Block on . . .

Though I genuinely did enjoy nearly all the work that went into assembling, publishing, and promoting The Getaway Car (aside, perhaps from a few permissions wrangles), the aspect of the whole process that I'll always be happiest about is the sense that my work added some pleasure to the world. Let's be clear: nearly all the pleasure offered by The Getaway Car was the work of Donald Westlake. I wouldn't begin to argue otherwise. But I will gladly take credit for doing the work of turning his work--ephemeral and occasional as it was--into something that's easy to get, and that was easy to bring to the attention of his fans, many of whom had never known these many thousands of words of his writing existed. That will always make me happy.

Recently there's been another, wholly unexpected effect, one that I won't claim any actual credit for but am glad to have played a small part in generating: inspired, he says, by The Getaway Car, for which he wrote a foreword, Lawrence Block has just assembled and published a collection of his own nonfiction writing about his career and the work of other writers. Titled The Crime of Our Lives, it's just been published, and it's full of great stuff. Block has long been a garrulous commenter on his own books, supplying forewords and head notes and afterwords to collections and new editions, pieces that are always funny, but at the same time serious about the work of writing and the way that a moment in a writer's life and career becomes crystallized in a particular book or story. For this collection, however, we get, not so much Block the host, but Block the guest: it mostly consists of his introductions for and articles about his peers, mentors, friends, and colleagues in the writing world, from the expected (Chandler, Hammett, Spillane, and, of course, Westlake) to the more surprising (Poe, Joseph Conrad). Each one is pure Block: idiosyncratic, anecdotal, personal, and wholly engaged with the craft and job of writing.

If all goes well, I'll be interviewing Larry about the collection soon for the new crime site The Life Sentence, so I won't go into much more detail here, but I can't close without quoting a couple of the pieces. First, for their sheer goofy humor, here are the first lines of an introduction to a collection of Ed Gorman short stories:

Ed Gorman is a terrific writer, and you're going to have a wonderful time reading these stories.

Now what?

That's seventeen words. Pete Crowther, who asked me to write this introduction, has given me to understand that introductions to the volumes he publishes run in the neighborhood of a thousand words. That's not a bad neighborhood, you wouldn't be afraid to wander there after dark, but the seventeen words I've written leave me with nine hundred and eighty-seven words to write, and what am I going to write to take up the slack? I mean, I've already said everything I really have to say on the subject. Here are some stories. Read them, and leave me alone. What else is there to say?

Well, I'll think of something. I am, after all, a professional writer.

No surprise: he does.

Here he is offering a take on a question that Westlake, too, pondered: Why did Dashiell Hammett burn out so quickly?

I wonder if an answer might not lurk in the one scene in The Maltese Falcon not to be found in the Huston screenplay. In it, Spade recounts at length the seemingly pointless story of a man named Flitcraft, who left his home and family and disappeared after nearly being killed by a beam falling from a construction site. By the time Spade succeeded in finding him, the man had re-created essentially the same middle-class life in another cit with another family. Spade explains:

But that's the part I always liked. he adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.

A beam fell and Dashiell Hammett taught himself to be a writer. Then no more beams fell, and he adjusted himself to that.

And, finally, here the opening of his obituary for his longtime friend Donald Westlake, written the day after Westlake's death, at the request of the Mystery Writers of America:

When the phone call came and brought the bad news, one of the first things that came to mind was John O'Hara's line: "George Gershwin died yesterday, but I don't have to believe that if I don't want to."

Go get the book. You'll enjoy it.

{As for The Life Sentence: it's well worth checking out. I'm one of many members of its advisory board, though I deserve credit thus far for nothing but encouragement, so the recommendation is genuine: this week kicked off with an interview of the always interesting Laura Lippmann by site founder Lisa Levy, and much, much more is promised in the coming weeks.}

Details, details

Every once in a while as a reader you encounter a detail in a novel that is so perfect, so unusual, and so strictly unnecessary, that you can't help but assume it comes direct from the author's experience--adapted as needed for the fictional situation, but still seeming to carry with it a whiff of reality that extends beyond the page.

My two favorite examples come from Joseph Conrad and Lawrence Block. In The Nigger of the "Narcissus", Conrad tells of a terrible storm:

On the lee side another man could be seen stretched out as if stunned; only the washboard prevented him from going over the side. It was the steward. We had to sling him up like a bale, for he was paralysed with fright. He had rushed up out of the pantry when he had felt the ship go over, and he had rolled down helplessly, clutching a china mug. It was not broken. With difficulty we tore it away from him, and when he saw it in our hands he was amazed. "Where did you get that thing?" he kept on asking us in a trembling voice.

Conrad of course drew on his experience at sea throughout his books, but that one moment--the extraneous detail of the miraculously (and inconsequentially) unbroken china cup feels as straight from life as anything else in his fiction.

Lawrence Block's moment comes in the best Matthew Scudder novel, When the Sacred Ginmill Closes. Published in 1986 but set in the '70s, back when Scudder was still a heavy drinker, it portrays the run-down, nigh-lawless New York of that period--the city, like Scudder, still mostly functional but clearly heading downhill fast. At one of the many drinking sessions in the book, a guy is prompted to tell a story of one of the strangest things he's ever seen in New York: leaving his girlfriend's house on West End Avenue in the 80s early one morning, he sees three black men standing in the street, "wearing fatigue jackets, like, and one's got a cap. They look like soldiers." He continues:

"Well, it's hard to believe I really saw this," he said. He took off his glasses, massaged the bridge of his nose. "They took a look around, and if they saw me they decided I was nothing to worry about--"

"Shrewd judges of character," Skip put in.

