Barry Ergang's FFB Review: SMALL GAME (1992) by John Blades

From the massive archive…

Scott Ryan is a man besieged. His opponents include coworkers, fellow commuters, neighbors, and—above all—his house. Oh yes, and squirrels. Living in an area the police sometimes treat as if it’s under martial law, having to duck below window level when his commuter train passes through a Red Zone to avoid being shot, his urban dream has become an urban nightmare.

He and his wife Kathy have purchased a fixer-upper in a becoming-gentrified section of their unnamed city. With three small children and the burdens their new home has imposed, and despite Scott’s ascendancy in the market research company he works for, they’re in over their heads. Working on the house consumes the bulk of Scott’s time when he isn’t working. He still manages to fit in some tennis now and then, but reluctantly because the house has become his Circe, luring him inexorably back to it and demanding that he cater to its every need and want.

When he isn’t cheating on Kathy with several different partners, that is.

Scott’s first-person recounting of events seems at first reasonable, if sometimes edged with desperation. But the reader soon realizes that something is wrong, that he’s an utterly unreliable narrator, that he may or may not be seeing things that aren’t there, claiming to do things he really doesn’t.

Some of the neighborhood squirrels have invaded the house and taken up residence in the walls and attic crawl space. They become Scott’s obsession, and his attempts to eradicate them become steadily more frantic—and sometimes dangerous.

John Blades’ short serio-comic novel might well be described as Kafkaesque in its depiction of a man driven to fulfill but overwhelmed by the popular notion of the “American dream.” Crisply written, and peppered with evocative turns of phrase, its episodic structure builds to a memorable finish.


Barry Ergang © 2009, 2013, 2021 

Derringer Award-winner Barry Ergang’s written work has appeared in numerous publications, print and electronic. Some of it is available at Amazon and at Smashwords. His website is http://www.writetrack.yolasite.com/

FFB Review: "Drum Beat-Madrid" by Stephen Marlowe --Reviewed by Barry Ergang

Barry is back this week for Friday’s Forgotten Books hosted by Patti Abbott. This week he reviews Drum Beat-Madrid by Stephen Marlowe. After you read the review and check out Barry’s work make sure you check out the complete list over at Patti’s blog. One could easily spend several lifetimes reading all the selections listed each week in the various genres…..

DRUM BEAT--MADRID (1966) by Stephen Marlowe

Reviewed by Barry Ergang

His primary office is in Washington, D.C., but private detective Chester Drum has also opened one in Geneva, Switzerland because his cases so frequently take him out of the United States. One of his most prominent clients, and a recurrent character in several books in this series, is Axel Spade. As Drum explains, “Axel Spade gives professional advice to black marketeers and smugglers. His going rates for an interview are a hundred bucks a half hour, and if you need the kind of advice Spade gives, a half hour of his time is the best investment you can make.” Spade has homes in New York City and Geneva, but must be careful about traveling elsewhere. He’s wanted in more than twenty countries.

When Drum Beat--Madrid opens, Spade and Drum are driving to Navarre, Spain, specifically to the ranch of Captain General Don Santiago Sotomayor, retired commander of the Guardia Civil. The purpose of the trip? Spade is going to marry Sotomayor’s niece, Luz Robles. Drum is to be his best man and, because he has a fair number of enemies, his bodyguard.

The Sotomayor family, the reader soon learns, is as dysfunctional as any outside of a Ross Macdonald novel. Don Santiago’s brother Hernando was a Loyalist during the Spanish Civil War. Don Santiago turned him in, and Hernando was executed. His son José was raised by Don Santiago. His wife and daughter went to Caracas, Venezuela. The wife died there, and Luz was raised by the Robles family. Son Ramón was adopted and raised in Baltimore, Maryland by Hernando’s closest friend. He’s now in the American Army, stationed in Spain, and calls himself Ray Moyers. He clearly has more than a platonic interest in his sister.

The schedule calls for José, who hasn’t seen his sister since they were children, to fly Luz from Madrid to Don Santiago’s ranch. When he lands and Luz is not with him, he explains: “We met in Madrid in the Ritz bar at noon. She had some shopping to do, she said. We were to meet later at the airport. I waited. She did not come. Still I waited. And then, at last, she sent a note saying she was afraid to fly with her señorito of a brother and had decided to take the train to Pamplona instead.”

A ransom note arrives at the ranch the next morning demanding fifty thousand dollars for Luz‘s return, leaving Drum and Spade to wonder why the ransom amount is so low, since Don Santiago can afford a great deal more. Drum spent two years with the FBI before going private, and has more experience handling kidnappings than the Guardia Civil. But Spade is initially unable to persuade Don Santiago to keep the two of them in the loop, let alone to permit Drum to investigate. It’s only after the kidnappers fail to appear at the designated ransom site they send Don Santiago to that the old man grudgingly agrees to let Drum take over. Take over he does, heading immediately to Madrid to try to retrace Luz’s steps and get a line on her current whereabouts--and those of her kidnappers. In doing so he encounters his share of colorful and well-delineated characters; surprises and revelations, not the least of which is the secret of the Sotomayor family treasure; some moral and ethical issues; and plenty of action, especially in Pamplona during the running of the bulls.   

