I, SNIPER: STEPHEN HUNTER

Stephen Hunter's history of the Swagger family has, over the years, been engrossing. It was a Hunter novel Bill Clinton was carrying when he stepped down from Air Force One on a visit to Britain; it appeared in newspaper photos, and because John Coldstream remembered my offering a review of the book to him I wound up reviewing it for the Telegraph; the Times, meanwhile, to whom I'd forwarded the offer in the meantime, and who had put the photo on the front page, declined to even discuss Hunter's new noteworthiness.

The series was at its best when it was involved with historical facts, which was more when it starred Bob Lee's father Earl; things like the corruption in Cold Springs, Arkansas, or mob-controlled Havana in 1953 (I always thought the Swaggers and the JFK/MLK hits were a good match, but the timings just never worked out!) and it has always benefitted from the aptly-named Hunter's interest in guns and sniper lore. There is a fine line between interest and obsession, however, and although I Sniper is admirable in the way it integrates the minutiae of armament apparatus into its plot devices, it never seems to allow for the idea of a reader whose own interest may be slightly less technical.

The title itself is interesting. It refers, obviously, to Swagger himself, who is simply the best at what he does, even if he's been content to do it in obscurity. When a more-reknowned sniper goes off on what appears to be a deranged attack on 1960s war protestors, Swagger is called in by your friendly FBI sniper turned special agent, to check his own suspicion that something doesn't feel quite right. The key clue turns out to be a device called I Sniper, a computerised scope which doesn't actually exist, but, according to Hunter is eminently possible. Finally, however, one can't help but think that I, Sniper also refers to Hunter himself, and that Swagger, who in this book is all-seeing, all-knowing, all-American, and always moral, is a wish-fulfillment more than a brilliantly conceived character.

Here he seems much more of a plot device, two-dimensional apart from his macho capability and his devotion to honour. This is something critics of war (in general, in Iraq, in Vietnam, whatever) appear to lack, and that signposts the villainry in the story far too openly to keep it suspenseful. This is a shame, because Hunter's skill at having Swagger anticpate and outthink his rivals remains undaunted; were he to invest Swagger with a bit more depth, as he had in earlier novels, he might have been able to rachet the suspense higher. Less is more in plot sometimes.
What Swagger becomes here is a kind of thinking man's Rambo; meanwhile, the fate of Nick Memphis, the FBI sniper/agent who is set up by the villain is the most suspenseful part of the story. Hunter, once a film reviewer for the Baltimore Sun, seems to take great pleasure in making a Washington Post (the paper to which he moved from the Sun) journo the real villain of the piece, and the twist that resolves that story is perfectly judged, especially if you are a devotee of the small print of small arms.

I have followed Hunter with great pleasure for many years, but in the end I Sniper is a book for the already converted; it has the feel of a series novel, a plot-driven Ludlum or Clancy maybe, and it's too device-centric by half. Bob Lee doesn't lose his swagger, but it would be nice to have just a small glimpse of the man behind it.

JACK O'CONNELL: THE AMERICAN EYE INTERVIEW

After far too long a hiatus my latest American Eye column, an interview with Jack O'Connell, is up at Shots (the link I originally posted to that has now expired). Jack was over to promote his latest novel, The Resurrectionist, which was one of the very best books of 2009 and deserved far more attention than it got.

If you missed my retrospective review of O'Connell's first novel, Box Nine, last month, you can link to it here or just scroll back through November's entries. In the meantime, here's the original interview:

JACK O'CONNELL

 

The thing that stands out about Jack O'Connell is his sheer enthusiasm for the art and craft of writing. As we reduced the world's stock of Guinness, and a bitter named The Fall, whose Biblical overtones impressed us, in an Irish pub nestled in a West End alley, O'Connell spun out the pleasures of reading which, for him, grew into the pleasures of writing. That we appeared to share the same tastes, indeed many of the same experiences with the same editions of the same paperbacks of our younger days meant the two hours became an exercise of head-shaking agreement, each punctuated by another drink.