"--and they set up this mortar, like they've done this drill a thousand times before, and one of them drops a shell in, and they lob a round into the Hudson, nice easy shot, they're on the corner and they can see clear to the river, and we all like check it out, and they still don't pay any attention to me, and they nod to each other and strip the mortar down and pack it up and walk off together."

"Jesus," I said.

"It happened so fast," he said, "and with so little fanfare, I wondered if I imagined it. But it happened."

"Did the round make a lot of noise?"

"No, not a whole lot. There was the sort of whump! sound a mortar makes on firing, and if there was an explosion when the round hit the water, I didn't hear it." "Probably a blank," Skip said. "They were probably, you know, testing the firing mechanism, checking out the trajectory."

"Yeah, but for what?"

"Well, shit," he said. "You never know when you're gonna need a mortar in this town."

If Lawrence Block didn't at some point see some dudes firing a mortar into the Hudson--or, at minimum, hear about it from someone else he knew, I'll buy him a steak dinner. Or maybe some beef tongue. (You'll see why in a minute.) The Scudder stories portrat a New York that's always believable, even in--or especially in--its seediest aspects. But that moment? Whump! Just too real.

All of which leads, with my usual obliqueness, to the book that brought these instances to mind: Kate Atkinson's Life after Life. I've got a lot more tolerance for historical fiction than Jessa Crispin, who recently gave up on the book because she "got about three pages in . . . and suddenly Hitler is there," but as I near the halfway point I'm not yet wholly sure of the book either--despite finding it engaging. That said, leaving Hitler aside Atkinson does wear her research well--the fundamental requirement for a historical novel that's not dreck. Her descriptions of daily life and its accoutrements feel like typical novelistic description rather than gawping at the past or detail delivered for its own sake.

There was, however, one moment that did feel like the fruit of research, a discovery so entertaining that Atkinson surely couldn't help but include it. In that regard, it's like the mirror image of the moments in Block and Conrad, shining more brightly than its surroundings not because it's crafted from lived experience but because it's the sort of thing that only the haphazardly diligent magpie's research of a novelist would likely turn up. See what you think:

Mrs. Glover was more than fully occupied with pressing a calf's tongue, removing the gristle and bone and rolling it up before squeezing it into the tongue press.

If I may take a moment to play the squeamish vegetarian: There is such a thing as a tongue press! Good god, I hope it has gone the way of sock garters and collar stays, beef tea and pink shape.

Finally, I won't blame you if you begin to suspect that I wrote this whole post for the sole purpose of sharing the following line--which a friend credits to me but I have to believe I stole from someone more clever:

Tongue--the meat that tastes you back.

Good night, folks.

Matthew Scudder is back

I wrote last week about how impressed I was by Lester Dent's achievement in Honey in His Mouth of writing a good crime novel built around a fencepost-dumb protagonist. Today, I'm marveling at an even more impressive achievement, this one by Lawrence Block: his new Matthew Scudder book, A Drop of the Hard Stuff, is a crime novel that derives nearly all of its suspense, not from the crime under investigation, but from its protagonist's day-by-day, minute-by-minute struggle to keep from drinking. And it works: the book is completely gripping, as through page after page you alternate between dread and relief, pulled on by the palpable force of Scudder's will even as you (and he) worry that it may not be enough.

Ed Park's review of the book for Time is a good place to go for more; he does a nice job of setting the novel in context of the rest of Block's Scudder books, in which alcohol--and, in the past several novels, recovery--has always played a large part. I think it was from Scudder, rather than from any afterschool special, that I got my first sense of how powerful addiction could be, and how the struggle to overcome it could never quite be definitively won. But none of the novels until this one have focused so relentlessly on that struggle, and it's a testament to Block's writing, and more to his narrative voice as Scudder, that he makes it so compelling. Scudder sits with a Coke as informants drink, and he catches a whiff of whiskey; he walks to fill time he would once have spent drinking; he calls his sponsor at all hours and gets the sort of advice that is familiar to us from Bubbles's struggles on The Wire or David Foster Wallace's brilliant analysis in Infinite Jest, advice that is so simple, so basic, so no-nonsense that it ought not to work--and yet somehow does.

All that should make for a novel that is relentlessly grim, but that's not the case; in fact, A Drop of the Hard Stuff is also a lot of fun--even in extremis Scudder is a gentle ironist at heart, and the book full of the usual Block touches, the humor and observations and asides that make it obvious how he and Donald Westlake could be great friends. My favorite is this playful exchange between Scudder and an informant:

He was frowning in concentration. "Jack, Jack, Jack. Did he have a sobriquet?"

"A what?"

"A nickname, for Christ's sake. And don't tell me you didn't know the word."

"I knew it," I said. "I've come across it in print, but I'm not sure I ever heard anyone say it before. I certainly never heard anyone say it in Poogan's"

"It's a perfectly fine word. And it's not exactly the same as a nickname. Take Charles Lindbergh. His nickname was Lindy--"

"As in hop," I suggested.

"--and his sobriquet was the Lone Eagle. George Herman Ruth, nickname was Babe, sobriquet was the Sultan of Swat. Al Capone--"

"I get the idea."

"I just wanted to keep on saying it, Matthew. Sobriquet. I know it from reading, and I don't think I ever heard it before, and I know for certain I never said it before. I wonder if I'm pronouncing it correctly."