According to Marlowe’s obituaries in The New York Times and The Boston Globe, he was well-traveled and lived in France, Spain and Switzerland. To anyone who has read any of the Chester Drum novels, this will come as no surprise: Marlowe’s sense of place and its culture was always meticulously and vividly rendered. Drum Beat--Madrid is no exception.

©2014 by Barry Ergang

Derringer Award-winner Barry Ergang’s website is http://www.writetrack.yolasite.com/. You can find some of his written work at Amazon, Smashwords, and Scribd.

Barry's Reviews: "Cover Of Snow" by Jenny Milchman

It has been quite some time since Barry contributed a review that was not specifically FFB related. Please welcome back Barry to the blog today as he reviews a favorite of mine. Jenny’s new book RUIN FALLS: A Novel is scheduled to be released April 22^nd. Jenny is also about to launch yet another book tour and currently plans to be in the Dallas area on August 9th. More details as they become available. If you have not read Cover Of Snow---you really should.

 

COVER OF SNOW (2013) by Jenny Milchman

Reviewed by Barry Ergang

After a peaceful night's sleep, Nora Hamilton awakens on a bitterly cold and snowy January morning in the Adirondacks to a nightmare. Her husband Brendan, a police officer in the small upstate New York town of Wedeskyull, has committed suicide. Her grief is as incessant as her determination to find out why. He'd given no indication that he was depressed about anything, so what drove him to this desperate act?

Nora's pursuit of the truth pits her against certain townspeople she thought were her friends; introduces her to strangers who become unlikely allies (readers won't soon forget Dugger); exposes her subtle conflicts with family members and a not-so-subtle one with her mother-in-law; puts her and others in mortal danger and, literally and symbolically, pits her against the treacherous snow that blankets the region, both concealing and revealing frigid current and decades-old brutal realities and concomitant attitudes.

The trepidations and mysteries in this suspenseful gem will have readers turning pages late into the night to find out what happens next, not least because many a chapter closes with a cliffhanger. Jenny Milchman has crafted an excellent debut novel studded with turns of phrase that add vividity without distracting from the headlong narrative thrust.

The novel is not without what some readers will perceive as flaws. There are unanswered questions about key events, some loose ends are left dangling, and the fates of some of the characters, major and minor, go unexplained. These didn't bother me personally; not every issue in life has a definitive resolution, and not every question gets answered. I can highly recommend Cover of Snow to fans of high-tension suspense fiction, and in fact recommended it to a number of friends even before I'd finished reading it. I'm looking forward to Jenny Milchman's next novel.

Barry Ergang © 2014

Some of Derringer Award-winner Barry Ergang's work can be found at Amazon and at Smashwords. His website is http://www.writetrack.yolasite.com/.

FFB Review-- SMALL GAME (1992) by John Blades-- Reviewed by Barry Ergang

Friday means Friday’s Forgotten Books. Patti is taking the week off to rest and recharge so Evan Lewis will be collecting the links and posting them on his blog here. If you are not already reading his blog you should be. So, after you read Barry’s review below of Small Game by John Blades surf on over and take a look. 

SMALL GAME (1992) by John Blades-- Reviewed by Barry Ergang

Scott Ryan is a man besieged. His opponents include coworkers, fellow commuters, neighbors, and—above all—his house. Oh yes, and squirrels. Living in an area the police sometimes treat as if it’s under martial law, having to duck below window level when his commuter train passes through a Red Zone to avoid being shot, his urban dream has become an urban nightmare.

He and his wife Kathy have purchased a fixer-upper in a becoming-gentrified section of their unnamed city. With three small children and the burdens their new home has imposed, and despite Scott’s ascendancy in the market research company he works for, they’re in over their heads. Working on the house consumes the bulk of Scott’s time when he isn’t working. He still manages to fit in some tennis now and then, but reluctantly because the house has become his Circe, luring him inexorably back to it and demanding that he cater to its every need and want.

When he isn’t cheating on Kathy with several different partners, that is.

Scott’s first-person recounting of events seems at first reasonable, if sometimes edged with desperation. But the reader soon realizes that something is wrong, that he’s an utterly unreliable narrator, that he may or may not be seeing things that aren’t there, claiming to do things he really doesn’t.

Some of the neighborhood squirrels have invaded the house and taken up residence in the walls and attic crawl space. They become Scott’s obsession, and his attempts to eradicate them become steadily more frantic—and sometimes dangerous.

John Blades’ short serio-comic novel might well be described as Kafkaesque in its depiction of a man driven to fulfill but overwhelmed by the popular notion of the “American dream.” Crisply written, and peppered with evocative turns of phrase, its episodic structure builds to a memorable finish.


Barry Ergang © 2009, 2013

Derringer Award-winner Barry Ergang's impossible crime novelette, The Play of Light and Shadow, is available at Amazon and Smashwords. Barry is selling books from his extensive personal collection at http://www.barryergangbooksforsale.yolasite.com/

Double Take Review: "THE BLACKLIN COUNTY FILES" by Bill Crider

From time to time Barry and I manage to have read the same book when it comes time to write a review. It has been a long time since this has happened but now that Barry has read The Blacklin County Files it makes another one of our "Double Take Reviews" possible. Below is Barry's take on the book and then my own from February 2012. Enjoy the reviews and then go buy the book as it is a good one......

