I like to think I gave Ed Gorman a fair shake. He’s honest enough to admit his political leanings (liberal), but he makes a genuine effort to humanize his characters, even those awful Republicans. I have to give him credit for that. He tries. But I didn’t like this second book (actually two books; it’s a double volume) of his that I’ve read, and I don’t think I’ll read any more. The Original Sam McCain Mysteries fails, in my view, for two reasons. One is an inadequate main character. The other is, if not a plain political lie, at least a definite—and surely conscious—misstatement of historical fact.

First of all the main character. As the title suggests, he’s a guy named Sam McCain. Gorman gives what seems to be his inspiration for the character in a passage where McCain meditates on his favorite mystery writer, the pre-Travis McGee John D. MacDonald:

There are no heroes in John D. novels, and that’s probably why I like them. Every once in a while his man will behave heroically, but that still doesn’t make him a hero. He has a lot of faults and he always realizes, at some point in every book, that he’s flawed and less than he wants to be.

If Gorman’s goal was to create a character who isn’t heroic, he’s succeeded. Sam McCain is a short young man, a poor lawyer in a small Iowa town in the mid-1950s, forced by penury to do jobs for the local judge, an elitist woman who delights in humiliating him in small ways. He talks a lot about his love for the town beauty, who is herself in love with a rich guy. Meanwhile another girl, apparently just as pretty and with more personal substance, loves Sam and he doesn’t reciprocate. In this he’s clearly an idiot.

He’s also a punching bag. People beat him up a lot in these stories, and he just endures it. When he finally overcomes the murderers, he ought to be grateful to the God he claims not to believe in, because without a deus ex machina or two he’d be long dead. I think he won one fight in the second book. Continue reading The Original Sam McCain Mysteries, by Ed Gorman →

I feel a little guilty about not liking Ed Gorman better as a writer. It’s very obvious that he’s a liberal, but he works so darn hard to be fair to people he disagrees with—like Republicans and evangelical Christians—that I feel I ought to reciprocate in some way. But Blood Moon left me pretty cold.

This is the first book for a series character, Robert Payne, a former FBI profiler who now works as an investigative consultant from his home in Iowa. He’s approached by a woman who tells him she believes there’s a serial rapist and killer hunting little girls. Her own daughter, she says, was killed by this man, but the police and her family don’t believe the cases are connected. Payne agrees to look into it, and soon discovers that each of the murdered girls had visited the small town of New Hope, Iowa before her death. Payne goes to New Hope and begins making inquiries. He also meets the very attractive local (female) sheriff. Continue reading Blood Moon, by Ed Gorman →

[Detective] Miller stood planted there like one of the lions in front of the Art Institute, only meaner-looking. Also, the lions were bronzed and he was tarnished copper.

I discovered, after I had bought True Detective, the first of Max Allan Collins’s Nate Heller novels, that it was one I’d already read, some time back. Nevertheless I didn’t regret the purchase. I’d forgotten what an extremely fine book this is—one of those few novels that lifts the hard-boiled mystery to a new level.

All the Heller books are good. Don’t get me wrong. But it’s impossible to keep a series from becoming formulaic after a while. With the Heller books, you have a series where the same private eye somehow manages to be on the scene for almost every important murder in America between 1930 and 1970. Each one is plausible individually, but they stretch credibility in the aggregate.

But this first novel deserves a place all its own. Collins’s own contemplation of the hard-boiled genre led him to want to write a book that stretched the limits and broke the rules, not with malice but for a reason. Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe was an honorable man, trying to keep clean in a dirty world. Collins’s detective, Nate Heller, is a soiled man, trying to find a way to preserve some degree of integrity. He’s a tragic character, and True Detective is a genuine tragedy, with a plot that functions like the mechanism of a guillotine. Continue reading True Detective, by Max Allan Collins →

I just got in under the wire, acquiring Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe from Amazon. I went to link to it for this review, and discovered the Kindle version was not available. I puzzled over this, since the book is right here on my Kindle device now, and I knew I got it from Amazon. Turns out it’s one of those Overdrive books that got removed the other day. So you’ll have to either buy a paper copy, or go to Overdrive for the e-book.

What Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe is, is an anthology, first published in the 1980s and expanded in 1999, of original Philip Marlowe stories written by current mystery writers. The contributors contributed their own Marlowe stories, and then added brief appreciations, telling how Chandler’s work had influenced their own.

The results are uneven, but entertaining. The authors all attempt to emulate Chandler’s style. Some do it better than others. The most interesting thing to notice, for me, was the personal indulgences several of them couldn’t seem to resist. Female writers (but not all of them) couldn’t help correcting Chandler’s portrayal of women, introducing the kind of female characters they wish Chandler had written about. A couple writers couldn’t resist injecting politics, something Chandler generally eschewed. “The Empty Sleeve,” by W. R. Philbrick, is interesting for having Philip Marlowe meet his own creator, Raymond Chandler, at a poker game. But he also injects, entirely gratuitously, a certain politician he doesn’t like in a sleazy role for which there’s no historical warrant I’m aware of. Roger L. Simon, still a liberal when the book was compiled, contributes a slashing indictment of the Hollywood Black List, “In the Jungle of Cities.” Continue reading Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe (Anthology) →

The good news—almost wonderful news, except for the One Problem that I’ll detail at the end of this review– is that the late Stuart M. Kaminsky’s delightful Toby Peters novels are being released for Kindle by Mysterious Press. I downloaded the very first book of the series, Bullet for a Star, and read it with pleasure.

The Toby Peters novels, if you’re not familiar with them, are light mysteries set in Hollywood. Toby is a very small-time P.I. who nevertheless keeps getting hired for cases involving famous movie stars (and a few other notables) of the Golden Age of Hollywood.

In this story, an executive at Warner Brothers (which fired Toby as a security man some time earlier) asks him to look into a blackmail scheme. Someone has sent them a print of a photo of Errol Flynn in a compromising position with a very young girl. Flynn admits the accusation isn’t out of the question, but in this case he’s never met the girl. The studio wants Toby to make arrangements to pay the blackmail anyway.

But instead of a simple exchange, there’s a fight, and Toby gets knocked out, and somebody gets dead, and then the action takes off. Continue reading Bullet for a Star, by Stuart M. Kaminsky →