"I'm the wrong person to ask."

"I'll look it up," he said, and he picked up his glass and put it down without drinking. "Hi-Low Jack," he said. "Wasn't that his fucking sobriquet? Isn't that what they called him?"

And just like that, digression is folded back into plot, and Scudder is off on his quest.

Block is a treasure, and the fact that he's still turning out good novels--novels that show that he remains engaged and interested in his craft--is something to celebrate. It's good to have Matt Scudder back.

Donald Westlake, Brian Garfield, and Lawrence Block

Work and baseball and the piano--a trifecta sure to lead eventually to crime and the gutter--are preventing me from putting up a proper post today. But you're in luck: over at the blog of my employer, the University of Chicago Press, we've just posted an interview I conducted with Brian Garfield (author of, among other novels, Death Wish) about his long friendship with Donald Westlake, their many collaborations, and his aborted screenplay for Butcher's Moon.

Even better: Garfield was kind enough to send us some photos of Westlake and the crew at the fabled Mysterious Bookshop poker game, circa 1972. The sight of Westlake's giant goatee alone is worth clicking over for.



Oh, and Butcher's Moon is available now, along with the first two post-hiatus Parker novels, Comeback and Backflash. Westlake's friend (and fellow Mysterious Bookshop poker player) Lawrence Block has written three different dynamite forewords for this batch. I recommend you go get 'em on your lunch hour, then close the door to your office and read away the afternoon.

Other books

As I was looking for the copyright date on the library copy of Donald E. Westlake's Bank Shot (1972) the other day, I happened to notice the page facing the title page, which reads:

Other Books

A Tale of Two Cities
The Magnificent Ambersons
So Big
W. C. Fields: His Follies and Fortunes
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
The Merry Devil of Edmonton
An Account of Corsica
The Love Machine
Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature

An obvious joke, perhaps, but I'll admit to laughing out loud.

So Big and The Love Machine, in case you're wondering, are not examples of the soft-core erotic novels that Westlake wrote with his friend Lawrence Block when both were hungry writers back in the early 1960s; they're novels by Edna Ferber and Jacqueline Susann, respectively (and, according to a listing at alibris, the love machine "is Robin Stone, a TV-network titan around whom women flock.")

Those soft-core novels will soon be seeing the light of day once again, however: via Sarah Weinman I recently learned that, according to Block, Subterranean Press will be reprinting all three in one volume titled Honey Girls and Hellcats next year.

Anniversaries

Three years ago today I wrote the first post at I've Been Reading Lately. Nearly six hundred posts later, I can't think of a better way to mark the anniversary than to commemorate another, more impressive milestone: the publication of the fiftieth book under the Hard Case Crime imprint.

I discovered Hard Case Crime the same way a lot of readers did: through the extensive coverage of their publication of Stephen King's The Colorado Kid, which was the subject of one of my first posts. Three years and thirty-seven books later, I still look forward to the arrival of each month's new title in my mailbox.

The fiftieth book, Fifty-to-One, by founding editor Charles Ardai, starts with the ingenious premise that the occasion is the fiftieth anniversary of Hard Case Crime, and it follows the adventures of the line's founder, Charley Borden, along with a dancing girl from South Dakota newly landed in the big city and the mobsters on whose wrong side--a mile wide, unsurprisingly--they soon find themselves.

In addition, Ardai has given his novel another twist: it consists of fifty chapters, named after (and related to) the titles of each of the books in the series. Being familiar with the series, I found myself looking forward to how this Oulipian conceit would force Ardai to figure out ways to finagle his way around such unpromising titles as A Diet of Treacle, Lemons Never Lie, and Grave Descend; I particularly liked his solutions to David Dodge's Plunder of the Sun and the Robert Bloch two-fer Shooting Star/Spiderweb.

But the rules Ardai has set for himself are only part of the fun. As a celebration should, Fifty-to-One feels like a book that was as much fun to write as it is to read. Its ramshackle charms remind me of nothing so much as late-1930s Hollywood movies, wherein you get the sense that the filmmakers threw in everything they thought their audience would enjoy and assumed they'd keep up with the plot. Gunplay, romance, sharp dialogue, character actors--it's all here, along with a heist, some bookies, the FBI, and more. The heroine plays like a more innocent Barbara Stanwyck (which would make her, what, Claudette Colbert?), and the baddies arrayed against her could surely accommodate Edward G. Robinson and Sydney Greenstreet; meanwhile, Ardai has resisted the urge to cast the series's founder as a flawless, lantern-jawed leading man, leaving him instead in the nebbishier reaches of the previously unexplored nexus between Ugarte and Han Solo.

As the pleasantly wild plot ticks through its surprises, we're also treated to a loving reconstruction of the seedier side of 1958 New York City, its racetracks and nightclubs, subways and taxicabs--Ardai even takes a few well-deserved shots at evil old Robert Moses. The most fun, though, are the cameos, from an violent Mickey Spillane to the wryly comic young writers Donald Westlake and Lawrence Block, who serve as a sort of pulp Bert and Ernie--or, more accurately, Ernie and Ernie.

Unapologetically a romp, Fifty-to-One carries none of the seriousness or psychological weight of the novels Ardai has written under the pen name of Richard Aleas, the second of which, Songs of Innocence, is one of the best crime novels I know. But it's a sheer joy to read, and a worthy celebration of a series that has brought me countless pleasure over the past three years.

Congratulations on reaching fifty, Hard Case. Here's to fifty more good years to come.