THE BLACKLIN COUNTY FILES (2012) by Bill Crider

Reviewed by Barry Ergang

As far as I can remember, my first experience with Bill Crider’s work came when I read his marvelous, not-to-be-missed “Cranked” in 2007, when it subsequently won the Derringer Award for the best mid-length short story of 2006. Since then I’ve read a couple of other short stories under his byline and a western novella, Dead Man’s Revenge, that he wrote using the pseudonym Colby Jackson. A prolific writer, he’s the author of several different mystery series as well as horror, western, and young adult novels. His longest-running mystery series stars Texas Sheriff Dan Rhodes, who is featured in the six stories in the e-book under consideration here. (NOTE: the cover says it contains five stories, the title page six. The title page wins—and so does the reader with the additional story.)

It opens with “Buster,” which is the name of one of the elderly, idiosyncratic Miss Onie Calder’s forty or fifty cats. Miss Onie summons Sheriff Rhodes to her home in a once-

fashionable but now rundown section of the town of Clearview because Buster is dead. She’s certain that her neighbor, Ralph Ramsdell, whose cat has been set upon by one of hers, is the poisoner. When he investigates, Rhodes discovers that something much more sinister is going on.

The Stag BBQ is an annual event in Blacklin County. "It was a chance for the movers and shakers to get together and drink a lot of beer, eat some BBQ and homemade ice cream, tell a few dirty jokes, and do a little gambling....Women weren't allowed. Blacklin County was becoming more conscious of women's rights by the day, but Blacklin County was, after all, in Texas, where a great many men still believed that some activities just weren't appropriate for women." It's probably just as well, in this case, because even some of the men get sick when they discover the body of Gabe Tolliver, who has apparently been "Gored." Sheriff Rhodes doubts the killer was one of George Newberry's Brahma bulls and must figure out which of the many attendees wanted Tolliver dead.

A recipe for homemade peach ice cream, Rhodes's favorite, is appended to the story.

Reverend Alf Anderson helps to restore a community when he turns the stone building atop Obert's Hill into a nondenominational church and attracts a congregation of more than three hundred people. One church member, Ron Eller, does nothing to endear himself to his fellow congregants when he leases his land to Calame's Crusher, Inc., a gravel company that is mining the limestone on it. Between the the noise and dust from the rock crusher, and especially the explosions, Obert residents are sorely unhappy campers: "They claimed that they [the explosions] were destroying property values, which were already low, and driving the livestock crazy. They were driving the citizens crazy, too...." Dan Rhodes has to determine who among them crucified Eller in "The Man on the Cross."

Arrested for armed robbery, Charles Lathrop is a serious rival of Adrian Monk's when it comes to obsessive cleanliness. He even cleans his jail cell, doing a better job of it than Lawton, the jailer, does. The ditched gun Deputy Ruth Grady finds is probably the weapon Lathrop used to hold up convenience stores and a Texaco station, though he denies ever having had one, and it's been thoroughly cleaned. But, as Sheriff Rhodes senses, it's his obsession that will prove his undoing in "Under the Gun," a story lighter in tone than those that precede it, and whose solution reminds me of one of the greatest inverted detective stories I've ever read: Cornell Woolrich's "One Drop of Blood." (I daren't explain why lest I spoil both of them.)

Co-authored by Bill's wife Judy Crider, "Chocolate Moose" concerns the strange death of Mack McAnally at the Round-Up Restaurant. It appears to be a bizarre accident, but when Sheriff Rhodes gives the scene a careful examination, he realizes he has a murder to deal with—the murder of a man who might well have been the most hated person in Blacklin County. "McAnally was, or had been until only a short while earlier, a bully...He spent his time working in his yard and harassing any animal that happened to stray onto his property. He had a pellet gun that he used to shoot at dogs and cats and, rumor had it, even the occasional human. When he was driving, he would sometimes swerve out of his lane in an attempt to run over a squirrel or family pet." The list of his hectoring transgressions is a good deal longer, and many a county resident undoubtedly has a reason for wanting him dead. It's up to Rhodes to figure out who that person is.

A recipe for the "World's Best Chicken-Fried Steak" is appended to the story.

The last and longest story in the collection, "Who Killed Cock Rogers?" begins with manure and ends with murder. Janelle Tabor complains to  Sheriff Rhodes when she's splattered with cow manure from one of Ralph Claymore's cattle trucks. The trucks make their way through Clearview's main street every week on their way to the auction sale, and have caused problems for other residents as well as for some of the merchants. There is nothing Rhodes can really do because the law is on Claymore's side. Thus Mrs. Tabor decides to talk to Red Rogers about the matter. "Rogers, whose real name was Larry Redden, was the closest thing Clearview had to a local radio personality. He did just about everything at KVUE...." One of those things was to host a daily talk show that "dealt with both national and local issues." He thrives on controversy. When he invites Mrs. Tabor and two other locals to present their sides of the argument to Ralph Claymore and one of his truck drivers on the air, chaos erupts and Rhodes has to hurry to the station to break up a physical altercation. Two weeks later, Rogers is found shot to death at one of Ralph Claymore's feed lots, and Rhodes has a mystery to solve that doesn't lack suspects.  

