Stories fade to haiku

There's a nice passage in Olen Steinhauer's The Vienna Assignment about immigrant stories, which really applies to all stories. Bruno, the central character is in a Vienna bar that is the second home to immigrants who have escaped from behind the Iron Curtain. The bar woman is explaining to him how their stories mutate over time, becoming more and more condensed, and stripped of raw emotion. What I find interesting, having listened to some people's stories and ancedotes several times, is that as long story or haiku the storyteller will no doubt have managed to convey the essence of the journey; that the short story is no less powerful than the full blown account. And that's a styling question crime authors need to make: where on the spectrum from full account to haiku they want to settle? For me, I prefer show over tell; sparse and tight over lengthy description. Steinhauer himself gets the balance just about right; neither overly long nor haiku.

'Ask anyone around here for their story. Ask what happened to them. If they just arrived, you'll find that their story goes on for a long time, with details on top of details, and you can watch them get upset - I mean, visibly - as they tell it to you. Ask someone who's been here a few years, and they'll have it condensed down to a sentence, maybe two, and that's it.'

'Interesting.'

'It's inevitable,' she said, then put out her cigarette. 'Over here, your past is just a story. It gets smaller with time, until it's just a haiku. Until it's got no more emotion in it.'

'Until it's cold.'

'Until your past can't touch you any more,' said Monika. 'Watch out you don't turn cold, too.'

Rather than wait for cold exiles to fill up the bar, Bruno returned home.

Saturday Snippet: Vanilla Ride by Joe Lansdale

I picked up a copy of Vanilla Ride by Joe Lansdale this afternoon and boy am I looking forward to reading it. Hap Collins and Leonard Pine are two of my favourite characters. If you haven't tried one of their stories then make haste to your nearest store or fire up Amazon, Book Depository, or whoever you use and get your mitts on one. The man sure can write. Here's the opening few lines of Vanilla Ride.

I hadn't been shot at in a while, and no-one had hit me in the head for a whole month or two. It was kind of a record, and I was starting to feel special.

Brett and I were upstairs in our little rented house, lying in bed, breathing hard, having just arrived at the finish line of a slow, sweet race that at times can seem like a competitive sport, but when played right, even when you're the last to arrive, can make you feel like a winner.

In that moment, life was good.

Brett sat up and fluffed her pillow behind her back and pushed her long bloodred hair to the side with one hand, shoved her chest forward in a way that made me feel mighty lucky, said, "I haven't had that much fun since I pistol-whipped a redheaded midget."

I'm only a few pages in, but the writing is tight, dry and witty, with great banter. A couple more lines.

Used to, you could leave your wallet on the porch swing and no one would bother it. These days, you left a cheese grater out, someone would steal the holes.

And:

Leonard said, "Man you could have at least put on pants. That robe is a little too peekaboo."

"My motto," I said, "is if you've got it, flaunt it."

"What you're flauntin' is enough to make a man turn a gun on himself," Leonard said.

Saturday Snippet: Hand in the Fire by Hugo Hamilton

Hand in the Fire tells the story of Vid Cosic, a Serbian immigrant to Ireland, and his relationship with the dysfunctional Concannon family who befriend him. Binding them together in a strange and strained embrace are four violent incidents - the death of Cosic's parents in a car crash in Serbia, the drowning of a pregnant, unmarried young woman off the Conemara coast, a drunken brawl that leaves a man with a broken jaw and hip, and fists thrown in the break-up of a troubled marriage. I bought it as in impulse buy in The Reading Room in Carrick-on-Shannon based on the strength of the opening few lines. And here they are:

You have a funny way of doing things here.

Like friendship, for example.

Nobody does friendship like you do in this country. It comes out of nowhere. Full on. All or nothing. I've been to places where friendship is cultivated with great care over a longer period of time, like a balcony garden. Here it seems to grow wild.

You could say that I did him a small favour. I found his mobile phone lying in the street and contacted his girlfriend. Her name was Helen and there was a picture of her on the phone, laughing into the camera. I could have read through all her messages, but I didn't want to be intrusive. I contacted her and arranged for him to pick it up that same evening. It was nothing more than that. Anyone else would have done the same. I waited outside a late-night shop and saw him walking towards me with a big smile as though we already knew each other. He thanked me and stood there, refusing to let me go. Before I knew it, he was returning the favour, shaking hands and leading me away to a bar for a drink.

I read the story in several sittings over one day and I'll post my review sometime this week.

How cops become bent …

A Saturday Snippet from Peter Temple's, Truth. A just about perfect, succinct explanation for how and why cops become bent. Great stuff.


Bent forever, the job. Why not? Terrible pay, the hours, the conditions, the risks. It only took a few days for him to work out who he had signed up with: the dim, the school bullies, body-builders, martial-arts fanatics, control freaks, thrillseekers, loners, kids from cop families, kids bought up by mum.