"He was committed to the tactical clarity of eradicating mystery," or, Finding the right crime novel

Feeling a bit drained by my most recent immersion in the world of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, what I need now is the literary equivalent of a snack--something I can gleefully, heartily enjoy in a single sitting. I find myself in the deplorable state of having no unread Parker novels in the house, but I do have a small stack of recent Hard Case Crime novels to choose from. Time to try some opening lines.

First up is The First Quarry (2008), by Max Allan Collins, which relates the origin of Collins's hit man anti-hero. The first line:

The night after Christmas, and all through the house, it was colder than fuck.

About as hard-boiled as you can get, no? And with bonus swearing. But I recently read (and enjoyed) Lawrence Block's Hit and Run (2008), about his hit man anti-hero John Keller, and though I've never really considered the question before, a one-hit-man-novel-per-month rule seems reasonable.

So we move on to The Max (2008), by Ken Bruen and Jason Starr:

"Gonna have your sweet white ass later."

Opening a crime novel with vicious dialogue is a solid move. In this case it's particularly good, because those of us who've read the first two Bruen and Starr black comedies know that the line is being addressed to the odious, ridiculous Max Fisher, a small-time hood with destructive delusions of grandeur--who when last we saw him was on his way to federal prison. But as much brutal, disreputable fun as The Max promises, I'm not sure that it's right to follow Anthony Powell's dry wit with Bruen and Starr's grotesquerie.

That leaves us with David J. Schow's Gun Work (2008):

How Barney came to occupy a room on the wrong side of management in a hostage hotel deep inside Mexico City had to do with his friend Carl Ledbetter and one of those scary phone calls that come not always in the middle of the night, but whenever you are most asleep and foggy.

Aha. That's the one: the sentence that grabs you by the collar and drags you along, ignoring your protests, until it's finished with you. I think this is what I was looking for.

Mere pages later, we get this passage:

Now, rate your friends, your acquaintances and your intimates. Among that group you already know which person you'd ask for help when shady badstuff rears up in your life. Yeah, that one--the person you always suspected was a bit illicit, a hair violent, two baby steps beyond the law. After-hours help, a less-than-kosher midnight run, some muscle, maybe some payback, and you know the person you'd call when quiet society says you should be calling a cop.

So who would I call? If I needed helpers for a stylish heist, I'd call rocketlass and Carrie, no question.


{Photo by rocketlass.}

But as a fixer for the sort of dangerous mess Schow's describing, one's wife would seem to be categorically excluded from consideration, so rocketlass is out. Should I call Tony? Bob? Ed? Amy?

Oh, what am I saying? I need to try to strike up a friendship with this guy.

This one's for Luc Sante . . .

and his love of crime novels, mass market paperbacks, and the French language.

Seen in the window of a furniture store in Montreal, perched--too carefully to be truly casual--on a modern end table next to an unrumpled (and perhaps unrumplable) platform bed, adding a quiet suggestion of danger, even trashiness, to the starkly impersonal lines of the faux bedroom of the display: a tatty and tattered paperback of a Lawrence Block novel translated into French under the title Trompe la Morte.

The scene:

When he returns, late, she’s sitting up in bed, half-draped by the artfully disarranged bedclothes, the floor lamp spotlighting the paperback in her hand that he’d left on the table that morning, now fully redeployed in its new role as a weapon against him.

Waving it at him with the manicured thumb she’s using to mark her place, she asks, in French, “Why do you waste your time reading this trash?”

He opens his mouth to reply, in English, but instead he turns away from her and quickly fans through the crumpled notes in his wallet. Even after what can only be termed a successful night, he’s still more than $120 short. Tossing the useless wallet on the low dresser, where it skids across the black lacquer right to the edge before stopping, he quickly begins to shuck his clothes, then fetches the last cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket before he lets the bundle drop, flares it into light. Then he stretches full-length on the bed, opposite her, his tired feet by her head, eyes up, staring intently as a finger of smoke ascends in a straight line toward the shadows of the ceiling.

“I hate it when you smoke in bed,” she says, again in French.

After a beat, he replies, “I know.” After another beat, he adds, “Mon cherie.”

{This is of course offered with all due and proper apologies to Mr. Block himself.}

A look into the case files

{Photo of our detective nephew by rocketlass.}

1 From Deadly Beloved (2008), by Max Allan Collins

"'Examine the past, understand it, then leave it behind . . . and move on.' Great advice, Doctor. But as a detective I spend at least as much time in the past as in the present."

"The nature of your business."

Are there any fictional detectives to whom that doesn't apply? Off the top of my head, I can think of a couple, such as Matthew Scudder or Derek Strange, who seem to traffic a bit more in crimes of the moment, but they seem more than balanced by those, such as Lew Archer, who are forever dealing with the lingering consequences of people's past, secret mistakes. Any strong exceptions worth noting?

2 Monday on "Fresh Air" Terry Gross interviewed Charles Ardai, the founder of Hard Case Crime. We all know that Gross is a good interviewer, and Ardai turns out to be a comfortable and interesting interview subject. It was fun to learn that he became a noir fan through high-school readings of Lawrence Block, whose Grifter's Game (1961) was the first book published by Hard Case. The most surprising thing I learned, however, was that the reason the retro-style cover paintings that grace Hard Case's books are a tad less salacious than those of the pulp era is not because of decorum on the part of Ardai and cofounder Max Phillips, but because of prudery on the part of major retailers such as Wal-Mart. The big chains say no nudity, so the painters opt for artful draping and incomprehensibly complicated lingerie instead.

