Benjamin Whitmer, Talmage Powell, E. Howard Hunt

1) Pike.  I'm no more than a third of the way through this 2010 novel by Benjamin Whitmer, but it has my heart beating faster already. The book is like Daniel Woodrell, but with a tougher edge, maybe with a shot of Jim Thompson mixed in.

2) Talmage Powell's 1962 novel Start Screaming Murder offers, among other things, a compassionate, if somewhat melodramatic, view of "little people" in Tampa, Fla. There are references to midgets and dwarves having flocked to Tampa in the heyday of carnivals and then to some being left flat with nothing to do when the carny era ended.

“Ed, what’s going on amongst the little people in this town, the midget and dwarf citizens who colonized here in the days of the carnies?” one character asks, and I can't help thinking that that relegation of the physical condition to adjective from substantive (dwarf citizens rather than dwarves) is an early example of the verbal sensitivity — political correctness, some would say — under which people with retardation, say, has replaced retarded people in everyday writing.

And I could not suppress a smile when narrator/protagonist Ed Rivers tells the reader that "The midget population of Tampa is sizable."

3) E. Howard Hunt's House Dick (1961) is the best crime novel I've read by anyone who went to become a Watergate burglar. It offers good, tough-guy observations such as:

"It was standard hotel coffee shop food with the usual decorative sprigs of defrosted parsley, but he hadn’t much appetite."

I might not have noted the following had I not known which president Hunt went to work for a decade later:

"Judges are fine; some folks think they’re even necessary. For me they’re guys you tell the story to after all the action’s over. And even then most of the bastards couldn’t tell a crook from a Congressman.” (highlighting is mine)

not to mention:

"Too early in the year for open-air concerts at Watergate."

© Peter Rozovsky 2013