GEORGE V HIGGINS' FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE AT FIFTY: GIVING JACKIE BROWN HIS DUE: THE ISOLATION ROW REVIEWS IV

I re-read The Friends Of Eddie Coyle recently, and then realised it was the 50th anniversary of the novel's first publication, so I've written a brief essay based on seeing something this time around I missed the first couple of times. One of the truly great crime novels. The essay's up at Medium, and you can use this link to read it, bypassing the paywall.

JOHN HARVEY JOINS THE CRIME VAULT LIVE: EPISODE FOUR

The fourth episode of The Crime Vault Live is now up online (link to it here) and it may be the best one yet.

Mark Billingham and I greet John Harvey, one of the greatest of British crime writers, creator of Resnick, and as I point out, in many ways one of the last of the old style pulpsmiths. And it's the place John makes a stunning announcement about an unexpected new novel! It's a wide-ranging show highlighted by our INTERROGATION of John. I managed to avoid discussing his Clint Eastwoody western series, Hart the Regulator (of which I have a complete set of the old paperbacks) which has books with titles taken, as this blog's was, from John Stewart. Nor his excellent but now overlooked stand-alone thrillers Frame and Blind, and I spared you further discussion of his poetry magazine Slow Dancer (where I first encountered John when he printed some of my poems) and we should have talked about his own poetry. But listen to his take on the introduction of Paul Christopher in one of Charles McCarry's novels.

We also covered Adam Sisman's biography of John LeCarre, author bios in general, reviews of books by  McCarry (often billed as the 'American LeCarre'), Alison Gaylin, and Graham Hurley; Patricia Highsmith on audio; London Spy, Black Mass, and Unforgotten, and the return of the Crime Vault's Vault in which we discuss George V Higgins and The Friends Of Eddie Coyle. Listen in. The show fits perfectly; we come full circle at the end, which doesn't happen often. And check out the publicity photo above: we look like we're about to star in a 60s British sitcom....

JEREMIAH HEALY: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of Jeremiah Healy has been up at the Guardian online as of last Friday (while I was out of touch in the wilds of New Hampshire); I don't know if it's been in the paper paper or not. You can link to it here. It's pretty much as written: there was an odd addition that said the books were set in 'Beantown', a fictionalised Boston, but that was removed.

The bit mentioned from my essay in Following The Detectives, about demolishing a whole neighbourhood was actually a quote from Jerry, a joke, but one that established the location of Beth's cemetery perfectly for my essay. Jerry also spoke admiringly and knowingly of the other Boston writers who featured in the essay: Parker, Dennis Lehane and George V. Higgins--I mentioned this in my copy but it was edited out. I think there would be an interesting essay to be written about connections between Higgins and Healy and their fictions. And of course Spenser knows a cop named Healy...

I knew the Healy books well, but I can't pretend to have known Jerry. Yet I could have extended the obit much further from the personal comments of writers, critics and fans all of whom found him a fascinating and memorable person, as well as a dedicated and talented writer. It was for me a privilege to be able to write about him, and something that helped mitigate the sad circumstances of his death. I hadn't read the Terry Devane books, so I've ordered the first one, and hope to renew our acquaintance that way.

ELMORE LEONARD'S ROAD DOGS: AN OBJECT LESSON IN CRIME WRITING

If you want (you surely don't need!) an example of what made Elmore Leonard such a great writer, turn now to his 2009 novel Road Dogs. Leonard, who by this time was in his mid-80s, brought back bank robber Jack Foley, star of Out Of Sight (1996), and teamed him up in prison with marielito Cundo Rey, last seen getting shot by Joe LaBrava in 1983's La Brava (which won an Edgar for best novel). Foley and Rey are prison 'road dogs', looking out for each other, and after Rey's lawyer gets Foley's 30 year stretch reduced, he sends Foley out to LA, where he's got two houses in Venice, a Cuban silent partner looking after them, and a psychic girl friend named Dawn Navarro, whom we last saw in Riding The Rap (1995).That last was a sequel to Pronto, and you can read here what I wrote about that, in tribute soon after Leonard died.

You'd look at the set-up of Road Dogs and you might accuse many others writers of being lazy, and trying to take advantage of established characters—in this case especially Foley, about whom it is admittedly difficult to read without seeing George Clooney step out from the excellent film version of Out Of Sight. But I wonder if, given he produced Riding The Rap and Out Of Sight back to back, if something hadn't clicked in the back of Leonard's mind, thinking Jack and Dawn ought to encounter each other at some point. After all, there's more than a little Raylan Givens in Foley's adherence to a strong, if flexible, moral code.

But there is nothing lazy about this novel, and that's because of the way Leonard works. 'Character is action,' as F. Scott Fitzgerald said, and what Leonard does is establish characters and then let them interact, and where his phenomenal story-telling ability lies is in his understanding of his characters and his willingness to let the story go where they lead. Which means this tale of double-cross and potential double-cross moves quickly and smoothly through a pretzel configuration of possibility. It's made more interesting by Leonard's omnipresent internal narration—he gets inside each character and lets you know what they're thinking. People concentrate on dialogue, and Leonard owed a lot, for example, to George V Higgins. But where Higgins would clue you in by making you follow what the characters were saying, Leonard is willing to let you follow what they are thinking, and see how that's reflected (or not) by what they're saying.

The freedom he gives his characters means there are one or two surprises along the way, and the confrontations that materialise are not necessarily the ones you are expecting, but that's what makes the novel work so well. Like the best of Leonard's writing, it's compulsive, and you feel that in writing it, Leonard wanted to know what was going to happen just as much as you do reading it. An object lesson....

Road Dogs by Elmore Leonard

Weidenfeld & Nicholson 2009, £18.99, ISBN 9780297856702

GEORGE HIGGINS' EASIEST THING IN THE WORLD: THE SHOTS COLUMN

NOTE: This review originally appeared as number 7 of my short-lived column 'American Eye' forShots Ezine. It was short-lived in part because I had trouble with the deadlines, as the openng sentence reminds me. Re-reading it in light of the preceding IT post on Killing Them Softly makes me think it might be time to revive it.

