does all come together in the end, and the Op has a nearly Agatha Christie-style long speech at the end explaining everything that happened, why it happened, and how this particular fiend manipulated it all. It's a fine bit of plotting, and does tie up the whole book in a bow, but it falls on the too-neat site of the great mystery divide, particularly when hardboiled books are typically much more comfortable with the messy and contingent and confused.

So Dain is slightly disappointing, coming after Harvest - it's less stark, less focused, more of a general mystery entertainment. And, as far as I can tell, all of those things made it much more successful at the time and put Hammett's career on an upward path - which his next novel strongly solidified. (That was The Maltese Falcon, if anyone doesn't know.)

Note: I read this is the Library of America omnibus edition of Hammett's Complete Novels; they also have a companion volume with all of the stories. As I said with Harvest, if you think you might want to read more than one Hammett book, that's a good package to get.

Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett

I've been reading a bunch of noir lately - the old stuff, mostly in Library of America omnibuses, because that's what I have on hand. And I figure that, if I was doing that anyway, I should really go back to the real beginning.

Well a real beginning. Nothing ever comes out of only one place, and nothing ever ends that cleanly, either.

But Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammett's first novel from 1929, is as good a signpost for "noir starts here" as any other, and better than most.

Hammett had been writing short stories and novellas for the pulps for seven years at that point, and there were hardboiled writers before him - there had to be a market to sell into - but novels feel more impressive than a collection of stories, no matter how much we try to be dispassionate about it.

This is the first of two novels about Hammett's series character The Continental Op, a nameless functionary of that nationwide detective agency - a fictionalization of the Pinkertons, mostly - who had starred in about two dozen Hammett stories before this. He's smart but not fancy, a man with - as would be said later - a particular set of skills, a man who is good at taking things apart to see what happens.

In Red Harvest, he takes apart an entire town. Personville is a corrupt town, a small mining city somewhere in the American West, under the thumb of one aging industrialist, Elihu Willsson, and the gangsters he brought in to crush a strike a few years back. The Op was hired by Willsson's son Donald, supposedly honest and given the town's one newspaper to run - in a crusading, clean-up-the-town rabble-rousing style that was not specifically against his father's corruption but would tend to conflict with the old man's interests.

The Op hits town, and plans to meet Donald that night. But Donald is murdered before that meeting can happen. And the Op, for his own reasons, more-or-less blackmails Elihu into signing a contract to "clean up the town." The rest of the novel is the Op - not as systematically or coldly or deliberately as one might expect - pitting the major gangsters of the town against each other, fomenting chaos and getting them to knock each other off (along with plenty of others) as quickly as possible.

You see, the Op's job is generally to follow the law, to support established authority - even if that is corrupt, maybe especially if that is corrupt, following the Pinkerton model - and not to crusade to get hoodlums to murder each other. He's quite clear that his superiors, particularly "the Old Man" in San Francisco, would shut down his operations very quickly if they knew what he was actually doing.

So he has a limited amount of time, and only a quick knowledge of the major players, and an entrenched power structure used to crushing any opposition. The Op exploits small cracks, drops hints, plants rumors, points hotheads at each other, and generally just acts as an agent of random chaos, trying to stir up as much trouble as quickly as he can and trusting to his skills and to blind luck to come out the other side of it. He's aided by the fact that the gangsters tend to trust him - why would they think his purpose is to destroy all their operations? - and so he gets to meet with many of them repeatedly, to plant ideas and get them thinking that they're each about to be betrayed by the others.

It all works: the Op does "clean up the town," in the sense that there's a bloodbath (about two dozen murders of specific named characters, plus a certain number of random mooks and palookas) and all of the existing gang leaders are dead when he finally leaves town. 

We all judge success in our own ways: he did what he set out to do.

Red Harvest is still cleanly readable, and the Op's psychology modern enough that a current reader will be in sympathy with him, from the intention to clean up the town to his worries that he's getting too bloodthirsty along the way. It's a short book with propulsive energy: it may be a classic of its type but it has none of the stuffiness we associate with "classic."

(Note: as I implied up top, I read this in a Library of America omnibus, the Hammett Complete Novels. If you're going to read more than one Hammett book - and why not? - I'd recommend it.)

The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett

This was more hard-boiled than I expected - though not quite as hard-boiled as Hammett's earlier novels. (See my various posts on his other four books, from earlier this year.)

The Thin Man was Hammett's fifth and final novel, coming at the beginning of 1934 and launching the famous film series later the same year. It's narrated by former private detective Nick Charles, who now spends his time managing his rich wife Nora's affairs...and drinking far too much. (Even given that it's set during Prohibition, and the drinking culture of the '30s, I'm pretty sure Hammett meant his readers to realize Nick is an alcoholic - or whatever word they would have used in 1934, probably "drunk.")