O'Connell was born, educated, and has spent his whole life in Worcester, Massachusetts ('within a three-mile radius, really'), which provides the geographical basis of his fictional Quinsigamond, but it is his reading that has provided Quinsigamond with its unique mix of rust-belt America, Weimar Germany, and futuristic LA. Although it's easy to see the influence of any number of modern cult-favourite writers in O'Connell's work, it is sui generis, never derivitive, and at least two of his five novels, his first Box Nine, and his latest, The Resurrectionist, deserve to stand alongside names like Pynchon, DeLillo, Disch, Dick, or and Burroughs.

Like many cult writers, though, none of O'Connell's books has found commercial success to match their critical acclaim. His problems may have started when Box Nine won the Mysterious Press first novel award. Prestigious as the prize was (and appreciated as the $50,000 prize was as well), it saw him labeled as a 'crime writer', and although it fit into that category, it also resisted it. Genre labels don't quite work for O'Connell; there are significant elements of sf, and stylistic experiment which put much 'serious' fiction to shame, which makes it difficult for them to appeal to the 'hard core' crime reader, while at the same time making it almost impossible to reach beyond the genre boundaries created by the 'mystery' section of bookstore shelving.

Along those lines, I noticed Jack was carrying the new US paperback edition of The Resurrectionist, and I commented that the covers of that book reflected his dilemma of classification. constant nodding in agreement and digressing into tangential concerns that seemed to be mutually apparent immediately....

JOC: I loved that first cover (the US cloth edition), but the publisher thought it was not quite right.

MC: It emphasized the circus/freak show sub-plot; it reminded me of Glenn David Gold, or maybe a book like The Prestige or The Illusionist.

JOC: And this cover (which features cards) is along the same lines, but less mysterious. I think it reflects part of the problem with my books. I was doing a tour recently, and in Denver I was in the general fiction section, in Phoenix I was in crime, and in San Francisco I was in horror/sf...

MC: Which might tell you more about San Francisco than your books! But the British edition really looks great, like a mainstream novel, perhaps historical, that John Banville or someone might have written. Maybe we should call it 'slipstream'...

JOC: No Exit have done a great job with my covers...

MC:...and they've always GOT the book; the Box Nine cover is much more sf than anything else! I saw you mentioned Harlan Ellison as an early influence. I didn't see Ellison the writer as much as Ellison the editor, because everything you've written would fit nicely into Dangerous Visions.....

JOC: Oh yeah. I loved those books, Disch, Delany, Aldiss. I sort of stumbled into sf as a kid, but then this stuff seemed so radical, and those writers led me, naturally, to finding Gravity's Rainbow, and wow! There's an anthology of stories out now, called the Secret History of Science Fiction, and it's based on a piece Jonathan Lethem wrote about ten years ago, speculating on what would have happened if the Science Fiction Writers had voted the Nebula to Gravity's Rainbow in 1973, when it was nominated, instead of Arthur Clarke's Rendezvous With Rama. From Pynchon to Delany's Dhalgren was a natural step.

MC: And where does the crime fiction fit in?

JOC: As a kid I loved Hammett and Chandler, and the next generation of pulp writers, the Jim Thompsons and David Goodises. But my first fictions were two Pynchon-type novels, long and dense, and they never sold. Then I did Box Nine, which is at heart a dark city noir, and has a female detective, and after it sold the first question was, can you make it a series? Is the main character coming back? And I said 'sure', because in my mind the main character was the city, Quinsigamond, not the woman! Both my agent and the editors were disappointed, but I said, did you see where Leonore winds up at the end of the book? And they said, well, send her to rehab! From a strictly commercial point of view they were, as usual, righter than I was. I think the problem is that I'm generally a little too dense for the dedicated crime reader, and there's no way to make the jump to 'literary'. There have been some relatively brief windows into what they call the 'slipstream', the cultish books just off the mainstream, but now my attitude is I've written five books, I'm turning 50, and I'm just gonna write what I write. You never know what's going to come out...