  

There’s a reason why September’s American Eye is late. It is because I was reading with one American eye shut, knowing that when I finished this collection of George V Higgins’ ‘uncollected’ short fiction, there would be nothing else of Higgins left for me to read for the first time. Not that the prospect of revisiting the work of the writer I consider the best and most original voice in crime fiction between Richard Stark and James Ellroy is depressing. But the idea that Higgins had some untold tales I will now forever miss just might be.

I say ‘uncollected’ because in fact, Higgins published a short-story collection, The Sins Of Our Fathers, in this country, and three of the tales included here were also in that book. That’s not a problem, really, although the editor of this volume, the prolific Matthew J Bruccoli, doesn’t appear to have done much actual editing: the book is littered with literals which detract from the overall appeal. There is, however, a nice, though short, introductory fond memory by Robert B Parker, who says that, like himself, as his career progressed, he grew more fond of writing about the characters, wherever that took him.

It’s true. Higgins appeal seemed to fade consistently, after The Friends Of Eddie Coyle, in part because it was such an incredible debut novel. But I think there was another paradox at work here: because the better his later work got, the more out of step with the times it became. In The Mandeville Talent, for example, he addressed the problem directly, with a detective character who, in effect, takes a yuppie couple under his wing and teaches them about the ways of the world. Because that was what his books were always about, the way of the world, the way it worked, the way things fitted together, or at least the way it used to work. Actually, it might be better to phrase that, the way we think it used to, because my impression is that, deep down, it still does work in a clockwork of give and take, of favours granted and withheld, of petty corruptions: palm greasing and back-rubbing, and it’s just the outward appearance which has been changed by the children of Higgins’ generation, our yuppie Thatcherite laissez-faire society, or maybe it’s that the behind the scenes graft has been taken over by a newly empowered apparatchik class.

Higgins didn’t like this, and it shows in this collection. The most important, and interesting stories, are billed as two novellettes, though the first, the title story of the book, is actually a short-story; but at least neither of them actually has been collected before. The title story comes with a separate prequel, a very short coda, as it were. It’s about the roles of men and women in society as much as anything to do with crime, and what makes it particularly interesting is the way Higgins experiments with the passage of time, not the easiest thing to do when you are telling the story mostly in dialogue. So conversations sometimes segue from one period to another, seamlessly, to the point where you’re not even sure where you are until you check.

The second story, which actually is a novellette, or maybe a novella, who cares? is called ‘Slowly Now The Dancer’, and if that perhaps suggests Anthony Powell and time, well, the time part of the suggestion is accurate. Again, Higgins plays with time, but in this piece time itself takes the place of his usual story-telling technique: there is far more narration than you’d expect, far fewer of the line-ups of quotation marks (inverted commas) signifying that someone is telling you their recollection of a statement made by a third person to a fourth as recollected by a fifth to your original story-teller.  Instead, Higgins’ narrative slips and slides between periods of time, as a Boston son returns to his family home in Vermont, and basically takes you through almost a century’s worth of changing social fabric along the way. You can see why the story never sold; as Prof. Bruccoli says in an editor’s note, only John O’Hara could sell such things. He doesn’t mention that even for O’Hara, such stories were often a hard sell, and that was a good while before Higgins. It’s not a crime story at all, yet I can’t help but feel any fan of Higgins’ crime fiction, and how can you not be?, would love it.

‘Old Earl Died Pulling Traps’ isn’t really a crime story either; it is about lawyers, though, who are ipso facto criminals, and it’s another tale of changing mores, taking us through a couple of generations of a small town, and a few people, and how they interact while conducting the business of their lives. For lawyers, lives are business to be conducted, and Higgins’ realisation of this is really the bedrock of all his fiction. It was published as a limited edition chapbook. ‘The Last Wash Of The Teapot’ is similar, again no crime involved, only a lawyer’s resolution of two people’s lives after one of them loses her spouse. It’s presented as a draft for a narrative play, a Hal Holbrook-type recital on stage, but it works on the page in the same way that Higgins’ storytellers have always worked on the page.

Some of these stories are slight. Higgins had a fondness for shaggy-dog stories; maybe there was a touch of O. Henry about him. A couple of his novels are really just extended shaggy dog stories, and unsatisfying as a result, but in the short story format you can get away with it. The three Donnelly stories are like that, but none the worse for it, and ‘Landmark Theatre May Shut Down’ actually surprised me by being, in the end, a subtle variation on the shaggy-dog theme.

In some of these stories Higgins is also writing as a New Englander, not, as in most of his novels, as a Bostonian. One difference is that the New Englander has a finer sense of the history of the place, and the people who make up that history. This was, to some extent, what The Mandeville Talent was concerned with, and why so much of it was set outside Boston. The other difference is that the world of urban crime is a Boston thing (and Providence, and Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport etc) but not something we associate with little places, and it is important for Higgins to write his characters in ways that are not dictated by their (and his) need to indulge in criminal behaviour. Anti-social, fine. That New England mentality is a big part of my other favourite of the stories, ‘The Habits Of The Animals: The Progress Of The Seasons’, which is really a study of marriage, as told by a character who just happens to be a state trooper.

He’s a Korean War veteran (like Parker’s Spenser) and he grew up in the Depression, and married in an era where sexual mores were different. That the story is set in a small town near Ossipee, New Hampshire, an area where I spent many of my childhood summers, makes no difference to my appreciation of this brilliantly judged piece of writing. It was reprinted in Best American Short Stories 1973, and for good reason. But just imagine yourself as Higgins at that point: your crime novel is a smash, it’s being made into a small classic of a movie, and this serious story is one of the year’s best. No surprise he never matched that peak in public acclaim again.