Gross also talked to Ardai at length about the two novels he's written under the pen name Richard Aleas, Little Girl Lost (2004) and Songs of Innocence (2007). I've read all but a handful of Hard Case's titles, and Songs of Innocence just might be the best of the lot, challenged only by a couple of the Block novels. Carrying us along as his young, damaged detective quickly gets in over his head, Aleas brutally gives the lie to the more wish-fulfilling aspects of crime fiction--and thus opens up the true, dark heart of noir. It's been nearly a year since I read the book, and it has only grown in my estimation since.

3 Ardai is currently writing Hard Case's fiftieth book, Fifty-to-One, to be published under his own name at the end of the year. Unexpectedly, it's a comedy, written in fifty chapters, each named after a Hard Case Crime novel. That qualifies as Oulipean, if just barely . . . but--question for Ed--might it also count as an Ouroboros? Especially once you see that the cover features tiny versions of a bunch of the Hard Case covers?



4 Speaking of cover designs, Rex Parker's Pop Sensation blog recently highlighted this unforgettable cover from a 1965 Pocket Books edition of Raymond Chandler's The High Window:



In the post, Parker points out that the man does look a tad goofy if you look at him too closely:

If you turn the book upside-down, that guy looks like your dad pretending to be a monster after he's had a hard day at work / a little too much to drink.

But I still call it a successful cover. After all, if you were at the train station waiting anxiously for the 3:22 AM to Utica, hat pulled down and collar turned up to hide your face, trying to look all casual by lazily turning the paperback spinner . . . wouldn't you stop cold on that one?

5 Though my blogger profile mentions that I work in publishing in Chicago, and .22 seconds on Google will dig up the name of my employer, I've never mentioned their name directly on this blog, both because it never seemed necessary and because, as my friend Luke puts it, "Getting fired for your blog is so 2002."

But excitement about some forthcoming books has convinced me to break my silence: I work as the publicity manager for the University of Chicago Press, and this summer the Press will be publishing the first three of Richard Stark's Parker novels. The Press's first venture into the hard-boiled underworld began when I dropped copies of The Man with the Getaway Face (1963) and The Outfit (1963) on the desk of my colleague who acquires out-of-house paperbacks, along with an explanation (including this post) of why I thought we ought to reprint them. Within a couple of days, she was hooked, too, and the Press--which had previously published some mysteries, including Robert Van Gulik's Judge Dee mysteries and Friedrich Durrenmatt's deconstructionist Euro-noirs--had picked up rights to those two, as well as Stark's first Parker novel, The Hunter (1962).

Not only did this mean that we got to commission great new cover illustrations, which I'll share when they're available, but it also meant that I got to write some serious crime copy:

You probably haven’t ever noticed them. But they’ve noticed you. They notice everything. That’s their job. Sitting quietly in a nondescript car outside a bank making note of the tellers’ work habits, the positions of the security guards. Lagging a few car lengths behind the Brinks truck on its daily rounds. Surreptitiously jiggling the handle of an unmarked service door at the racetrack.

They’re thieves. Heisters, to be precise. They’re pros, and Parker is far and away the best of them. If you’re planning a job, you want him in. Tough, smart, hardworking, and relentlessly focused on his trade, he is the heister’s heister, the robber’s robber, the heavy’s heavy. You don’t want to cross him, and you don’t want to get in his way, because he’ll stop at nothing to get what he’s after.

Though I'd read some Westlake and some Stark before, I read my first Parker novel on the way to visit my family at Thanksgiving. I've read fourteen more in the six months since, and I'm not the slightest bit tired of them. I imagine that the feeling of being involved with these reprints is similar to what Charles Ardai felt when he signed up his first Lawrence Block--and now I'm looking forward to years of aiding and abetting Parker's criminal ways.

6 All of which means that I really ought to expand on the disclaimer that I vaguely offer in my blogger profile, just to be clear, before I return to my usual approach of not mentioning work. How's this?

This blog is entirely separate from my job, written only in my non-work hours. The opinions are mine alone and are offered neither at the behest of or with any restraints from my employer. If you want to believe that my manifest enthusiasm for my favorite novel, Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, published by Chicago, could possibly be feigned, then I'll take your name and call you the next time the Continental Op needs the services of a professional cynic.

Old New Yorks

In his 1948 essay "Here Is New York" E. B. White wrote that "To a New Yorker the city is both changeless and changing." What a visitor like me sees is countless New Yorks of the past living on in everything from the thrilling shine of the Chrysler Building--triumphantly shouting, "Progress!"--to the accidental decoupage archaeology of rock show handbills in the Village--derisively sneering, "Throw it all away." And New York seems to be always, aggressively, doing both.

As I've wandered the city this week, I've also wandered earlier New Yorks in books, traces of which remain visible in the streets around me. I've already written briefly about one of those, Edith Wharton's New York of carriages, balls, and finely delineated social strata. But I've also lost myself in E. B. White's exuberant postwar Manhattan and Lawrence Block's beat-era Greenwich Village.


{52nd Street, 1948, from the Library of Congress's American Memory project.}

White's essay needs no introduction; it's generally regarded as an essential portrait of the city. White writes not so much about specific places as about certain moods and typical scenes: the wrestle for a cab, Bowery winos bedding down, the casual attention of the crowd at an outdoor performance in Central Park. This is the city as gliding complexity and atmosphere:

It is seven o'clock and I reexamine an ex-speakeasy in East Fifty-third Street, with dinner in mind. A thin crowd, a summer-night buzz of fans interrupted by an occasional drink being shaken at the small bar. It is dark in here (the proprietor sees no reason for boosting his light bill just because liquor laws have changed.) . . . The owner himself mixes. The fans intone the prayer for cool salvation.