In uniform, a full understanding of the job slowly dawned. A life spent dealing with the dishonest, the negligent, the deviant, the devious, the desperate, the cruel, the callous, the vicious, the drunk, the drugged, the temporarily deranged and permanently insane, the sick and sad, the sadists, sex maniacs, child molesters, flashers, exhibitionists, women-beaters, wife-beaters, child-beaters, self-mulitators, the homicidal, matricidal, patricidal, fraticidal, suicidal.

Some of them dead.

You could quickly slide into otherness, estrangement from the civilian world, a sense of entitlement. What did it matter if you didn’t pay full price for your clothes, your drycleaning, got free coffee, a sandwich, if people bought you drinks in pubs? You could take lotto tickets, not pay at places. People gave you horse tips, invites to clubs, you could go after your shift with a mate, everything on the house, the best girls.

Just give your name. Expecting you, the bloke.

They gave every sign you were the sexiest thing that year, you had experiences not normally had on a date or with the wife. When you were pissed, someone gave you something. And then one day you got the call.

Shit, mate, bastard pulls me over on the Tulla, goin a bit over, yeah. Not the fine, mate, the fucken points, gonna have to get the fucken push-bike out, have a word, can you? Appreciate it, mate.

Saturday Snippet: The Wheelman by Duane Swierczynski

The Wheelman was one of my top reads of 2009, a ferociously paced heist caper, with snappy dialogue and a gazillion twists. Here's a snippet where a former ex-cop quizzes the mute, anti-hero, Lennon.

'Okay, you're officially sprung. You can cut the shit and start talking.'

Oh Jesus. Here we go again.

'Look, you mick bastard, I know you can speak. I heard you. Right before you blew up my fucking house. You said something about arseholes. Which I really fucking love. The extra 'r' in the there. Why not just say asshole? No fucking idea.'

Lennon, of course, said nothing. He couldn't. Not that this cop would understand that. Just let him keep flapping his gums. It was more time to figure out a next move.

'Still the tough guy, eh? Look, really, cut it the fuck out. We need each other, otherwise you wouldn't even be here. Here's the deal. I'm taking us to my hotel room. Now don't get that look on your face. I'm not a fag. You're not my type, anyway. I like men who can moan when I fuck them up the ass. Most you could do is scratch the mattress. And frankly, that wouldn't do it for me. It's all about the audio.'

The white lane markers whizzed by at seventy miles an hour.

'Christ, your a humorless fuck.'

Lennon saw the city receding behind him and realized they were headed north. Or northeast. To the northeast. Where this ex-cop used to live.

Great stuff. My review is here.

Saturday Snippet: Diamond Dove by Adrian Hyland

Emily Tempest’s life is split between the aboriginal world of her long dead mother and the white world of her mining father. Neither completely out of place nor fully at home in either an aboriginal camp or a rough and tumble mining town, she spends time in both. In the following two passages, Hyland describes wonderfully the two worlds.

‘Li’l Emmy, parnparr,’ said Gladys Kneebone as we sat by the fire half an hour later. ‘Didn’t they feed you down south?’

Gladys herself was a battleship on stilts. She wasn’t much older than me, but she’d exploded in every direction. She was immensely tall, immensely fat, wearing a green dress and a coiffure that looked like it had been fashioned with a splitting axe. She thrust a pannikur of head-banging tea into my hand, fossiked through the embers with a stick and offered me a leg of … a leg of what? I wondered warily. Rabbit?

‘Good tucker that one,’ she exclaimed.

I took a look at the scorched carcass grinning up from the ashes. Jesus, a fuking cat! Been a while since I’d had one of those. What the hell, I decided, it couldn’t be any worse than some of the crap I’d endured in roadhouses on the way up here.

It wasn’t. Kind of stringy, kind of greasy, kind of …well, catish but I managed.

Many of the adults I remembered from my childhood – Stumpy Doods, Spinifes, Timothy Windmill – drifted over and had a quiet word, shook my hand or threw their wary arms around me. Cissy Whiskey slipped in through the ruck, touched my face as if it was a sacred object and gave me the long lost daughter spiel. Cissy was famous for her ash-baked damper. I must have eaten tons of the stuff, smothered in golden syrup and washed down with sweet black tea. Despite the damper, Cissy herself was as skinny as a picket, with piercing eyes and an aureole of white hair.

* * * *

He appeared to be offended by the look of alarm that shot across my face. I was, I supposed, insulting the place he’d chosen to make his home. But Bluebush! What a dump! The sort of town which it’s easier to buy a silencer that a decent coffee. When we visited town, I’d never leave my father’s side; as a little black kid, you could feel the antagonism radiating out from the whitefellers when you passed them in the street.

And what a mob they were themselves. A bigger collection of dikheads and drop-kicks you’d have to travel a long way to find; boozers, bruisers and substance abusers, rockjaw Germans and lockjaw Yorkshiremen, grease monkeys and gamblers, meatworkers, meat-heads, missionaries, maniacs, men on the run, men on the dole, men on the Witness Protection Program. Peddlers, pushers, whores and bores, deperadoes of every denomination. You name it, they were there, drawn to the town like flies to a carcass.