Yet the novels flowed, and they constitute one of the strongest bodies of work for any crime novelist. And the stories flowed too. The last one in this collection, ‘Jack Duggan’s Law’ was chosen by Joyce Carol Oates for the Best American Mystery Stories collection a couple of years ago; it’s one of Higgins’ sleazy lawyer tales, and it is a good one. There’s an elegiac feeling about the book. His last published novel was called At End Of Day, and a number of his later novels were elegiac, almost nostalgic. This collection feels nostalgic too, But the overall flavour of this book is set out by the story titles. Beyond those already named, those like ‘An End Of Revels’ and ’Life Was Absolutely Swell’. Not that life WAS necessarily that swell, but that it was superior, in its way, to what it is now. Or least it was when George V Higgins was writing about it. He died a week before his sixtieth birthday. Sometimes, the easiest thing in the world is hard.

THE EASIEST THING IN THE WORLD
Carroll & Graf, 2004, $15.95 ISBN 0786716665

 

KILLING THEM SOFTLY: GEORGE HIGGINS RETURNS ON FILM

Killing Them Softly is only the second film to have been adapted from a novel by George V. Higgins. As the first was The Friends Of Eddie Coyle, which is a classic, and that was almost 40 years ago, this raises the simple question 'why?'. On the surface, Higgins' novels seem to invite the transition to screenplay; they are written primarily in dialogue, and in Killing Them Softly, just as in Eddie Coyle, large chunks of dialogue are transferred from page to screen virtually intact; forty years have not rendered Higgins' characters or their talk obsolete. Perhaps it's because the dialogue tells so much of the story: Higgins' stories are generally being told by one character to another, with the reader listening in to a very Boston (and Irish) kind of recital. Indeed, Andrew Dominik's adaptation of Cogan's Trade is set in 2008, in a place which looks and lives a lot like post-Katrina New Orleans, but has Boston's suburbs, and seems to be somewhere where everyone sounds like they're from somewhere else, including Australia.

If Eddie Coyle were a perfect little neo-noir, set in Boston's underground, Killing Them Softly aspires to be more, and that may be part of the reason it misses the bigger picture. For Dominik it's the set-up that is the point; the initial robbery, of a mob's poker game, is not quite an inside job, but includes the cynical framing of a hapless victim who has once before tried an inside job. The frame is engineered by a small-time grafter who hires two losers to pull off the job. It nearly works, but it is destined, inevitably, not to work. Jackie Cogan is the man sent in to set the balance right, his trade being that of killer, and in Higgins' world, that balance is a difficult equation, one that proves too difficult for Dominik.

You can see how in bits of the film that are his, not Higgins', like the title. It comes from Cogan's explaining why he likes to kill from a distance, 'softly', because it's embarrassing the way people behave when they realise they are going to die. It marks a sort of embarrassment of his own, not so much at his job, but at the fact that his job is necessary. In Higgins' world, Cogan's job is necessary because although the world has its rules, they are honoured in their breach; that is exactly the way the world works. In Dominick's version, the world doesn't really work. This leads him to surround the story with reminders of the world we are living in, mostly shown on TVs running in the background,with Barack Obama, Shrub Bush, or 'Hank' Paulson illustrating disaster and break-down in the 'real' world outside. It culminates with a shut-down speech by Cogan (as played by Brad Pitt) to the mob lawyer played by Richard Jenkins. On the surface, it is the most prefect Higgins scene, because Jenkins' character is actually the one who best reflects Higgins' world, the one character in this film who could have fit comfortably into Eddie Coyle. Pitt's lecture, however, seems to have been lifted from Howard Zinn, or maybe Oliver Stone or James Ellroy, about how corruption and cheating are at the heart of America; it sure doesn't come from Higgins. Higgins understood that rules are honoured in their breach, and that the real world functions (or perhaps functioned, before the focus of 24/7 TV) in those breaches. It's why many of his best books work in the areas where people make the corruption work, or illustrate to the naïve how it can work.

Dominik's interest is an outgrowth of his earlier film, of Ron Carlson's The Assassination Of Jesse James, which also starred Pitt, and was primarily about the rise of celebrity, and the demands it puts on would-be heroes. Pitt's Cogan is suitably non-heroic when he needs to be—there's an excellent scene in which he explains to one of the doomed hoods that 'very few guys know me', but that's undercut by his larger moral view, and by an extremely awkward introduction set to Johnny Cash's 'The Man Comes Around', which is like being clobbered by a lead mallet. You can also see echoes of Dominik's signature film, Chopper, in his fascination with the violent absurdity of the criminal world—his comic hoods and their scenes of heroin use, which reminded me of the point-of-view bits in Brother From Another Planet or bits of Jackie Brown; the whole circus around James Gandolfini, as the hit man who's lost his nerve; and especially in the wonderful, if familiar, performance by Ray Liotta, both touching and absurd and culminating in extreme violence. For Higgins, this world is not absurd, and its violence rarely shocks in its extremes.

In the end, Killing Them Softly seduces by catching much of Higgins' tone, by casting good actors who make the most of the roles, and by refusing to 'blow up' the story. But if it catches the tone, it misses much of the point, without making a better one of its own. In fact, its very title is a contradiction. Think about it: Cogan insists on bringing Mickey (Gandolfini) down to kill Squirrel, because Squirrel knowns Cogan, and he doesn't like the emotions involved in a hit, getting too close to the victims as they plead for their lives. Remember? That's why he likes to "kill them softly", at a distance. But if he kills them at a distance, what the fuck difference does it make whether Squirrel knows him or not? I pondered that one to no beneficial effect for the rest of the movie.

One footnote: a number of essays about the film remarked that The Friends Of Eddie Coyle was not only Higgins' first novel, but also his best, as if this were some kind of curse and also an explanation for his lack of pick-up by Hollywood. Eddie Coyle is, as I have suggested many times before, a small and perfect book, but not necessarily Higgins' best. Because his style, although refined, remained the same, and remained the inevitable talking-point in reviews, and because he wrote 26 novels, portraying a world that was starting to change, his books received less and less attention as his career continued. In fact, you could look at Killing Them Softly as reflecting the realisation that the world has changed.

