Crime Factory: Hands Across the Ocean

In this month's Crime Factory blog, I take a lingering look at my favourite Brit crime flick. And no, it ain't Get Carter. Sorry about that, People of Newcastle, Gateshead, County Durham and Anywhere Else They Filmed.

True Brit Grit

Gots me so much writing to do, I'm half-mental with the exertion. Hope you lot appreciate it. In the meantime, you can catch a rerun of "The Great Pretender" (originally published in Needle), alongside many, many better stories in the new charidee anthology True Brit Grit (UK & US), which has been assembled by those foul miscreants Paul D. Brazill and Luca Veste. Talking of short stories, I've had a few acceptances recently, so expect to see me clogging up the likes of Noir Nation, Blood & Tacos and the follow-up anthology to Lost Children some time this year.

Oh yeah, and Wolf Tickets is free again this weekend. But since you're reading this, I guess you already have a copy, right? RIGHT?

Crime Factory: Fuck (Some of) Tha Police

This month at The Crime Factory, I give you my list of police procedural authors that don't necessarily play by the rules:

When it comes to crime fiction, especially in the UK, the police procedural is king, and it’s no secret I’m not much of a fan. My issues with the sub-genre boil down to my distaste for cheap characterisation and sociological Manichaeism, and my fundamental belief that the circumstances of crime are more interesting that the investigation. But then, my opinion is clearly the minority, and it’s impossible for me to tar an entire sub-genre when there are so many outstanding exceptions. That’s right, I’m gonna turn that figurative frown upside down and hereby present, for your delectation and delight, ten authors whose police novels deserve your attention ...

Yeah, turns out that I like some police procedurals. Surprised me, too.

Saturday's Child, Crime Interviews and free stuff!

For those of you who asked if and when the Cal Innes series will make their appearance on an electronic reading device near you, I can answer firmly and without fear of contradiction that yes, they will, and soon (like, before the end of the year). They'll be as cheap as usual, will be available in both the UK and US (World English, baby!), and - need I say this? - are the preferred editions.

Len Wanner's second volume of The Crime Interviews is now available, and he's clearly scraping the bottom of the barrel because I'm in there, waffling on about all manner of shite. Still, he supports it with some peachy interrogations of other, proper authors an' that.

And finally, those sons-a-bitches over at Blasted Heath are giving away my hard work again, this time with yet another freebie. Yep, for a limited period, you can download a (free) copy of Dead Money and get a copy of Gun free! I know, it's mental, so where's the catch?

There isn't one. Happy Easter, you filthy animals.

The Cliché of a Shadowy Street

Christa Faust alerted me to this article in the Wall Street Journal, that manages to celebrate the Library of America's most recent hardboiled releases with the prerequisite smattering of condescension and misinformation. Christa Faust wasn't a fan, and rightly so. From La Faust:

I can't help but feel like the snarky little barb about "a wisecracking private eye who is an icy femme fatale" is directed at me, though clearly no one who's actually read my novels would refer to them that way. I certainly can't think of very many other modern books that fit that description. Can you?

Nope, but I don't really think Sandlin's having a pop at Faust, either. To think that would be to admit that Sandlin has an understanding of what constitutes modern hardboiled and noir fiction, and that's clearly not the case - he barely has a handle on what constitutes classic hardboiled and noir fiction. As it stands, I think his mash-up of stereotypes is less a veiled dig, more a misguided attempt to amuse. It also serves to boost Sandlin's credentials as someone who can spot cliché, before he proceeds to define noir in the usual lazy fashion as a "seedy panorama of con men, carnies, outlaws and losers" and bizarrely assert that the two Library of America crime novel collections cover crime fiction "in its glory years - roughly from its first sproutings in the pulp magazines of the late 1920s through its efflorescence in the cheap original paperbacks of the 1950s". Sounds like someone read part of an introduction somewhere and skimmed the rest, because such a statement is hardly accurate.

Let's be charitable and assume he means Cornell Woolrich represents the "first sprouting" even though he didn't write crime novels until the '40s (his first six novels were squarely in the F. Scott Fitzgerald vein), because as far as I'm aware the James M. Cain, Horace McCoy, Kenneth Fearing, Edward Anderson and William Lindsay Gresham novels featured in the collection were all first published as hardcovers, as was Highsmith's The Talented Mr Ripley from the second collection. And so to suggest that the "literary quality of the selections is remarkably high" is utterly redundant, unless he means that publishers such as Alfred A. Knopf, Simon & Schuster, Harcourt Brace, Frederick A. Stokes, Rinehart & Company and Coward-McCann were known for publishing trash. It's also worth reiterating that James M. Cain and Horace McCoy were grouped with the likes of O'Hara, Saroyan and Steinbeck in Edmund Wilson's "Boys in the Back Room", who were seen as naturalist writers with roots more in Hemingway than Hammett. And so tarring them with the pulp brush is disingenuous at best.

Sandlin's other points are similarly questionable. His distaste for true pulp comes across in his assertion that Paul Cain "wasn't any good", leading to an odd comparison with Hammett on the basis that Cain was Hammett's replacement at Black Mask. That isn't something I've heard before, and I'd be intrigued to see why Sandlin thinks so, considering that Cain and Hammett published in Black Mask at the same time, and that under Joe Shaw's "captaincy", there were any number of writers working within Shaw's ideal of "economy of expression" and "authenticity in character and action". But because he leads with that link, Sandlin is apparently justified in his comparison, which is the literary argument equivalent of taking a shotgun to a barrel full of fish. Of course Cain wasn't as good a writer as Hammett - very few writers, including the lazy critic's favourite Raymond Chandler, come anywhere close. For the record, I'm hardly Paul Cain's biggest fan, but just because I didn't particularly enjoy Fast One, it doesn't mean it isn't an important work in the evolution of the hardboiled novel. And just because he isn't as good as Hammett, it doesn't mean he doesn't deserve to be collected. But then, according to Sandlin, even the best examples of the genre are "outliers and literary freaks".