As evidenced by the passages quoted above, Bill Crider's style is lean and straightforward. It's also leavened with some wonderfully dry humor. Because of the brevity of every story but the last in this collection, characterization is very sketchy. But these are not the kinds of tales in which characterization takes precedence. They're good old-fashioned short detective stories in which half the fun is trying to figure out from the clues given who the culprit is—with the exception of "Under the Gun," in which readers can try to figure out where the known culprit slips up and so give Rhodes the evidence he needs to turn the thief over for prosecution.

The Blacklin County Files, which I can and do enthusiastically recommend, has me looking forward to reading the Dan Rhodes novel-length mysteries in which, based on my reading of the aforementioned "Cranked," I'm sure there's greater character development.

Barry Ergang © 2013

*****

Also awarded a Derringer, this for the best flash fiction story of 2006, Barry Ergang's work has appeared in numerous publications, print and electronic. You can find some of it reprinted in Kindle editions and at Smashwords. He has books for sale from the collection he's accumulated over many years at http://tinyurl.com/ndlbpc7 Please have a look. Barry contributes 20% of the price of books to our fund.  

Long familiar to readers via the Sheriff Dan Rhodes series novels Texas author Bill Crider has assembled a short collection of previously published stories featuring the good sheriff Dan Rhodes.  The Blacklin County Files: 5 Sheriff Dan Rhodes Stories read just like the good novels in that the stories feature humor, mystery, and the extensive cast of  folks that populate the town of Clearview and the surrounding East Texas County of Blacklin.

The small collection opens with the story titled “Buster.” Miss Onie Calder is quite elderly and someone has killed one of her many cats. She blames an angry neighbor and wants him arrested for murder. Things aren’t that simple but the truth will come out.

Sheriff Rhodes knows things happen in the county that might be technically against the law.  But, Rhodes is not a hard-nosed law and order guy and is willing to look the other way on certain things as long as nothing happens.  In “Gored” Sheriff Rhodes has to break his long standing policy of ignoring the Blacklin County Stagg BBQ. The quiet annual event deep in the woods as a remote cabin usually has no problems and nothing much happens but this year the addition of a dead man means Rhodes has to investigate.  By the end of the story if you were not already hungry for barbecue and all the fixings Bill Crider helpfully includes a recipe for homemade Peach Ice Cream.

Ron Eller never did look like Jesus did in all the pictures Sheriff Rhodes saw as a kid in Sunday school classrooms. The fact that he did not look like Jesus at all didn’t stop somebody from killing him and wiring him to a cross. In “The Man on the Cross” Sheriff Rhodes has to figure who killed Ron Eller and why in a story that starts the Monday morning after Easter. The suspects are many in this complex tale of faith, profit, and deceit.

If you live in Blacklin County and you want real good food--meat and potatoes kind of food that will stick to your ribs-- you go to the “Round Up Restaurant.”  The sign outside the door makes it clear that they don’t serve chicken¸ fish or anything vegetarian. In “Chocolate Moose” authored by Bill and Judy Crider, Sheriff Dan Rhodes has to go to the restaurant to investigate a death. Pretty much everyone in the county hated Mack McAnally and for various good reasons.  Now he is dead in a very strange way in one of the dining rooms. It could be an accident or something more. A good story that finishes up with the killer caught and a recipe for the “World’s Best Chicken Fried Steak” and includes the recipe for gravy.  Life doesn’t get much better than that.

Environmental issues are often a theme in the series---especially in recent books. An environmental problem and controversy are present in the “Who Killed Cock Rogers?”  Shipping live cattle can often be a messy operation with unintended consequences and controversy. But, nobody expected a murder because of it.

So, get yourself some glass bottled Dr. Pepper (plastic bottles and cans just aren't the same), some peanut butter and cheese crackers, and kick back for a spell with the Blacklin County Files. Five good short stories featuring Sheriff Dan Rhodes, his wife Ivy, Deputy Rudy Grady, Jail Dispatcher Hack Jensen and numerous other good and no so good local residents.  Plenty of humor¸ twists and turns in the cases, and detail regarding the residents makes The Blacklin County Files: 5 Sheriff Dan Rhodes Stories  yet another fun comfortable cozy style read from award winning author Bill Crider. Solidly good, just like his novels, author Bill Crider provides yet more good reading.

The Blacklin County Files: 5 Sheriff Dan Rhodes Stories

Bill Crider

http://www.billcrider.com

2012

Kindle E-book

Material supplied by the author in exchange for my objective review.