MC: The Resurrection is your first book in nearly a decade. Was it very carefully planned?

JOC (laughing): Just the opposite! Partly, I was working days, editing the alumni magazine at Holy Cross, and I'd get up at four ayem to write. But the first draft did not contain Limbo ((the comic book story which Sweeney reads to his comatose son)) and I wrote it in a white heat, in about 8 months, which all began after a cafe crawl around Poitiers, at a festival with Francois Guerif, or Rivage, my French publisher. It was inspired by the Gold Medal guys I love, particularly Gil Brewer, and it was the story of Sweeney and his son and the gang of bikers. I'd written maybe 90% of it, and I was really excited and I sat down to write a simple scene, where Sweeney reads a comic to his son, and the questions started. I took a left turn. Six months later, the wife says 'how did it go?' and I say 'we're going to have to get rid of Sweeney,' and she looks at me and says 'Let's not do that, alright?'. But the Limbo story just grew and grew, and in the end it was double the length it is now in the book, as I had to select just the best bits.

MC: How direct is the Gil Brewer influence?

JOC: It's partly conscious and partly organic evolution. I knew from the beginning that the only thing I wanted to do was write, but I had this terror because it didn't seem a career option to a kid growing up in Worcester! But it was the verve of those guys, the Brewers, and Ellisons, and also Richard Matheson, which I wanted to emulate. Eventually, I was able to marry it to more metaphysical themes, and more epic scope, but it took lots of experimentation, false starts, and frustration; not least those two novels which are up in the attic somewhere. Box Nine finally started to do it, I think by leaning more toward the genre electricity side of things.  The crime element of The Resurrectionist is mainly one of character; Sweeney is a real noir hero, he's disturbed, he's needy, and above all he's vulnerable, with a weak spot that the ruthless can take advantage of, and there's a black widow femme fatal, in Nadia, a seemingly virginal blonde in Alice and a creepy shrink, a Dr. Ampthor type, in her father.

MC:  And the Limbo Comics stories are so wonderful. I'm amazed someone doesn't jump at adapting them in comics, it's very much like Alan Moore..

JOC: And how great would that be. Comics, and then the movies!

MC: I'll drink to that.

ROY DISNEY: THE GUARDIAN OBIT

My obituary of Roy Disney is up at Guardian.co.uk (click here) and should be in tomorrow's print edition. It was shortened somewhat, and what was lost was my observation that Roy's life in the Disney business was re-enacted in many of the Disney films he supervised, most notably The Lion King --his resemblance to his uncle Walt was striking, and he twice exiled himself from the Disney board, only to return both times and, if not assume the role of leader that his uncle had, at least keep the company running the way he thought Walt would have wanted. Although he was ruthless as a corporate raider, when it came to Disney he had a firm belief in the company's traditional core values. I was also not surprised at all when Bob Iger survived the Eisner purge; I worked for Bob at ABC Sports and watched his ascent through Capital Cities/ABC, and throughout that time what stood out to me was Bob's belief in doing well what the company was created to do. It would have been nice to have more time to discuss Roy's personal life, or the very bitter feud with Jeffrey Katzenberg (in many ways, more than Eisner, Roy's polar opposite--or polar express opposite) or the books by Bob Thomas and James Stewart on the two Disney crises (the Stewart is the better), or to discuss the changing nature of the Disney enterprise in terms of Walt's original conception of a controlled, self-contained, Disney world (or Disneyworld!). But life is long and space is brief.

RICHARD NORTH PATTERSON'S RACE

I've suggested before that in Richard North Patterson's political thrillers the politics usually was more compelling than the 'thriller' portion of the story, and at one point I compared him to Allen Drury. This can lead to problems, because the more involving your background story, the more mechanical seem the devices of the thriller. In his last novel, Exile, Patterson moved into current affairs. The book was set amidst the perpetual conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and full of well-researched in depth analysis of the struggle, extremely balanced, carefully nuanced, and deeply sympathetic. Of course, although the book was resolved, the issue could not be within the framework of a thriller.