My review is here

Saturday Snippet: Henry

The Crime Scraps post about Geung, Colin Cotterill’s character with a learning disability, bought back fond memories of one of my own characters from an unpublished novel - Henry, who has Down's Syndrome and who works as an assistant to an amateur detective, who is herself wheelchair bound. Henry is one of the stars of the Irish Special Olympic Judo team, who is pretty handy in a tight corner and has great humour with a mischievous streak. He's a character I'm hoping will one day see the light of day as I'm very fond of him. Two Henry snippets:

Henry swivelled the chair around and pushed Mary down the drive. Jack trailed after them, leaving Mrs Roche stranded and confused in the doorway. As they turned at the end of the driveway, she gave a faint wave and slowly closed the door.

‘Ignorant cow,’ Mary muttered under her breath.

‘What Ms Carmichael?’ asked Henry.

‘I said, I thought that Mrs Roche was very rude.’

‘I thought you said she was an ignorant cow.’ Henry said loudly before bursting into a braying laugh.

-----

Mary was sitting at the wheel of her car, her fingers drumming off the steering wheel, staring over at Aidan’s house. In the passenger seat Henry was humming, bouncing his head to the tune he was making.

‘Henry, you’re repeating. How does the rest of the song go?’

Henry looked at Mary and carried on humming the same few notes over and over.

‘For god’s sake Henry, do another tune, will you.’

‘My favourite,’ stated Henry and then resumed his humming.

‘I know! We all know. Can’t you do another one, that one’s driving me nuts.’

‘How long we gonna be here, Ms Carmichael?’

‘I dunno, Henry. It depends on whether Aidan goes out or not. Maybe ten minutes, maybe a few hours.’

‘Can’t we just go and talk to him?’

‘No, no, not yet. We need to work out if he’s behaving oddly, you know, if he might be doing things he shouldn’t. Besides, what would we say?’

‘We could ask him if he’s seen Mrs Roche’s cat?’ Henry suggested.

‘We could, you’re right, but then what? Aidan, are you doing things you shouldn’t?’

‘Yeah,’ said Henry enthusiastically. ‘We could ask that.’

‘No! He’d know what we’re up to then, wouldn’t he. We need to catch him out. Get him to reveal what he’s hiding.’

Henry nodded his head and then started humming again.

‘Jesus,’ Mary muttered, ‘can you hum a different tune, Henry?’

‘It’s my favourite,’ he replied, continuing to repeat the same few notes.

Saturday Snippet: Walking the Perfect Square by Reed Farrel Coleman

A short snippet from my November book of the month, Reed Farrel Coleman's, Walking the Perfect Square, with the main character, Moe Prager, being his usual philosophical self.

Leaving Pooty's I felt as much as I did after my college statistics classes: more confused on the way out than on the way in. But that was less Jack and Pete's fault than mine. My first step was a misstep. I could see that now. I was a bloodhound with no nose for blood. My forensics training was rudimentary at best. I wasn't going to find a magic carpet fiber or blood splatter. There was nothing at Pooty's for me to find that any of the other investigators, most far more experienced than myself, wouldn't have already stumbled upon. Maybe that's why they hadn't gotten anywhere. Sometimes, I thought, experience gets in the way. Even if I was wrong, it sounded good.

I found myself staring at Patrick Mahoney's poster pasted to a mailbox next to my car. 'HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN?' the bold block letters wanted to know. It struck me that I hadn't really. I remembered a slide of a Magritte painting from my Introduction to Art History class - I guess I had college on my mind that day. It's funny what you think about. Anyway, the painting was of a tobacco pipe and the artist called it Ceci n'est pas une pipe. In English I'm pretty sure that translates into 'This is not a pipe'. The point is, it wasn't a pipe. It was a painting of a pipe. And the poster I was looking at wasn't Patrick Mahoney. I guess that's what hit me.

My review is here.

Saturday Snippet: The White Gallows

This is a snippet that is unlikey to see the light of day beyond this post. It was the opening of The White Gallows, the next book in the series after The Rule Book, but I've decided to drop it. It took a little bit of persuasion, but on reflection I think the person who made the case is right. It feels kind of funny to edit out because it was written as flash fiction and then the rest of the novel was imagined and built from it. Dropping it somehow feels like erasing the key, initial cornerstone from the foundation of the story, although the book seems to work better without it - it provides some kind of haunting absence, I think. The cover, right, was the best I could mock up in five minutes and I'm lacking a bit of inspiration on that front. Ideas gratefully received. Anyway, here it is:

It was the same recurring nightmare, though nightmare was probably the wrong word. It wasn’t some fantastical labyrinth of cryptic signs and symbols, of ghosts and monsters. It was the Truth – of skeletal people he’d tortured, beaten and shot; of people so dehumanized they were merely automations; fragile beasts in a vast machine that ensnared them, extracted value, and disposed of their broken bodies. They were mules - animals of labour to be worked to death; stupid creatures that needed cajoling, disciplining and punishment to make them comply. They didn’t merit compassion or pity or aid when they broke; they were to be shot as lame mules were shot.

