Ice Men

Greetings, my legion of fans. We're about an hour from kick-off of what is sure to be the most talked about NFL match-up of this season. Yes, I am of course talking about the Washington Redskins vs. the New Orleans Saints. Which team will survive to eventually win the next several Super Bowls*? The Redskins, of course. This is the beginning of a new dynasty.

In the meantime, won't you read a few half-assed comments about some relatively obscure crime novels I think you might want to check out, should you find the time?

Black Friday by David Goodis - This is one of the first truly hard-boiled crime novels I ever read. It's a slender, nasty little story about a two-bit crook, named Hart, who falls in with a family of criminals after stumbling across one of their victims. Early on, Hart has to fight his way out of a jam, and in the process kicks one of his assailants in the groin. He kicks him so hard that he shatter's the guy pelvis, and the guy later dies. As a young kid reading that, I realized that this book could go anywhere and do anything. And the point of view wasn't going to suddenly switch to a noble policeman. I like noble policemen, mind you, but sometimes they're just not around when you need them. Goodis -- who also wrote the novels Dark Passage and Down There, the latter of which was later filmed as Shoot the Piano Player** -- knew that as well as anybody. Chandler and MacDonald could keep their "knights errant"; Goodis was interested in the poor saps that Marlowe and McGee had to wade through to get to the end of their quest.

A Hell of a Woman by Jim Thompson - Thompson enjoyed a brief resurgance in popularity in the 1980s and 90s, due in large part, I believe, to Stephen Frears's film version of his novel The Grifters (with a screenplay by, not coincidentally, Donald E. Westlake). As a result, a lot of people seem to know Thompson's famous novel The Killer Inside Me. That's a fine book, but my favorite by Thompson is this one. The story is a typical one for this sort of thing: it involves a salesman/con-man, named Dillon, who is willing to take out a couple of people if it means a big payday. Okay, fine, but what I remember most about this novel is the last couple of pages, in which Thompson shows us Dillon's disintegrating psyche in one long, almost Joycean paragraph. We see what Dillon thinks he's thinking, and what's actually going on inside his head, almost at the same time. Also, at the end, does Dillon do what I think he does...?

The Shark-Infested Custard by Charles Willeford - This novel, Willeford's last, is a masterpiece of tone. In the same casual, disenterested pitch that Willeford uses to describe a character driving home from work, he will use to describe that man committing murder. Essentially a series of connected short-stories, The Shark-Infested Custard relates the day-to-day lives of a group of fun-loving, middle-aged businessmen who occasionally find themselves needing to commit crimes in order to get a bit of money, get out of a jam, get laid, whatever. None of it matters to any of them, and in stripping his prose of any description that might imply judgement, Willeford comes awfully close to writing a kind of existential horror novel. This one's really brilliant. Read it.

Told you this was going to be half-assed! Anyway, I gotta go help the wife with groceries. But seriously, read The Shark-Infested Custard.

*Or should it be "Supers Bowl"?

**And despite the fact that the film is considered a classic of world cinema and bears the stamp of Francois Truffaut, and despite the fact that Goodis's novel is now all but forgotten, the book is still better than the film. And I like the film.

Ice Man

According to Amazon.com, this coming Monday is a day I’ve been waiting for a very long time. On that day (or thereabouts – Amazon isn’t always reliable about release dates) the first three novels by Richard Stark (aka Donald E. Westlake), about an ice-blooded thief named Parker, are being re-issued by the University of Chicago Press.

Under his own name, Westlake is probably best known as a writer of light caper novels featuring Dortmunder, but among fans of the hard-boiled crime genre, Westlake, and Stark (and Parker) carry great weight, and are rivaled in respect and acclaim perhaps only by Raymond Chandler. These books are crime fiction at its best, hardest, most pitiless and unsympathetic. Parker is a thief, professional and brutal. He's not the "one good thief", the kind of clever con-man you root for because he's smart and honorable in his own way, and besides everyone around him is far worse -- doing things like throwing old ladies at babies, distracting the police by setting fire to pandas, that sort of thing. No, Parker could probably be safely referred to as a scumbag, and you read these books because you know Westlake isn't going to blink. You know Westlake won't betray Parker.

Anyway, that's what I'm told. I've actually never read any of these novels. Oh, I've read Westlake before, and I think he's sensational (I particularly recommend The Hook and The Axe -- despite the titles, these are unconnected apart from certain thematic similarities), but I've never cracked any of the books upon which the bulk of his reputation is built. That's because they've almost all been out of print for the entire time I've been aware of them (which is a long time), and second-hand copies of the early books in the series can sell on Amazon for anywhere between thirty to seventy bucks. It's been frustrating, but I figured I could wait, all the while picking up the rare cheap Parker novel whenever I ran across one.

