The Kind of Face You Shoot: The Murdering Fool

I'm not sure when or from what source I first heard about Derek Raymond, but I'm positive that the reason I became aware of him at all is I Was Dora Suarez. It's possible that the connection being made in whatever it was I was reading, was between I Was Dora Suarez and horror fiction, this being interesting because Raymond's novel is a work of crime fiction, not horror. For some reason, linking those two genres together is something that's only done sporadically, most often when there's a blatant crossover, as in, say, Red Dragon or The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris, which weld the crime procedural with almost Gothic villainy (the argument could be made, and made easily, that Harris's follow-up, Hannibal, pretty much leaves crime behind altogether, and is a full-on horror novel; that it's garbage is immaterial). Otherwise, unless a horror writer is intentionally bringing noir tropes into his or her horror story, the fact that both genres traditionally traffic in violent death and dark psychologies and evil intentions doesn't seem to most people to be particularly worth noting. Hence why what I learned about I Was Dora Suarez, and it's very particular reputation, made such an impact on me that day, whenever it was, because the novel is considered one of the most violently transgressive, shocking, and horrific crime novels ever written. It's a novel that was thought to be so vile (in its content, not its morality, though there must be some folks who consider it morally repugnant, too) by Raymond's publishers at the time that they refused to take it, and he had to shop it elsewhere. The oft-quoted passage from Marilyn Stasio's review of it in The New York Times Book Review, when the novel was originally published in 1990, goes like this:

If you think of the act of writing as a game of chicken between the author and his talent, then Derek Raymond is one author who achieves his ecstasy by sailing off cliffs. Everything about I Was Dora Suarez shrieks of the joy and pain of going too far.

I Was Dora Suarez is an Infamous Cult Novel, and who doesn't want to read those?

What I eventually learned was that I Was Dora Suarez is the fourth in a Raymond's series of novels --  referred to alternately as "The Factory Novels" and "The Black Novels," in the first case because the building that houses the police division Unexplained Deaths (or A14) is known as The Factory, and in the latter case because in mood, tone, and content, the novels are very black indeed -- about an unnamed London police detective, our narrator, with an appalling tragedy in his past and an overwhelmingly intense empathy for murder victims that only just exceeds his loathing for anybody who isn't exactly like him (more about that in a little bit). And even though I wanted to read I Was Dora Suarez more than just about anything, I decided to -- and please try not to admire me too much for this -- read the three preceding Factory novels first. So over the years I plowed through He Died With His Eyes Open (filmed twice by the French, and once considered for a third Gallic adaptation by Claude Chabrol), The Devil's Home on Leave, and How the Dead Live (there's a fifth, which I haven't read, called Dead Man Upright, published in 1993, not long before Raymond's death in 1994). Perhaps you'll notice a theme among those titles, as "black" was the theme of Cornell Woolrich's own, original series of "black" novels (The Bride Wore Black, Black Alibi, The Black Angel, etc.) which he, Woolrich, never broke from, yet here we have I Was Dora Suarez, an outlier. Anyhow, what I learned from those books was that Raymond (whose real name was Robin Cook) was an evidently very sincere writer with a very despairing imagination, and a weird devotion to certain detective fiction tropes which he'd have been better off tossing aside since, for one thing, just because everyone claims genre fiction is formulaic doesn't make it so, and also, he wasn't very good at writing them. Which is perhaps more to the point. I'm not talking about the crime investigation structure of the detective story, and I'll grant you that part of the formula is pretty much unavoidable when writing about a criminal investigation. No, I'm talking about things like hardboiled dialogue, for which, right from the start, it's clear to me Raymond had no gift. Enough years have passed since I read those first three novels that it would be very difficult for me to go into particulars, but I remember that Our Narrator clashes over and over again with Bowman, an inspector on the police force he despises, that, essentially run like this:

"You're just a fool, Bowman. Someone should help you find your brain."

"You can't talk to me like that!" Bowman screamed.

Paraphrased, etc. In addition, the stories Raymond concocted, while manufactured to fit his handful of themes, were wild enough to strain credulity, which is not unusual in crime fiction by any means, but this sort of plotting requires a deft touch if the philosophical thrust -- and if there's one thing Raymond is after, it's to turn the crime novel into philosophy -- of the novel is something like "This is the modern psychological landscape."

I didn't think any of these novels weas terrible, though, and in fact I thought each one was at least a slight improvement on the one before: Raymond's emotional commitment strengthened as his writing became less erratic. I remember thinking that How the Dead Live as a whole represented the most obvious jump in quality on several grounds, not least the surer hand exhibited in handling another wild plot, and making it work more directly towards the goal he'd always been aiming for. This gave me reason to be optimistic, since my disappointment in his writing never altered my plan to get around to I Was Dora Suarez "one of these days." Its infamy simply cast too immense a shadow over the last twenty years of crime fiction.

When Melville House reprinted the first four books in the Factory series, Joyce Carol Oates (Oh God, not her again! I'm afraid so) reviewed He Died With His Eyes Open and I Was Dora Suarez for The New York Review of Books. Finding herself quite enamored, she wrote:

Few detectives go so far as Raymond's Detective Sergeant, who falls in love with murder victims because they have been wrongfully killed, and there is no one but the Detective Sergeant to avenge them. Edmund Wilson could not have dismissed Derek Raymond's Factory novels as below the radar of serious literary consideration, and Auden would surely have been impressed with their stark originality, though Raymond's vision is wholly secular and fatalist and there is little sense of redemption in these blood-drenched pages...

Which is certainly in line with just about every opinion of Raymond and this series I've ever come across. Though regarded from a distance this must seem like a strange hope, nevertheless what Oates claims these books are, and what she claims they succeed in accomplishing, is what I still hoped I Was Dora Suarez would deliver. When all is said and done, though, dragging Wilson and Auden into the fray seems defensive at best. In any case, I've now read I Was Dora Suarez, and the first thirty pages or so did two things for me: it convinced me that the novel's reputation for being shocking was reasonably well-earned, and made me wonder if perhaps this novel really was a masterpiece.

Those pages describe a pair of murders (well, three, but let's stick with the main two for now), of an old woman named Betty Carstairs, hurled head-first through her own grandfather clock, about whom Raymond writes:

...Betty Carstairs was eighty-six, and that was how she died that night. She had never truly asked herself if the long and arduous history of her life had been worthwhile, or whether indeed it had had any meaning at all; but she had at least supposed that she owned some right to her own body, to give or withhold it while it was still worth looking at, and to continue to live on in it even after it was not. She had endured two wars, accepting in both the losses of people close to her that wars entail; she had been less afraid of the bombing than of considering why it was that so many of those who made up her personal world should perish in an apparently random way, and why it was that she should have expected patience from herself and found it, each time her husband, long dead now, had invaded her physically -- for she was Scottish, and had never been an awakened person: all she had ever really enjoyed doing was walking. And then, lately, when she had fallen seriously ill with her heart and knew that she was spent, she marvelled and wondered, when she was not in pain, why she need feel so afraid and alone.

Well, now she had been killed in her own clock, so that was that, and that was the squalid and miserable end of Betty Carstairs.