He was shouting at an emaciated figure - his head shorn of hair, face gaunt and drawn - only he couldn’t hear his own words, just the deafening noise of the factory. The man stared back blankly - no sign of comprehension or fear or defiance or hate; just emptiness. He could feel the gun in his hand, his arm lifting, coming into vision. He shouted again, waited for a reaction, then pulled the trigger.

A hole appeared in the man’s forehead just above his left eyebrow. He stayed on his feet a couple of moments, then dropped to his knees, his dark brown eyes still staring back, but now, ironically, somehow alive, his lips pulled in a slight smile. The corpse toppled forward its face smashing into cold concrete.

He moved the gun across the scared and hate-filled faces of witnesses, challenging them to defy his authority. A fellow, older mule hesitantly moved forward, his arms raised, hands open, and crouched down in the blood next to the body offering comfort and grief. His hollow, tear-stained face glanced up as the well polished boot arrived, his head jerking violently, his body toppling backwards, arms flailing. His skull cracked off the edge of a workbench and he slumped unconscious to the floor.

Koch woke with a start, his breathing laboured, heart pounding. His chest felt constricted as if tightly corseted. His striped cotton pyjamas were damp with cold sweat, the bed clothes kicked to the floor. He pushed himself up against the headboard, trying to slow his rapid breaths, and reached for a glass of water from the bedside locker. The room was near dark, dimly lit by a pale orange nightlight.

The nightmare had ended early - the shooting was always near the beginning. It was followed by a sequence of other atrocities he’d performed or witnessed – beatings, torture, rapes, punishments, humiliations, executions - all without mercy; none merited.

He took a sip of cool water and shivered. For over sixty years he’d been plagued by the memories. He could push them away during the day, but they haunted him each night, eating away at his soul, denying him peace. He knew they would never stop; that he could never be forgiven.

He deserved as much, he knew that. He’d killed people in cold blood and watched thousands more die; he’d been a willing participant. He’d thought of them as no more than animals; sub-humans that were devious, conniving enemies of the state. They deserved to pay the ultimate price for the crimes of their race and religion.

It was over thirty years later before he started to change his mind; before he admitted to himself that his victims were as human as he was – were more human than he was. He’d never told anybody else and he had no intention of ever doing so.

There was a sound downstairs, something being knocked over, thudding to the floor. He sat perfectly still and listened. The house was silent, then a creak. The floorboards were as old as the house and they sang with age. He’d once read that Japanese palaces were built with nightingale floors – boards that creaked however lightly and skilfully they were trodden on. That’s what the old farmhouse had become - a Japanese palace. A floorboard sang out again.

He picked up his cheap digital watch and brought it close to his face. Roza, his housekeeper, had long left the farmhouse. She lived in a barn conversion across the yard, although he knew it was unlikely she was there; she’d be spending the night with her boyfriend in Athboy.

It was probably a burglar. If they were going to come for him, they would have done so by now. And they would have come straight to his bedroom and searched the house later. If he could survive the Russians as they swept through Eastern Europe and the aftermath of the war, he could handle a burglar. He placed the watch back on the locker and eased his thin, frail legs out of the bed, sliding his bare feet into cheap slippers.

Koch crept across the room to an old wardrobe, the floorboards beneath a thick white rug revealing his slow progress. His fingers were shaking slightly with age, as they had periodically for the past two years, and he struggled to open the secret panel at the back of the unit. After a few moments it popped open and he pulled free a small handgun. It felt heavy in his hand despite its size, the grip comfortable in his palm.

He moved to the door, eased it open, and stood still listening for movement. The house was quiet; then the creaking of a misplaced step. Stealthily, he headed for the top of the stairs, the gun held in front of him, steadied by both hands, the training from sixty years ago still remembered. He eased himself forward, the gun pointing down into the darkness below.

The house had once again become silent. Gingerly he descended the stairs, the pale light of the night sky eating into the shadows through the semi-circular window above the Georgian door, the dull thump of his heart filling his ears. As he neared the ground floor he flicked on the light switch, swinging the gun round the empty hallway. He nudged open the door to his left, reached in, switched on the lights and slipped into the room. From behind the door somebody yanked the gun from his hand and something heavy landed on the crown of his head.

