Hard Man

The best way to describe Allan Guthrie's new crime novel Hard Man (2006) is with one word: Ouch.

Guthrie fills his story with almost non-stop violence. Page after page and scene after scene, people are getting hurt. We see them punched, kicked, elbowed, kneed, and head-butted. They get their heads cracked against the floor, and they get their heads cracked against the wall. They get stabbed, with big knives and small, knives that are designed as weapons and knives that are designed for cooking. They get hit with hammers and shot with nails--and, of course, bullets.

That should, by all rights, make for a terrible book, troubling and wearing in equal parts. But it doesn't. Hard Man is a solid crime novel, dramatic and fun--even funny--because Guthrie creates distinctly odd and memorable characters, by turns grotesque and believable. And he has a flair for the short sentences and terse language of the crime novel; here's how the book opens, for example:

Another hot day in July. That was four in a row. Pretty good for Scotland.

Not so good for the corpse in the boot.

The orgy of violence Hard Man is set into motion by a father who decides that he and his two sons, bottom-feeding Edinburgh crooks, need to scare off his teenage daughter's estranged husband, who has been making vague but disturbing threats. Like many of the characters in Guthrie's three novels, they overestimate their own fighting skill--and, perhaps more important, their own toughness. See if you can find the flaws in the father's thinking here, as they wait for their young, strong, and violent prey to answer his door:

Jacob had glanced at his sons, nodded, then rang the doorbell. He slapped a wrench against his open palm while he waited for an answer. Oh, aye. They were all tooled up, they'd handle Wallace no problem, reputation or not. He was only one man against three, and those three were Baxters. Admittedly Jacob wasn't a huge threat by himself, cause, well, he was sixty-six years old and not as fleet of foot as he once was. Flash, to be fair, was even less of a threat: skinny, small--not to be cruel to his younger son, but the word Jacob was looking for was "weedy." Rog was a different story. Hard to believe those two boys had the same parents. Rog was a big lad, weighed over twenty stone, gripped that hammer proudly in his massive fist, and Jacob felt pretty safe standing next to him. Rog was a bouncer. He was used to this kind of thing. And the suit Rog insisted on wearing all the time worked in his favor. Aye, Rog meant business in more ways than one.

Jacob was sure Wallace would cower in front of their combined might.

You of course won't be surprised to learn that Wallace does no such thing; when you learn that Rog is actually a bartender rather than a bouncer, you won't be surprised that Wallace gives all three a solid beating.

So the men turn to Pearce, who was the main character in Guthrie's Two-Way Split (2004) and made a cameo in his Kiss Her Goodbye (2005) (both of which I've written about before. Pearce is the center of this book, too, the real reason, aside from the action, humor, and grotesquerie, to keep reading. Unlike the three Baxters, Pearce is the real thing, a true hard man--but he has reached a point in his life when he's pretty sure that's not what he wants to be. All his life, he's responded to problems with violence--a method that, in some ways, has worked for him. But in Two-Way Split we saw him, fiercely pressed physically and emotionally by circumstances, attempting to control his violence; his acts of kindness--even heroism--late in the book suggested that he might be able to find a way forward. As Hard Man opens, Pearce is living quietly by the seaside in Edinburgh, alone except for his newly adopted three-legged dog, and trying to figure out what he'll do once his small stash of money runs out.

So when the Baxters offer him the job of guarding the girl (with implied roughing-up-Wallace duties), he's not interested. Following their own bizarre logic, they decide to kidnap his dog, and the ploy works. Before long, Pearce has been sucked into the inimitably incompetent world of the Baxters, and he soon finds himself up against Wallace--who, it turns out, is a much scarier man than anyone thought, and possibly a much harder man than Pearce himself, because he seems to have little of the human left in him. Pearce fights Wallace, Wallace fights all the Baxters, and a lot of people get grievously wounded as the story rushes to a bloody climax.

Guthrie revels--I really think that's the only word that fits--in exploring what his characters do and think about once they've been injured: the Baxters, in particular, resemble characters in Kafka or silent cinema, always leaving one thing half-done as they rush off to try to do another that's suddenly occurred to them, racing around Edinburgh bloodied and broken and trying, with their pain-clouded brains, to figure out what to do next. He also clearly loves the slang of Edinburgh low-lifes, larding the conversations of his characters with unfamiliar terms. I didn't start making notes until midway through the book, but even so I picked up quite a few good ones: girning, cowped, fiky, plonker, horsetosser.