Note that Betty was the second victim that night. The first had been a pretty young woman, Betty's lodger and friend, Dora Suarez, daughter of a Spanish father and Jewish mother. About her death, Raymond writes:

Silly little bat, she kept trying to get away from him long after there was nowhere for her to go, telling him over and over that she had made her peace with the world, which infuriated him in a delicious way -- and yet all he achieved by the panic he had caused in her was make her trip over one of the trailing sheets between the two beds, which created a prize cock-up, becuse all she did then was fall with a thud on the floor and a bit later, even when she did finally manage to get up again, she had by then got her stupid little head in totally the wrong position for him, so that instead of his being able to take her head clean off, bag up and leave, he somehow got in a fluster. And now look at the fucking place, a shambles, shit order! It wasn't a question of the blood everywhere or the smell of her entrails in the frozen room that upset him so much as the mess he had made of her. She was sad to look down at, like a fuck that hadn't come off; the assorted bits of her lying all over the toffee shop left him with an emptiness, they left him wanting to take the whole scene back and play it again.

He'd be punishing himself for this, of course -- still, in the meantime, whew!

He got jerked off over her all right in the end, though, just the same, even though he nearly bit his bottom lip off doing it.

Notice that here, unlike in the passage about Betty Carstairs, the information is more about the killer than it is Dora Suarez. There's a reason for that, or many, one of which being that I Was Dora Suarez is a first-person novel, told from the point of view of Raymond's nameless detective. Which means he's telling us all these seemingly third person things (though there's a telling use of "we" in this section that clues the reader into the fact that something's up) and it's hard not to wonder how he knows, for example, that Betty Carstairs only enjoyed walking, and nothing else in life. Then again, and this is an odd choice on Raymond's part, we eventually learn, through Dora Suarez's diary which the detective finds in her room, that Betty Carstairs wasn't as miserable in her marriage as that "invaded her physically" bit would suggest.

The power of this, especially if you've read enough fiction about serial killers, is that Raymond seems to be describing, to the degree that it is within any sane person's ability to do so, actual serial murder. The killer (and he will be named eventually in the course of the novel) does not choose his victims based on some contrived nonsense equation ("His dad's car was a Ford so he murders only people named Ford") but instead he's driven, apparently, by genuine violent, psychopathic desires. And what he does to Suarez -- I quoted some of it, but by no means all -- exactly corresponds to the kind of horrific, sewer-like defiling of their victims engaged in by real serial killers. In other words, this isn't a "thriller." In these pages, Raymond is returning murder to its rightful realm of terror, disgust, torture, and madness, without trying to place it within some kind of structure.

When the killer leaves that crime scene, he drives to the house of a man named Roatta, a corrupt fellow we learn next to nothing about, other than that there is some criminal/professional situation at play here. All that matters is that the killer kills him. He shoots him in the head:

The upper part of Roatta's head entirely disappeared; it vanished in a red screen of exploding blood and bone, and when that cleared away, there was nothing left of his head at all except his lower jaw, from which a sly tongue with things running off it dropped...

Etc. There's no need to keep typing. We're clearly now in the land of Cartoon Violence. This is jarring, coming so soon after the naturalistic repugnance of the Carstairs/Suarez murders. Worse yet, though it might not seem to be a problem at first, is the implication that the Roatta murder is not a serial killing, but rather a professional, hired murder. So that this serial killer is also a hitman, which means, for the reader of crime fiction, or for anybody, I should think, a host of things, such as: this is not a serial killer as they exist in the real world, regardless of what those powerful first 25 pages might have indicated. Which means, further, that the dreaded shadow of "plot" has now been cast over I Was Dora Suarez. Plot, by the way, is fine. Even great, if you're good at it. But when you can't, or don't care to, work the mechanics of plot in your favor, so that in your novel, as here, the plot is nothing more that a series of exposed gears creaking with rust, the sincerity of the writer's philosophy begins to pale next to the disingenuousness of the storyteller.

There's no need to focus on that bit especially, though, because everything I've just quoted and talked about can be found in I Was Dora Suarez's first chapter. In chapter two, the thing drops off the fucking cliff. I do believe that I've already strongly implied that this all goes tits up after a while, and the fact that it starts out so much better than the previous Factory novels somehow does not improve the overall experience. And my bewilderment in the face of I Was Dora Suarez has somewhat less to do with the novel itself than it does with the critical refusal to acknowledge the unignorable garbage that makes up the vast majority of pages 25 through 190 (give or take) of this 202-page novel. All of which sounds harsh, but please know, my reasons are sound.

The problem with writing about where I Was Dora Suarez goes wrong is that none of the problems -- and they're all, save those of plot and so forth, of pretty much the same type -- aren't all that interesting. What's uncomfortably fascinating is how long they last. After that first chapter, the story progresses along roughly these lines: because the three murders described in the opening chapter occurred so close together, both geographically and temporally, the Detective Sergeant (for the sake of simplicity I'll go with Oates on this one) believes they're connected (a bit of a leap when you consider that Suarez was killed with an axe, Carstairs with brute force, and Roatta with a handgun). The inspector assigned to the Roatta murder, a man named Stevenson, agrees, so the two of them team up. A diary that Suarez kept (and in which she strongly implies that she was suffering from a terminal illness, and, furthermore, had intended to commit suicide on the very night she was murdered) leads them to a mob-run club where Suarez, who was a prostitute, sometimes met clients. There's also a photograph of Suarez singing at a mobster's birthday party, and in the background of that picture is the blurry form of a man heading for the exit. The Detective Sergeant almost immediately decides that guy's the killer, which turns out to be correct, as it happens.

Admirers of the Factory series like to talk about "the shadow of Thatcher" and things such as this when discussing the novels. There's no question in my mind that Raymond wrote these books with that sort of sociopolitical agenda in the back of his mind, but it's beyond me, personal politics aside, why that should factor into a consideration of their quality. Political affiliation paired with the very act of writing genre fiction seems to make folks swoon, but neither thing excuses you from being bad, and much of I Was Dora Suarez is quite bad.

The problem begins with the Detective Sergeant, who is an asshole -- this would be fine if I didn't get the sense that Raymond believes him to be an honorable and admirable man in every respect. He's admirable because he is working and struggling and suffering on the behalf of murder victims, which is fair enough, but he absolutely stomps all over everybody who isn't exactly like him. Or maybe they are, but he doesn't even give them a chance to show what they think. In this passage, the Detective Sergeant (who's been brought back to the force specifically to work the Dora Suarez case, after a suspension stemming from events described in How the Dead Live) is trying to settle -- bitterly, it must be said -- into his office, while feeling like the resented outsider. Raymond writes:

The top left-hand drawer of my desk had been turned into a kind of death row by seven of last year's flies; but except for them that piece of furniture was empty, so I decided to prove to everyone in the place, including myself, that I existed by picking up the phone. The phone sounded dead for quite a while, but after I had dialled zero nine and rapped its grey plastic head very hard on the woodwork several times I finally got a WPC with a bright little voice which said: 'Who is this, please?'

'I'll come down and introduce myself if you don't look out,' I said.

'Line 205 is not in use,' she said.