Saturday Snippet: If the Dead Rise Not by Philip Kerr (2009)

In the following passage Bernie Gunther ruminates on the meaning and life and death in his characteristically philosophical way, which is usually tempered by hefty dose of humourous cynicism, but not in this case. My review is here

Later on, I went out to my car and in the shifting dark I thought I saw the figure of the dead gardener, standing beside the well where he’d drowned. Maybe the house was haunted, after all. And if the house wasn’t haunted, I know I was, and probably always would be. Some us die in a day. For some, like me, it takes much longer than that. Years, perhaps. We all die, like Adam, it’s true, only it’s not every man that’s made alive again, like Ernest Hemingway. If the dead rise not then what happens to a man’s spirit? And if they do, with what body shall we live again? I didn’t have the answers. Nobody did. Perhaps, if the dead could rise and be incorruptible and I could be changed for ever in the blinking of an eye, then dying might be worth the trouble of getting killed, or killing myself.

Saturday Snippet: The Rabbit Factory by Marshall Karp (2006, Allison and Busby)

LAPD detectives Mike Lomax and Terry Biggs are investigating the death of a lowlife paedophile who was getting his kicks fondling young children whilst working as Rambunctious Rabbit, the signature mascot of the global entertainment conglomerate Lamarr Enterprises. Whilst a relatively straightforward police procedural, Karp tries to spice things up with a little humour, particularly through the laddish banter between cops. For example, Lomax and Biggs’ boss can’t help employing rectal references whenever he’s moaning about something.

He threw a computer printout on Kilcullen’s desk.
“We ran his prints. He’s been a busy little pervert.”
Kilcullen stood up. “Jesus, Lord, how in Christ’s name does a fucking pedophile get a job hugging and fondling kids all day?”
“He must’ve interviewed really, really good,” Terry said. Kilcullen, the father of six, ignored the crack. “What do you got so far?”
“We got dick,” I said. “Murder weapon and a sicko calling card. Terry was thinking that it could be a serial killer stepping up to the plate.”
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph, that is exactly what they’re shitting bricks about. They’re afraid some bozo is going to start picking off their cartoon characters one at a time. Biggs, I was just telling your partner, this one is on you boys. In fact, if you have anything else to do, like eat, sleep, or wipe your ass, cancel it.”
Brick shitting and ass wiping. Kilcullen was usually good for at least three scatological references.
“Yes, Sir,” Biggs said, answering for both of us.
“Good, because I’ve got the Governor of Cali-fucking-fornia crawling up my butt,” he said, completing the trinity of rectal references.

And a couple of hundred pages later.

“No problem,” Kilcullen said. “Fuck the asshole D.A.’s Office and their stupid fucking rules. Ike Rose can pay my goddam proctology bill if it will help solve these murders and get the Governor out of my rectum.”
Three anal references in five seconds. The man was in rare form. “Anything else?” he said.

My review can be found here.

Saturday Snippet: The Devil Met a Lady by Stuart Kaminsky (ibooks, 1993)

The Devil Met a Lady blends facts concerning Bette Davis’ life with the fictional world of private investigator Toby Peters (my review here). Kaminsky’s dialogue is snappy and smart, and the book would easily translate into a retro-noir movie or be updated to be set in the present.

The emergency room nurse patched up Jeremy’s head with iodine and strips of gauze held down with tape, and then she took care of me. She was dressed in white, smelled like rubbing alcohol, and reminded me of my ex-wife Anne. The nurse’s name was Joanne Writz. Her hair was yellow, her body thin. She didn’t look the least bit like Anne, but she noticed that my wounds were not fresh and she looked at me with the disapproving eyes of someone who expected no better from men.

‘I saw them enter the hotel,’ Jeremy explained as he watched me being cleaned and chastised. ‘I wasn’t sure it was them or I would have come inside.’

‘We’ll find her,’ I said.

‘You sure you want me to hear this?’ asked Joanne the nurse.

‘You plan to talk to anybody about it?’ I asked.

‘Only if I’m asked,’ she said, touching a rib. ‘Body’s not bad, if you ignore the scars.’

‘You like movies?’ I asked her.

‘Sure,’ she said, wrapping tape around my chest. ‘Judy Garland and Gene Kelly in For Me and My Gal?’ I tried.

She looked at Jeremy and then at me. ‘Are you asking me for a date?’ she said, putting her hands on her hips.

‘Says ‘Miss’ on your name tag,’ I answered with a grin.

‘I don’t go out with suicidals and children,’ she said.

‘I’m not suicidal.’

The nurse looked at Jeremy.

He looked back at her and nodded. ‘I’m sorry, Toby,’ he said. ‘But she may be right.’

‘Anne used to say I wouldn’t grow up,’ I said, as Joanne stepped back to survey her work.

‘Hmm,’ she said, satisfied.

‘Anne’s my ex-wife,’ I explained.

‘From what I can see, she’s a wise woman,’ said Joanne. ‘You can go now. Come back when you grow up.’

Saturday Snippet: Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell

Winter’s Bone is a coming of age story concerning sixteen year old Ree’s attempt to track down her no-good father in order to save her family’s beat-up house from possession by a bail bond company (my review here). Beautifully told, Daniel Woodrell expertly captures the sense of place and clannish familial social relations of the rural Ozarks of Missouri. In the following passage, Ree turns to her jailbird uncle for help, only to be turned down – Woodrell capturing the casual violence and minor politics of family ties.