With The Race, Patterson returns to more straightforward electoral politics, and dispenses entirely with the thriller format. Patterson writes with a firm sense of narrative, and can wring out the suspense from the long process of the Republican presidential primary. But by setting the novel so firmly in the present, and with such easily-identified characters, he creates a whole new problem for himself. In his earlier trilogy, Kerry Kilcannon was just enough not a Kennedy to be believable, just enough of a middle-road Democrat to be part of the process. The second and third of those novels, Balance Of Power and Protect And Defend, engaged with single issues, and the fact that he approached those issues from a position of 'right' and 'wrong' allowed him to focus the narrative better than The Exile. And they dealt in 'real' politics, as practised by more or less 'real' people.

Paradoxically, Patterson's new presidential candidate Corey Grace, Gulf War hero and POW, is too obviously crafted from a base of John McCain to be real. Though Patterson acknowledges that Grace's good looks and liberal outlook are taken from former Maine senator, 'defense' secretary (and thriller writer) William Cohen, it is McCain's background that resonates through Grace. And though Patterson claims Grace (the name is revealing) is a 'politician as we wish politicians would be', he is a character from a romantic fantasy, in which Republicans can be more liberal than their Democratic rivals, yet still believe in the party that has long-since jettisoned any pretense toward such values. Those guys died with John Lindsay, who was, as mayor of New York, a sort of soft-shelled version of Grace (the mayor of the Big Apple lives in Gracie Mansion, by the way, unless, like Giuliani, his wife throws him out!). There's also an honourable Republican general pitched somewhere between James Earl Jones as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs to President Harrison Ford and Colin Powell.

This is a more serious problem than it seems, because the novel's main impact is its final twist, a truly brilliant one, but only someone as uncorruptable (that is, fantastic) as Grace would be able to pull off what he does. Yet it becomes difficult to believe in the character, because he is such an impossible construct. Even his girlfriend, Hollywood star, liberal, and black, notices this problem, though being the fantasy man he is, he overcomes her reservations.

But the meat of the novel, the machinations between the 'mainstream' candidate (loosely based on Rick Santorum, with a little Mario Cuomo perhaps) and the evangelicial preacher candidate (who turns out to be almost as honorable as Grace, which is another flight of fantasy) and their campaign advisers, is gripping, so gripping I would have perferred more of the primaries, rather than the jump straight into the convention. There must have been a temptation to include an assassin and amp up the straight-forward thriller element, but Patterson's been there and done that.This is book is better for that, but by opting to anchor his political story so firmly in reality, and then turning to fantasy politics, he's lost the element of ambiguity which would have made this a political novel up there with Advise And Consent, or The Last Hurrah (both of which I read when I was 12 or 13, along with Fail Safe and Seven Days In May...and you wonder where my cynicism about the American system comes from!).

Bill Clinton has a lot to answer for, as I suspect Patterson is yet another former 'liberal' disillusioned by the Clinton presidency, and turning to the moral certainties of the Republicans as a result. The Exile suggested Patterson favours those who recognise, if not favour, grim reality. I wonder how Barack Obama, whose dating a black woman couldn't become a campaign issue as it did for Grace, but whose politics, at leaast before he took the oath of office, didn't match Grace's, nor the character who's the thinly-disguised Colin Powell, fit into Patterson's paradigm when he got elected president?

The Race, by Richard North Patterson
Pan Books, £6.99, ISBN 9780330440158

JACQUES CHESSEX: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of Jacques Chessex is in today's Guardian, you can link to it here. In a very moving piece of synchronicity, a copy of A Jew Must Die, which is published in February, arrived in the post this morning from the estimable Bitter Lemon Press, and moves to the top of my reading list. You can also read my September 2008 review of The Vampire Of Ropraz by linking here.

