Felony Fists will knock you on your can, then have you bouncing back up for more

I like the novellas I've read in the Fight Card series because they do such a convincing job of capturing the feeling as well as the form of boxing stories from the 1920s, '30s, '40s, and '50s. This is true even for the stories set in the present day, as in the imprint's stories about mixed martial arts (MMA).

Felony Fists, written by Paul Bishop, published under the house byline of Jack Tunney, and set in the Los Angeles of Mickey Cohen and Police Chief William Parker, is no exception. Honor, hard work, overcoming long odds, digging deep within one's self, good winning out ... all are part of this and other Fight Card stories, and not in any smirking, ironic, post-modern way, either. Bishop and his fellow authors clearly love the old-time tales, and clearly believe today's readers can enjoy stories in that vein. And they're right.  Felony Fists is fast-paced, full of intersecting plot lines and narrative climaxes that read as if they were meant to leave the reader panting for the next month's installment. That's good stuff for an impatient generation, isn't it?

I've never stepped inside a ring, and my guess is that you have not, either. But no matter; Bishop  fills the novella with the sort of boxing detail that creates a convincing milieu and teaches you something about the sport as well. Boxing is not called the sweet science for nothing.

* 

Felony Fists contains one jarring verbal anachronism:

 "Both Tombstone and I were actually fighting the uncomfortable feeling of country cousins visiting upscale relatives."

Not only does the first recorded use of upscale date only to 1966, according to Merriam-Webster, but the word feels utterly wrong for the period of the book's setting. I would wager that upscale did not come into widespread use until the late 1970s at the very earliest. Its use is a glaring mistake in a story set in the early 1950s. But it's the only one. The judges here at Detectives Beyond Borders say — and it's a unanimous decision — that you should read Felony Fists.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Welcome to Gerard Brennan's Belfast octagon

Back in September, Eric Beetner and Terrence McCauley took part in a panel I moderated at Bouchercon 2013, and talk turned to novellas they had written for the Fight Card line, a series of boxing stories by new pulp and hard-boiled authors under the house name Jack Tunney.

What is the appeal to younger authors in the 21st century, I asked them, of writing stories set in the 1930's, '40s, and '50s, using a byline fashioned from the names of two athletes of the 1920s, about a sport that has not loomed large on the American scene since the 1970s?

Beetner dismissed the widespread belief that boxing is no longer popular, citing the rise of mixed martial arts (MMA). And lo, it was one of Fight Card's two MMA novellas that not only opened my eyes to the nuances of a sport that took shape only in 1993, but also demonstrated in its purest form the appeal of those old-style boxing stories.

The novella in question is Welcome to the Octagon, and the author is Gerard Brennan, a  longtime friend of Detectives Beyond Borders and an author with a growing list of credits for the stage and the page. That he sets Welcome to the Octagon in contemporary Belfast only emphasizes his fidelity to the old-time conventions of pulp boxing stories: the good guy, the gangster, the girl, the temptation, the tug of war between old and young.

The story has wry, self-deprecating humor:

"My heart wasn’t in it, but I had to live up to my nickname. The Rage! That was a joke. There and then I felt like The Disappointment. But I roared at the crowd and they roared back."

It has sharp social observation that reminds the reader he or she is no longer in New York or Los Angeles or a tumble-down precinct of some other American city:

"The Troubles had gone away. Except for the new age scum that was rising to the top. Maybe TapouT didn’t typify the real gangsters pulling the strings in Northern Ireland — we’d get to them quicker by looking at our politicians first — but he was a wannabe villain that slipped through the cracks of a mostly law-abiding society. A wannabe villain that would have been crushed by the RUC or the paramilitaries of old."

Brennan knows how to keep a story moving, planting narrative hooks toward the ends of his chapters and throwing in at least one character wrinkle unlikely to have shown up in an old-time boxing story. But what may have impressed me most is his engagement with MMA, a sport until now shoved somewhere back in my consciousness next to street luge, half-pipe, and bicycle motocross. MMA is compounded of styles and techniques taken from many fighting sports, and Welcome to the Octagon is full of observations about the resulting complexity and the demands it places on the fighters.

Welcome to the Octagon has heart, humor, and respectful engagement with its subject. What's not to like?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013