Kevin R. Tipple © 2012, 2013              

Review: JUSTIFIED ACTION (2013) by Earl Staggs --- Reviewed by Barry Ergang

JUSTIFIED ACTION (2013) by Earl Staggs

Reviewed by Barry Ergang

As I did when I reviewed Short Stories of Earl Staggs, I want to preface this review with the disclosure that Earl and I are longtime friends by virtue of having been colleagues on the staff of Futures Mystery Anthology Magazine. When he offered me the Kindle edition of his latest novel, Justified Action, in return for an objective review, I readily agreed. I've enjoyed all of the short fiction of his that I've read (which includes two Derringer winners) as well as his first novel, the detective story Memory of a Murder.

I read Justified Action right after finishing Donald Hamilton's The Vanishers, a Matt Helm novel, and it was a refreshing change. The Vanishers was too long, felt padded, and thus what should have been a suspenseful fast-moving page-turner turned into a slog. In marked contrast, Justified Action has exactly the kind of pace one wants in a thriller. The novel introduces Tallmadge "Tall" Chambers, a lieutenant in the U.S. Army. "A year ago, he was a Captain stationed in Kabul, Afghanistan, training new recruits and leading special ops in country. After an ugly incident with a drunken Colonel, he was sentenced to desk duty here at the Pentagon." He has three months left before he can retire after twenty years of service, and he's eagerly—and restlessly—looking forward to it.

His life-changing moment occurs when his old comrade-in-arms, Stephen Winslow, with whom he worked in Special Forces, takes him on a mission to Texas to kill a band of terrorists. Tall is subsequently recruited by General Cyrus Brock as the newest member of an unnamed special government agency begun by Brock four years earlier. "The CIA, NSA, Central Security, all the agencies, have their hands full with the major groups everyone's heard of," Brock explains. "For every one of those major groups, there's a hundred small groups or cells. No one knows about them...What my special agency does is track them down and put them out of business. And when I say put them out of business, I mean by whatever measures are necessary, no matter how extreme they may seem," adding, "Unless there are extenuating circumstances, we do not take prisoners...We operate with one simple credo. Kill one terrorist, save a hundred lives."  

The day after he accepts the General's offer to join the agency, Tall learns about Anatole Remski, a dangerous and elusive terrorist mastermind. Six months later, Stephen Winslow dispatches him to a mission in Afghanistan that results in Remski's capture. It's a short-lived victory because Remski manages to escape—not long after he assures Tall that they'll meet again and that, when they do, Tall will die. 

The novel covers several years' duration, during which time someone very near and dear to Tall dies in an automobile accident, leaving Tall in a depressive state for weeks until Stephen tells him that it was murder and Remski might be behind it. Moreover, various operatives around the world Tall has worked with are being systematically killed, making Remski the likeliest suspect. Re-energized, Tall sets out to hunt him down. In the process, he and the reader encounter quite a few surprises, among which is that a potential Presidential candidate might somehow be involved.    

Earl's economical prose style is effectively descriptive while moving the story at an unflagging pace. Unlike The Vanishers, Justified Action contains no passages that feel like filler. The principal characters, and even some of the minor ones, are well-delineated. Ruthless, coolly pragmatic Matt Helm, though fascinating to watch, has never seemed to me especially companionable, whereas Tall Chambers, though ruthless when he has to be, is a likable hero, a guy you'd enjoy having a drink with.   

The book teems with action, as a thriller should, but the on-screen violence is handled discreetly. Readers who are repelled by graphic depictions of brutal activities needn't shun this novel on those grounds; Earl does not revel in gore-fests. Nor does he find it necessary to depict sexual encounters. They're handled with tasteful obliquity. Readers  who are offended by raw language need to realize that this is not a cozy domestic novel of manners; many of the characters swear from time to time. However, the profanity is not taken to extremes, and there is not a single f-bomb in the entire book.

Justified Action is highly recommended to anyone who loves an absorbing, fast-paced action thriller. And I'd say that about it even if the author wasn't an old friend.   

Barry Ergang © 2013

A Derringer Award winner, some of Barry's written work is available at Amazon and Smashwords.

April 2013 Reads and Reviews

In addition to interviews, news and other things on the blog, this is the complete list of the “April 2013 Reads and Reviews.” All reviews are mine unless otherwise noted.

Gun Shy by Ben Rehder ---FFB Review 

DOUBLE VISION by F. T. Bradley

Breaking Point: A Joe Pickett Novel by C. J. Box

The Texas Capital Murders by Bill Crider

The Jurors Who Knew Too Much by Gail Farrelly

Sweet Little Hands: A Nasty Little Story by Lawrence Block

The Book of Murdock by Loren D. Estleman--FFB Review

The Drifter Detective by Garnett Elliott ---reviewed by Barry Ergang

Killers edited by Colin Harvey

The Education of a Pulp Writer by David Cranmer

The Officer’s Code by Lyn Alexander---Reviewed by Earl Staggs

Burn by John Lutz---FFB Review by Barry Ergang

My thanks again to Barry and Earl for allowing me to post their reviews on the blog.  It is much appreciated. 

Kevin

Barry's Reviews: "The Drifter Detective" (2013) by Garnett Elliott

Awhile back I read this book and really enjoyed it. After I posted my review, I asked publisher David Cranmer if I could forward my copy on to Barry  so that he could read and review it if he so desired. David graciously said yes and that led to the review below.....