Nick and Nora live in San Francisco, but are in New York for the end-of-the-year holidays - as Nick says in passing late in the book, to get away from Nora's relatives, who are annoying that time of year.

He meets Dorothy, the now-adult (but barely so) daughter of a former client, Clyde Winant, who asks him to help her get in touch with her estranged father. Nick replies that he's not in the PI business anymore, but gets caught up in the case anyway, as he's also contacted by Wynant's lawyer Herbert Maculay, Nick's army buddy from the Great War, and learns from the police that the reclusive Wynant's secretary, Julia Wolf, was murdered two days after he talked to Dorothy.

Events circle around the missing Wynant - an inventor who gave up his lab a few months ago to go do something unspecified, and has only been communicating through Macaulay since then - and his ex-wife, Dorothy's mother Mimi Jorgenson (remarried to a gigolo named Christian, though the money she got from Wynant is about to run out).

Nick keeps insisting he's not investigating anything, but keeps talking to Lieutenant Guild, who is looking into Julia's murder, and shares theories and ideas with Guild. He also keeps talking to all of the major characters - I skipped a few above; there are also some gangsters and a speakeasy owner, plus some minor-character drinking buddies who turn up repeatedly but don't have much to do with the actual murder or investigation.

Well, I should be fair: Nick mostly spends the book drinking, and he's talking with the people who are where he's drinking - speakeasies and their homes. And several of the principals of this case - Dorothy and Mimi and Maculay in particular - keep urging him to solve it.

And, in the end, he does, not entirely to the satisfaction of all of those people (hint hint). There is the usual "I guess you're wondering why I called you all here" scene, and the murderer - who actually killed three people, as Nick details - is carted off by Guild to face justice.

It's an amusing novel, though it does still shade a bit to the hardboiled side, with its gangsters and speakeasies and moral decay, than to a more frivolous drawing-room mystery, like the popular conception of the movie series. (I don't think I've seen any of the movies, so don't count on me for any specific genre-typing there.) Nick does drink a hell of a lot, which is a bit disconcerting, but Hammett clearly meant it to be, which makes it an element of the novel rather than just a bit of the culture at the time.

All in all, if you want to read a Hammett novel, my recommendation would be the first or the last: Red Harvest is still one of the great foundational hardboiled novels, and this one is fun and lively and somewhat lighter in tone. If you want more than that, the Library of America volume Complete Novels includes, as its title implies, all five of them.

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

Where to start? This is a novel overshadowed by a movie, a novel that stands as the most successful piece of a stunted career, a novel that's more conventional than a reader might think, a novel that doesn't necessarily show well against later entries in the same genre.

I've been reading Hammett and Chandler recently, and as a guy with an English degree, Chandler runs rings around Hammett in every way possible - character insight, striking language, verisimilitude, atmosphere. There's nothing wrong with Hammett, but his work comes across, a hundred years later, as workmanlike and interesting rather than compelling and fresh.

The Maltese Falcon was published in 1930. The famous movie - the third adaptation, actually; Hollywood was quick in those days - came a decade later. Hammett's writing career was over by then, and his fall from grace with the public just about to come: it turns out that America wasn't fond of avowed Communists in the post-war era.

I think I need to mention the plot, though it almost seems absurd to do so. Sam Spade is a detective in San Francisco; he gets a client in a young woman who tells him and his partner (Miles Archer) a story about a runaway younger sister that neither of them believe. Archer is killed that night, following the man the girl says lured away her sister.

There is no sister, and that other man is killed later that night. The cops half-heartedly try to pin one or both murders on Spade, mostly to see if it will work, but it doesn't. Spade is hard-boiled, spitting tough dialogue at the cops and everyone else, and heads out to investigate - there's that famous speech at the end where he talks about the death of Archer. (There are four or five famous passages in Falcon; speeches you probably already know, from the book or the movie. I don't want to pooh-pooh those: they made it into the movie because they're said exactly right, because they're perfect expressions of their moments.)

Anyway, it turns out there's a fantastically valuable statue that the girl - Spade eventually learns her name is Brigid O'Shaughnessy - and several others have been chasing around the world. Spade learns more, runs around San Francisco for a few days, gets involved with one more murder, gets (basically out of nowhere) a package with the statue, has a tense meeting with all of the major players at the end, and hands over the killers to the cops so we can have an ending. The plotting is decent enough, though it does suffer from the mystery-novel issue of being all running around and talking to the same people over and over again, like a particularly unpleasant fetch quest in an CRPG.

The idea of the falcon is slightly silly, the ending is a dying fall in a way that doesn't quite strike me right, and I've never quite bought that Spade and O'Shaughnessy "loved" each other, as the dialogue at the end wants to say. Spade is a bit too much the stereotypical tough guy to really become a fully-rounded person - for me at least.