A couple of small points about the obit: L'Ogre was published in English as A Father's Love, but only in America, by Bobbs Merrill. It's an interesting title switch, because of the ironic ambiguity, but what is lost is the fairy-tale sense of a dangerous childhood. The Guardian added the French titles of books which basically have English cognates, like The Vampire Of Ropraz, which seemed redundant to me, but in the case of Les Aveugles du seul regard left the title as is, as I suggested they might, since my own translation as The Blind Who Only Glance may not be the best.

I had also mentioned a collaboration he did with the sculptor Manuel Muller, A Night In The Forest, which when I wrote the piece had yet to appear, but now presumably has been published. I'm hoping Bitter Lemon will publish The Last Skull Of M. De Sade in English eventually; in Donald Wilson's translations one gets the feeling of Chessex's French prose, a style which reminds me somewhat of the prose of poets like Robert Creeley, and with the atmospheric feeling of a number of Quebecois novelists, particularly Marie-Claire Blais.

DOUGLAS HORNE'S NEW LOOK AT THE JFK ASSASSINATION

Robin Ramsey, editor of Lobster (to which I contributed occasionally, and which is soon to re-appear as an on-line journal) forwarded on a link to some background information about a new JFK assassination book. Oh no, I hear you groan, but Inside The Assassination Records Review Board, Vol IV, by Douglas Horne, is a comprehensive review of the medical evidence, written by an AARB staffer. You can get some background to the book in the review posted here, at the JFK Countercoup blog, but following that is an interview with Horne in which he sets out the major pieces of new evidence, or new interpretation, he uncovered, you can link straight to that here.

Reading that interview, I'd be tempted to put Horne's book up with James Douglass's JFK And The Unspeakable (my essay on that book from Lobster can be linked to from the Bullseye's listings on the right, or just bang it here) and the LaFontaines' Oswald Talked as the past decade's most substantial and convincing books showing a conspiracy and a cover-up (not necessarily in concert) in the JFK assassination. He's very convincing on the autopsy, and though there aren't any answers provided, when you combine it with the long-ignored evidence in Douglass' book, and the strong case the LaFontaine's make for Oswald's thinking he was a government agent infiltrating subversives, the conclusion that the assassination was not the work of a lone crazed assassin, or even a few crazed assassins, becomes inescapable.

IAN VASQUEZ IN THE HEAT COMPETITION

Ian Vasquez's novel In The Heat won the 2008 Shamus Award as best first PI novel, and his publisher, Regal Literary, is celebrating that by giving away five signed copies of that book and his second novel, Lonesome Point.

To enter, you have to join Ian's Facebook page, and send an email to vasquez@regal-literary.com, with the subject line I'm A Facebook Fan, by 31 December. Sounds easy enough, especially if you're on Facebook. You can check the page out here. Ian's own homepage is here too.

Look for a review of a non-signed copy here at Irresisitible Targets soon...

LIONEL DAVIDSON: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obit of Lionel Davidson, whose eight adult novels won three CWA Gold Daggers, is in today's Indpendent; you can link to it here. I suspect Davidson will be one of those rare writers who gets revived cyclically; his work is firmly rooted into its various settings, and times, and this, along with the intricacies of his plotting will probably intrigue new audiences.

CAPTAIN LOU ALBANO: THE GUARDIAN OBIT

My obituary of Captain Lou Albano is in today's Guardian, you can link to it here. 'Bombastic' was a great word to use in their headline, but the copy itself was trimmed to fit available space, and a few good points were lost (as well as the adjective 'great' when I described him as a 'great heel manager'. I was never a particular fan of Capt. Lou's, but bombastic he was, and when you consider all the reasons professional wrestling is both entertaining and embarassing, he makes an almost perfect example of the 'sport's' appeal. In fact Lou managing George Steele may be some sort of litmus test for wrestling fans with sentience above plant level. To get the full flavour of the Captain, here's my original copy for the Guardian:

CAPTAIN LOU ALBANO: WRESTLING MANAGER

Outrageous even by the flexible standards of professional wrestling, the appeal to teenagers of 'Captain' Lou Albano, who has died aged 76, was a key factor in the ascent to mainstream popularity of the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) in the 1980s. Albano's appearance as Cyndi Lauper's father in her video 'Girls Just Wanna Have Fun' was a sensation in the early days of MTV, and led to a programmed feud with WWF wrestlers which grew to include other 80s celebrities like Mr. T, whose popularity helped transform the likes of Hulk Hogan into household names. Albano's cartoonish act later found its perfect home playing in the live action segments, and providing the voiceover for the animations of one of the Super Mario Brothers.