But I would argue particularly that The Mandeville Talent (you can link to the IT essay on that book here) is a subtler version of the same idea, dealing with murder and white-collar crime, while a number of his last novels, especially A Change Of Gravity and At End Of Day, are elegant reflections of his world-view in changing times. Higgins is always worth a read, and this film is certainly worth your time as well.

PETER YATES AND EDDIE COYLE: A DIRECTOR'S LEGACY

It's sad that with the obituaries following Peter Yates' death, his career as a film director already appears to be becoming defined primarily by the car chase in Bullitt (though that is probably preferable to the mainstream's second-choice, Jacqueline Bisset's wet-T shirt in The Deep, which won't stop my using a photo of it below). It's not that Bullitt isn't an interesting film without the car chase; in many ways Yates and Steve McQueen showed the way for Don Siegel and Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry. And it is a great car chase, which inspired William Friedkin's (with the same stunt driver) New York version in The French Connection, and was probably topped by the auto-decapitation in Philip D'Antoni's Seven-Ups. But Bullitt was by no means Yates' best crime movie, and the McQueen's Mustang is not probably not even Yates' best chase scene.

That would be Dennis Christopher, on his bicycle in Breaking Away, chasing the visiting Italian cycle team he idolises, and having that idealism shattered along with his bicycle's wheel. Or if not that one, Christopher's race with his friends in the Little 500; the climax of that excellent film about growing up, friendship and, incidentally, sports. To me, Yates was a director primarily interested in character, who got miscast by Bullitt into being thought of as an action man. His problem was that his 'serious' movies where he tried to examine 'adult' issues, never quite clicked, whereas he does an awful lot with Bullitt's character by letting Steve McQueen simply be, and letting Bisset (again) and others react to him. It makes sense if you think of Robbery, his first feature, which, for all its moving-train action, and the London car-chase that got him hired for Bullitt, is really about Stanley Baker's relationships with his gang members and pursuers. It's noticeable how much Baker is very much a silent-type like Bullitt, and Joanna Pettet a very effective Jacqueline Bisset. It's interesting, because for a while on You Tube, before they disappeared for the inevitable copyright and intellectual 'property' issues, I was watching early episodes of The Saint and Danger Man, the two TV shows where Yates first made his mark, and you can often see how the economies of scale in television result in some very subtle exercising in character. And in Patrick McGoohan's John Drake, you see the same sort of detached cool that McQueen would show as Bullitt.

When taken out of the genre context, Yates' 'serious' work seems just slightly off-the-mark, though some of the knock-off stuff, like The Deep, tries to be better than it is. I think of films as varied as John & Mary; Mother, Jugs, and Speed, Murphy's War, or Eleni, none of which really convinces, and some of which miss by a lot. The exception is The Dresser, but again I think it is the structure of Ronald Harwood's play which helps Yates get to the characters, and get to them he does, with Finney and Courtney delivering epic performances. Yet even at his peak, between Breaking Away, and The Dresser, Eyewitess (written, as was Breaking Away, by Steve Tesich) fell flat, despite a good premise and strong cast. Another promising crime film, House On Carroll Street was perhaps too derivative of its period, and ended flatly, but it was an interesting attempt by Walter Bernstein to put that period into some sort of context, and remains an overlooked but interesting film.

Yates real legacy should lie in two very different crime films based on classic books by pantheon writers. The Hot Rock was scripted by William Goldman from Donald Westlake's first novel featuring the Dortmunder gang, comic caper crime played for laughs but always with Westlake's real crime sensibility not far from the surface. Yates caught it almost perfectly, with a seemingly mis-cast Robert Redford eschewing glamour to portray the permanently-jinxed Dortmunder, George Segal and Ron Liebman perfect as gang-members Karp and Murch, and Zero Mostel an unforgettable foil. Compare it to the sequel, Bank Shot, with George C Scott, to see just how sure a hand Yates had.

His masterpiece, of course, was The Friends Of Eddie Coyle, adapted beautifully by Paul Monash from the understated, dialogue-driven prose of George V Higgins' first novel. There's a bit of noirish inevitability in Eddie Coyle's fate (again, foreshadowed somewhat by Baker in Robbery), from which Robert Mitchum draws out all the emotions, and like The Hot Rock, his supporting cast is wonderful: Peter Boyle as his 'friend', the bartender Dillon, a young Richard Jordan as the Fed, Foley, Steven Keats as the gun-dealer Jackie Brown, and Alex Rocco as the bank-robbing Jimmy Scalise, providing the sort of energy Liebman did in The Hot Rock. Eddie Coyle is one of those magnificent adaptations of a small but perfect novel; like Huston's version of The Maltese Falcon the dialogue simply jumps off the page onto the screen. But as with all his best work, Yates was fascinated by Higgins' concern with the relationships (signalled by the title), the levels of trust and lying, friendship and business, that delineate Coyle's world. The actors get it; they don't play for sympathy from the audience, they play their parts in a world of give-and-take, a world where you make your choices and take responsibility, and what you don't know is your own fault. It's one of the greatest of all crime movies, it's Yates' best, and it's that, not a Steve McQueen car chase, that constitutes his true legacy.

GEORGE V HIGGINS' MANDEVILLE TALENT: A Forgotten Friday Entry

I picked up a copy of The Mandeville Talent in a charity shop recently. It's out of print, my original copy is in storage somewhere, but it was one of my favourites among George Higgins' novels, and I wrote about it recently, from memory, in my chapter on Higgins' and Robert B Parker's Boston for Maxim Jakubowski's Following The Detectives. I wanted to re-read the book, almost 20 years after it was originally published in 1991, to see how accurate my memory had been but also to gauge just how much two decades might have changed my appreciation of Higgins.

Turns out I had remembered the book well, and that it holds up rather better than I thought it might. The novel tells the story of Joe Corey, a up-and-coming New York mergers and acquisitions lawyer, whose wife takes a job as a professor at Mount Holyoke, up in the Berkshire mountains of western Massachusetts, near the town of Shropshire where her grandfather, James Mandeville, president of the local bank, was murdered just before Christmas 23 years earlier. Dissatisfied with his current life, Joe gets drawn into the unsolved crime, made to look like a suicide, and begins to investigate.

