FFB: Shoot -- Douglas Fairbain

Here's another book I picked up in a thrift shop the other day just because I couldn't resist it.  I read it almost exactly 40 years ago, when the first paperback edition came out, and I've never forgotten it.  It's short (always a plus!), fast, and dark.   

It opens with a sentence that Stephen King admires (see On Writing): "This is what happened."  The narrator, Rex Jeanrette, and his hunting buddies, all of them combat veterans of various wars (WWII, Korea) are deer hunting when they spot another group of hunters across a river.  Suddenly one of the other hunters brings up his rifle and shoots one of Jeanrette's group, wounding him, and one of that group fires back, killing a man.  That's what happened.  But what it leads to, well, that's the rest of the book.

Jeanrette is a sociopath who'd be right at home in one of Jim Thompson's novels.  The other men all seem to have something missing in their lives, something they haven't experienced since being in combat.  Jeanrette recruits a couple of others who are much the same, Vietnam vets who are just drifting because since combat they have nothing much to focus on.

Shoot shows macho taken to the extreme.  And it's right up to date.  It could've been written last week with some simple changes, or so it seems to me.  It's noir of a very dark hue, too, though the subject isn't one of the traditional ones noir deals with.  Check it out and see what you think.

Borderline -- Lawrence Block

Borderline is what's being called these days "mid-century erotica," returned to print by Hard Case Crime.  It was originally published as Border Lust in 1962 by Don Holliday, one of the pseudonyms that appeared now and then on books published by Nightstand and others of Bill Hamling's imprints.  This book is obviously from early in Block's career, but it's so well done that it's likely to make many veteran novelists (or at least one: me) envious.

The new title is perfect for the book, not that the other one didn't fit.  It certainly did.  But this one is better because the book is about people who are crossing borders.  The setting is El Paso and Juarez, which were different cities in 1962 from what they are now.  (By coincidence, I just read Sam Hawken's Tequila Sunset, and if you want to see the cities now, check it out.)  The reason the new title fits so well is that the borders people cross in this book aren't just the physical one that separates Texas from Mexico.  They're crossing them in lots of other ways.  '

Meg, recently divorced from a boring husband, crosses the border to Mexico and crosses the border from wanting sex of all kinds to having lots of it.  Weaver is a killer.  He's killed one girl, and now he's decided that since they can only execute him once, he might as well kill as many has he can before they get him.  He crosses the borderline easily, and it's scary how well Block was writing about a serial killer before such killers became a crime fiction cliche.  Marty's a gambler who lives an ordered life.  He keeps to himself and does things his own way.  He meets Meg and crosses the border into irrational behavior.  Lily is a runaway.  She'll do what she has to as long as it pays.  She crosses the border into using whoever is handy.  They think they're using Lily, but they're all wrong.

Naturally these four characters are going to come together, and I was reminded of John D. MacDonald's The Damned, which is set farther south in Mexico but which also has a cast of disparate characters.  In fact, the opening chapters in both books are quite similar, except in the MacDonald book the point of view is a man's, while in Block's novel it's Lily's. 

But Macdonald's novel isn't noir, and Block's certainly is.  Things aren't going to end well for Block's characters, not any of them.  If you can take graphic sex and even more graphic violence, this one's well worth a look.  And there's bonus material as well, two short stories and a novella.  Ed London's the narrator of the novella, a nicely done p.i. yarn.  The first story's narrated by a rapist.  Very violent.  Be prepared.

The 10 Best Movies About Lovers on the Run

The 10 Best Movies About Lovers on the Run 

Forgotten Book: I'll Find You -- Richard Himmel

 Not many Gold Medal writers are forgotten, but Richard Himmel seems to be.  A brief Google search turned up next to nothing about him or his books.  I'm partially at fault here, since I've had a good many of them on my selves for well over 30 years and never read a one of them.  Why? Well, you can't read everything.  Anyway, I decided it was time to take a look at one.  Himmel, after all, sold millions of books.  His first one for Gold Medal was I'll Find You, and it was the second novel GM published. (The first was John Flagg's The Persian Cat, and Flagg is another GM writer whose work I've never read.  So many books, so little time.)

What did I learn? For one thing, the Gold Medal pattern was set from the very beginning. I'll Find You has just about everything that the later books from this publisher had.  The first-person narrator, Johnny Maguire, is a self-proclaimed punk, a night-school lawyer whose attitudes toward women are primitive at best: "OK, so she might have fought. It would have been good that way. Maybe that's what she wanted.  Maybe she wanted to get messed up a little bit. Maybe that's the way it was good for her." He says this about a woman he's fallen for, hard.  She's the first woman he's ever loved, though of course he's had plenty of sex.  Sex is big in the GM line.

As soon as Maguire falls for the woman, she disappears, an apparent suicide. Maguire doesn't think she's dead and decides to find her.  Hence the book's title.  And he does find her.  That's when things get complicated.  Gangsters are involved, and there's a murder, but this isn't really a crime novel. In its own twisted way, it's a love story in the Gold Medal vein, with the emphasis on speed, with lots of raw emotion, with plenty of melodrama.  And a really great final scene and line, very much in keeping with the character of Johnny Maguire.

Himmel had something going for him, and it's not a big surprise that the book was such a hit.  My guess is that he didn't plan to make Maguire a series character.  He wasn't cut out to be one.  The book sold so many millions, however, that bringing him back must have proved irresistible. In one of the sequels, Maguire is even an investigator for the State Department.  I guess I'll have to read another one to see how this came about.

The Science of Paul -- Aaron Philip Clark

Paul Little, ex-con, gives his grandfather a private burial in the opening scene of The Science of Paul. Then Paul and Tammy, a woman who loves and cares for him, return to Philadelphia. Paul completes his probation in a few days, and then things will be fine. Right? Of course not. Paul walks out on Tammy, and things almost immediately start to go bad. And then they go worse. And worse.

Paul thinks that if he can just get out of Philly and back to his grandfather's farm, he can turn his life around. The question is, will he live long enough to do that. The cops are after him for murder, the bad guy is after him for other reasons, and his probation officer's going to revoke his probation.

While all of this is happening, you might think you're reading a straight-forward crime novel, which you are, but it's also a carefully plotted mystery, with things satisfactorily resolved in the end. Well, maybe Paul's case (couldn't resist that phrase, Willa Cather fans), but the mystery aspects are.

New Pulp Press has another winner here. This is good, hardboiled stuff, and Aaron Philip Clark's a guy to watch. Check it out.