'Well that must explain why we're both a couple of cunts talking down it then, mustn't it?' I said. 'Now pull your finger out with a loud pop, missis, get it functioning like five minutes ago was a hundred years too late and then I will give you permission to go even further and go totally and utterly mad by stopping all incoming calls while I read up on two murders, which, though you mightn't believe it, is the bizarre, rather sordid kind of work that goes on in this part of the building.' I added: 'And try not to wast my time, because with the current crime rate we never have any.'

'I was just doing my job.'

'I know,' I said, 'and that's what I'm complaining about.'

I think we can all agree that the proper response from the woman unfortunate enough to be in the position to answer that phone, after all that from the Detective Sergeant, would be "What the fuck??" And his tirade, which is based on nothing, actually goes on from there. The only thing I can figure is that Raymond loathed bureaucracy (but don't we all?) and took it as a given that by showing that in order to get your phone set up, or to talk to a person about something important, that falling into a hopeless bureaucratic labyrinth was now your fate unless you, like the Detective Sergeant, were willing to chew his way through to the center like acid. But in order to get that across, mustn't you first describe the bureaucracy? Instead of that, Raymond has his hero piss in the face of a woman who just answered the damn phone, and we're meant to react with a somber fist-pump: it's hopeless, but at least one man is trying.

It's when the Detective Sergeant and Stevenson get to the mob-run club, which is called the Parallel Club, that I Was Dora Suarez really begins to collapse. The Sergeant and Stevenson interrogate a variety of people associated with the club. The Sergeant and Stevenson both have the same approach to their questions (or "questions") and both men sound exactly alike -- the men being questioned all sound exactly like each other, so I guess that's fair enough. But anyway, this is the key, and bear with me, please. On pages 101 to 102 of my Melville International Crime edition:

Another well-stuff fun seeker who looked as if he were quick on his feet if he had to be came over to us and said: 'Who was it you said you were again?'

'Correct the tone, son,' said Stevenson. 'You can see we're police officers, so fuck off and wheel some brains on or I'll have your on a one-way single.' A passing punter who looked as if he had caught socialism in the bar and then brought it up in the scented jacks wavered past us on his way over to an Indian girl naked except for gold slippers and a fur coat, who obviously, from her choked expression, looked as if she felt she could have scored higher. The punter, who was young, with a very high-fairy-tale bald head, said to Stevenson: 'Manners!'

Stevenson said: 'I'm on my manor, it's called the Factory. Are you on yours?'

'My father owns half this street!'

'Don't bet on it,' Stevenson said.

On page 108:

Stevenson showed Robacci the picture and said: 'OK, now. Now we're here in the Parallel with this photo, aren't we? What night was that, then?

'No need to stammer over it, Robacci,' I said.  'We're in the middle of Roatta's last birthday party here, aren't we?'

He had to say yes.

'The girl singing,' I said. 'The dark girl with the mike there.'

'Don't know here.'

I said: 'Repeat that, but take all your time, because your answer could effect your long-term future.'

'I might have seen her.'

'Don't tell me people sinc in your club in front of your customers without your knowing who the fucking hell they are,' I said.

'They came and went,' Robacci said, 'you know. Felix looked after that end.'

'This is the face of one that went,' I said, 'and the payment for that is going to be weighty.' I said: 'So wring your brains out and put a name to her before you lose your own -- because I'll bury you in the British prison system till the end of time if you don't; the Factory always finds a way.'

Page 113:

'Stevenson said: 'What goes on upstairs here?'

'Upstairs?' said the doorman? 'What upstairs?'

'Your realise we've got a W to take these whole premises apart,' said Stevenson. 'Now, the bother you're already in, you perjure yourself in front of two police officers and you'd best make your will, I'm telling you flat, Johnny.'

'Now let's play it again,' I said. 'The upstairs.'

Page 124:

Stevenson said to Scalo: 'It's your unlucky night.'

Scalo said: 'I don't know what you expect to find here.'

Stevenson said: 'Not you, anyway.' He went over to the phone and dialled up the Factory. He said: 'Bring up a car, yes, it's to the Parallel again, regular minicab service, isn't it? You've one with a wind down for St Stephen's, the other wherever you've a spare cell in the building. Its name's Scalo. Ice it, we've a search on, then we'll be over with a few questions -- yes, straightaway, nice one, bye.'

Scalo said: 'You're never going to nick me.'

Stevenson said: 'What do you mean? That was it, they're on their way, hot-throb.'

"Hot-throb"?

And so on. There's one big revelation in this stretch, one which amps up while at the same time undercutting the "shocking" element of the book, because it's so absurd -- it has to do with what at first are called gerbils, until Raymond seems to have forgotten that and starts calling them rats, and a certain depraved use of such animals you've probably heard of. I'm not going to get into it. But otherwise, over the course of at least forty pages straight (which is not to say forty pages only) what you're reading is what I've just quoted extensively above. And I could have kept going. And going and going and going, but you'd have stopped reading and reported my blog. The other thing you should keep in mind is that this is forty pages out of the novel's full two hundred. That's one-fifth of I Was Dora Suarez given over to the Detective Sergeant or Stevenson saying to somebody "Listen sweetheart we will throw you into a prison jail" and the guy saying "Wait you can't do that" and then they say "Oh don't think that twice, glory-bird" or whatever. It's endless, and thunderously dull.

And none of this even reveals anything that leads them to the killer. They find the guy because the Detective Sergeant is convinced that this blurry faceless figure in the photograph must be the guy, and then he goes to a high-level mob guy with whom he's conveniently formed a bond somewhere along the way, and asks the mob boss "Do you know any serial killers? Tell me straight, sunny man," and the guy does know a serial killer and guess what, it's the same serial killer we've been looking for this whole time.

All the while, we're meant to just bask, or wallow, in the existential, this-modern-world terror that the Detective Sergeant (and Raymond) seems to believe it's heroic to suffer through. The Detective Sergeant is basically Jesus: he suffers for us. Although unlike Jesus, he hates us all. Well, not all of us. Once or twice in I Was Dora Suarez we run across a character who meets with the Detective Sergeant's approval. There are at least two at the morgue, where he learns the extent of Dora Suarez's tragedy (her terminal illness was AIDS, and she had very little time left). After going over the terribleness of her murder and her illness, one of the good men wheels the body away:

Wiecienski said: 'I'll take care of her,' and he drew the towel over her.

Time put a dead little question into a silence that fell as he did so, marred only by the squeak of the rubber wheels; and then the full horror of Suarez's death must have struck all of us in that high room smoking with ice simultaneously, because we all turned and looked at each other, speechless, and Wiecienski looked back at us over his shoulder once with red eyes as he took her back.

Why does Wiecienski look back? "Look at me guys, I'm crying!" My guess is Raymond wanted us to know that the character started to break down once the professional interaction was over, but the only way he could find to tell the reader, in a first-person narrative, was to have him behave in a completely unnatural way.

But frankly, Raymond seemed to have a tough time keeping things straight -- either that, or he didn't care. Whatever tedious, thudding blurt of sentimental despair pops into his head will end up on the page. On page 164, at the very end of chapter eight, the Detective Sergeant says:

Do you know I cry in my sleep? Do you think a man can't cry in his sleep?