Albano was one of the great 'heel' wrestling managers, and a mainstay of the Worldwide Wrestling Federation (WWWF), owned by Vincent J McMahon, which dominated the northeastern US area, and was the precursor to the modern WWF, now known as WWE. Born in Rome, Albano moved as an infant to America, where his family settled in Mount Vernon, outside New York City. A gridiron and wrestling star at Archbishop Stepinac High School, he won a football scholarship to the University of Tennessee, but soon left college to join the army. He was working as a bouncer when he met some wrestlers and began training, making his debut aged 20 in Montreal. His career took off when he joined Tony Altimore as a mafioso tag-team, 'The Sicilians'. After success in the American midwest, McMahon Sr hired them for his WWWF, which dominated the US market between New York and Washington, DC; in 1967 they won the WWWF tag titles from 'The Golden Boy' Arnold Skaaland and Spiros Arion.

Altimore was the better wrestler, but Albano's arrogant interviews inflamed the crowds. He soon became a manager, his 'captain' title a self-awarded honorific, and was especially effective for heels who couldn't talk like convincing villains, or weren't supposed to talk, in character, like the 'Russian' Ivan Koloff, who, in 1971 with Albano as his manager, ended the long reign of Bruno Sammartino as WWWF champ. Albano drew heat from fans with his rapid-fire stacatto delivery, peppered with catch-phrases like 'often imitated, never duplicated'. His increasingly bizarre appearance, an open Hawaiian shirt flaunting his great belly, numerous piercings from which he hung rubber bands, and a rubber band wrapped around his beard, matched his chaotic ringside behaviour. He was at his best managing tag-teams, the wilder the better, including the evil Valiant Brothers, the hillbilly Moondogs,and the Wild Samoans.

But his finest moment came when he double-crossed his wrestler, Superfly Jimmy Snuka (right), in order to switch to manage The Magnificent Don Muraco. Snuka then met Muraco in a 1983 cage match which ended with Snuka, now the babyface, delivering a flying 'Superfly splash' on top of Albano, to the crowd's delight.

Albano met Lauper on an airplane flight, and after making the video (a performance that may have inspired Rodney Dangerfield in Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers) he began taking full credit for her success, and putting her down as a 'mere woman', which led to MTV's Rock and Wrestling Connection programme. Vince McMahon Jr. had bought his father's company, renamed it the WWF, and taken it nationwide on cable TV, where MTV was the fastest-growing channel. The feud began with Lauper managing woman wrestler Wendi Richter in a grudge match against The Fabulous Moolah, managed by Albano. Rowdy Roddy Piper stepped in, which led to Mr. T, then a huge star with The A Team, interfering, and the feuds were eventually resolved at the first Wrestlemania, which put Hogan and the WWF on the mainstream map.

Albano's popularity made it natural he turn 'babyface' (good guy) in his final years in the ring, managing the lovable George 'The Animal' Steele and the popular British Bulldogs, Dynamite Kid and Davey Boy Smith. He explained his character change by saying he'd had surgery to remove 'a calcium deposit on the medulla of my oblongata.'. He made three more videos with Lauper, and later toured with the band NRBQ, playing their manager. A true icon of the 1980s, he acted in Miami Vice, the film Wise Guys, and the wrestling movie Body Slam, before shaving his beard to play Mario, in Super Mario Brothers in 1989-90. He later became a familiar pitchman on local New York television. But he occasionally still presided over chaos. At his 75th birthday party, police had to be called to a Mount Vernon restaurant to remove one wrestler, 'The Sandman', who began fighting with bar staff after breaking glasses while delivering a long and emotional testimonial to his hero. Albano, 'often imitated but never duplicated', died 14 October, under hospice care in Mount Vernon. He is survived by his wife Geri and four children.