The novel tells two stories. One is the story of the crime, and the other is the story of how life actually works in the world where society still functions in terms of people. This was Mandeville's talent, to be the unprepossessing big-shot in his small town. Corey's volunteer efforts on the case impress a local DA, who puts him on to a retired investigator, Baldo Iannuci, who begins to take him through the few clues buried in the minutiae of the case. Meanwhile, Baldo initates Corey into the way a small town works, the give and take that makes it function. The two lessons interweave, of course, and it is through small things dropped casually into coversation, little facts, seemingly unimportant, that are the result of long-developed relationships, that Baldo and Joe begin to get close to the truth.

There is an element of the too-pat here, as one or two recollections come just too easily or coveniently, and occasionally you wish the voices telling the story were more distinctly individual. But meanwhile, Joe is learning why liquor store owners offer some customers discounts, and how real estate agents behave with their customers. 'The first principle,' Baldo says, '...is that people live up to your expectations. If you let them know you expect them to hammer you, well, they won't disappoint you--they'll do it.' It is a rough principle, but a fair one if you're treating people with respect.

Which of course is what Jim Mandeville never figured on. He had taken a loan to buy property; he'd guessed right and now his property was worth far more than the loan. In his world that wouldn't change the game. But for the man from whom he'd borrowed the money, the game was played differently, and it did change. This is also the game Joe Corey discovers he is leaving behind. Higgins ties all the ends together smartly, his two strands weaving together perfectly, and you almost expect 'here endeth the lesson' to pop up somewhere.

The reason I wondered how The Mandeville Talent would hold up was the nature of the changes we've seen in our world since then, and the way the zero-sum game of gangsters, merchant bankers and merger and acquisition lawyers has penetrated right down to small town America. Higgins left Boston for this story partly because he'd investigated a similar small town murder, but more importantly because he wanted to explain society's workings at the micro level. I think he saw the world changing quickly, and needed distance from the Hub, and the State House, and bigger time politics, to say what he wanted to say. Ten years later he would revisit western Mass, in A Change Of Gravity, by which time his recounting of local politics was already elegaic. Higgins knew that the give and take of life wasn't always, strictly speaking, legal, or in the wider sense, fair, but it followed certain rules, it made a certain sense, and things worked reasonably well. I wish I could say the same now.

HARVEY AND HORACE: JOHN HARVEY'S TAKE ON HORACE MC COY

John Harvey has a very acute little piece on his Mellotone70Up blog (link to it here) about writing an introduction to Serpent Tail's upcoming reissue of Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses, Don't They? in which he defines the fatalism in McCoy which makes him so popular in France.

I wrote a quick response and posted it there, but I thought I'd share that response with you here, and add a few small second thoughts...

Very nice piece–and interesting speculation. I havent read No Pockets For A Shroud (though I should have by now) but it seems to fit in with a number of works, going back to Jack London's Iron Heel and including President Fu Manchu, which speculate on proto-fascism in America: I wonder whether it’s the fatalism or the politics (or a little of both) that relate to its relative lower status?

There is that strange disconnect, more evident in noirish films, between the obviously corrupt society it portrays, and the triumph of the system (more than the little guy who is the nominal hero) which of course is what is corrupt in the first place. The honest are exceptions, and honesty is a flexible thing in the real world, and that’s what makes McCoy and Hammett (and George V Higgins) work…

Certainly McCoy is arguably the most fatalistic of all of them, which is what makes him great. In fact, you might call him at his strongest nilhilistic, which would also explain the French attraction to his work.

You can link to my take on the spectactularly good I Should Have Stayed Home at Irresistible Targets for March 2009, here. I do believe it was an influence on Wilder and Sunset Boulevard and it's certainly up there with the best Hollywood novels, of West or Fitzgerald or whomever (though it's hard to see Fitzgerald as proletarian, even in the Pat Hobby stories!). O’Hara is sadly overlooked today, there's an off-the-wall comparison to made with him and the Mailer of Deer Park.

Footnote: I'm not sure John can get away with blaming it all on Sun Ra, but with Sun Ra, all things are possible. A college friend of mine once sat in Ken McIntyre's office while he talked to Sun Ra on the phone, and afterwards I asked him what Ken called him, Sun? Mr Ra? Herman Blount (his original name)? Wasn't it a dilemma? No, my friend answered. He just called him 'man'.

ROBERT B PARKER: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY, COMPLETED

My obituary of the great detective novelist Robert B Parker is in today's Guardian; you can link to it here. I read Parker from his very first novel, and probably read just about all of them, and the bit about the Chandler revival was true; those Ballantine editions with the glossy covers were very popular, and I wrote an essay at the time for a magazine called Starling, about discovering Chandler. Maybe I'll dig it out and reprint it here. I've written a lot about Parker over the years, and my attitude toward him is summed up in one of my favourite 'interviews'; a review of Trouble In Paradise which you can link to from the 'Bullseyes' section to the right, or by hitting the link here.

I felt unusually odd writing the obit because last month I finished an essay on Boston for Following The Detectives, a Maxim Jakubowski-edited anthology about various cities and their detectives, which was predominantly about George Higgins, Parker, and Dennis Lehane. And in November I reviewed his Spenser novel The Professional, linked to here, which is worth reading because it summarises both the strengths and weaknesses of his later work. But I could still hear what I'd written then echoing around my head, Parker's death was that unexpected.

The obit ran mostly as written, allowing for the usual oddities of style (Colby College became Colby college, though one would never see Oxford university in the British press; the actress Helen Hunt became an actor), but lost was one comment on why Parker's slighter work remained entertaining; the wise-cracking Spenser usually got the zingers to end each chapter--zinger was probably thought to need explanation.