Then on page 202, the very last line of the novel:

I had tears in my eyes for the first time since I had broken my arm at sixteen playing football, but my tears were not for me -- they were for the rightful fury of the people.

Motherfucker, you just said...

The Kind of Face You Shoot: If You've Got the Money, Honey

James M. Cain began his seminal 1934 debut novel The Postman Always Lives Twice, a book that defines and practically created an entire genre, this way:

They threw me off the hay truck about noon.

I could almost stop there, but no. Cain goes on:

I had swung on the night before, down at the border, and as soon as I got up there under the canvas, I went to sleep. I needed plenty of that, after three weeks in Tia Juana, and I was still getting it when they pulled off to one side to let the engine cool. Then they saw a foot sticking out and threw me off. I tried some comical stuff, but all I got was a dead pan, so that gag was out. They gave me a cigarette, though, and I hiked down the road to find something to eat.

One gets the sense that this narrator is not employed, and probably hasn't been for a while. He just drifts into whatever situation is next for him, and the next temptation which, when indulged, will either satisfy or destroy him. But he's barely thinking like that. His thoughts run to the primal: he needs food now, so he will look for it. As it happens, he will get a job, which will also bring him next to temptation, and death, and, well, you know. That's what having a job gets you, I suppose

I don't believe it's reaching to claim to hear an echo of Cain in the opening paragraph of Elliott Chaze's Black Wings Has My Angel, published exactly twenty years later, in 1954:

I'd been roughnecking on a drilling rig in the Atchafayala River for better than sixteen weeks, racking the big silver stems of pipe, lugging the sacks of drilling mud from barge to shore, working with my back and guts and letting my mind coast. It needed a lot of coasting. Down around six thousand feet we twisted the pipe off in the hold and they abandoned the well, paid us off, and said to come back in two months, maybe three months.

Tonally, this is sort of the "gainfully employed" version of Cain -- it's a reverse, in other words, as we will learn that Chaze's narrator (who, eventually, after quite a while actually, we discover goes by the name "Tim Sunblade," which...) is not drifting towards a job, but happily away from one. Cain's guy, Frank Chambers, will very soon cadge a meal from the guy who subsequently hires him, and who he will subsequently murder, but we're not immediately privy to the darkness just under his surface. As far as his personality goes, the first impression is one of a guy just trying to get along. Chaze's Tim is a bit different, in that when, still on page one, he talks about being complimented by the driller who hired him for the job that just ended, strongly implying that if Tim comes back and keeps up the hard work he'll be promoted, Tim let's us know that "It was all I could do to keep from laughing in his face."

If Chambers is stumbling into a job and then into the arms of Cora, the dangerously ravenous wife of his boss, and thereon into Hell, Tim is moving with great deliberateness into the arms of the frighteningly cash-mad Virginia (she's a prostitute, and he hired her), but he also doesn't need her to entice him into a life of crime. He's already a criminal, in fact a prison escapee who since escaping has been building towards carrying out the armored car robbery planned by Jeepie, a fellow escapee from Parchman who was killed by prison guards before he could get on the other side of the wall. And that plan has always involved the murder of one of the armored car attendants. "You can see it for yourself," he tells us. "Alive he was nothing but trouble." He's prepared to willingly dive into Hell.

Black Wings Has My Angel has been largely unavailable for about forty years (though not quite so unavailable as many think; in 2012 Stark House reissued the novel, pairing it in one volume with Bruce Elliott's One is a Lonely Number). It's just been reprinted by NYRB Classics, and in his introduction to that edition Barry Gifford talks about his plan to publish it, during his stint as editor of Black Lizard Books during their great 80s heyday, was thwarted by a new batch of editors with final say who didn't believe Chaze's novel was up to snuff. Having read it now myself, I can't view that decision as anything short of ludicrous. In just about 200 pages, Chaze is able to tell his story, which includes a tormented, highly sexual, violent and romantic relationship with Virginia, a complicated drunk who seems alternately joyous and disturbingly avaricious, as well as the carefully planned armored car heist and its aftermath, as well as any number of digressions. About, for example, Tim's time spent working at a factory that made sugar-beet trucks, which he takes for a variety of reasons while working on the heist. There's a whole little short story in here about two of Tim's co-workers, and Chaze fits it into the greater whole with a lot of grace and dark humor.

It's Chaze's prose, though, that is the real show here. Gifford claims that of the Chaze novels that he read after being knocked out by this one, none came close to the power of Black Wings Has My Angel. I can't imagine that the man who wrote this never wrote anything else worthwhile, however. Check out this passage, for example. Tim comes home to find Virginia gone, which happens more than once, and since her timing is especially bad in this instance he goes searching for her in the bars of downtown Denver. At one point, Chaze writes:

From time to time I had a drink and that helped. I remember in one bar down the street from the Denver Post there were six or eight newspapermen at the bar, loading up between editions. You can spot them anywhere. They talk in headlines and they drink gravely and their faces are clean and their fingernails full of carbon. They have many private jokes. They are about the only people I know who are the same out of college as in college, in small towns and big ones. These fellows listened politely when I asked the bartender my stock question. Tall blonde, good shape, very good lips and legs. Drinks whisky neat at times -- water chaser. You seen her? Then one of them volunteered the statement that there was no such woman and all the others nodded. 'Pretty women do not drink whisky neat,' he said. 'They defile it. They perfume it. They dump fruit salad in it.' They all nodded again. It was enough to make you sick. My uncle's a newspaperman. All by himself he's enough to make you sick. Here we had five of them.

Note, among other things, the way the number of newspapermen goes for "six or eight" to five, as though Tim doesn't give a shit how many there were -- one's too many, and one more might as well be a thousand more. Chaze was a newspaperman himself, by the way, which might go without saying.

Black Wings Has My Angel would seem to refer to Virginia, in the classic femme fatale tradition, and it very well may. But what's interesting is that Tim doesn't get sucked into a moral abyss by Virginia. They're both rotten people, but from page one of the novel (and before that, even) Tim had a plan to commit murder. As far as I can tell, Virginia didn't. She's possibly insane, and almost certainly has the kind of death wish that such characters in such novels and films often do, but murder is brought to her; she doesn't bring it to Tim. So the angel of the title must be, I'd say, the angel of death, whose wings, if it exists, must of course be black, and who is always the double-dealing guardian angel of men like Tim.

In the last chunk of the novel, Chaze introduces some curious and rather nutty plot machinations which are hard to swallow (one of them doesn't even end up mattering at all, which to me counts as a plus) but which fit into the usual themes of fate and karma that are the bread and butter of the classic American crime novel. In addition to those plot details, there are also a few bits of imagery that are just this side of bonkers, and may actually be on that side. One of them is so absurdly direct and appropriate, if you will, that if someone ever translated it into a painting, there would be no other title for it than "Crime Novel." It's so exactly right that it is exactly right. If you get me.