And, just saying, in the book he's tall and blonde.

All in all, for me, The Maltese Falcon is no Red Harvest. It's iconic and famous and full of moments familiar from later parodies and references, but, on its own, it's just a solid B- hard-boiled mystery novel from early in the genre, told mostly in a meat-and-potatoes style and featuring a main character without a whole lot to make him distinctive other than "hard-boiled PI."

Spade & Archer by Joe Gores

Joe Gores is one of the few -- perhaps the only -- private-eye writer who walked the walk before he talked the talk; he spent twelve years working for a detective firm, and then moved sideways into writing novels. He's also the author of the most authentic series of PI novels, the DKA Files, which dramatize the PI's life without turning it into the parade of dames, murder, and crusty tycoons that characterize less rigorous books. And he's also the author of the well-regarded historical mystery Hammett -- which he wrote thirty years ago, so it's itself semi-historical at this point -- about, of course, the guy who created the Continental Op and Sam Spade.

So he would have been the obvious choice to write a prequel to Hammett's famous The Maltese Falcon. But the obvious only works out about one time in ten, so it's great to see that Gores did get the job to write this book -- that the rights-holders were smart enough to go to him, and Gores was inspired enough to want to do -- and that Spade & Archer came out as a good historical mystery, rather than as the bit of extruded mystery product that it so easily could have been. (Two words should be sufficient: Poodle Springs.)

As the cover indicates, this is a prequel to Maltese Falcon; it ends with the first few words of Falcon. But it begins seven years earlier, in 1921. Sam Spade is at the end of his rope working for the large Continental detective firm -- too much time chasing cheating spouses and strong arming strikers for his blood -- so he opens a one-man shop in San Francisco. He hires Effie Perine to be his secretary and makes an arrangement with a lawyer, Sid Wise, who has offices on the same floor.

Spade & Archer is in three sections, each essentially a separate novella -- Spade has a case in 1921, one in 1925, and a third in 1928, right before the events of Maltese Falcon. The three tie together, of course, particularly because they have the same mysterious villain behind them all. (As the flap copy accurately describes the plot: "The next seven years will see him dealing with booze runners, waterfront thugs, stowaways, banking swindlers, gold smugglers, bumbling cops, and the illegitimate daughter of Sun Yat-sen; with murder, other men’s mistresses, and long-missing money.")

I imagine a lot of the fun of Spade & Archer lies in seeing all of the elements of Maltese Falcon come together in Spade's earlier life -- how he comes to take Miles Archer as a partner (and to start sleeping with Miles's wife Iva), his relationship with Sid Wise (and with the cops), and so forth. I'd thought about re-reading Maltese Falcon immediately after Spade & Archer, but that's not its appropriate place -- it should be read (or re-read) before diving into Spade & Archer.

Gores's new book is a solid detective story with great '20s atmosphere; don't get me wrong. But it also reads a bit like a list of crossword puzzle answers, and that puzzle is Maltese Falcon. Any reader of Spade & Archer should be intimately familiar with Maltese Falcon to get the full effect.

Among Others by Jo Walton

Among Others is a fantasy novel.

That's not a categorization; it's an assertion. The novel itself could be read as the diary of an emotionally disturbed young woman, who retreated to the fabulization of her own life to deal with a nearly unbearable trauma and whose voice the reader must mistrust from the ground up. But that's a false reading -- I insist that the faeries in Among Others are real, in all their numinousness and slipperiness, and that what Mori tells us is true, as far as she can tell it. I believe.

Among Others throws out another caltrop for the unwary reader: it's a fantasy novel that's in large part about science fiction, about the joy of reading SF books, discovering SF communities, and arguing in the ways that only SFnal people do. But its own story cannot be argued in those terms; its fairies cannot be proven or disproven by logic and close reading. This is a fantasy novel: one must accept Mori when she tells us about her life and her secret knowledge, and we must believe her. We must believe her. No one else could tell us these things.

Who is Mori? Morwenna Phelps is a plain teenage girl, with a leg and hip damaged by the same hurtling car that killed her twin sister Morganna. Mori is a girl who claims her mother is an evil witch scheming for magical power in nearly indescribable ways. Mori is a Welsh girl who sees fairies and does magic -- which doesn't work the way you think it would. Mori is a girl now in the care of her father, Daniel Markova -- separated from her mother for several years -- and on her way to the moderately posh girls' boarding school Arlinghurst, because that father has no idea what to do with her. Mori is a girl who loves science fiction books with a hunger that radiates off the page, the need of a smart young woman for stories that explain the secrets of this world and all of the others.