More crucially, an entire paragraph on his westerns was cut. This was odd, because it reflected the earlier reference to Rich Slotkin's Gunfighter Nation, because it connected Tom Selleck to the Jesse Stone films, which also thus go unmentioned, because Gunman's Rhapsody is an important work within his output, because Appaloosa was a quality film, and a successful one, and also because the forthcoming fourth novel in the Cole and Hitch series is mentioned in the final paragraph, but with no explanation, as if the previous reference had not been excised. Anyway, here's the missing bit, which was the penultimate graf in my copy:
-->

In 2001, Parker's novel Gunman's Rhapsody recast Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday as Spenser and Hawk; which led to his working on the screenplay for the 2003 TV movie remake of the classic Monte Walsh, starring Tom Selleck. Selleck then played Jesse Stone in a series of TV movies between 2005-09, with one remaining unaired. Parker's 2005 western, Appaloosa, was made into an excellent film by the actor Ed Harris, and spawned two more novels featuring lawmen Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch. 

I could go on about how the link between westerns and detective stories is so important, but mostly I'd like to end by remembering just how much pleasure Parker's writing brought me over the years, and how much we will miss him now that he's gone.

EUGENE IZZI'S THE CRIMINALIST: A Forgotten Friday Entry

Eugene Izzi was found hanging outside the window of his Chicago office in December 1996, the noose anchored to his desk. His death was ruled suicide, but it took place in strange circumstances. When I wrote about it for the Financial Times, I dismissed the idea of murder (in his pockets was the manuscript, on disc, of a novel about a man who infiltrates a white supremacy group, and there was a suggestion that such a group might have been seeking revenge for his own infiltration of them) but did consider that he might have been enacting a scene from the novel, which then went wrong. But in Izzi's 1996 novel Players, a career criminal arranges his own death, in order to provide for his family, and after publishing 16 novels in just ten years Izzi might have been feeling a similar need.

Izzi broke onto the scene with 1987's The Take, and his third book, Bad Guys (1988) was a classic which already set up his main themes of corruption, betrayal, revenge and other difficult personal choices. Izzi wrote feverishly, and in some of his books the material can seem out of control, but when he was at his best, he was among the best and most hard-boiled writers in the field. He was George Pelecanos, but more into the corruptions of the criminal and cop world, and offering less in the sense of redemption coming from the hard work of everyday life.

The Criminalist was his second novel published posthumously (the first, A Matter Of Honor, was a sequel to Bulletin From The Streets, two books which seemed to take off from Elmore Leonard's City Primeval, but neither in a very convincing fashion). It is one of his very best, having the same sense of powerful anger all his books do, while avoiding that headlong speed-rap prose that particularly detracted from some of his longer novels, including those two Leonard pastiches.

Dominick diGrazia is the criminalist of the title, a sort of super-cop who operates as a lone wolf within the Chicago Police Department. DiGrazia is a trained forensic scientist who prefers to remain on the street, and he has powerful friends in high places to cover his back in the political snakepit that is the CPD. When a corpse is discovered in an alley, maimed in the same way as a famous unsolved murder from twenty years earlier, DiGrazia manages to take over the investigation himself.

Since DiGrazia’s ex-partner, now retired, had been the original investigating officer, and since the original victim was the sister-in-law of a cop, who was accused of killing her, the strands of the story are set up carefully. The most detailed and labyrinthine plots exist within the police, which we see primarily through the eyes of Janice Constantine, a veteran beat cop who becomes DiGrazia’s temporary partner.

Many of Izzi’s core personal themes throw themselves up here, the ones that appeared to reflect aspects of his own life: abusive parents, distrustful marriages, the inability of people to transcend the hands dealt to them by life. But his usual sense of rage is tempered here by care and even sensitivity; using a female point of view seems to help give him some distance, and, unlike some of his novels, he's here concerned about keeping the reader guessing about what is true and what isn’t. The investigation may reach its conclusion with a slight anti-climax, but the story plays fair even as it carries you along. You could also look at it as a precursor to TV shows like CSI, in that Izzi took the popular forensic strand of crime writing, and transferred it to actual investigators. This time, his adapting of his work to popular trends worked perfectly, and it deserved to be a springboard to greater success.

We can speculate about what sort of conditions conspired to grant Izzi the artistic peace to keep this novel so well under control. We can also speculate further about the locked-room mystery he left behind with his death. We can regret that this was the last Izzi novel we got to see (the family apparently decided not to release the novel which was on his person when he died, just as they honoured his wish to keep his second novel, The Eighth Victim, out of print—it's not great, but it's not THAT bad!). The Criminalist was said by some sources to be Izzi's best-selling novel, though when I interviewed his editor, Jennifer Sawyer-Fisher, she said the book had received only a 'small boost' from his death. When I originally reviewed The Criminalist ten years ago, I said that, given the circumstances of his death, 'it’s heart-warming to read something so good'. That's still true, and after George V Higgins, he's the writer I'd most like to see get back into print.

THE CRIMINALIST Avon Books, USA, 1998

JOE GORES' INTERFACE A Forgotten Friday (the 13th) Entry

It's hard to call Joe Gores' Interface a 'forgotten' book, especially since it was re-issued in 2004, thirty years after it first appeared, in Orion's 'Crime Masterworks' series. But it's worth looking at again, especially because Gores followed it up in 1975 with Hammett, another great novel, which became a fine, if flawed film, and now of course has a new novel out in the US, Spade & Archer, a knowing prequel of sorts to The Maltese Falcon. It hasn't been announced in this country yet, so I haven't seen it, though I have seen some mixed reviews, which have led to me think it isn't perhaps as hard-boiled as one might've thought it might be.

I say that because I think Interface was, arguably along with George V Higgins' debut The Friends Of Eddie Coyle, the most important crime novel of the 1970s. Where Higgins was looking forward, in the sense he was working out a style that no one in the genre had used before, and which he would refine to the point of brilliance, Gores looked back, producing a novel that probably was the greatest take on the idea of hard-boiled detectives anyone had attempted to that point, and probably greater than any de-construction of the genre since. Apotheosis is a word often used without justification, but to me, Interface is the apotheosis of the hard-boiled novel.