The Kind of Face You Shoot: It Seemed That the City Was Dying

In 1938, the British writer Gerald Kersh came up with perhaps the most quintessentially noir title before noir as we define it even began when he published his now classic novel Night and the City. If the goal is to completely illustrate the noir sensibility in as few words as possible, you're more than halfway there with those four words, yet what's generally regarded as the first true noir film, Stranger on the Third Floor, was still two years away. This is why, or one of the reasons why, the cultural supremacy of films when defining this genre bothers me so much. Oh, crime literature is certainly not ignored, but from where I stand the attitude towards them isn't too far from "You know those great noir movies? Well some people wrote books like that, too!" As if they were almost very respectable novelizations and not the originators. My argument has also been, when it comes to the cinematic noir style, that if you read the books that started it all, that style almost seems like the only logical way to faithfully adapt them. Night and the City? Got it. Roll camera.

Kersh, meanwhile, has faded into near oblivion since his death in 1968 at the age of 57. Not entirely, and at least one American publisher, Valancourt Books, and one British one, Faber, have recently reprinted novels and/or story collections by Kersh. (One reason he hasn't given up the ghost entirely is because Harlan Ellison, himself a cult writer, though it's a healthy cult, has said many times that Kersh is his favorite writer; in 1969 Ellison edited a selection of what he considered Kersh's best short stories, which tended to have more of a horror or science-fiction edge than his novels, called Nightshades & Damnations, which is back in print through Valancourt.) But if that one, maybe last, grip on posthumous survival weakens and Kersh drops away for good, that would just about figure, given his struggles while alive. There were political problems, for one thing -- according to Paul Duncan's overview/essay of Kersh "Gerald Kersh: Man of Many Skins" which is included as an afterword to my 2001 iBooks reprint of Night and the City, Kersh was accused of being both a fascist and Communist, as well as an anti-Semite, though he was Jewish. More bizarrely, after Kersh's first novel, Jews Without Jehovah was pulled mere weeks following its publication after some of Kersh's relatives filed legal objections due to what they believed were thinly-disguised, and, needless to say, unflattering portrayals of themselves in the highly autobiographical story, "injury was added to insult," as Duncan pretty much unavoidably puts it, when one of those relatives, an uncle, ran over Kersh (he survived) in a car bought with money won in the Jews Without Jehovah libel lawsuit. It was an accident, I guess? Anyhow, Kersh never seemed to stop struggling, with writing, publishing, or his ill health. Even so, he published a wide variety of novels, nineteen in all, with seemingly no two alike: there's a deeply cynical, caustic comedy about the running of a shabby movie theater (Fowlers End); a fictionalized account of the Lidice massacre, carried out by the Nazis in retaliation for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich (The Dead Look On); a Hollywood satire (An Ape, a Dog, and a Serpent); a novel of Rome under Nero (The Implacable Hunters); an autobiographical novel about Kersh's stint in the Coldstream Guards (They Died With Their Boots Clean); even a sequel of sorts to Night and the City, called The Song of the Flea. Plus many others. It's always the truly unique ones who are forgotten. Doesn't it seem that way? I remember, years ago, during one of his rare appearances online, Harlan Ellison got on his official website, which he doesn't run or visibly participate in all that often, to ask help from his fans in tracking down a copy of the obviously quite rare Jews Without Jehovah. I hope he found one.

And of course, the main thing keeping Kersh's name even on the fringes of anyone's mind is that he wrote the novel on which one of the most famous film noirs -- that is, Jules Dassin's 1950 adaptation of Night and the City -- was based. About which more in a bit, but first, what about that novel? Though mostly focusing on the character of Harry Fabian, an amoral, greedy, lying pimp and conman, Kersh's book is more of an ensemble than the Dassin film would turn out to be (just one of a slew of differences, about which more in etc.). In addition to Harry, there's Helen, the poor jobless young woman pushed by her friend Vi into working at one of those chiseling "bottle party" nightclubs, where even having a hostess like Helen or Vi sit at your table costs money, only to discover, Helen does, that she likes it. Helen's romantic interests, which become irrevocably intertwined with her financial ones, are divided between Adam, an aspiring sculptor who's also a bartender at The Silver Fox, the club where she works, and Harry, whom she meets at The Silver Fox, and where Harry fritters away every penny he gets his fingers on. After clawing and conning his way to obtaining two hundred pounds he desperately needs to set up his business as a wrestling promoter, which he believes will make him rich, Harry celebrates at The Silver Fox, where Helen, Vi, owner Phil Nosseross, and a guilt-ridden Adam squeeze him for everything he's got. Later, after a blind drunk Harry staggers away, having already thrown up in the street, Vi notices the vomit he's left behind:

Vi screwed up her face, and said: "Somebody hasn't half been sick."

"That was Fabian," said Adam; and pointing to the pavement, added: "There's about thirty or forty pounds down there. God knows what the foold did to get that much money, but that's were it's gone to."

Which pretty neatly sums up Night and the City's attitude towards money. In some ways that passage could stand as a synecdoche for the book as a whole. Either that passage, or perhaps this one:

The bell of a near-by church sent out into the night two extraordinary slow, reverberating strokes. Their echoes beat about Fabian's head. He experienced a sickening spiritual depression, a sense of futility and wasted time, as he stood, damp with sweat in his heavy overcoat, looking down at the reflections of the lamps in the puddles. "Two o'clock," said Fabian.

Rain started to fall again.

"I give up," said Fabian.

That sense of utter doom and moral waste overwhelms the novel early, though in its very early going Night and the City seems like in tone it will closely resemble the high, angry comedy of Fowlers End. Kersh was a gifted prose stylist, of a particularly English sort, the sort that leads to one character's voice being described this way:

In order to reproduce the way Figler spoke, put your tongue between your teeth, stop up your nose, half fill your mouth with saliva, and try to say: "This is the end of the matter."

Fuse this with the hardboiled menace of the genre, and you get this description of a London crime boss: "He was freezing point made articulate." There's a great deal of this in the early chunk of Night of the City, and throughout, but eventually this sort of prose steps back and the novel becomes surprisingly dialogue-heavy. Writing dialogue was another one of Kersh's great talents, so this should not necessarily be seen as a loss. Anyway, there's something quite Chandleresque about that "freezing point" line. But curiously, the humor that Chandler brought to his prose, not to mention the humor Kersh often brought to his own, is soon left behind.

And before you get the wrong idea about Harry Fabian, you should know that he's not deserving of your sympathy. He may get rained on and he may give up, and he may get taken for a drunken idiot by the staff and management of The Silver Fox, and Adam, the most virtuous of Night and the City's cast of characters, may feel pity for him, but Fabian will, over the course of a novel, pimp out his girlfriend Zoe, latter plan to sell her into white slavery, hope for the death of an elderly wrestler only for the publicity it will bring his business, and more. In Jules Dassin's film, the character, as played by Richard Widmark, seems to have at one time been a regular decent fellow who at some point went wrong. Kersh's Fabian provide no evidence that he's been anything but hateful since birth. Kersh appears to be suggesting that Fabian is the city personified -- amoral, predatory, sociopathic. And doomed, too, because Kersh's optimism, such as it is, is aimed at the creative independents like Adam, not at those who flow anonymously through the veins of London, which is almost everyone else in the book.  Fabian is the city at night.