And she tells this story, in her own words, as she writes it down in a diary over the course of the 1979-1980 academic year. She views her fellow boarding-school students as if they were an alien race she has to comprehend, with their intra-house sports contests and elaborate points systems and not-quite-homoerotic close friendships. She casts a spell to find friends, and struggles with the idea of magic entirely -- because her mother is still out there, and still seeking to bend Mori to her will through her own magic. She finds her way into the local town, which has a tea shop (source of honey buns, sent to complicated nets of friends to mark  in-group status at Arlinghurst), and a bookshop, and a library -- and, most of all, eventually, some people Mori can talk to. But what Mori does most of all is read -- Le Guin and Delaney, Cherryh and Tiptree, Silverberg and Brunner (and some non-SF as well, in amongst the others) -- and think about what she read, and plan to go look for more books, and make lists of things she wants to read, and wonder what other books might be out there.

It's not a convoluted plot, or one with lots of action -- though Walton expertly works Mori's voice, telling the reader exactly what's important at any moment but never telling the whole story of anything at once. But plenty of things do happen -- and not just in Mori's head. (Though that's where all of the most interesting things are happening.)

In some other, equally as fictional or real 1979, a teenage boy in Cleveland is voraciously reading Chandler and Hammett, Ross Macdonald and Ian Fleming. And a girl in Perth is discovering Rosemary Sutcliff and Gillian Bradshaw. And a boy in Cape Town is excited by Edward Albee and Tom Stoppard. Among Others is the specific story of Mor and her life, of science fiction and its wonders and communities, but it's also the story of a million bookish young people, who latched onto SF or fantasy or gothics or historicals or sea stories or plays or even YA problem novels -- who latched onto books and the stories they tell as a gateway out of their individual lives and, eventually, used those books to light their way out into the worlds they really wanted to live in. It might be your story. It's my story in many ways. And Jo Walton tells that story superbly, magnificently, amazingly, through Mori Phelps, who is and isn't Jo Walton in the way that only fiction, only fantasy can manage.

I can't recommend this book highly enough to anyone who was ever that misfit kid, reading incessantly to get away from the world that didn't make sense into worlds that did. And I can't describe Among Others' virtues better than Steven Brust does on the back cover:

Amazing. The timing of revelation is perfect and the first-person narrative is flawless. As Mori shuttles between her family's magical intrigues and the transformative books she reads, her story becomes so real that it hurts. In a good way.

Among Others is a great fantasy novel, a great novel, a great love letter to the power of books and science fiction, and a great picture of a young person so many of us were like, in our own ways. And I believe in fairies because Mori tells us they're real.

The Moving Target by Ross Macdonald

I have a shelf dedicated to reading projects, in my to-be-read bookcases. It's mostly sat quietly for the last few years, with three half-assembled "projects" slowly disappearing behind other things piling up in front of them. I thought I had to assemble all of the books first; my model was Starktober and similar things, where I read a whole bunch of books quickly - generally one a day - and wrote about them just as quickly.

But I don't read like that now, so those "projects" have sat gathering dust.

On the other hand, I have been reading through authors intermittently, mostly nudged by the presence of Library of America books on my main shelves. Over the last couple of years, I got through all of Dashiell Hammett's novels, and then Raymond Chandler's, that way.

One of the "projects" was to read all of Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer novels. And I just realized I could do that the same way I was reading other authors: one at a time rather than in a big burst. So I think I will.

The Moving Target was the first of that series, and the first novel to appear under the author's pen name. ("Macdonald" was really Kenneth Millar, but his wife, Margaret Millar, was also a crime novelist, with a growing career at the same time, so her husband cycled through "John Macdonald" and "John Ross Macdonald" before settling on the version of his name he kept for the rest of his career. It was always a fairly open pseudonym; I suppose mostly to keep their books just a few feet separate on the shelves.) "Macdonald" had published four standalone mystery/crime novels before this; he wasn't brand-new, and he'd gotten good notices.

So Moving Target comes mostly formed. It's very much in the Chandler mode: Macdonald's series hero Lew Archer is similarly tough and cynical at this point, and Macdonald has flights of language not unlike Chandler's in the course of the novel. It's also, most obviously, a book about a private detective in Los Angeles and its surroundings in the late 1940s - Chandler would have been the glaringly obvious touchstone even if Macdonald had tried to run farther away from him.

As I recall, Archer became more of a viewpoint, especially as the series went on - he was a window into the lives of the people he met, and did less commentary than Chandler. I'll have to see if I still think that, this time through the novels. It's not really the case here: Archer gets knocked out multiple times, kissed by dames, and gives a few major speeches, all of which is solidly in the Chandler mode.

The joke about Macdonald is that all of the Archer books are about family problems, which stem from some event that happened twenty years ago in Canada. (Macdonald was born and lived most of his life in California, but his family was Canadian and he spent his youth in Ontario.) This first one is about families, but all of the cliché elements aren't there yet - there's no Canadian content here.