Gores was breaking ground pretty consistently back then. His 1969 novel, A Time Of Predators, anticipated Death Wish by a few years, although it's closer to Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, one of his two most misunderstood movies (The Getaway being the other, and for many of the same reasons) although I haven't read The Siege Of Trencher's Farm, the source novel for the film, it came out the same year, so neither was presumably an influence on the other. His DKA series was, in essence, police procedural set in a detective agency, specializing in skip tracing: long before Alex Cox's film. He was one of, if not the first, writers to emphasize the mundanity of routine private investigations, something that would be followed by any number of private eye writers. He'd also played around in the DKA novels, including a cameo appearance by Richard Stark's Parker, a gesture returned by Donald Westlake in a novel of his own.

I mention Parker, because Gores dedicated Interface to Parker, 'that Stark villain...because he's such a beautiful human being.' And that's quite a big clue into the business of Interface, because the crook in that story, called Docker, is Parker with a slight limp, and the nominal hero, Neil Fargo is as bent a private eye as you've ever seen. The book begins with Docker killing two men and stealing drugs for which he was supposed to be the bag man, limping away with both money and heroin. Docker was a Vietnam buddy of Fargo's and Fargo has brought him in, acting as middleman between a local dealer, Kolinsky and an importer, Harriss. Kolinsky keeps a junkie mistress, called Robin, who's given up on life, and she knows Docker, and Fargo is looking for her, because she's actually Roberta Stayton, an heiress whose father pays Fargo for the search.

It's not a pretty story, and it's not told in pretty terms: in fact it seems of a piece with all those grimy looking early 1970s crime movies, the dark and grimy side of the bright New Frontier, when the veneer of society's civilising structures had been removed from the ever-present underworld. It's a novel about failed dreams, and about obligations to the past; a novel about the ruin of Vietnam and the sonambulant world of drugs. Most of all, it's about what being a private detective is all about. In The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade has a line about not really being as crooked as he's supposed to be, and of course he has responsibilities he cannot escape, lines he will not let himself cross. The same is true in this book, which spends 200 pages deconstructing everything about a private eye you're supposed to believe, and then putting it back together with one twist that turns it all on its head. I loved the novel when I read it for the first time, and it is so well-done I was still caught by its twist when I re-read it thirty years later. Joe Gores has always been the real deal, and this is the most real of all his books. It's a classic, it's one of the all-time greats. Over the years I've handed out a number of copies of the book to friends; it's the kind of book you want everyone who loves the detective novel to read.

Interface by Joe Gores 1974
Orion Crime Masterworks edition, 2004 £6.99
ISBN 0752851888

STOP, YOU'RE KILLING ME! GUARDIAN/OBSERVER 1000 NOVELS EVERYONE MUST READ: CRIME

The second chapter in the Guardian/Observer's '1000 Novels Everyone Must Read' was titled 'Crime', but anyone looking for a coherent best of the genre would be disappointed. Of course such lists exist to attract attention, if not controversy, and this one was specifically designed to rise above the usual suspects, such as the 50 best crime novels chosen by the Times back in April (see it here) or the Telegraph's last February (here). It's somewhat harder to pick apart than those were (see, for example, Mike Stotter at Shots here on how difficult it is to know where to start) but there are some egregious omissions--and inclusions-- by any standards.

Having said that, it is important to note that the list was introduced with a tortured attempt to define their goals, a Mission Statement which, using prose George Bush might envy, detailed an attempt 'to reflect as much of the spectrum as possible, as well as the regularity with which literary novelists have made evildoers their theme. The difference? The latter break genre rules, typically eliminating the hero who solves or prevents crime. And they usually write more stylishly; but the recent rise of the literary crime fiction epitomised by PD James has made that distinction less clear.'

Oh really.

This at least explains why Carrie O'Grady is such a treasured crime reviewer for the paper; her review of Fred Vargas, which was so amazingly wrong-headed it prompted an entire essay: 'The Guardian's Telegraph Crossword Theory of Crime Fiction', which you can find linked in the 'Bullseyes' section at the right, or here, made exactly the same sort of myopic distinction, with same sort of celebration of the epitome of 'literary' crime fiction ignoring some seven decades of writing. O'Grady features prominently in writing the entries here; you might not share her sense of the importance of Michael Innes's 'impish glee', but it helps explain why Anthony Berkley is a 'master of the genre' and Donald Westlake doesn't appear, in any of his guises, as if Richard Stark's writing didn't mark a revolution of crime style.

Yet even within their own parameters, the G/O can't achieve any consistency; not least because rather than reflect as much of the spectrum as possible, they tended, by choosing multiple books by favoured writers, to narrow that spectrum considerably. For example, five books by Ruth Rendell, none by, say, Margaret Millar, or Kate Wilhelm, or Laura Lippman's Every Secret Thing, if they want something recent. Colin Dexter has two books included, one because, according to Ms. O'Grady 'the Jag, the jokes, the crosswords...it's all here' (the crosswords?!) but where is John Harvey? Michael Dibdin gets his own section written by Mark Lawson, in which four books are chosen, perhaps these were the books Mark must read before he dies. Guardian reviewer Matthew Lewin gets to provide a sidebar on 'modern hardboiled crime', but the selections are only two of James Lee Burke southern gothics, and two by James Ellroy: yes, LA Confidential is a must, but why The Big Nowhere rather than the more crucial Black Dahlia or the more manic White Jazz? Why not the amazing American Tabloid, the start of the still unfinished American Underworld trilogy? Indeed why not a Lloyd Hopkins novel or even Ellroy's startling debut, Brown's Requiem? And in modern hardboiled crime, where is Michael Connelly?

Or, for that matter, Joe Gores, whose DKA novels are the most real of non-police procedurals, whose Hammett became a film (see below) and opened a sub-genre for writers as detectives, and whose Interface is the most serious bending of the hard-boiled detective hero that anyone has done before or since (you can find my essay on it here).