Teardrop raised his hand and drew it back to smack her and let fly but diverted the smacking hand inches from Ree’s face to the nut bowl. His fingers dove rattling into the nuts, beneath the silver pistol, and lifted it from the lazy Susan. He bounced the weapon on his flat palm as though judging the weight with his hand for a scale, sighed, then ran a finger gently along the barrel to brush away grains of salt.

“Don’t you, nor nobody else, neither, ever go down around Hawkfall askin’ them people shit about stuff they ain’t offerin’ to talk about. That’s a real good way to end up et by hogs, or wishin’ you was. You ain’t no silly-assed town girl. You know better’n that foolishness.’

‘But we’re all related, ain’t we?’

‘Our relations get watered kinda thin between this valley here and Hawkfall. It’s better’n bein’ a foreigner or town people, but it ain’t nowhere near the same as bein’ from Hawkfall.’

Victoria said, ‘You know all those people down there, Teardrop. You could ask.’

‘Shut up.’

‘I just mean, none of them’s goin’ to be in a great big hurry to tangle with you, neither. If Jessup’s over there, Ree needs to see him. Bad.’

‘I said shut up once already, with my mouth.’

Ree felt bogged and forlorn, doomed to a spreading swamp of hateful obligations. Therewould be no ready fix or answer or help. She felt like crying but wouldn’t. She could be beat with a garden rake and never cry and had proved that twice before Mamaw saw an unsmiling angel pointing from the treetops at dusk and quit the bottle. She would never cry where the tears might be seen and counted against her. ‘Jesus-fuckin’-Christ. Dad’s your only little brother!’

‘You think I forgot that?’ He grabbed the clip and slammed it into the pistol, then ejected it and tossed pistol and clip back into the nut bowl. He made a fist with his right hand and rubbed it with his left. ‘Jessup’n me run together for nigh on forty years – but I don’t know where he’s at, and I ain’t goin’ to go around askin’ after him, neither.’

Ree knew better than to say another word, but was going to anyhow, when Victoria grabbed her hand and held it, squeezed, then said, ‘Now, when is it you was tellin’ me you’ll be old enough to join the army?’

Definitely on my list of best reads for this year and an author whose back-catalogue I'm looking forward to catching up with.

Saturday Snippet: The Lime Pit by Jonathan Valin

Since I’m flying back to Ireland today, I thought I’d do another Ohio snippet, revisiting The Lime Pit by Jonathan Valin, which I’ve posted about before here and here.

The following two passages give some insights into the psyche of Harry Stoner, his sentimentality and desire to help, but his deep cynicism of the world and his ability to make a difference. The second passage also has a go at detailing the difference between a fictional and real detective, which I think was a nice turn.

I didn’t really think about it. I wasn’t in a thinking mood. Which is no way to run a business as perilous and actuarial as mine. Those photographs had touched a nerve, right down to the root, awakened the strict moralist who hides inside of me and makes cheap ironic patter at the expense of my clients. Like an insult comedian, he’s a sentimentalist, quick with the apologies, the gush about how all his needling is well meant; and, like the insult comedian, his apologies are as phony as his laughter. All he really understands is anger – a comprehensive anger that extends to anything that falls short of the ideal. Which is why he stays hidden most of the time. He’s a vehement, childish cynic- all moralists and comedians are; and in a different city, in a line of work less likely to give him occasion to rail, he’d probably get me to into a lot of fights. But if Cincinnati is good for anything, it’s good for beating the dickens out of a latent Puritan.

I was feeling a very different kind of weariness as I trudged back to the bedroom. If Jo hadn’t been sleeping so soundly, I would have tried to ease the load by confessing some of it to her. The big difference between detectives in books and detectives in real life is that detectives in books are always rescuing their clients from perilous straits – which is a bunch of hokum, at that. That’s the way we would have things be, when the bitter truth is that no one can rescue anyone from anything. As exciting and professional as they are, those books about ageless beach bums who salvage their women’s psyches along with the family fortunes aren’t doing the world much good. All it takes is a little living to know how far from the truth that kind of fantasy can lead you and how irresponsible and finally dehumanizing playing the role of rescuer can be.
Now I am and have always been a sentimentalist. I’m a sucker for romance, maybe because I have so much trouble conjuring it up in my own life or maybe because it’s more romantic to live it out through other people’s lives. But, in my work, there comes a time when I have to abandon the abiding and pleasant notion that Harry can make it all come out right in the end. Harry can’t do that. And Harry shouldn’t promise desperate old men that he can. And Harry shouldn’t take jobs with that in mind. And Harry was feeling sick at what he’d committed himself to.