Hard Man would almost be worth reading just for the novelty of the slang; add in the odd characters and the still-compelling figure of Pearce, and you've got a strong crime novel. It can be excruciating, but it's also frequently so over-the-top as to be hilarious--I probably laughed guiltily about as often as I gasped in horror. That certainly doesn't make for a book you would lend to your mother-in-law--but what self-respecting crime novelist would want anything less?

Kiss Her Goodbye, one more time

As I’ve mentioned before, one of the things I like about this medium is that it enables me to revisit my opinions about books if I feel like I haven’t quite conveyed what I meant, or if I’ve changed my mind about a book through further thinking about it or through conversations with friends or commentators. And that’s what I’m doing today.

A week ago, I wrote a post comparing the leg-breaker protagonist of Allan Guthrie’s Kiss Her Goodbye (2005) and the hit-man protagonist of Max Allan Collins’s The Last Quarry (2006). As part of that comparison, I wrote,

I want to know why Allan Guthrie chose to make Joe a leg-breaker; Kiss Her Goodbye could have been written, with essentially the same plot, with Joe as a burglar, or a safecracker, or any sort of petty criminal. So what does the leg-breaking add other than another level of seaminess and violence to a story that could have had plenty of both without it? I finished the book still a little unsure.

Well, this being the Internet, sometimes you get an answer. This morning, Allan Guthrie himself commented:

In answer to your question, I decided to make Joe a 'legbreaker' because the entire book is about a violent man trying not to be violent in the face of extreme provocation. If he was a safecracker, the whole point of the book would have been missed. It wouldn't have interested me. Violence interests me. The psychology of the hard man is what I wanted to explore here. As for Joe's lack of qualms: he has qualms aplenty--he holds Cooper back in that opening scene you mention, he's terrified of Park, he's sexually dysfunctional, he's a borderline alcoholic (as you mentioned)--maybe I didn't state it overtly enough, but it's all connected to the job.

Nothing like a word straight from the source to send you back to the book. He’s right about the opening scene—I described Joe as having few qualms as he and his friend/boss Cooper beat a guy with a baseball bat. What had stayed with me from that scene was the visceral impact of the violence, but I’d forgotten that Joe does at least attempt to restrain Cooper:

“We’re going to kill you now, you little tosser.”

“That isn’t necessary.” Joe put his hand on Cooper’s elbow.

Billy was sobbing. He started screaming again.

Cooper said, “Two minutes at most.”

“He’s got the message.”

Cooper shook Joe’s hand off and took a swing. Something crunched when the bat hit Billy’s face and Billy stopped screaming. Cooper said, “Now he’s got the message.”

Joe’s restraint is subtle, in comparison to the violence surrounding it, but it’s definitely there. And Guthrie will get no argument from me about Joe’s overall dysfunction. I traced his alcoholism and sexual problems to his desperately unhappy marriage, but I can accept that the wrecked marriage itself is just another component (and result of) of his overall self-destructive impulses, fueled by frustration and anger about the violence of his job—and his nature.

That violent nature, Allan Guthrie argues, is what he was interested in all along in writing this book. Because I was looking at Kiss Her Goodbye in conjunction with The Last Quarry, I was thinking about both protagonists in terms of plot first—did they need to have the jobs they had order for the plot to function? Guthrie’s saying that instead I should look at it in terms of character: sure, you could have a book with similar plot mechanics whose central character was a safe-cracker, but it would be an essentially different book, and one that he wouldn’t be interested in writing. He’s interested in Joe himself and how the person he is drives the events of the book; if they’re to have any meaning, the man and the plot are inseparable.

When I look at Kiss Her Goodbye from that angle, I see what he’s getting at: the essence of Joe (and his problems) is the violence inherent in him and his job, and that’s what drives both the action and his relations with the other characters. I still think the book isn’t entirely successful, but, as I said in my original post, Guthrie’s aiming high. He’s written a book more emotionally and psychologically complex than Collins’s The Last Quarry; the fact that I prefer the Collins says at least as much about me and my taste in crime novels as about the books themselves.