The selections also seem overly influenced by film (or TV) adaptations, and not just because they need art to decorate the section, and they must believe film stills work better than book covers, but also because films are a short cut to a writer's work (and reputation). Even so, is 'Get Shorty' really the Elmore Leonard you'd feel everyone 'must' read? Why The Manchurian Candidate and not Winter Kills? On the other hand, Jim Thompson gives you The Grifters and Coup de Torchon, as well as Peckinpah's excellent The Getaway (and its insipid remake). And yes, in this case, a still of a soaked Ali MacGraw may well make a better illo than the cover of Thompson's book.

In spy fiction are 'Tinker, Tailor' and 'Constant Gardener' really more essential reads than 'The Honourable Schoolboy'? Those two are listed among the choices, while the more crucial 'The Spy Who Came In From The Cold' is included as part of an essay, The Best Spy Fiction, by Henry Porter (at least one of whose books, Empire State, deserves mention) which includes only two other candidates, both by Eric Ambler. On the main list are three James Bonds (all by Ian Fleming; I'm amazed they could resist including Kingsley Amis or Sebastian Faulks) but none of Donald Hamilton's Matt Helms. And is there really no place at all for the spy fiction of Robert Littell, Charles McCarry, Alan Furst, Paul Hennisart, or, indeed, Norman Mailer?

Mailer? Well, I say this because the list also includes two of Thomas Pynchon's novels. The Crying Of Lot 49 was a clever choice, but V, which was my favourite book when I was 17, and still is one of them now, is more of a stretch. John Dugdale does point out that, in V Pynchon pardies the John Buchan/Erskine Childers--both included in the Guardian's list-- thriller, but V is a novel filled with literary parody, not a crime novel itself.

Mailer wrote a huge spy novel, Harlot's Ghost which holds up very well, and to which the promised sequel remains unwritten. He also wrote a parody hardboiled, Tough Guys Don't Dance. There's murder at the heart of An American Dream, my own favourite of his novels, and of course there's The Executioner's Song, probably his best book, which is a non-fiction novel and certainly more rewarding for you to read than most of the books on this list.

I mention Mailer also because a very erratic group of 'literary' works are shoe-horned in, the likes of Ian McEwan, Patrick Susskind, Sarah Waters, Brett Easton Ellis, and Donna Tartt (someone must've loved that Bennington/Manhattan circle 15 years ago!). These are the literary lights who 'with regularity make evildoers their theme', yet nothing included by any of them holds a candle to An American Dream, much less American Tabloid.

There are also a lot of classic novels, including Zola's Therese Raquin and Dumas' The Count Of Monte Cristo. I love the latter, (who doesn't) and I guess it has crime (perjury) at its core (as well as a great prison break), but its inclusion really opens the door to any number of adventure novels, and might best have been put into a supplement of books you have to read before you hit puberty. Genre seems to create some major stumbling blocks for the Guardian. Peter Carey's Kelly Gang is surely a western, even if it is set in the southern hemisphere, while both the Michael Crichton novels included are surely sf. Why them and not any other sf classics that involve crime, like Philip Dick's Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep (not that it's Dick's best, but it does have a detective, and it was made into a famous film by a British director). If you've got The Three Musketeers, why not Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination? Why not Crichton's Eaters Of The Dead?

The whys and why-nots were the decisions of a 'panel of experts' but the write-ups for the entries chosen were apparently then assigned elsewhere, so we can't blame those who wrote the entries. For example, I doubt anyone 'must read' James Hadley Chase's No Orchids For Miss Blandish but I'll concede it does have some historical value here in Britain. As John Sutherland writes, Chase had studied Warner Bros. gangster movies, but perhaps he wasn't aware that the 'experts' had also chosen for this list William Faulkner's Sanctuary, which would make it worth his pointing out that Chase evidently studied Faulkner's book far more closely than any movie.

One can quibble too choices of books for the authors who were included; I'm not sure who'd choose Lush Life as the only Richard Price novel, or Sidetracked for Henning Mankell, but those quibbles aren't as important as asking why two Sara Paretsky and no David Goodis, two John Grishams and no Ross MacDonald, or why Jonathan Lethem but not Michael Chabon.

There are some positives. Nice to see George V Higgins, who surely qualifies for such a list even were it reduced to a dozen. Yes, Eddie Coyle was the one made into a movie, but it is still one of Higgins' very best. Good to see Sjowall and Wahloo remembered, even if one suspects they chose The Laughing Policeman because they don't know there's also a movie of The Man On The Roof! There's Friedrich Duerrenmatt's The Pledge, recognition of his place within the pantheon. Among the literary choices is Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red, for which John Mullan makes a good case. All of Hammett's four great novels are in, though someone (I'm assuming it wasn't Maxim Jakubowski, who wrote the entry, but one of the sub editors 'correcting' him) felt compelled to Anglicise it, transforming Red Harvest's setting of Personville (aka Poisonville) to Pentonville (!) Even the Continental Op might be amused by that one.

As I said, these lists exist to stir debate, prompt rants, and sell papers. But also, in this case, to educate the audience. And it is so heartening to learn that, thanks to PD James, crime fiction may someday attempt to rise to the literary heights of Perfume, Fingersmith, American Psycho, or The Secret History. Mission Accomplished!

POSTSCRIPT (24/1): It turned out that the Crime supplement was actually far more sensible than those that followed, whose categories, after Comedy (where the choices made Crime's look rational and comprehensive), grew increasingly more bizarre, like the oxymoronic Family and Self, State Of The Nation, and my favourite, War and Travel. The beauty of that one was that it allowed them to include Black Beauty, South Wind, Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance (which isn't a novel, and if we're including non ficton where's Dispatches?) and even The Mark Of Zorro (what, no Fu Manchu?), while excluding War And Peace. Think about it. The outre categories meant inclusion for most of Pynchon, which was a good thing, but among all the fashionable moderns and Guardian contributors, they found no room for anything by Richard Powers, in my mind the very best 'younger' novelist writing in English. And how CAN anyone discuss the self or the nation without reference to Philip K Dick?.