Saturday Snippet: Disco for the Departed by Colin Cotterill

Colin Cotterill’s lightly comic series following the exploits of Dr Siri Paiboun, the reluctant state coroner, is set in Laos in the mid-1970s, shortly after the communists come to power. In the following scene from Disco for the Departed, Nurse Dtui, his assistant, takes the opportunity to wind-up a small group of former royalist officers who have been send to the rural north-east of the country to be ‘re-programmed.’

‘I’m looking forward to seeing my first pog.’
‘Your first what?’
‘Pog. My ma used to tell me about them when I was little.’
Siri looked away so the policemen wouldn’t notice his smile.
‘Can’t say I’ve ever heard of them,’ the officer confessed. ‘What are they?’
‘You can’t be serious. You haven’t heard of a pog? I admit they’re rare, but up here in the north-east the animals are never penned up. They all roam around together, the chickens, the dogs, the goats, the pigs. With the animals being the way they are, there’s a fair amount of experimentation that goes on, if you know what I mean.’
Siri could no longer control his face. He got to his feet and walked over to the front steps to look at the full moon reflected hazily on the surface of the pond. It was a beautiful setting for such a dishonest political racket. He chuckled under his breath but made it sound like a cough. Dtui continued at her most convincing best.
‘… and here in Huaphan, probably due to the altitude, or, some say, the sulphur in the water, on occasions, the union of a randy male dog and a sow, produces …’
‘You cannot be serious.’
‘I swear on my brother’s life. I’ve seen the photos. They have the face of pig and the paws and tail of a dog. I can’t believe you’ve never heard of them.’
‘Yeah, I’ve heard of ‘em,’ said Officer Four.
‘You haven’t,’ said Officer Two.
‘Now that you mention it, I might have seen one on a farm just outside of Tha Reua. Didn’t know what it was, though. Odd-looking thing,’ recalled Officer One.
‘That’s right,’ said Dtui, ‘and up here they’re everywhere. If you see one around perhaps you could grab it for me. I’d love to take one back for my ma.’

What I like about the scene is that the officers are unsure of how to react and are unsure of what will make them look bigger fools – being ignorant of the existence of pogs or admitting that they know of their existence. Cotterill, I think, captures this balance between ego and worldly-wiseness and indecisiveness really well. My review of the book can be found here.

Saturday Snippet: Queenpin by Megan Abbott

Megan Abbot’s Queenpin charts the relationship between the legendary Gloria Denton, the city’s chief moll, and a young woman who she takes on as an apprentice (my review here). Abbott sure can write and her two principal characters are multi-layered and complex. Here’s how both are introduced.

I want the legs.
That was the first thing that came into my head. The legs were the legs of a twenty-year-old Vegas showgirl, a hundred feet long and with just enough curve and give and promise. Sure, there was no hiding the slightly worn hands or the beginning tugs of skin framing the bones in her face. But the legs, they lasted, I tell you. They endured. Two decades her junior, my skinny matchsticks were no comparison.
In the casinos, she could pass for thirty. The low lighting, her glossy auburn hair, legs swinging, tapping the bottom rim of the tall, better stools. At the track, though, she looked her age. Even swathed in oversized sunglasses, a wide-brimmed hat, bright gloves, she couldn’t outflank the merciless sunshine, the glare off the grandstand. Not that it mattered. She was legend.

Hell, I’ll admit it, I had a taste for the other from the start. Where would a twenty-two-year-old kid rather be? Setting the table for corned beef and cabbage dinner with her old man, forks scrapping, moths fluttering against the window, the briny smell from the kitchen sinking into my skin with each tock of the imitation grandfather clock? Or gliding my way through the fuzzy dark of the Tee Hee, vibrating with low, slow jazz, clusters of juniper-breathed men and women touching, hands on lapels, fingers on silk nylons, cigarettes releasing willowy clouds into every acid green banquette? Sure, it was no El Morocco, but in this town, it might as well have been. The place felt alive, I could hear it beating in my chest, between my hips, everywhere. Clock-out time and I never wanted to leave. I’d grin my way into a Tom Collins from Shep, the lantern-jawed bartender, and watch from the corner stool, watch everything, eating green cherries, the candied drink soaking into my lips, my tongue.

Tell me you don’t want to get to know these two feisty, scheming women?

Saturday Snippet: The Price of Darkness by Graham Hurley

Graham Hurley's DI Faraday novels are set in one of Britain's less fashionable provincial cities, Portsmouth, which is perhaps why he doesn't seem to have attracted the same kind of attention as other British police procedural writers such as Ian Rankin and Colin Dexter. This, I think, is a shame as Hurley's novels are first class; well researched and plotted, with realistic dialogue and a strong sense of place. It's clear that he knows the city and environs well. Here are two extracts of the positive and negative sides of the area.