This revisiting also serves as a reminder that I frequently latch onto one way of thinking about a book and have to be jarred or pushed into looking at it from another angle. It’s one reason I like talking with people about books—and writing this blog, which in itself forces me to think and rethink, if only to achieve a coherent explanation of my opinions.

So thanks for the comment, Allan; I appreciate you taking the time to explain. And this gives me a chance to mention something that I left out of my original post, because it didn’t really fit anywhere: for all my questions about Kiss Her Goodbye, I did like it enough to go looking for Allan Guthrie’s other novel, Two-Way Split. It’s coming out in paperback in the United States in October (with a really sharp cover design), so I’m sure you’ll all hear more about it then.

Two jobs

Quarry, the protagonist of Max Allan Collins’s The Last Quarry (2006) is a retired contract killer. The protagonist of Allan Guthrie’s Kiss Her Goodbye (2005), Joe Hope, is a leg-breaker for a loan shark. Neither job is one you’d want to tell your mom about. And if you were, say, Saint Peter, you’d probably put the contract killer at least a few places in line behind the leg-breaker, right? Yet while I enjoyed The Last Quarry despite Quarry’s profession, while reading Kiss Her Goodbye I couldn’t get around the problem of Hope’s job. I’m not sure there’s a defensible explanation; hell, I’m not entirely sure of the explanation at all. Maybe I’ll figure it out by the end of this post.

Kiss Her Goodbye is by no means a bad novel: in telling the story of the suicide of Joe’s daughter and the death of his wife it paints a detailed picture of the seamy side of Edinburgh, and Guthrie’s created some memorable characters (particularly good is a young lawyer who is drawn to the dangers of Joe’s life). But then there’s the leg-breaking. Joe explains how he got into being an enforcer, recruited by his best friend when he was about to become a father and his job prospects were poor. Now he’s a borderline alcoholic in a deeply troubled marriage, desperately unhappy with life—but I didn’t get the sense that his relationship to his job itself was as complicated as I’d have liked. The opening scene features him and his friend messing a guy up with baseball bats, and he seems to have few qualms as they inflict tremendous pain on the man.

Given that Joe’s job is to seriously hurt people, I’d like a little more complexity, and at least as much inner turmoil related to his job as to his marriage. I want to know why Allan Guthrie chose to make Joe a leg-breaker; Kiss Her Goodbye could have been written, with essentially the same plot, with Joe as a burglar, or a safecracker, or any sort of petty criminal. So what does the leg-breaking add other than another level of seaminess and violence to a story that could have had plenty of both without it? I finished the book still a little unsure.

I probably wouldn’t have thought about this at all had I not soon after read and enjoyed The Last Quarry. Collins has written before about Quarry, though this is the first I’ve read, and this novel finds him recently retired and managing a small resort somewhere in Minnesota. A chance encounter in a deserted convenience store leads him to a contract to kill a young woman in Colorado, a job that quickly begins to get under Quarry’s skin—via, of course, his heart.

This all ought to be at least as unacceptable as Joe Hope’s leg-breaking. But Quarry operates with a degree of open introspection that in Joe Hope is submerged by anger and self-pity, and while Quarry’s potted defense of his occupation (essentially, the “if I get hired to kill you, you’ve probably done something to deserve it” defense) is unconvincing, he clearly operates according to a code. It’s a code that would, I think, hold leg-breakers like Joe in low esteem. In addition, his role as a hit man is essential to the book; it’s what drives the entire plot.

Is all that sufficient to make the difference, to justify my enjoying Quarry while judging Joe? Well, no. Not if I’m making a strict argument about ethics, and not even if I’m limiting the discussion to fiction, where one of our most important jobs as readers is to make judgments about the characters we’re being shown, their decisions and actions.

But Quarry is a convincing character and good company—funny, self-effacing, and cynical, with a skilled barroom raconteur’s narrative style—and that carried the day. It enabled me to concentrate not on what he did for a living, but on what he was attempting to do now that emotion had made his job more complex.

That’s where these books’ role as entertainment takes over: an affable hit man is flat-out more fun than a dour leg-breaker. Allan Guthrie may be aiming higher—trying to show us some real darkness—but Collins’s touch is more sure, and The Last Quarry ends up a better read.

But I do have one request for Collins: please, please, please never describe a man’s penis as a “blade of flesh” ever again. Please. I have to go cleanse my mind now.