The prominence of the whispering fans in that scene is a reminder of how much of what White writes about is now lost: "Here Is New York" is a summer essay, written in the days before air-conditioning was widespread, and there is much in it of the street life and overheard intimacy generated by open windows and inescapable heat. The arrival of air conditioning is a seeming small thing relative to the scale of a city, yet it leads the windows, transoms, and back doors to be closed, people to be sealed off just a tiny bit more from one another and from the city they make together.



If White is writing about the city as one big agglomeration of individuals, Lawrence Block, in A Diet of Treacle (1961) is writing about how those individuals try to define themselves in opposition to that mass. It follows a trio of young people through beat-era Greenwich Village: Joe, who returned from Korea with emotional damage that expresses itself as a vague inability to do; Anita, a Hunter College student who visits the Village to escape the square life she can already see stretching before her; and Shank, the sociopathic pot dealer who will quickly get them in over their heads.

A Diet of Treacle was probably fairly provocative at the time it was published: it's full of scenes of pot-smoking and sex, and the characters show increasingly little regard for social conventions. But now it's more an interesting artifact, even a work of reportage, an account of the lingo and poses of late-1950s hipness, full of "cats" and "squares" and "bread." The portrayal of pot as a phenomenally powerful, life-changing drug is particularly quaint at this distance, but pot is an important part of what defines these kids: knowing it and using it marks them as different.

In his novel Lucky at Cards, Block portrayed the tug-of-war between the allure of the criminal life and the reliability of the straight side. In A Diet of Treacle, he shifts the terms a bit: though he demonstrates with the luridness of a school filmstrip the dangers of a life consumed by, for want of a better term, criminal hipness, he doesn't pretend that the straight life holds any real appeal for these kids, either. As Block portrays them, they really are stuck, their only safe choice being to sink back into the stultifying conformity of 1950s America.

Wandering Greenwich Village today you still see kids trying to make that choice--or, even more, trying to simply frame it, to decide what's conforming and what's not, what's hip and what's not, what's selling out and what's staying true. I find it almost painful to watch, but maybe I shouldn't. Should I instead take heart in the way that generation succeeds generation down there--and that despite (as the great blog Pinakothek lamented a few weeks ago) the ever-greater ease of buying a hip identity, every generation sees some of those kids slip through, shed poses, and find what truly matters to them? Should I take heart that, so far, Greenwich Village, despite changing and changing and changing, is still in some essential way there for them?

Meanwhile, I continue to wander today's city that will be different tomorrow, dressed as usual like an anachronism in my old suit, overcoat, and fedora, which I discovered yesterday must make me stand out from all the other oddities that comprise a New York street scene--enough at least to draw the attention of a contemporary iteration of one of Block's hipsters: as I walked down 25th Street just past Madison Square Park, a baggily-dressed long-haired teen, lost in the music of his headphones, raised his head just enough to see me, cocked a finger, and said, with an air of approval, "Fedora." Then he bopped on, going about his business, and disappeared into the crowd.

To begin the weekend, some beginnings

{Photo by rocketlass.}

In the wake of the long, involved Austerity Britain, I've felt the need for its opposite: books that are petite and circumscribed i their intent, but no less potent--bursts of intensity rather than drawn-out explorations. So I've pillaged my bookshelves for narrow-spined volumes, and for the past few days I've carried half a dozen books with me on the train every day, blazing through one and then choosing another. I think that's the form my whole weekend is likely to take.

Coincidentally, the first couple I've read have had fabulous openings, the sort that instantly establish an unforgettable tone and, were you to read them in a bookstore, would send you straight to the cash register to buy the book so you can enjoy the rest of it on your back steps with a martini.

The first paragraphs of Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) don't feature Miss Brodie, the book's unforgettable central character, whom in the supplementary materials to the HarperPerennial edition Hal Hager describes as

fascinatingly complex, idealistic, self-deluded, vulnerable, vital, romantic, preposterous, lonely, gregarious, outspoken, [and] solipsistic

--to which I'd have to add "inadvertently malevolent," or even "slightly sinister." They do, however, establish a singular mood and prose rhythm--attentive and matter-of-fact, yet subtly ironic about the world of rules and conventions portrayed--that drew me right in:

The boys, as they talked to the girls from Marcia Blaine School, stood on the far side of their bicycles holding the handlebars, which established a protective fence of bicycle between the sexes, and the impression that at any moment the boys were likely to be away.

The girls could not take off their panama hats because this was not far from the school gates and hatlessness was an offense. Certain departures from the proper set of the hat on the head were overlooked in the case of fourth-form girls and upwards so long as nobody wore their hat at an angle. But there were other subtle variants from the ordinary rule of wearing the brim turned up at the back and down at the front. The five girls, standing very close to each other because of the boys, wore their hats each with a definite difference.

Georges Simenon's The Man Who Watched Trains Go By (1938) opens in a totally different register. Crime novels, perhaps more than any others, need to declare their tone at the start. The lurid cover, after all, has already told us roughly what to expect inside: bad behavior--possibly stretching to murder--and most likely some sex and consequences. The question is how we'll get it, and what the author's relationship to the contents will be. Will he, like Chandler or Graham Greene, create for us a fallen world suffering the consequences of its rot? Will we get the matter-of-fact, crime-as-workplace approach of Donald Westlake? Perhaps the story will be filtered through the knowing perseverance of a Lawrence Block narrator?