One of these outliers is David Goodis, for whom Sandlin has a little more affection and understanding, even though Goodis has never really been "little-known" - he was a bestseller (Cassidy's Girl sold over a million copies), had some success with movies in Hollywood (Dark Passage) and Europe (Shoot the Piano Player) and is still regarded as a major noir stylist by anyone with even a passing knowledge of the Gold Medal writers. Hammett is mentioned again, this time "rescored by Tom Waits", which not only completely misunderstands Hammett (who shares neither style nor content with Goodis) but also Tom Waits (who hasn't played the barfly in almost thirty years). Sandlin also complains that Goodis is "too much like a French idea of what an American hard-boiled writer should be", because his typical protagonist isn't "a tough guy at all but a slumming intellectual", which makes me wonder what he thought of Goodis' companions in the second Library of America volume, notably Thompson's hooker-beatin', Freud-readin' Lou Ford, Highsmith's psychopath aesthete Ripley, and Willeford's aspiring artist and fry cook Harry Jordan. We'll never know, because he doesn't mention them, perhaps because those novels don't immediately fit his idea of hardboiled American fiction, which is "about finding the poetry where most people see a gray functional landscape", a phrase which coincidentally fails to apply to more than three of the eleven novels across both LoA American Noir collections, and which smacks of a writer desperately trying to tie his conclusion into his opening paragraph.

That opening paragraph is symptomatic of the problems inherent in Sandlin's piece, notably his self-styled position as sophisticated American yearning for the kind of grit that Hollywood peddled in the '40s, rather than its literary equivalent. Sandlin and critics like him appear to operate in a state of blinkered condescension, with occasional sojourns into superficial criticism. To these critics, The Postman Always Rings Twice is a novel about fucking and killing rather than the key influence behind both a landmark work of existential literature (Camus' The Stranger) and one of the first Italian neorealist films (Visconti's Obsessione). That Postman was never a hardboiled novel is irrelevant to these critics - it's necessary to position the novel as hardboiled in order to say how much it succeeds in spite of its genre. After all, easy arguments are the lazy critic's stock-in-trade.

Yes, a lot of hardboiled fiction trades in the clichés of film noir, but some of it actively subverts cliché, and some of it happens to use genre to tell important truths in a direct manner. Without a solid understanding of that genre, a critic is more likely to indulge in conjecture than any considered critical analysis. In my not-so-humble opinion, if someone is paid to offer criticism on something - i.e. if they're a paid critic, as opposed to an amateur reviewer like myself - a basic qualification for the job should be that they know what they're talking about, and not let personal bias lead to ridiculous statements like, say, dismissing Philip K. Dick a "lunatic outsider sci-fi writer".

I firmly believe that critics can educate and enlighten, I believe they can make careers, and I believe that an astute critic keeps the art of novel-making alive just as much as any author. I also believe - unless I happen to encounter written evidence that suggests otherwise - that Lee Sandlin is definitely not one of those critics.

The new Grift is here! The new Grift is here!

That's right, you heard. Grift numero uno is now available to buy from a website, wait for a wee while, and then clutch in your sweaty wee paws like it's the last jazz mag on earth*. Look at that line-up, then look at it again. My bit on the movie adaptations of Charles Willeford (not the last you'll hear from me on this particular subject) snuggles in between an appreciation of John Rector (who is great - you should all buy his books) and a piece by The Legend That Is Lawrence Block about Paul Kavanagh.

But wait! There's more!

Scott Phillips on Derek Raymond (not like that, you pervs)! Interviews with Julie Morrigan and Chris Offutt! Fiction from McDonald, Holm, Rawson, Bruen, Funk, Robinson, Pluck, Cizak, Merrigan and Bates!

So what are you waiting for? Shove it into your brains through your eye sponges!

* My first jazz mag was a disappointment. Very little jazz. Lotsa cold-lookin' ladies. Still, it kept me occupied for a while.

Double Indie Whammy!

Nathan Cain over at Independent Crime comes roaring back to the blog with a BOGOF, specifically reviews of both Dead Money (it won the Spinetingler Ebook tournament, divven't yeh knaa):

The story is ultimately one of delusion and unraveling, and Banks keeps it coming, pacing it well, making sure that, as he peels back the layers or Slater’s twisted personality that he never reveals too much too soon. By the time you get to the end, you’ll be laughing along with Slater, but not for the reasons Slater is laughing.

and Wolf Tickets:

The story is a straightforward one of revenge, but the real fun comes from how the two characters see each other. The chapters alternate perspectives, giving the reader insight into how these two friends really see each other, adding a layer of complexity to what would otherwise be a slight story. As with Dead Money, Banks proves deft at doling out insight in just the right amounts, complicating what he presents to the reader as rather straightforward characters. By the end you’ve been spun 180 degrees with such deftness that you didn’t even notice it. A surprising, violent, and strangely uplifting ode to friendship, is not to be missed.

Thank you, sir. Very kind of you. And I must say, all this goodwill for Farrell and Cobb is very inspiring. Perhaps I'll write another one ...