Speaking of the Dassin film (which has just been released on Blu-ray by Criterion), you shouldn't taken any of what I've said up to this point to mean that I think that Night and the City is anything less than wonderful. It's strange, though, that while it softens Fabian considerably -- he's a shit, but he may not be the devil -- the ending of the film is even more suffocatingly dark than that of the novel. Nobody could reasonably claim that Kersh's ending is a happy one, but as I've said it does reserve a certain amount hope for Adam, the sculptor. This only goes so far, as Kersh wasn't writing Adam's life story (though I guess I'll have to see if Adam and his fate are featured in that sort-of sequel The Song of the Flea), but it's there; it is, in fact, the note Kersh chooses to go out on. Dassin and screenwriter Jo Eisinger, meanwhile, choose to go out on a note of death and posthumous humiliation.

The plot of Dassin's film is quite a bit different than Kersh's: the novel's avaricious Helen is made the unhappy wife, played by Googie Withers, of The Silver Fox owner Phil Nosseross (Frances L. Sullivan). I would argue, too, that there's just a sliver of poignancy to Withers portrayal (just a sliver) that replaces the growing horror that Kersh's depiction of Helen invites. Fabian's girlfriend in the film is neither Helen nor Zoe -- there is no Zoe here -- but rather Mary (Gene Tierney), a decent woman who works at The Silver Fox, but this is not made to look like the profession of vipers that Kersh argues it is. Adam's there, too, but he's a good, dull man who's never part of the plot when he could actually do anything. Decency and creativity interest Dassin somewhat less here than they did Kersh. People who embody both do exist, but unlike in the novel, in the film there's no struggle to be or do either. Such people need to turn tail and run from people like Harry Fabian, and in any case, they needn't fear temptation.

But the gist of Dassin's film is pretty much that of Kersh's novel. Dassin's great innovation, apart from that brick-to-the-face ending, is the inclusion of a gangster character, a powerful rival wrestling promoter played by Herbert Lom. This man, Kristo, is I suppose some version of Kersh's Clarke, who finally had little impact on the novel's plot, but Kristo, in this film, becomes the menace that runs through that whole novel but can't be pegged to one man, because it's everywhere. For the sake of expediency, Dassin and Eisinger pegs it to Kristo. Yet Kristo has all the heart. The emotional centerpiece of Dassin's Night and the City belongs to him. This choice is a masterstroke. If Fabian (and Widmark is superb, as you'd expect) has all the panic, sweat, and desperation, Kristo has all the soul. He is the night to Fabian's city.

The Kind of Face You Shoot: With All My Heart I Hope For the Worst

Currently, Nic Pizzolatto is having his ass handed to him. By this I of course mean that both the professional and the amateur reviews of the second season of his much-discussed HBO crime show True Detective have thus far, two episodes in, been pretty withering. Then again, set against the critical and amateur reviews of season one of True Detective, which were rapturous to an almost bewildering degree (and I say this as someone who liked that season) almost any dip in enthusiasm would have to count as withering. But I'll tell you, I'm utterly unable to account, on logical or critical grounds, for the shift from adulation to sneering mockery which this show is now experiencing. Whose aunt did Pizzolatto throw off a cliff? Whatever problems season one had are, I'll admit, still there -- among these I myself would count a certain thoughtless adherence to formula, an over-fondness for reference, and possibly an inability to distinguish good poetry from bad -- but so are all the good things: strong lead and secondary performances, a wonderful air of grim mystery, menace, and suspense, a willingness (even a need) to take genre seriously (something Pizzolatto is being dinged for now, though, somehow, not then). And finally, my favorite thing about True Detective, a willingness to be straight-up weird, something that has made its way into the show, ironically, via something that has become one of the show's deficits, which is that fondness for nodding too hard at the works of others. This is a plus and a minus, in other words. When it works on the show, you get, in season one, the weird horror of Robert W. Chambers, H. P. Lovecraft, and, most intriguingly, Thomas Ligotti pulled into the mix of a homicide investigation. In season two, the strong James Ellroy influence that I also noticed in season one becomes foregrounded, as this year's storyline (and each season is a new self-contained story, with a new cast and new characters) and structure almost begs you to think about Ellroy's 1988 masterpiece The Big Nowhere. Recently, it also wants you to think about Georges Franju's film Judex, but never mind about that.

So what happened? Fucked if I know. I'm enjoying season two of True Detective as much as I enjoyed season one (in other words, a reasonable amount). As usual, the backlash can only be observed from a distance and wondered at. You can't assume anything about those engaging in the backlash -- or, rather, you can, and it's possible that I have, but you can't say, publicly, that there's any sort of dishonesty at work here because you just can't know. (And to be extra clear, I don't know, but I am baffled; also, if you never liked the show then obviously you're off the hook.) This is a relief because as it happens, while this post is about Nic Pizzolatto, it isn't about True Detective. In 2006, Pizzolatto published a book of short stories called Between Here and the Yellow Sea. It received praise from such writers as Adam Johnson, Ellen Gilchrist, Tom Franklin, and William Gay. (This, in and of itself, shouldn't necessarily mean anything to you, though I would argue that it's not something that should mean nothing to you, either.) In 2010 he published a novel, called Galveston. The reaction to that, which included a rave by celebrated crime writer Dennis Lehane in The New York Times Book Review, probably greased the wheels that led to True Detective happening at all. None of this, of course, means that True Detective is any good -- if you don't like it, you don't like it. But in the wake of that show's season two premiere, which might have to be regarded as disastrous, Pizzolatto has been accused of being phony, and a bad writer. And I'll admit that if a certain thing that many predict will happen in episode three of season two does in fact happen (we'll all find out in about six and a half hours), then I will have no choice but to call out Pizzolatto on some pretty egregious bullshit, storytelling-wise. Nevertheless, I've read selections from Between Here and the Yellow Sea as well as all of Galveston, and I'm telling you, Pizzolatto means what he writes. You can scoff at it and think his work "takes itself too seriously" (whatever in the world that means), but just because he takes the crime genre more seriously than you do, that doesn't somehow mean he's lying.

Of the three short stories I read from his collection, the one that comes closest to being a traditional crime story is the title story, "Between Here and the Yellow Sea." In it, a young man named Bobby Coressi remembers the day Amanda Duprene, the cheerleader he loved, unrequitedly, in high school hopped into a Chevy and took off forever, leaving behind her father, that same high school's football coach:

I was there the day she left. I mowed lawns back then, and on that Sunday I worked the yard next to Coach Duprene's house. A red Chevy Blazer parked in their driveway. Four boys I knew from school were in that truck. The back end sagged with boxes and bags, a surfboard. High school was over, and they were all moving to California. Coach Duprene watched from the porch and didn't wave as the truck rolled way.

Someone, we can now say, should have stopped that Chevy. It's no secret. She makes movies under the name Mandy LeRock. I've only seen one.

Some time later, Bobby and Coach Duprene join together for a road trip to California, with the vague notion of saving Amanda from the clutches of the porn world. You might envision some kind of bloody showdown with porn goons, revelations that Amanda has sunk beneath the level of mainstream pornography into something more shadowy and frighteningly transgressive, but no. There is a rather dark revelation, or rather a hint towards one, but otherwise Pizzolatto lets the story play out to a deliberately anticlimactic end. The conclusion that not everyone wants or even especially needs your help is not the kind one is usually asked to draw from a crime story.

