A Shaw-King development: Two authors join my list of year's favorites

Here are two enjoyable additions to my favorite books of 2013. along with some of what I wrote about them earlier this year:

I've just finished reading Johnny Shaw's Big Maria, and I admit I teared up a bit at Shaw's resolution of his three screw-up protagonists' fates. The old-fashioned virtues of faith, determination, loyalty, and staying true to one's friends, family, and self are much manipulated and abused by governments, corporations, the media, and a thousand people we all meet every day to the point that's easy to mock them or to grow cynical. But irony is easy. Shaw gets a reader believing in this stuff even as the reader laughs.

Furthermore, I suspect Shaw does this deliberately. Here's a bit from near the book's end, XXX substituted for a character's name to avoid a spoiler:

"The same pit that (XXX) had imagined as his grave had become just that. Some might have found it funny, but the irony would have pissed (XXX) off. Irony is only amusing when it happens to someone else. Death isn't funny to the dead."

I'm not entirely sentimental about this book, though. Among the many things to like are Shaw's subordination. His supporting characters are just as memorable and wacky as its three protagonists, but Shaw knows when to pull them back and let the main characters take center stage. He brings those subsidiary characters part way toward resolving obstacles he had put in their way, but he avoids the monotony-inducing trap of resolving their problems as thoroughly as he does the main characters'.  Shaw has chops, and he also knows how to build a story.

***

I like Dana King's Grind Joint for its local color; its humor; its lack of sentimentality about its decaying urban setting; its ending that comes out of nowhere, but in a good way; and its tribute to a late star of King's beloved Pittsburgh Pirates.

A teenager who figures peripherally in the story is given the name Wilver, and if that's not a tribute to Wilver Dornell "Willie" Stargell, I'll eat your silly vintage-style 1979 Pirates baseball hat.

The novel's ending is harder to discuss because I don't want to spoil the surprise. Suffice it to say that I did not see it coming, that it hits with a melancholy punch, that I'd have said, "Wow!" had anyone been around to hear me say it, and that it made perfect sense.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

A Bouchercon moderator at work, plus why Johnny Shaw is righteous

For anyone who wonders what a Bouchercon panel moderator looks like in action, that's me at right, calmly steering my "Goodnight, My Angel: Hard-Boiled, Noir, and the Reader's Love Affair With Both" panel at Bouchercon 2013 in Albany two weeks ago (seems like years ago already. I'm just about ready for Bouchercon 2014.)

The gentleman to my right is Jonathan "Bad Juju" Woods, who was part of the panel. The photo is courtesy of Rita McCauley, whose husband, Terrence, was also a panel member. Thanks, Rita.

*

I've just finished reading Johnny Shaw's Big Maria, and I admit I teared up a bit at Shaw's resolution of his three screw-up protagonists' fates. The old-fashioned virtues of faith, determination, loyalty, and staying true to one's friends and family and self are much manipulated and abused by governments, corporations, the media, and a thousand people we all meet every day to the point that's easy to mock them or to grow cynical. But irony is easy. Shaw gets a reader believing in this stuff even as that reader laughs.

Furthermore, I suspect Shaw does this deliberately. Here's a bit from near the book's end, XXX substituted for a character's name to avoid a spoiler:

"The same pit that (XXX) had imagined as his grave had become just that. Some might have found it funny, but the irony would have pissed (XXX) off. Irony is only amusing when it happens to someone else. Death isn't funny to the dead."

I'm not entirely sentimental about this book, though. Among the many things to like are Shaw's subordination. His supporting characters are just as memorable and wacky as its three protagonists, but Shaw knows when to pull them back and let the main characters take center stage. He brings those subsidiary characters part way toward resolving obstacles he had put in their way, but he avoids the monotony-inducing trap of resolving their problems as thoroughly as he does the main characters'.  Shaw has chops, and he also knows how to build a story.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Johnny Shaw, all-American

I'm also quite enjoying my second piece of post-Bouchercon reading, Johnny Shaw's Big Maria. Shaw is the man behind "Blood and Tacos, featuring Chingón, the World's Deadliest Mexican," and anyone capable of coming up with that title, much less a story to go with it, is worth watching out for.

Big Maria is the story of a mammoth caper planned by three of the biggest screw-ups in all of crime fiction. The novel's first three sections have the outsize japery of "Blood and Tacos," but Shaw makes his misfit gang touchingly self-aware and endows them with optimism that is positively all-American.

And he does it all without losing the book's hard edge. When the characters get hurt, man, do they get hurt. When they get drunk, man, do they get drunk.  But somehow you'll wind up laughing.

I hope I'm not overanalyzing if I detect tributes to David Goodis in those early chapters as well as to Donald Westlake's Drowned Hopes and the Parker novels he wrote as Richard Stark. Overanalysis or not, the influence hunting is just a small part of the fun.

Now, back to my reading.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013