Simenon, in the opening paragraphs of The Man Who Watched Trains Go By, announces, loudly, that we will be dealing with inexorable fate, and an ordinary man caught up in its brutal machinery:

As far as Kees Popinga was personally concerned, it shoudl be admitted that at eight in the evening there was still time: his fate, among others, had yet to be sealed. But time for what? And what else could he have done other than what he did do, convinced as he was that his actions were of no more consequence than during the thousands and thousands of days that had gone before?

He would have shrugged in disbelief had someone told him that his life was about to change radically, that the photograph on the side table showing him standing in the middle of his family, with one hand casually resting on the back of a chair, would soon be printed in every newspaper across Europe.

A nice touch, from the former newspaperman Simenon, the transfiguration of the utterly ordinary family photo into a frightening talisman of dark renown.

I was going to stop with two, but then I picked up Gregoire Bouillier's odd little memoir, The Mystery Guest: An Account (2004), which I read a couple of nights ago, and couldn't resist sharing its deliberately casual and opaque first page, too:

It was the day Michel Leiris died. This would have been late September 1990, or maybe the very beginning of October, the date escapes me (whatever it was I can always look it up later on); in any case it was a Sunday, because I was at home in the middle of the afternoon, and it was cold out, and I'd gone to sleep in all my clothes, wrapped up in a blanket the way I often would when I was alone. Cold and oblivion were all I was looking for back then, but this didn't worry me. Sooner or later, I knew, I'd rejoin the world of the living. Just not yet. I felt I had seen enough. Beings, things, landscapes . . . I had enough to last me for the next two hundred years and why go hunting for new material? I didn't want any trouble.

Deceptive in so many ways, that opening frankly invites us to conspire with Bouillier--to acquiesce to his pretense that there's still time for him to clarify the date--and offers, in exchange, it seems, so much. He's seen enough? Enough to last two hundred years before he has to rejoin the living? What could possibly be next?

The answer, though, turns out to be both more pedestrian than you would expect--a mysteriously ended love affair--and yet strangely interesting, even comforting, regardless. Like the others I've written about today, The Mystery Guest is a modest book, but its pleasures and rewards are genuine, and I hope to write more about it soon. For now, I'll close by saying that Bouillier lives up to the implicit credo in the following statement about dreams:

The significance of a dream, we're told, has less to do with its overt drama than with the details; a long time ago it struck me that the same was true of real life, of what passes among us for real life.

Paying attention to the details: the novelist's art in brief.

Enjoy the weekend, and remember to raise a glass to the labor movement. We'll never pay them back enough for what they've given us.

'Cos I ain't got no interest in them

One of the first things I read this morning was an article that Leila at Bookshelves of Doom pointed me to that highlighted the dismal results of an AP poll about American reading habits. Twenty-seven percent of adults surveyed, the poll revealed, hadn't read a book in the past year, and the median number of books read overall was four (though the figure jumped to seven when non-readers were excluded). Now, for those of us who love and/or make our living from books, those are unquestionably depressing figures. Though we can take heart from learning the unsurprising news that Democrats and liberals read more than Republicans and conservatives, we also have to worry that older folks read more books than younger people--not a good sign for the future.

But at the same time, it's important to remember that reading has always fought an uphill battle--against illiteracy, poverty, and lack of time long ago, and against long commutes, big-screen TVs, and video games today. Just as there have always been those of us to whom reading is a central part of life, there have also been those who couldn't or wouldn't open a book.

While I do think reading, any sort of reading, is deeply valuable, I've never been a Cynthia-Ozick-style literature-as-medicine sort: I want people reading because they want to read, because they think there may be something in a novel that expands on the movie version, because they're curious about what Grandpa saw in the war, or because Johnny Damon has great hair. Reading that is clearly pitched as a form of self-improvement can too quickly become reading as punishment--an unlikely recipe for the sort of quiet, contemplative inwardness that reading generates at its best. That's not saying that we should be complacent, especially if we hope to make a living from books in thirty years, but at the same time we have to be realistic about the competition for attention that books face--and we can't delude ourselves into thinking that there was ever a golden age when everyone was reading serious books.

I was thinking about all this on the train this morning when I came across a brief note about reading habits in David Kynaston's Austerity Britain. Kynaston reports the results of research in 1947 into reading habits by the government-sponsored public opinion survey group Mass-Observation (an unparalleled source of detailed information about British life in the 1940s). He opens with a result that reading advocates would be happy to elicit today:

"Reading" was given as the favourite hobby by three in ten of the middle class, by two in ten of the skilled working class, and by one in ten of the unskilled.

Though I don't know for sure, I imagine that the number for all categories would be lower today in both the United States and Britain--but when you think of how little was competing for leisure-time attention with books in those days, the figures don't seem quite so daunting. At the same time, almost half the 1947 sample, Kynaston reveals, admitted to never reading books at all; the reasons they gave for not reading, like so many of the verbatim responses collected by Mass-Observation questioners, are fascinating:

None of them subjects is interesting to me. All I like is gangster stories, though there's precious much chance of reading here. Three rooms we got and three kids knocking around. No convenience, no nothing except water. I'm glad to get out of the house I can tell you.

Cos I ain't got no interest in them--they all apparently lead up to the same thing.