"The Drifter Detective" (2013) by Garnett Elliott

Reviewed by Barry Ergang

In Texas just after World War II, investigative jobs in cities like Dallas and Houston are hard to come by for one-man operations because big firms like the Pinkertons and others tend to get them, so ex-G.I.-turned-P.I. Jack Laramie tools around rural areas in search of business, hoping to eventually amass enough money to open an office in San Antonio or Austin. Towing a horse trailer, which he sleeps in, behind his DeSoto coupe, he's on his way to Abilene where there is a "hint of a job" when the car begins to act up. He manages to get it to the small town of Clyde and to a service garage. The proprietor assures him that because it's late afternoon, the car's problem won't be diagnosed until the next day at the earliest.

The man gives Laramie directions to the local saloon, and tells him the widow Talbot runs a boarding house where he might get a room for the night. (Laramie figures it wouldn't be a good idea to sneak back to the garage to sleep in the horse trailer.) Soon after he meets Sheriff Gideon Hawes, who says he can throw some work Laramie's way. The job, he learns the next morning, entails keeping an eye on the estate of a prominent local citizen, Thomas McFaull, who might be engaged in some illicit activities. Laramie agrees to do it, and quickly finds himself entangled with McFaull's promiscuous wife, a surly sheriff's deputy, a railroad worker, and the flirtatious widow Talbot. It isn't long before matters turn dangerous, and Laramie finds himself wondering if things are really as they seem and whether he'll survive so he can get back on the road to Abilene again. 

A neatly-paced, action-packed long short story, "The Drifter Detective" is written in a colorful but not overwrought style and populated with characters the author imparts life to. For fans of hardboiled fiction with pulpy flavor and texture, this one is well worth Amazon's 99¢ asking price.

*****

Barry Ergang ©2013

Derringer Award-winning author Barry Ergang's fiction, poetry and non-fiction have appeared in numerous publications, print and electronic--see http://www.writetrack.yolasite.com/. He has been selling some of the many books he's accumulated over many years, and will contribute 20% of the price of the books to our fund--see http://www.barryergangbooksforsale.yolasite.com/. You can find some of his work in e-book editions at Amazon and Smashwords.

FFB Review: "THE GIRL WITH THE LONG GREEN HEART" by Lawrence Block--- Reviewed by Barry Ergang

Friday means Friday's Forgotten Books. Barry Ergang is back with the review below to close out the year. For the complete list of books, authors, and reviewers, please surf over to Patti Abbott's excellent blog..........

THE GIRL WITH THE LONG GREEN HEART (1965) by Lawrence Block

Reviewed by Barry Ergang

Having spent seven years in San Quentin after a con game went bad, and determined to walk a straight-and-narrow path to avoid a return to prison, John Hayden now lives a deliberately spartan life in a small, cheap room and works as the assistant manager at a bowling alley in Boulder, Colorado, earning eighty-five dollars a week. He's taking a correspondence course in hotel management, hoping one day to buy a roadhouse outside the city that has rooms upstairs and cabins out back. "The current owner doesn't know what to do with the place," he tells Doug Rance. "He's a lush and he just knows how to sell drinks and how to build himself a case of cirrhosis. With the right kind of operation the place would be a gold mine."

Rance, nine years younger than Hayden's forty-two, is someone Hayden met years earlier but never worked with, and who has come looking for him, hoping to persuade him to go back on the grift. Rance was recently in Las Vegas where he met a woman named Evelyn Stone, the titular character. She complained to him about her boss, a man named Wallace J. Gunderman, the intended target of Rance's depredations—the "mooch," as marks are referred to in this novel—whom for personal reasons she'd love to see get taken for a great deal of money. Gunderman made his money buying and selling land, and had already once been the victim of a con game involving property in Canada. Rance wants to work yet another Canadian land grift on Gunderman, and thinks Hayden would be the ideal partner. Evelyn Stone would also get a cut for her role in the game.

As much as he fears the prospect of going back to prison should something go wrong, Hayden realizes that his portion of the money they stand to take Gunderman for would enable him to fulfill his roadhouse dream almost immediately instead of requiring him to work for chump change and save perhaps twenty-five hundred dollars annually for the next nine or ten years while living a desolate excuse for a life. And so he declares himself in, and he and Rance go to elaborate lengths to stage the operation and psych out the mooch. Gunderman is neither stupid nor a fool; he needs to be carefully suckered into buying what Hayden and Rance pretend to sell. They execute their scheme thoroughly and meticulously, taking into account every contingency. They have everything covered, right? Nothing could possibly go wrong, could it?

If I told you, you'd want to kill me for spoiling the fun and excitement. As it is, I've given you the barest outline of the novel's beginning without revealing necessary and intriguing details, minutiae, and subsequent plot developments.

Narrated in the first person by John Hayden, in an unadorned, often staccato prose style, The Girl with the Long Green Heart is one of Lawrence Block's earliest efforts. It amply demonstrates the storytelling skill, sense of character and pace, that would ultimately win him the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award, and many other literary honors. As has usually been my experience with a Block novel, this one was very hard to put down, and is highly recommended to fans of criminous fiction.     