Louis Vincent Albano born 29 July 1933 Rome, Italy
died 14 October 2009 Mount Vernon, NY

PAUL WENDKOS: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obituary of the director Paul Wendkos is in today's Independent; you can link to it here. I liked The Mephisto Waltz quite a bit when it came out, but it was my later discovery of The Burglar, a small gem which is arguably the greatest of all David Goodis adaptations (and features a part for John Fasenda, later to be the stentorian voice of NFL Films) and is a feverishly atmospheric film where Dan Duryea, despite being too old for the role, catches perfectly the doomed frustrations of Goodis' world. It's a small classic, and provides a rare substantial part for Martha Vickers, who contrasts brilliantly with Jayne Mansfield; you can almost sense her 'been there, done that' feeling. Wendkos really only came close to repeating such atmosphere with The Brothers Rico, but the made for TV format wasn't geared to those kinds of moodyness.

RICHARD PRICE'S LUSH LIFE

With Lush Life, Richard Price returns to New York, taking the tunnel back to the Lower East Side after setting his previous trilogy in the fictional Dempsy, New Jersey, just across the river. It's a move that seems to reflect Price's work on The Wire, not so much because his Jersey city couldn't provide him with the urban backdrop that Baltimore does in the world's greatest TV series, but because Lush Life concerns a character who would be a bit player, mostly excluded from most of the Wire's five series arcs: the bar manager Eric Cash, 35 and looking at a dead-end future among the latest influx of yuppies and young artistic types moving from trendy spot to trendy spot in the upwardly-mobile neighbourhoods of Lower Manhattan.

Cash is like a bit player from the The Wire elevated into the main role. Not a bartender in the kind of places McNulty and Bunk drink, nor the ones the politicians or teachers or dock workers of that series did their drinking either. He is also a recognisable figure from Price's earlier work, the sensitive kid who's not a genius and not inspired and always about to be subsumed into the neighbourhood he can never escape. He was there in The Wanderers, Price's bravura first novel, and now, he's somewhat desperate.

Cash is walking home late with one of his bartenders, Ike, who's everything Cash was 15 years earlier. Especially optimistic. They are dragging along Ike's shit-faced friend when they are confronted by two muggers, one of whom has a gun. When Ike resists, he gets shot; the friend is dropped unconscious to the ground and Cash has fled to the safety of a nearby building. When the police arrive, the embarrassed Cash's story doesn't seem to hold up with other witness reports, and he becomes their main suspect.

What Price does in Lush Life is play with urban misdirection. The key to success, it seems, is knowing what it is you want, where you are going. But the city exits to confuse you, and what happens when you are wrong, when you can't trust your instincts? When you're a detective like Matty Clark, being right isn't enough, and being wrong is dangerous. Clark, cut off completely from his sons upstate, drawn to the wife of the murder victim's father, is the reflection of Cash in a cracked mirror; what he might have been had he not had the illusory options of acting, or writing, or indeed small-time drug dealing. When Clark's instincts fail him about Cash, the case spins dangerously out of control, and the politics of the police nearly defeat him. Price writes his cops very well, something that made The Wire so effective, but there is a deeper comparison here, because easy as it is to see Clark and Cash as two sides of a coin, the other side of the Cash coin could just as easily be Price himself, the Price reflected in those earlier novels.

There is one last comparison with The Wire, whose structure, within each series, was echoed in each of the books of Price's Jersey trilogy. It's an old-fashioned, Dickensian structure, and in Lush Life Price has turned back to a more modern, driven narrative. Although he draws his characters from the projects as well as his cops, they become the bit players in this. But even the bit players resonate; in fact, the only characters who remain thin are the yuppies, tourists in Price's world as much as they are in New York. Which makes the cover contrast interesting; the Bloomsbury paperback, illustrated above, could well be a still from The Wire, where the original US cover (right) actually sells the hip downtown scene, as if it were one of Price's earlier novels.