At last Winter felt firm ground beneath his feet. He explained about the history of the place, all those wars, all that prize money, all the matelots sailing home in triumph after hammering the French. He described the Harbour, HMS Victory, world-class museums in every corner of the dockyard. Then he moved onto the venue itself, Spithead, the biggest stage in the world, a stretch of water made for an event like this.
To be honest, he said, Portsmouth had always raised a bit of a smile on anyone who really knew it. The place had always been full of character but a bit rough, a bit scuzzy. Lately, though, money had been flooding into the city. He told her about the glitzy new shopping developments, the harbourside apartment blocks, the marinas packed with ocean-going yachts. And now, he said, the council had found the bottle to fund the jewel in Pompey's crown, the Spinnaker Tower, five hundred feet of soaring concrete, a fantastic peg on which the city could finally hang its hat.

The Millboork flats lay at the end of the spur motorway to Southampton docks, a gaunt Sixties tower block stuffed full, according to Bazza, with problem families. Rain had pooled on the cracked paving stones outside the main entrance and a spilling wheelie bin, abandoned in the middle of nowhere, was attracting a cloud of squalling seagulls. ...
Winter was gazing up at the flats. The sheer size of the building reminded him of similar blocks in Pompey. Somerstown or Portsea, he thought. Grey lives, grey concrete, grey sky. No wonder half the population had settled for shit television and a freezerful of pizzas.

It's a shame that none of this could be captured on the cover which bears no relation to the story. My review of The Price of Darkness can be found here.

Saturday Snippet: The Reapers by John Connolly

Whilst I had some issues with The Reapers, the story within the story of Louis' recruitment was superb and below is a short extract about the nature of racism in small-town, Southern US in the 1950s and 60s. It seems to hit the nail on the head to me.

But no one on either side ever forgot that the law was white. Justice might be blind, but the law wasn’t. Justice was aspirational, but the law was actual. The law was real. It had uniforms, and weapons. It smelled of sweat and tobacco. It drove a big car with a star on the door. White people had justice. Black folks had the law.

The boy understood all of this instinctively. Nobody had been forced to explain it to him. His mama hadn’t sat him down before she died and gone through the subtleties of law versus justice with him as it applied to the black community. As far as anyone was concerned, there wasn’t a black community. There were just blacks. A community implied organization, and there were a great many people who associated organization with threat. Unions organized. Communists organized. Black people did not organize, not here. Maybe elsewhere, and there were those who said that the tide was changing, but not in this town. Here, everything worked fine just the way it was.

Saturday Snippet: The Collaborator of Bethlehem

I could have picked any number of passages from Matt Beynon Rees wonderful tale of Omar Yussef's quest to save his former pupil, George Saba, from wrongful prosecution. I chose this one because I like the idea of food creating a map of life.

He spooned out a helping of fattoush, a Syrian salad of mint, parsley, romaine lettuce and chopped pita bread. He had only to place Maryam’s fattoush in his mouth and the sharpness of her lemon vinaigrette would transport him to a café in the Damascus souk where he had spent many wonderful times in his youth. Maryam hadn’t been there with him, but somehow she seemed to have tasted what he had tasted. It was as though her cooking made a map for him of his life story. It was comforting like a well-bound, old atlas that took your imagination across mountain ranges without the physical exertion, annoyance, and inconvenience of actual travel. He wondered if Louai Abdel Rahman felt the same way about Dima’s cooking. Perhaps he hadn’t been married to her long enough for the taste of her grape leaves to supplant that of his mother’s in his memories of taste and happiness. Omar Yussef thought that, as the fugitive crept home through the dusk, he would have been struggling to concentrate on the dangers around him. A mother’s cooking and its redolence of home was powerful for any Palestinian. He was comforted that at least the boy had died anticipating pleasure.

I'm going to have to get lunch now. My review of The Collaborator of Bethlehem is here.

Saturday Snippet: He Died With a Felafel in His Hand

In the early 1990s John Birmingham lived with 89 people in a dozen different shared houses in Melbourne and Brisbane and kept notes on all of them. He Died With a Felafel in His Hand (Yellow Press, 1994) reveals snippets about the flotslam of housemates that drifted through his various abodes and details some hilarious anecdotes of the goings-on and the weird twilight world of shared multi-unit, rental accommodation. It's one of my favourite books with a guaranteed smirk or belly laugh on every page. What the book reveals is that everybody has strange little quirks, and some have very large ones, that drives other people nuts; and that friendships grow, twist and mutate, alliances form and fracture, and people bond and then fall out spectacularly. It starts thus,

He died with a felafel in his hand. We found him on a bean bag with his chin sitting on the top button of a favourite flannelette shirt. He'd worn the shirt when we'd interviewed him for the empty room a week or so before. We were having one of those bad runs, where you seem to interview about thirty people every day and they are all total zipper heads. We really took this guy in desperation. He wasn't A-list, didn't have a microwave or anything like that, and now both he and his felafel were cold. Our first dead housemate. At least we got some bond off him.

If you've never lived in shared housing and want to know what it can be like or you want to re-live the twilight moments, then this is the book for you. I've just googled the book and see it was made into a stage-play and also a movie - I'll have to check that out sometime.