Category Archives: Crime fiction

Book review: Dare Me

Posted on May 26, 2012 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

Dare Me“At first, cheer was something to fill my days, all our days. Age fourteen to eighteen, a girl needs something to kill all that time, that endless itchy waiting, every hour, every day for something – anything – to begin. There’s something dangerous about the boredom of teenage girls.”

So says Addy Hanlon, narrator of Megan Abbott’s latest book, Dare Me. And you better believe it.

I’ll make no bones about being a huge fan of Abbott’s work (I’ve previously reviewed her work on this site here and here). Her first four books, set in America in the thirties, forties and fifties, took classic noir themes and characters and gave them a mighty twist. The End of Everything, her break out work, was a deceptively simple coming of age tale about a missing girl in an anonymous middle class American suburb in the seventies.

Dare Me takes place in the present, in another part of the great expanse of nameless US suburbia. Addy and Beth have been best friends for years and are the top dogs of their high school cheerleading squad. Beth is the captain, Addy always her faithful lieutenant. Cheerleading and their commanding place in it is the ground zero of their world. “Let’s face it,” Addy says at one point, “we’re the only animation in the whole drop ceiling, glass bricked tomb of a school.… Read more

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Posted in Book Reviews, Crime fiction, Megan Abbott, Noir fiction

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Pulp Friday: A Rage in Harlem

Posted on May 25, 2012 by Andrew Nette| 2 Comments

Today’s Pulp Friday offering is A Rage in Harlem by Chester Himes.

Himes is a difficult author to categorise. He’s wrote a number of excellent, fast paced, darkly humorous crime novels, of which the so-called “Harlem Domestic” series featuring the black police detectives ‘Coffin’ Ed Jones and ‘Grave Digger’ Johnson, are the best known.

He also wrote a large number of short stories, as well as polemical and literary works focusing on his experience of racism in the US.

Born into a poor family in Kansas in 1909, by the age of 19 he’d been sentence to 25 years in jail for armed robbery. He started to write in jail. Upon his parole he made attempts to start a writing career, financing his efforts through a myriad of jobs. But success eluded him until the early fifties when he moved to France, where the translations of his early novels had met with critical acclaim.

A Rage In Harlem was the first of Himes’s seven novels featuring ‘Coffin’ and ‘Grave Digger’, who spent as much time racism in the police force as they did crime in Harlem. The story revolves around a man who scraps together money to pay for an abortion for his girlfriend. Everything goes terribly wrong, however, and she disappears with the funds.… Read more

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Posted in Chester Himes, Crime fiction, Pulp Friday, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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Pulp Friday: pulp from the seventies and eighties

Posted on April 27, 2012 by Andrew Nette| 2 Comments

“When he has to, Shannon can be as vicious as the worst Mafia thug who ever used a blow torch on a stoolie.”

We usually associate pulp fiction with the classic hard-boiled covers of the fifties and sixties. But pulp endured well into the seventies and beyond, before finally dying out and in the late eighties.

Today’s Pulp Friday is a selection of pulp covers from that latter period of pulp, the seventies and eighties.

I’m not sure why, but the pulp from this period seemed more extreme than it’s earlier iterations, if that’s possible, more turbo changed and over the top. The violence was more pronounced. The characters were PIs, mercenaries, spies and adventurers, like their predecessors, but they were even more starkly drawn, often to the point of being bizarre.

If you doubt me, check out the following.

Shannon #3: The Mindbenders features a private eye who lives “in a penthouse on Manhattan’s swank Upper East Side, but most of his work is done in the gutter”. He is the number one agent for a boutique government spy agency called Morituri, run by a priest referred to as Number One. Shannon is handsome, independently wealth and writes PI novels in his spare time. This book involves the suicide of a woman Shannon was close to which he ties to other deaths involving the UN.… Read more

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Posted in Crime fiction, Fawcett Gold Medal Books, Pulp fiction, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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Crime fiction criminals

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Andrew Nette| 4 Comments

By definition, the majority of crime fiction characters are criminals or at least commit illegal and/or immoral acts. But books where the main character is a full-time professional criminal are surprisingly few and far between. Here’s a selection of some of the best.

It’s worth noting that when this post originally appeared on the Crime Fiction Lover website, readers came up with several good additions, including Andrew Vachss’s Burke, Charlie Huston’s Henry Thornton, Lawrence Block’s hitman character Keller and Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley. I had originally thought of including the James Ellroy character Dudley Smith (“Knock, knock, who’s there, Dudley Smith, so reds beware”), but he’s a bent cop so not eligible. However, Ellroy’s Pete Bondurant would definitely make the cut.

Please leave a comment if you can think of any others.

Parker by Richard Stark (aka Donald Westlake)

The 24 books written between 1962 and 2010 featuring the professional thief known as Parker remain some of the best crime fiction ever written. Sixteen Parker novels appeared between 1962 and 1974. Westlake took a rest from the character until 1997, then wrote another eight Parker books.

Parker is a career criminal who steals things for a living. Get in his way on a job or try to double cross him afterwards and he’ll hurt you.… Read more

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Posted in Crime fiction, Donald Westlake aka Richard Stark, Garry Disher, George V Higgins, James Ellroy, Jim Thompson, Megan Abbott, Michael Caine, Parker, Ted Lewis

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Pulp Friday: double shot of Gil Brewer

Posted on April 20, 2012 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

“She lit a fuse inside men.”

Last time I featured Gil Brewer on Pulp Friday, it resulted in a spirited Twitter discussion as to who was the quintessential hard-boiled pulp author, Brewer or Donald Westlake aka Richard Stark.

Personally, my votes goes to Westlake/Stark on account of his Parker books.

But I do love Brewer’s sleazy psychological take on pulp fiction. He’s also a case of life imitating art. He died in 1983, after years of alcoholism, mental health problems and financial stress. And Like most of the most accomplished pulp novelists, he only gained critical attention well after his death.

Both the titles featured today were published by Monarch Books, based in Derby, Connecticut, Play It Hard in 1964 and Wild To Possess (“She lit a fuse inside men”) in 1963.

It looks like Brewer was in good company in the Monarch stable of pulp writers. As the advertisement on the inside back cover of Wild To Possess states, you could buy these two Brewer titles and three other Monarch pulps for just $1.50. That’s value, especially given that among the titles to choose from were The Key Game “A fast moving exhilarating story of emotional fadism among uninhibited married couples”, and The Lolita Lovers,  a “dramatic novel of the ‘beat’ generation living and loving by thir own rules in a teeming asphalt jungle”.… Read more

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Posted in Crime fiction, Donald Westlake aka Richard Stark, Gil Brewer, Noir fiction, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art, Vintage pulp paperback covers

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