Archer is hired by a rich woman to find her husband. Ralph Sampson is a Texas oil millionaire, living on his rents and making occasional random deals, drinking too much and flying around impulsively to Las Vegas and elsewhere. Ralph disappeared the day before, after a flight back from Vegas. Archer was brought in by the family lawyer, Bert Graves, who he worked for when Graves was a DA and Archer an investigator in that office.

Graves is involved in a love triangle with Sampson's twenty-year-old daughter Miranda: he's pursuing her in a slightly embarrassing middle-aged way, while she's making eyes at her father's hunky pilot, Alan Taggert. Mrs. Sampson is openly derisive of her husband, insisting - though she's an invalid whose legs don't work after a fall from a horse - that she's going to outlive him. And Sampson, as Archer discovers, has some very odd business connections, including the gangster owner of the Wild Piano club, a thug named Dwight Troy, and a self-declared guru, Claude, who Sampson gave a mountain hunting lodge as a "temple."

Archer chases Sampson's trail for a couple of days, as it becomes clearer that the millionaire was kidnapped and eventually a ransom note appears. He meets a number of women connected to the case, faded movie star Fay Estabrook and ex-con pianist Betty Fraley, and some violent men connected to them.

Most of this takes place near the Sampson mansion in Santa Teresa - Macdonald's invention, a fictional town loosely based on Santa Monica that later mystery writers would also use - and in the mountains and rural roads nearby. That's one of the most clearly 1949 parts of the novel: how empty so much of Southern California was at that moment, with the post-war building boom still building up steam. (The other thing is another post-war sense, that something big had just happened and was over, leaving a lot of men still keyed up, still used to handling dangerous, important work and now trying to settle back into smaller, quieter lives.)

Archer solves the crime - well, crimes, since there's more than just the kidnapping to deal with in the end. A mystery novel needs at least one murder, doesn't it?

This is an atmospheric and smart mystery novel, very much in the Chandler manner and style but already showing clear signs of distinguishing Macdonald from Chandler. Archer is less romantic than Chandler's hero, Marlowe, maybe more of a post-war man in that. And, as I recall, the series only gets better from here.

Reviewing The Mail: 7/24

Even at the rate I'm going, there's no way I can read everything I have -- and certainly not in a timely way. So, assuming I keep getting things in the mail, I'm going to point out some items of particular interest more-or-less as I get them.

For this first installment, these books have been sitting around for a couple of weeks, for example, and I've been poking through them, but I don't want to wait to write about them.

So this will be "Reviewing the Mail" -- a quick overview of the good and interesting stuff that I've gotten recently. The title is from Chuck Klosterman's description of what a rock critic really does.

Ross Macdonald, The Way Some People Die, Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, July 2007, $12.95

Ross Macdonald's "Lew Archer" novels are the third, and least lauded, leg of the modern detective fiction stool, along with the better-known Hammett and Chandler. Macdonald took the expansive, socially engaged plots of Chandler but pulled back from Chandler's "soiled knight" hero to a more remote, detached detective in Lew Archer. Nearly all of the novels in this series are great; The Underground Man, his masterpiece, is one of the five or so best detective novels ever written. Underground Man, however, was already in print as a stylist trade paperback from Vintage -- The Way Some People Die, on the other hand, has been out of print for the past ten years.

Vintage sent me their new edition of The Way Some People Dies, the third Lew Archer novel, which was originally published in 1951. The design sense is impeccable, as always with Vintage -- though I suppose I could complain that they always change the design for a series in the middle. (I have ten or so Macdonald books from Vintage, with a very different look -- and Vintage's run of Jim Thompson also changed gears five or six times before it was done.) People like me do want the books to look like they belong next to each other on the shelf. But that's the only thing I could complain about.

The first two Lew Archer books were good, but in The Way Some People Die everything Macdonald was trying to do crystallized, and he seized control of his two great locations: the great American dreamland of California and the often-unbridgeable spaces between people. He's essential reading for anyone who likes serious mystery novels, and this is a perfect place to start.

Sheila Williams, editor, Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine: 30th Anniversary Anthology, Tachyon Publications, 2007, $14.95

I don't think I need say much about this book, which collects some of the best stories from the first thirty years of a great science fiction magazine. Maybe just listing a few of the titles will do the job for me: John Varley's "Air Raid." Octavia E. Butler's "Speech Sounds." Bruce Sterling's "Dinner in Audoghast." Kelly Link's "Flying Lessons." Charles Stross's "Lobsters." Stephen Baxter's "The Children of Time."

Not impressed? OK -- you're hard to please. But the other stories in this book are by Robert Silverberg, Isaac Asimov, Kim Stanley Robinson, Connie Willis, Jonathan Lethem, Mike Resnick, Ursula K. Le Guin, James Patrick Kelly, Michael Swanwick, Lucius Shepard, and Robert Reed. I dare to you find an anthology of stories from the same venue, covering the past thirty years, as strong as that.