Another story, called "The Guild of Thieves, Lost Women, and Sunrise Palms" is about a young guy named Hoyt who lives in an RV park with his dad. One day, his dad gives Hoyt two thousand dollars and says that he has to leave for a while, and that money will have to last Hoyt until he gets back. In the meantime, Hoyt hangs out with his friend CB, a war vet who now deals drugs with Hoyt's help, and whose RV is across from a palm reader. If this all seems a little too colorful, Pizzolatto's prose is always clean, letting whatever feels like it might be a bit much just exist, unadorned:

CB has told Hoyt that CB used to mean Charles Bailey but now it meant Coffin Boat. CB used to be enormous. He used to hold the state triple-A division record in the shot put. He has a composite plastic plate in his hip and a note that excuses him from metal detectors. He's always refused to tell Hoyt stories about Iraq. CB's skin is dark brown and hard like wood, and he has a thick face, a flat nose, black eyes. He is full Choctaw. Great pink scars engulf his left arm -- a gnarled arm seeded with shrapnel, always bent in a way that reminds Hoyt of the tiny, useless claw of a T-Rex. Hoyt met CB two years ago, pawning the first thing he ever stole, a neighbor's shiny .45 Magnum.

Again, as with "Between Here and the Yellow Sea," the elements of a crime story are laid out, but "The Guild of Thieves, Lost Women, and Sunrise Palms" doesn't even employ the kind of crime plot that "Between Here and the Yellow Sea" subverts -- Hoyt's story is instead completely aimless, as is Hoyt. The idea, one supposes, is to take crime out of the high-plotting we usually associate it with, such as you'd find in Chandler, or Ellroy, or, you know, True Detective, and put it back into the realm of bored, angry reality. Which Pizzolatto pulls off rather well, although he's not immune to letting the language of fiction mar the reality he's trying to construct. At one point, two cops are questioning Hoyt about his father, and during one tense moment of the interrogation Pizzolatto writes "One of the deputies idly examined a fingernail." Which, frankly, is pure movie horseshit, a shortcut to "jaded" or "heartless" that has been rolled out unimaginatively in countless films.

And it's odd, too, that Pizzolatto would choose to compound this sort of thing with his blatant references to other crime novels and films. In the other story I read, "1987, The Races," which is pretty much not a crime story at all, about a boy spending a day at the tracks with his kind, yet stupid and desperate, father, the boy, whose mind is all jumbled up with his parents' divorce, his loyalty to his dad, his dad's own frustrating behavior, that he feels great anger at a well-meaning woman at the tracks his father likes (and I'll add for the sake of context, has just given a lot of fruit to), and anyway, Pizzolatto writes:

[The boy] wanted to grab the sack of oranges and beat her with them, like he'd read about a man doing to a woman in a crime novel his father had.

The decision to so blatantly and awkwardly reference Jim Thompson's The Grifters is all the worse because "1987, The Races" is a good story -- it has immediacy and real heartbreak in it. Nothing is brought to the table by basically saying to the reader "We both like crime fiction so much that I'm not even going to name the book in question because you don't need me to." It would be far less irritating if Pizzolatto had chosen to pay homage to The Grifters by writing a story in which someone is beaten with a sack of oranges, with no mention that the idea came from a Jim Thompson novel. That is, in fact, the kind of reference Pizzolatto is messing around with in True Detective: the Ligotti, Chambers, and Lovecraft stuff in season one, and the James Ellroy stuff now in season two. At no point in season one did anybody say "Have you ever read Thomas Ligotti? Well let me tell you..." Whereas in "1987, The Races" he's essentially stopping his story to say "The Grifters by Jim Thompson." Although it was not mentioning Ligotti by name in season one that led some people to accuse Pizzolatto, rather absurdly I believe, of plagiarism, so maybe he shouldn't listen to me.

Anyway, the decision to clumsily insert genre references into his writing was not an impulse he was able to shake by the time he wrote Galveston, his novel from 2010. About midway through the book, the narrator, Roy Cady, is talking to another tenant of the motel where he, Rocky, a young prostitute, and her three-year-old sister Tiffany are staying. This other tenant, Tray, says to Roy:

"You know you remind me of, man?...Guy from the movies. What's that guy? He was in the movie about the cockfighter. And the other. Ole boy driving around with a head in the car."

Two words never uttered in the ensuing exchange are "Warren Oates," because we know, we don't need to be told. Although I do wonder about somebody who has seen both Cockfighter and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia yet can't remember Warren Oates' name. On the other hand, now we know that Roy Cady looks like Warren Oates.

So, I don't like that sort of thing, but otherwise I did like Galveston because Pizzolatto, when he's not simply scratching some pointless genre itch, is a good writer. In the novel, Roy Cady is muscle for a New Orleans gangster. As the novel opens, he's just learned that he's dying of lung cancer -- the x-ray showed in his chest "a blizzard of soap chips." When he hits the bar out of which much of Stan Pitko's, his gangster boss, business flows, Roy orders Johnnie Walker Blue, a $40 a shot Scotch that also recently turned up on True Detective, so that's another thing with Pizzolatto, apparently. Anyhow, Roy starts drinking Johnnie Walker Blue because why not? The gist of the rest of Galveston's set-up is that for a variety of reasons, both business and personal, Roy begins to think that the job he's being sent out to do will result in his murder, as ordered by Stan Pitko. He turns out to be right, but, lung cancer or no, Roy doesn't feel like going out like that, he fights back, kills his murderers, and ends up fleeing the house where it all went down with Raquel Arceneaux ("She pronounced it Arson, oh."), aka Rocky. They're now both on the run from the same people, and they find themselves heading to Texas. Galveston specifically, though there is a detour to pick up Rocky's kid sister, which shocks Roy, as does the gunshot coming from Rocky's family home that precedes her leaving with the three-year-old Tiffany. Did Rocky murder her father while she was in there? She claims she just scared him.

Galveston is a much more traditional crime story than anything I read in Between Here and the Yellow Sea, although much of the novel, after that groundwork has been laid, involves the journey of Roy, Rocky, and Tiffany, as well as Roy's relationship with Rocky, which he can't bring himself to make sexual even though she seems almost too willing. This sort of gender mess is one of the things that raised folks' antennae even during the much ballyhooed first season of True Detective -- why all the hookers, why is sex such a huge factor in the makeup of the female characters? -- and it's almost as if this genre, which is a beloved and respected one by, I'll go out on a limb and say, many of the same people now down on the show, had never before contained any strong component regarding the power of female sexual wiles. But I almost feel like it kind of did? For a little while there? Speaking for myself, I liked the character of Rocky a lot, and though she's a bit of an archetype (you can use a less flattering word if you'd like) she's a well-drawn one. At one point, speaking about her to someone else, Roy says that Rocky "had a hard life," which you can see early on (the particulars are eventually made clear, though they're easy enough to predict); you can also see that this hard life has thrown her into an awful situation that she's trying to deal with. And she's about twenty years old. People tend to have abundant sympathy for such people in real life but denounce them as sexist cliches when someone writes about them in fiction.