I look at this Monday as the day I can finally think of myself as a true connoisseur of the crime genre. I've been reading deep into the genre for many years, but I've always felt like a guy who walked around claiming to know more than a thing or two about a little writer you may have heard of by the name of Shakespeare, all the while concealing the shameful fact that I'd never read Hamlet (though I had seen those two movies they made from Hamlet, the ones starring Mel Gibson and Lee Marvin).

Okay, yes, I could have read any of the five or six Parker novels I've been fortunate enough to stumble across over the years (like Butcher's Moon -- $75 on Amazon, last I checked, bought by me for a buck at a thrift store in Nag's Head, NC), and reading the books out of order is a practice that has even been sanctioned by Booker Prize-winning Irish author John Banville, who, incidentally, recommends starting with The Jugger. But while I'm currently reading John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series out of order, and finding that in this case the practice seems to be working out fine, I could never bring myself to dive into the middle of the Parker books like that. These are, supposedly, the best the genre has to offer, after all. The experience has to be as pure as I can make it.

So mark your calendars. Or just put a note on your fridge that says "Monday: Stark books. Also buy meat". Or whatever else it is you need to buy that day, I don't know. I'm not you. But anyway...Westlake. Stark. Parker. Monday. 'Twill be a great day.

PS - This post was supposed to mainly be about lesser known crime novels and writers that I wanted to bring to everyone's attention (while possibly taking a few pot-shots at those writers I feel are wildly overrated, George P. Pelecanos!), and now look what happened? It all plum got away from me. So I guess I'll have something to write about tomorrow. Take that, bloggers who at this particular moment are fresh out of ideas!

From the Queue

So this week, from Netflix, it's going to be Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Brute Force, and De Sade, Cy Enfield's apparently Hammer-esque horror film, starring Keir Dullea, and written by Richard Matheson.

The sheer variety of triple (or however many movies you get at a time) feature options afforded by the good, if occasionally frustrating, folks at Netflix is mind-boggling, and I try to plan them well. This grouping is a pretty good one, I think. Two genre films, one with a trashy reputation, one which has garnered far more respect, and another movie that is an established art-film classic. And they're all pretty short, too!

I have to confess that for a while I've harbored this minor fantasy that all of the wonderfully knowledgable and friendly bloggers I've met over the past year or so would start sharing their Netflix queues with each other -- you know, that whole "Friends" thing they have -- so we could all see what everybody else was up to. The point of this post is actually not to try and get anyone to do that, because I can see the downside to it, too. I mean, I don't think Jonathan or Dennis or Brian or Rick or Fox (especially not Fox), or even Marilyn, would regard me askance if they knew that I had, waiting in my queue, Ubalda, All Naked and Warm, but I do have a few films in there that I simply don't have the energy to try and explain to anyone. Frankly, it's none of your business. No, I will not share my queue with any of you people. Mind your own business!

But next week's triple feature...what do you think about The Company of Wolves, Air Force and Short Eyes? Or maybe Leaves from Satan's Book, The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On and The Real Andy Kaufman? Young Mr. Lincoln, My Favorite Year and Body Parts?

Well. That's enough randomness for one night. G'night!

Affinity 3

"There was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty one."

-Kingsley Amis

Lucky Jim

Further Update

Oh, hello. I just wanted to let everyone know that I expect to return to blogging pretty soon (as in, the next few days). All things considered, my dad's doing pretty damn well now, and I'm easing back into my regular routines and thought processes. So, hooray, blogging, and so forth. And if I can remember where the hell I was going with that whole "horror movies are bad now" thing, I might even finish it.

In the meantime...

Apologies to Chris Sims.

D'oh!

One of the things that held me back from starting a blog was the fact that I could never come up with a good name. When I finally did luck onto one I was happy with, the ball got rolling fairly rapidly after that. The Kind of Face You Hate is, I think, unusual, and eye-catching, and -- if I'm ever able to get into a rhythm with this thing -- will indicate in a vague way "what I'm all about". Don't you know.

Well, last night I was watching Manhunter, a favorite of mine. As you do with favorite movies you've seen a billion times, I was waiting for some of moments I love most. One of my favorite moments is when Graham puts his family on a plane to ship them the hell out of there, and he's staring out a window, into the rain, and he says "It's just you and me now, sport."

Or, should I say, It's Just You and Me Now, Sport.

Son of a bitch!

Update

First of all, I want to sincerely thank everyone for their kind thoughts. Second, while we're not out of the woods by any stretch (by which I mean my family, and specifically my dad), those woods are at least less thick and dark than they were previously described to be. I want to be realistic (because this is serious, no matter how much good news I hear) but also optimistic, and currently those two points of view are waging a glorious battle within me and everyone else dealing with this situation.

Anyway. The hiatus is still in place (it's hard to think about why I think horror movies are generally so bad right now, as you can imagine), but I thought I'd pop in and let you guys know I'm doing okay. And thanks again.

PS - It's strange the books one reads for relaxation and distraction in moments of crisis...