If you already have a long shelf of Year's Best anthologies and single-author collections, you might just have everything in this book already. For the rest of you, this is an easy way to get a lot of good stuff all in one place.

Brian Ruckley, Winterbirth, Orbit, September 2007, $14.99

I'm currently on a hiatus from beginning new multi-volume series of big fat secondary world fantasy novels, but this one looks pretty impressive, so I should note it. Winterbirth is the first novel from Scots author Brian Ruckley, and the big launch title for Orbit US, a major new SF/Fantasy imprint from the same people who created the exceptionally successful Orbit line in the UK.

It looks dark, bloody, and pseudo-Scottish, and the series title has "Trilogy" built right into it, so there's very little chance of serious multi-book bloat. I'd say this is for fans of George R.R. Martin, Steven Erikson, and David Gemmell. Any UK folks out there already read it, and willing to give an opinion?

Books Read: October 2025

I do this every month, mostly for myself. This is what I read last month. I'll add links once the posts go live. As usual, I do it largely because I've been doing it for a long time: it's somewhat useful and very familiar, and I guess that's good enough.

Robin Enrico, Life of Vice (10/4)

Art Bathazar & Franco, ArkhaManiacs (10/5)

Brian Doherty, Dirty Pictures (10/5)

Yves Chaland, Freddy Lombard, Vol. 5: F.52 (digital, 10/11)

P.G. Wodehouse, The Mating Season (10/11)

Matt Kindt & Wilfredo Torrres, Bang! (10/12)

Drew Friedman, All the Presidents (10/18)

Loren D. Estleman, Infernal Angels (10/18)

Séverine Vidal & Kim Consigny, George Sand: True Genius, True Woman (10/19)

Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man (in Complete Novels, 10/19)

Alexandro Jodorowsky & Mœbius, The Incal, Vol. 2: The Luminous Incal (digital, 10/24)

Zach Worton, The Disappearance of Charley Butters (10/25)

James Thurber, The Last Flower (in Writings and Drawings, 10/25)

Manuelle Fior, The Interview (digital, 10/26)

Dino Pai, Dear Beloved Stranger (10/27)

Kim Newman, Something More Than Night (10/27)

In November, I will continue to read books, and, if I'm not hit by a bus, I'll list them here in time.

Quote of the Week: How a Lying Liar Lies

"The chief thing," I advised them, "is not to let her tire you out. When you catch her in a lie, she admits it and gives you another lie to take its place and, when you catch her in that one, admits it and gives you still another, and so on. Most people - even women - get discouraged after you've caught them in the third or fourth straight lie and fall back on either the truth or silence, but not Mimi. She keeps trying and you've got to be careful or you'll find yourself believing her, not because she seems to be telling the truth, but simply because you're tired of disbelieving her."

 - Nick Charles in Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man, p.893 in Complete Novels

Books Read: March 2025

Here's what I read this past month. I list it here mostly as a way to keep track of it for myself; if it helps one other person in the world I suppose that's a bonus. I add links as the posts go live; I'm currently running five to six weeks ahead, so you'll have a bit of a wait.

James Kochalka, Mechaboys (3/1, digital)

Helene Stapinski, Five-Finger Discount (3/1)

J.L. Westover, Mr. Lovenstein Presents: Feelings (3/2, digital)

Jack Vance, Servants of the Wankh (3/2, in Planet of Adventure)

Yves Chaland, Freddy Lombard, Vol. 3: The Comet of Carthage (3/8, digital)

Jaime Hernandez, Queen of the Ring: Wrestling Drawings: 1980-2020 (3/9, digital)

Evelyn Waugh, Remote People (3/9, in Waugh Abroad)

Andrea "Casty" Castellan, Mickey Mouse: Trapped in the Shadow Dimension (3/15, digital)

Mike Mignola, Bowling with Corpses and Other Strange Tales from Lands Unknown (3/16, digital)

Louise Brooks, Lulu in Hollywood (3/16)

Julian Hanshaw, Cloud Hotel (3/22, digital)

Megan Nicole Dong, Sharky Malarky: A Sketchshark Collection (3/23, digital)

David Goodis, Down There (3/23, in Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s)

Brian Michael Bendis and Bill Walko, Fortune & Glory: The Musical (3/28, digital)

P.G. Wodehouse, My Man Jeeves (3/28)

Sophie Goldstein and Jenn Jordan, An Embarrassment of Witches (3/29, digital)

Sergio Aragones and Mark Evanier, Space Circus (3/30, digital)

Dashiell Hammett, The Dain Curse (3/30, in Complete Novels)

Carl Hiaasen, Paradise Screwed (3/31)

In April, I'm pretty sure I will read some more books.