Of course, Galveston is mostly about Roy, whose own life up to and including his cancer diagnosis hasn't been a barrel of monkeys. Early on, he lays out his family situation:

I was seven when John Cady got back from Korea, and less than two years later he'd fallen of a cooling tower at the refinery and broken his neck, drunk before noon. I called him dad but as I grew older several things made it pretty obvious he was not my father -- our looks, the timeline of my conception. He was always kind to me, though we didn't know each other long. Around a year after we buried him Mary-Anne dropped off a bridge. She preferred me to call her Mary-Anne instead of Mom, which she claimed aged a woman ten years. They said she jumped, but I don't believe the people she was with are to be trusted. Then the group home and the Beidles and the cotton fields.

And now I was dying and everything that had ever happened to me was starting to seem hazily important.

I'd say roughly about a third of the way into Galveston, the plot takes a surprising left turn. Though it comes somewhat early, I'm still somewhat loathe to spoil it here. Suffice it to say, it opens things up considerably, in terms of how we think about certain characters going forward, and how Pizzolatto then manages the suspense, and increases it, in this not terribly plot-heavy book (though the element of suspense, of various kinds, is inherent in the novel's very premise). It also heightens the dread, and the doom, which, given the turn in question...well, never mind. But it works a treat, as they say.

One of Pizzolatto's great gifts as a prose writer is his ability to sketch out an environment, and side characters, with such breezy authenticity that, in all honesty, highlights the hopelessness of that Warren Oates gambit. Speaking of which, Tray, the character with whom Roy has the Oates conversation, is a great piece of added menace, and that section of the book at the Texas motel is a wonderful bit of atmosphere. Pizzolatto is also able to write about poor white Texans without condescending to them, or portraying them as unlikable unless, of course, they happen to be unlikable. This is a distinction not many are able to draw. There are a variety of, for lack of a better term, "civilians" that Roy, Rocky, and Tiffany encounter in their travels, and Pizzolatto seems to understand intuitively how they talk, and how the good ones differ from the bad ones, and what is quickly, noticeably specific about each. Pizzolatto isn't one of the all-time great crime writers by any stretch of the imagination, but that sort of gift is not one to be dismissed. In any genre, but, you might could argue, in this genre especially.

Eventually, Galveston reaches a conclusion that will satisfy some but not others, but which is, fittingly, in tone and incident somewhere between the plotless endings to the stories (the three I've read, anyway; not much of a sampling) in Between Here and the Yellow Sea and the kind of stylized mayhem of True Detective. I liked it. I like his TV show, too, even though most people seem to have decided he's doing the wrong thing. If, however, as a result of this backlash, True Detective gets buried, I'll be okay with it (certainly more okay than Pizzolatto would be), because I assume that would lead him back to writing novels. I'd like to read his next one.

The Kind of Face You Whaaaaaaa!?: An Announcement

Oh hello. As some of you may remember, every October for the first several years of this blog's existence, I used to write, every day, about horror fiction. Sometimes novels, sometimes a pair of short stories more or less randomly chosen from an anthology, most often a couple of short stories by the same author so that I might discuss that author within some kind of framework. While by no means my most popular posts, this project did sort of define The Kind of Face You Hate, and those who did read them seemed to like them. I found this very flattering and gratifying, and every year I looked forward to expanding my knowledge about one of my favorite genres. I was forced to think about horror on a level that I wouldn't have had I been merely(!) reading these books and stories for pleasure. If my blog was ever going to have any sort of legacy, which I would have to say I kind of doubt it will, but if was ever going to, this ongoing series, collectively titled The Kind of Face You Slash, would be it.

On the other hand, it fucking sucked; it was, to my mind, and increasingly so over the years, a ridiculous amount of work for someone to do yet not be paid for. Remember, I not only had to write every day, but read every day, as well. Yes, foresight and better planning might have eased this burden, but I have frequently found, over the course of my life, that the best way for me to actually complete something is to have a deadline. And this was a downright shithouse of a deadline. The whole thing, once fun, became after five years a howling, waking nightmare of effort. I believe you can almost see me crumbling under the weight in those later years. One post in particular almost did me in. The stories I read so thoroughly defeated me through their mediocrity that when I sat down to write about them I did briefly consider hitting my computer with a brick to see what the result would be (I'm not going to link to it because, as you might expect, my review of the writer in question was unkind, and eventually he showed up in the comments, and said something that still makes me feel bad about what I wrote). In 2013, I enlisted the help of a series of friends and associates to take half of October off my hands, so that I would have to write and read fifty per cent less than I had before, and those guys came through like gangbusters. The problem was, being a kind of...not editor, because I didn't edit anyone, but I guess a manager, of a sort, didn't alleviate the pressure; it merely substituted the old ones, and not even all of those, with new ones. In short, I still had to work. So, in 2014, I decided that was it, I was indefinitely retiring The Kind of Face You Slash. You know how homicide detectives can get so burned out by the atrocities they're forced to deal with every day that they finally ash up and have to "get out of the life?" Well that was me exactly, and there's no difference between me and a homicide detective.

Cut to today! I'm still not going to bring back The Kind of Face You Slash this October! However, what I am doing, is I'm announcing that The Kind of Face You Slash is going to be an ongoing series from here until whenever. That is to say, I will be writing The Kind of Face You Slash posts in, say, November. And December, maybe. And January. And possibly even (almost certainly) this October. Not thirty-one posts in thirty-one days, but a continuous, though sporadic, series about horror literature. It will be similar to The Cronenberg Series, the major difference being that while The Cronenberg Series ended (for the time being) when I reached the latest of Cronenberg's major works (still entertaining the idea of writing addendum-type posts about his short films, by the way) in the case of The Kind of Face You Slash there's no end in sight. I'll end the series when I finally think "You know what? Fuck you guys." Which could be tomorrow, just to be clear.

But hold on! There's still even more to tell you! And I think I'd better keep this part brief because this announcement post has been very long and boring so far! As a result of my ruthless focus on horror fiction, as someone who writes about genre fiction I have been shamefully neglectful of my other favorite genre, which is crime fiction. And so the other day I says to myself, I says "Hey wait a minute, maybe you could write about crime fiction." And I was like "Yes." So, as of today I am announcing the start of yet another series, as continuous and as sporadic as The Kind of Face You Slash, but this time about crime fiction. So everything I said about the horror project in the last paragraph you can apply to this crime project, which I shall call The Kind of Face You Shoot. That one's actually going to begin sooner rather than later, because I've had something percolating, but anyway, there's your announcement. The Kind of Face You Slash is back, but on a new and endless-ish schedule, and it will be joined by The Kind of Face You Shoot, which will look at crime fiction (mostly novels, given the nature of the genre) from the old-timey ones to new-timey ones. From Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to some fuckin' new guy, I guess.

Incidentally, the best part of this announcement is that the idea was all my own, and wasn't quite reasonably suggested to me by Jose Cruz one day on Facebook. So thanks for nothing, Jose! I DON'T NEED YOU!