Lush Life's promises of redemption, in the Philippines or Atlantic City, are presented as illusory. The reality is the city, which, as much as anything, is Price's most sharply drawn, compelling, and dangerous character.

Lush Life by Richard Price
Bloomsbury, £7.99 ISBN 9780747596776

JACK O'CONNELL'S BOX NINE: A Forgotten Friday Entry

I'm revisiting Box Nine specifically because O'Connell is in Britain to promote his latest novel, The Resurrectionist, but more generally because it is hard to believe that a novel which won the then prestigious $50,000 Mysterious Press First Crime Novel Prize, and which has been followed by four books full of both invention and erudition, should even spring to mind as being overlooked today. But Box Nine appears to be out of print in America, and although The Resurrectionist may be his best book yet, it has not received anything like the attention it deserves.

Box Nine, like all O’Connell’s novels, is set in Quinsigamond, which is based geographically on Worcester, Massachusetts (where O'Connell lives) but is a futuristic fantasy of a mill town crossed with the Blade Runner LA of cyberpunk novels. In Box Nine there’s a new drug around town, called Lingo, which gets you speaking in tongues but also drives you to fiercer rage than the worst crank you ever saw. The high is great, but the price is high.

Connections to Vonnegut’s Ice-Nine are obvious, and also to Naked Lunch, which first posited language as a viral infection, and addiction. Language, in one way or another, has been at the heart of all O'Connell's work. When Box Nine first appeared, I noted O’Connell’s most relevant influences appeared to be the early Thomas Pynchon, concerned with issues of entropy, the early Don DeLillo, apparently concerned with early Pynchon, Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch (and the Borges who inspired Cortazar) and of course Blade Runner, and its source material, Philip Dick's Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?

This may have seemed a strange mix to apply to a small city in central Massachusetts, however fantastically it is imagined, but it does work, particularly because O’Connell’s alternately manic and dreamy prose echoes not only the effects of Lingo, but his concerns with the uses and abuses of language itself. I am amazed this guy is not being taught in post-modernist English Departments all around the world.

Leonore Thomas is the drug cop investigating Lingo. Problem is, she’s a thrill-seeking speed freak gun fetishist who might be more at home on the other side of the fence. In a city torn apart by ethnic gangs, the big drug lord is Cortez (Cortex? Neil Young's Cortez the Killer? Keats' 'stout Cortez'?) and the microcosm of society O'Connell presents is more like a slide full of bacteria wiggling under a microscope. It works as a crime novel, it works as a 'mainstream' novel, it works as a cult 'slipstream' novel. The bottom line is, it works.

O’Connell is one of those writers who can bend his prose to what he’s doing. There aren’t many of them around. It's form as an extension of content—and it wasn't a surprise I discovered Robert Creeley as one of his earlier influences. I, and other reviewers, keep comparing O'Connell to so many great writers not because he's derivative, but because he's unique, the kind of writer who makes you want to compare him to those other great writers who've blown you socks off with your first hit. Sort of like Lingo. And now I try to compare his career path, and I find no one close to the same, perhaps Joseph McElroy or someone else you probably haven't heard of either, or maybe Donald Harington, most of whose books were set in his own fictional Arkansas (see my obit of him here). But he's the real deal, and Box Nine is the place to get that first hit. No Exit Press have kept him in print in the UK, and their cover for The Resurrectionist should be one that attracts the kind of 'sophisticated' general readership who perhaps might pass by the book were it billed as crime. Their cover for Box Nine was a beauty too: Dick would have loved it. At least one publisher gets it.

Box Nine No Exit Press 1998 (second edition)
ISBN 9781901982275

The Resurrectionist No Exit Press 2009
ISBN 9781842433065