Barry Ergang ©2013

Barry’s books for sale from his personal collection are at http://www.barryergangbooksforsale.yolasite.com/.

You can find his fiction at  http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B005GXMF86 and http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/cassidy20.

FFB Review: "Lucky You" by Carl Hiaasen (Reviewed by Barry Ergang)

Friday means Friday’s Forgotten Books. Normally the list is over at Patti Abbott’s blog, but again this week, the list is over at Todd Mason’s Sweet Freedom Blog. If you have not been over there before, you really should poke around a bit after you read the below review from Barry. 

LUCKY YOU by CARL HIASSEN

“Suspense” is one of those words that, in fiction, we probably take too much for granted as implying apprehension and associate purely with the sinister. We expect to experience suspense when reading a mystery, horror, science fiction or adventure story, but we forget that it can enter into even the homiest of tales--e.g., Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, unlikely as it would seem one of the most suspenseful novels ever. Ultimately, any good story contains an element of suspense or we wouldn’t bother reading it to the end. “Suspense” equals “page-turner,” whether the author is Homer, Dante, Dostoevsky, Raymond Chandler or Stephen King.

Where does suspense enter into comedy? A joke is a perfect example. You listen intently, waiting for the punchline, sometimes anticipating it, sometimes only thinking you’ve anticipated it correctly. If the punchline delivers the goods, you laugh; if it doesn’t, you remain silent--or groan.

Can a mystery or crime novel be both funny and suspenseful? All you have to do to answer that is read one of Jonathan Latimer’s Bill Crane novels, or Craig Rice’s novels and stories about John J. Malone. Even John Dickson Carr (a.k.a. Carter Dickson), best-known for the eerie atmospheres that surrounded his “impossible crime” tales, occasionally injected some wacky humor into otherwise macabre proceedings. Donald E. Westlake, in God Save the Mark, The Hot Rock and many others, has shown that the criminous can be comical.

Which brings us to Carl Hiaasen, who may be as good as comedic suspense writers get, and his book Lucky You. It’s a page-turning good time that’ll have you smiling and occasionally laughing out loud. The only problem Hiaasen elicits is the conflict between wanting to devour his books in one or two sittings versus wanting to savor the hilarity over a period of days.

Lucky You starts when a young black woman, JoLayne Lucks, a veterinary assistant in the small town of Grange, Florida, learns that she’s won the state lottery to the tune of $28 million. With her winnings, she hopes to purchase a tract of land called Simmons Wood before developers do, to prevent it from being transformed into a shopping mall. What she doesn’t know is that there’s another winner, a white supremacist wannabe named Bodean Gazzer, who has enlisted the dubious assistance of the glue-sniffing, aerosol-huffing misfit Onus Dean Gillespie, who goes by the monicker Chub. Bodean intends to steal JoLayne’s ticket, $14 million not being enough to fund his newly founded organization, the White Clarion Aryans.

Tom Krome, formerly an investigative reporter for a New York paper that downsized its staff, and now working as a feature writer for a small Florida paper called The Register, is assigned to interview the reticent JoLayne. When she’s robbed, beaten and humiliated by Bodean and Chub, Krome decides to help her recover her ticket.

That’s how the book starts.

Deliciously complicating matters are various bizarre subplots and characters, among them Mary Andrea Finlay Krome, Tom’s wife, whom he’s been trying to divorce for years and who keeps eluding his attempts to do so; Katie Battenkill, with whom Tom has had a two-week affair; Judge Arthur Battenkill, Katie’s philandering but vindictive husband, who dispatches an inept assistant to burn Tom’s house down; Sinclair, Tom’s managing editor, who has a religious revelation in Grange and begins “speaking in tongues” after he holds a turtle whose shell is painted with the image of one of the Apostles--painted by Demencio, an entrepreneur who preys on the devotions of the ultra-religious by creating and perpetuating roadside miracles--among them a statue of the Virgin Mary that weeps perfume-scented tears; Dominick Amador, the incompetent builder who cashes in on the religious trade by drilling holes in his hands and feet to create “stigmata” Shiner, the convenience store clerk recruited by Bodean and Chub and assigned by Chub to kidnap the love of his life: Amber, the canny waitress at Hooters; and Bernard Squires, investment manager for the Central Midwest Brotherhood of Grouters, Spacklers and Drywallers International, sent to Grange by Richard “The Icepick” Tarbone, who is skimming the union’s pension fund, to purchase under any circumstances the same tract of land JoLayne wants to preserve.

Hiaasen, himself an investigative reporter for the Miami Herald (which makes one wonder what kinds of people he’s encountered in real-life, and whether some of them find their ways into his books), skillfully blends these characters and situations into a plausible sequence of comic and not-so-comic events in a way that will keep you turning the pages to find out what happens next. Like Swift, Twain and Thurber, all of whom he’s been compared to, Hiaasen has a satirical take on contemporary life; like Dickens, he has a knack for rendering outlandish characters so as to make them goofily believable. Even his villains, if hardly likable, are fascinating to watch.

