Jim Thompson, Benjamin Whitmer, Daniel Woodrell, mood-breakers, a question for readers

I wrote earlier this week that Benjamin Whitmer's novel Pike reminded me of Daniel Woodrell with a tougher edge, maybe with a bit of Jim Thompson mixed in. I had never seen those writers mentioned together, so I was pleased when I picked up a copy of Thompson's Pop. 1280 yesterday and found that it came with a foreword by Woodrell.

"Sheriff Nick Corey is Jim Thompson's greatest creation," Woodrell writes. "Pop. 1280, set in Texas, is so directly a southern novel, so clearly from that tradition, that it would stand high on the Southern Lit shelf (which means high on the Lit Shelf, period) if it were not so consistently misidentified as a work with its roots genre, and therefore arbitrarily reduced in stature. ... The vision is dark but the writing bizarrely hilarious, utilizing the strain of downhome joshing I love so well and learned at the knees of my old ones."

Now, I've been to Texas just once in my life, to Houston and Galveston, and, while my charming hostess does like to say, "Y'all, hush!" I can claim only the most cursory acquaintance with the state, the region, and their quirks and folkways. But I have to think Woodrell is right because fourteen chapters in, Pop. 1280 is dark, hilarious, a stunning performance that sustains its mood in every word, far and away the best of the limited amount of Thompson's work that I've read (Savage Night,  The Getaway, part of The Grifters).

I may have more to say on this astonishing book later, but for now some thoughts on why hard, dark writing may the most difficult kind of crime writing to do well. Here's what I mean: I've read plenty of the hard stuff recently, Thompson, Whitmer, Jedidiah Ayres' Fierce Bitches, Crime Factory's Lee Marvin-themed short-story collection Lee, Eric Beetner, and Blood and Tacos. Lots of that writing is good, some better than that, but what interested me were those stories where a not-quite-right word threw the atmosphere off just enough to take me out of the story, if only for a moment. No author wants to do that, but I suspect the stakes may be especially high in noir, hard-boiled, Southern Gothic, or any other genre that depends heavily on mood.

The slip-up need not be large; all it takes is a bit of jargon or psychobabble, a grammatical error ("Lying still, strapped down tight, the hostage's eyes meet his."), or some annoying quirk of contemporary speech creeping in (level, say, as in "his confidence level" rather than "his confidence.")  

That's me; What are your mood-breakers? What lapses will take you out of a story?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Good sentences, period.

Catering to the proverbially shrinking attention span of today's readers (but really to that of this blog's writer), here are some enjoyable excerpts from Detectives Beyond Borders' recent crime reading. Who says context is everything?

"Smolorz, you'll draw up a list of all private menageries in Breslau and the neighboring regions, also a list of eccentrics who sleep with anacondas."

— Marek Krajewski, Death in Breslau 

"The dick books ["Dick books" = true-crime pulp magazines. ed.] are shot. I figured I'd hang on till I retire, but I don't see them lasting five years."

— Joseph Koenig, False Negative 

"The puns and double entendres that he purged from his writing he saved for Greenstein, who mistook him for a wit."

— ibid. 

"He'd considered himself the glue that held the Press together, and was disappointed in a way that it hadn't fallen apart immediately without him."

 — ibid. 

"Sneaking in back doors was for weak men and Canadians."

—Johnny Shaw, "Blood and Tacos,"  featuring Chingón, the World's Deadliest Mexican 

"In ten minutes I had a clean and tight dressing on my ear and he hadn't spoken once about the Bhagavad Gita."

—Eric Beetner, Dig Two Graves 

"(N)either man felt like chatting. Instead their silence included Lars neglecting to tell Trent that the green salsa was the hottest one."

— Eric Beetner, The Devil Doesn't Want Me

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Detectives Beyond Borders tries some "Blood and Tacos"

Let's keep this pulp thing going a while longer, only with a twenty-first-century nod to a 1970s successors to pulp magazines.

I've just read Gary Phillips' "The Silencer," the first story in Blood & Tacos #1, and here's why I think I'll like this quarterly digest of short crime fiction,  whose fourth issue should be out soon:

• Phillips' title character, a Vietnam veteran, used to run an auto-repair and customizing shop called Danang Drag Motor Specialists.
• The "former petty street thug Ronnie Brownlee, who now went by Rahim Katanga."
• Katanga's group, with its "Ministers of Praxis, MPs for short."
• "Y'all say four kids went missing after they attended your propaganda class."
  
  "After school program, policeman," a tall MP emphasized. "We help them with their math and reading skills."
• Any story that makes both a self-styled revolutionary group and The Wild, Wild West part of its literary arsenal has got lots going for it.

That sort of thing makes me wish I'd been around in the 1970s.

Wait a minute, I was around in the 1970s, and it's a hell of a lot of fun to see the era evoked even as a story pokes fun at its excesses and its self-seriousness. I like these guys' attitude.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013