Book-A-Day 2018 #198: Poisonville by Massimo Carlotto & Marco Videtta

The corrupt town is traditionally a small one in fiction. It may be a city, it may be a local powerhouse, but it's not the center. The rot may be pervasive and all-encompassing, in the darkest noir, but it's still contained. Telling the same story in a world capital would be too depressing -- too much like the news.

Poisonville, a noir novel by Massimo Carlotto and Marco Videtta, is set in a deeply corrupt city in Italy's booming Northeast, about a decade and a half ago. The city is never named: it can be any one you want it to be, or all of the region collectively. Call it Personville, if you want to be cheeky. (Poisonville as a title is new for the English-language edition; the Italian original was named the more straightforward Nordest. The reference is to Hammett's Red Harvest -- possibly the first major corrupt-town story -- in case you missed it.)

A gorgeous young woman, Giovanna Barovier, is about to be married to rising young lawyer Francesco Visentin. But she's having an affair with another man. She meets him, has sex with him for what she knows will be the last time. Afterward, she tells him that she has to tell everything to her fiance -- and her lover drowns her in a bathtub to keep his secrets hidden.

The wedding, obviously, does not happen. Francesco is devastated -- almost as much because his fiancee was having an affair as because of her death, and maybe even more so because she had dark secrets in her life he didn't know about. Worse for him, he's initially accused of the murder: she was found in her bathtub at home, and his alibi for the time of death is vague. (We know he didn't do it, because we know her lover killed her -- but we don't know who her lover is.)

Carolotto and Videtta roll out the plot from there, with a medium-sized cast of mostly the prosperous and successful elite of this city -- though including Giovanna's disgraced father, who went for jail for burning down his business for the insurance and incidentally killing a few people in the fire. A few, including Giovanna's best friend Carla, are trying to trace and fight the corruption, but most are at least mildly complicit in it.

Francesco's father Antonio and The Contessa -- head of the other most prominent family in town -- are spearheading a semi-secret plan to move the Torrefranchi Foundation, some vague consortium of local businesses, from Italy to Romania, where labor is much cheaper and regulations much laxer. For the time being, someone is dumping toxic waste near the city, which Carla is trying to trace.

This is not a mystery. Francesco is cleared of suspicion in the murder not because he investigates anything, but because his father fixes it. He does snoop around a little with Carla, but that doesn't accomplish much.

It is a noir novel, and so the accumulating pages are devoted to showing, from all sides, just how corrupt this town is and just how deep the rot goes, through nearly all of the characters.

In the end, we learn both the plans for the Foundation and the identity of the murderer/lover -- and both are, as they must be, the worst possible ones. And, because this is a good noir novel, they are related.

This is a very place-particular noir; the authors spend a lot of space talking about how horrible and corrupt the Northeast is in general terms. Noir often has that kind of rhetoric, either from a particular character or the narrative voice, and it often is about the specific place. But, for most of us, Italy's Northeast isn't a place we know much about, or can conceptualize clearly, so it can feel like stridency or monomania. ("OK, we get it -- it's a rotten area full of rotten people.")

It's also entirely a Girl in a Fridge book: Giovanna exists to be beautiful and loved and at the center of mysteries, and has to die on page 20 so a man can get angry and upset and engaged. I enjoyed Poisonville, and it's good at what it does, but I wish it had been Carla's story -- she's an outsider, almost entirely innocent of the Northeast's corruption and not tied to these intertwined families, plus a woman, plus the dead woman's best friend. She has the most reason to want the truth, and the best standing to force it out.

Ah, well. It's futile to mourn the novels that weren't written. This is the one that exists, and it's deeply noir in the best and most unfortunate ways: know that if you decide to read it.

Quote of the Hour: And Then What Happened, Fella?

...[I] went over to my hotel, thinking about that neat white bed. But it was nearly eight o'clock, and my stomach needed attention. I went into the hotel dining room and had that fixed up.

Then a leather chair tempted me into stopping in the lobby while I burnt a cigar. That led to conversation with a traveling railroad auditor from Denver, who knew a man I knew in St. Louis. Then there was a lot of shooting in the street.

We went to the door and decided that the shooting was in the vicinity of City Hall. I shook the auditor and moved up that way.

I had done two-thirds of the distance when an automobile came down the street toward me, moving fast, leaking gun-fire from the rear.

 - Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest, p.97 in Complete Novels

Quote of the Week: Knockout

Cooper hit the floor, bounced, and settled there. It took the referee half a minute to count ten seconds. It would have been just the same if he had taken half an hour. Kid Cooper was out.

 - Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest, p.69 in Complete Novels

Books Read: August 2025

This is what I read last month; as always, it's mostly an index to the blog and primarily useful to me  rather than you the home viewer. But there it is:

Richard Sala, Night Drive (digital, 8/2)

Ruth Goodman, How to Be a Victorian (8/2)

Doug Savage, Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy (digital, 8/3)

Mark Chiarello, editor, Wednesday Comics (8/9)

William Goldman, The Princess Bride (8/9)

René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo, Asterix the Gladiator (8/10)

Sophie Goldstein, House of Women (digital, 8/16)

Jack Vance, Trullion: Alastor 2262 (in Alastor, 8/16)

Sergio Aragones' Groo: The Hogs of Horder (digital, 8/17)

Jeff Lemire, 10,000 Ink Stains: A Memoir (digital, 8/23)

Various, The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Amazing Colossal Episode Guide (8/23)

Peter Bagge and Gilbert Hernandez, Yeah! (digital, 8/24)

Ambrose Bierce, In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (in The Devil's Dictionary, Tales & Memoirs, 8/24)

Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima, Lone Wolf & Cub, Vol. 7: Cloud Dragom, Wind Tiger (digital. 8/25)

Carol Lay, Murderburg (digital, 8/26)

Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (in Prose and Poetry, 8/26)

Stan Sakai, Usagi Yojimbo, Book 8: Shades of Death (digital, 8/27)

P.G., Wodehouse, The Small Bachelor (8/27)

Kenji Tsuruta, Wandering Island, Vol. 1 (digital, 8/28)

Philippe Riche, Bad Break, Chapter #2 (digital, 8/29)

Loren D. Estleman, The Left-Handed Dollar (8/29)

Michael Sweater, Everything Sucks: Kings of Nothing (digital, 8/30)

Denis-Pierre Filippi & Silvio Camboni, Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse and the Amazing Lost Ocean (digital, 8/31)

Dashiell Hammett, The Glass Key (in Complete Novels, 8/31)

I plan to keep reading books in the future.

Quote of the Hour: Theory of Lies

"It's a funny thing - I suppose you've noticed it - the people who lie the most are nearly always the clumsiest at it, and they're easier to fool with lies than most people, too. You'd think they'd be on the look-out for lies, but they seem to be the very ones that will believe almost anything at all."

 - Gilbert Wynant in Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man, p.861 in Complete Novels 

Quote of the Hour: Not Quite a Credo

 "....Nobody thinks clearly, no matter what they pretend. Thinking's a dizzy business, a matter of catching as many of those foggy glimpses as you can and fitting them together the best you can. That's why people hang on so tight to their beliefs and opinions; because, compared to the haphazard way in which they're arrived at, even the goofiest opinion seems wonderfully clear, sane, and self-evident. And if you let it get away from you, then you've got to dive back into that foggy muddle to wangle yourself out another to take its place."

 - The Continental Op, speaking in Dashiell Hammett's The Dain Curse, p.342 in Complete Novels

Books Read: November 2024

Here's what I read last month. Links will follow once the posts go live.

Asher Perlman, Well, This Is Me (11/2, digital)

P.G. Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim (11/2)

Tony Lourenço, Thierry Lamy, and various artists, Pink Floyd in Comics (11/3, digital)

Elias Grieg, I Can't Remember the Title But the Cover Is Blue (11/9, digital)

Emil Ferris, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Book Two (11/10, digital)

Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest (11/10, in Complete Novels)

Ryan Harby, Awkward Pause (11/16, digital)

Alex Irvine, Anthropocene Rag (11/16)

Jean "Moebius" Giraud, Moebius Library: The Art of Edena (11/17, digital)

Olivia Jaimes, Nancy Wins at Friendship (11/22, digital)

Axelle Lenoir, Camp Spirit (11/23, digital)

Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist (11/23)

Sarah Andersen, Adulthood Is a Gift! (11/24, digital)

Derek Evernden, Bogart Creek, Vol. 1 (11/28, digital)

Stan Sakai, Usagi Yojimbo, Book 5: Lone Goat and Kid (11/29, digital)

Julian Hanshaw, Space Junk (11/30, digital)

Reading will continue as long as I'm physically capable.

Welcome to Hard Case Week

As long-time readers might have noted, I'm prone to bizarre reading projects. And it's been a while since the last one, which means I'm overdue.

So, since I'm on a business trip in San Francisco -- home of Dashiell Hammett, father of the hardboiled mystery -- and since I look to have quite a bit of spare time here, and because I'm missing a publishing party I really wanted to go to (for the launch of Naomi Novik's fifth novel and a celebration of Hard Case Crime)...for all those reasons and more, I took a pile of Hard Case books to read on this trip, and I'm going to try to review them at least one a day while I'm here.

I finished Lawrence Block's A Diet of Treacle on the plane, and am most of the way through Christa Faust's Money Shot, with five more books stacked under those. I'm on West Coast time this week, so my "day" may skew later than usual -- but I hope to have something up about Treacle before Sunday is over here.

And maybe the next time I come to a strange city, it won't be on a holiday weekend, and some actual human beings will be around...