If you haven’t read Hiaasen, whose previous novels--Tourist Season, Double Whammy, Skin Tight, Native Tongue, Strip Tease (the book is infinitely better than the movie!), and Stormy Weather--are all eminently worth your time, Lucky You is a wonderful place to start. If you have read him but haven’t gotten to this one as yet, you’re in for a laugh-peppered treat rich with subtle social commentary that never hinders the pace.

Still doubt that comedy can be suspenseful? Lucky you: you can dispel the doubts by reading Lucky You.

Barry Ergang ©2008, 2012

Winner of the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s 2007 Derringer Award in the Flash Fiction category, Barry Ergang’s written work has appeared in numerous publications, print and electronic. Some of Barry’s fiction is available at Smashwords and Amazon.com, and Amazon also has available a couple of his poetry collections. His personal collection of books for sale are at http://www.barryergangbooksforsale.yolasite.com/. 

Red Scarf Review Amended

On Friday, August 10, 2012, Kevin posted my review of The Red Scarf by Gil Brewer. Although I praised the novel as an excellent example of the noir fiction that came along in the 1950s and praised the publisher, New Pulp Press, for resurrecting it, I also took them to task for releasing an e-book edition riddled with various types of errors. I contacted them about it and editor Jon Bassoff got back to me promptly, thanking me for pointing out the problem and assuring me it would be corrected.

Today, September 8, 2012, Jon sent me the corrected e-version of the novel. (I don't believe the paperback edition had the same problems.) Therefore, I want to assure everyone who might be interested in reading it--and it's definitely worth reading--that you can disregard reader-reviewer complaints you'll find at Amazon and possibly at other sellers' sites about the errors. The publisher's responsiveness is commendable. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

--Barry Ergang

FFB Review: "THE INNOCENT MRS. DUFF" (1946) by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding

This week for Friday’s Forgotten Books it is Barry’s turn front and center. The complete list of books is over on Patti Abbott’s blog at http://pattinase.blogspot.com/ While you are there, check out what is going on with Pulp Ink 2 and other things of note.

THE INNOCENT MRS. DUFF (1946) by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding

reviewed by Barry Ergang

Discussions about mystery/suspense fiction often debate whether certain stories are plot-driven or character-driven. I take the first to signify a tale in which plot is something extraneous that happens to the characters, imposed from without; the second to signify a tale in which the plot develops from the characters populating it, who themselves create the situations they become entangled in. I don't find one type necessarily better than the other. The result, for better or worse, depends on any given author's integration of the multitude of elements that make up the storytelling process. That said, let me highly recommend as a first-rate example of the character-driven story The Innocent Mrs. Duff by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding.

The story is told from the point of view of the priggish, class-conscious Jacob Duff, a man in his forties who has recently remarried following the death of his first wife Helen, the mother of his young son Jay. Regina (“Reggie”) Duff, née Riordan, is twenty-one, beautiful, caring, outgoing and, in Jacob's view, shallow and stupid. A year into the marriage, he has lost interest in her and ponders divorce. It becomes apparent to the reader early on that Duff himself, with his narrow snobbery, his selfish insistence on the way things ought to be, and his unwillingness to communicate with his wife to effect understanding and compromise, is the shallow one. Fourteen pounds overweight, he vows to lose the excess poundage by exercising and dieting—but he begins to drink heavily, frequently getting sick. After each drinking bout, he swears he’s going to cut down or quit, but finds himself unable to, rationalizing the need for alcohol every time.

As the story deepens, his own idiosyncrasies create worsening problems for him which he blames on Regina and others, ultimately leading to a tragedy of his own making. Holding skillfully and subtly develops her drama and its personae in a clear prose style—without resorting to the kind of analysis and psycho-babble one is more likely to find in current “psychological suspense” stories. Instead, the reader observes Duff in action and interaction, is privy to his thoughts, and can thus indulge in his own analysis if he wishes to.

In a letter to Hamish Hamilton, his British publisher, Raymond Chandler wrote: “Does anybody in England publish Elisabeth Sanxay Holding? For my money she's the top suspense writer of them all. She doesn't pour it on and make you feel irritated. Her characters are wonderful; and she has a sort of inner calm which I find very attractive. I recommend for your attention, if you have not read them, Net of Cobwebs, The Innocent Mrs. Duff, The Blank Wall.” The edition I have, which also contains The Blank Wall, is published by Academy Chicago and contains a cover blurb from Anthony Boucher: “For subtlety, realistic conviction, incredible economy, she's in a class by herself.”

Can I get an “Amen”?

For more on this book or The Golden Age of Detection surf over to The Golden Age of Detection Wiki found at http://tinyurl.com/2pbs2d

Barry Ergang © 2007, 2012

Winner of the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s 2007 Derringer Award in the Flash Fiction category, Barry Ergang’s written work has appeared in numerous publications, print and electronic. Some of Barry’s fiction is available at Smashwords and Amazon.com, and Amazon also has available a couple of his poetry collections. His personal collection of books for sale are at  http://www.barryergangbooksforsale.yolasite.com/.