I'm not very good at reading, I never was. I've never liked it some'ow.

Too long. I like to get straight into a story. I have started books and I have to read through the first pages two or three time. I like to get stuck straight into a story--there's too much preliminary if you see what I mean.

I find the next-to-last respondent almost unbearably poignant--"some'ow" he doesn't like something he was never good at, that he probably was never taught how to do properly. The respondent who might read gangster stories, were it not for the chaos of the house, could be a contemporary parent--and he reminds me of another Mass-Observation subject Kynaston quotes elsewhere, this one on the subject of religion:

Well, I believe in God, but I can't say I'm religious. You get a bit hasty when you've so many children.

The final respondent, though, I think I could help--I know lots of novels that "get straight into a story," with no messing around. If anyone wants to lend me their time machine, I'll load it up with Lawrence Block novels (and maybe, if I want to really freak him out, some Murakami), pop back to 1947, and drop them off at that guy's local library. Anything I should be sure to bring back?

Catching up on some sewing

Oh, no--it's the return of that cherished friend of sportswriters, church bulletin editors, and fluffy metro columnists--the Notes Column! Only this is a blog, so it's a Notes Post. Ahem. But I'll at least try to follow the advice I give my staff at the office when they're writing copy: make sure there's always a thread leading the reader on. Here's hoping I succeed.

1 Yesterday's post included a George Herbert poem, "Prayer (I)," that is essentially a well-patterned list of different ways of conceiving prayer. I wrote that

even a nonbeliever like me can like me can discern the quiet confidence underlying Herbert's rushing tumble of metaphor in this poem.

Being a nonbeliever, though, I'm also a non-prayer, and even Herbert's poem can't change that.

But today, while reading Tim Page's article about his Asperger's syndrome in the newest issue of the New Yorker, I came across a line that brought Herbert's poem to mind: in noting the tenacity of his friendships, Page says,

I concur with Virgil Thomson, who once said that worry was one form of prayer that he found acceptable.

Though not much of a worrier, I will gladly place myself in Page's camp here, though I'd also like to add the glories of simply thinking about friends in their absence--the joys of, for example, experiencing a work of art simultaneously from my own perspective and from what I imagine would be theirs. That imaginative creation of an absent loved one can easily shade over into the realm of prayer, a sort of devotion or obeisance or even insurance payment to an important missing piece of one's life.

2 Speaking of the New Yorker, the August 6th issue may be the best single issue of any magazine I've ever read--and that's even once you take into account that John McPhee, ordinarily a favorite, is in this issue writing about golf, a sport that, despite the fact that I played it in high school, I see no reason ever to read about. An article on e-mail spam is followed by a piece about a murdered U.S. attorney that is followed by Elizabeth Kolbert on the mysterious disappearance of the bees (which has worried the apocalyptic sci-fi fan in me before) that is followed by, unusually for the New Yorker, a piece of fiction I really liked (long-untranslated writings by Russian Daniil Kharms (who was arrested by the NKVD in 1941 for making "defeatist statements")) that is followed by a brief Louis Menand piece about the craft of biography that is followed by an article about Robert Walser's unforgettable fiction (which includes Walser's immortal response to the question of how his writing was going during his stay in a sanitarium, "I am not here to write, but to be mad.") that is followed by a look at the new New York Times building that is, finally, followed by a look at the art of Sara and Gerald Murphy (friends of Cole Porter and F. Scott Fitzgerald's models for the Divers in This Side of Paradise).

It's an astonishingly good run of articles, a reminder to occasionally stop and marvel at what the New Yorker pulls off, week in and week out. Even once I skip all the pieces about opera, classical music, and business tycoons, there's something to read and admire every week.

3 The newest New Yorker, meanwhile, includes an article by Adam Gopnik on Philip K. Dick, whose recent Library of America volume I've been reading for the past several days. When I came across the Gopnik article, I had just begun Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968); had I not, I might not have agreed with this statement from Gopnik:

Dick tends to get treated as a romantic: his books are supposed to be studies in the extremes of paranoia and technological nightmare, offering searing conundrums of reality and illusion. This comes partly from the habit, hard to break, of extolling the transgressive, the visionary, the startling undercurrent of dread. In fact, Dick in the sixties is a bone-dry intellectual humorist, a satirist—concerned with taking contemporary practices and beliefs to their reductio ad absurdum.

The sense of paranoia is hard to ignore in Dick; in my (relative to the true Dick fans) limited knowledge, it does seem to be the overarching theme, regardless of what Gopnik argues. But the opening pages of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? are flat-out funny. As the novel opens, bounty hunter Rick Deckard has just woken up and is immediately in an argument with his wife, Iran. In the midst of the dispute, he considers how he ought to employ his mood organ:

At his console he hesitated between dialing for a thalamic suppressant (which would abolish his mood of rage) or a thalamic stimulant (which would make him irked enough to win the argument).

"If you dial," Iran said, eyes open and watching, "for greater venom, then I'll dial the same. I'll dial the same. I'll dial the maximum and you'll see a fight that makes every argument we've had up to now seem like nothing. Dial and see; just try me."

Gopnik goes on to point out, correctly, that

The gift of Dick's craziness was to see how strong the forces of normalcy are in a society, even when what they are normalizing is objectively nuts.

4 Dick's crazily brilliant The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) features the following exchange between a hallucinating man and his ex-wife (who is almost certainly not actually there):

Eying him, Emily said, "You're blammed."

Blammed. He hadn't heard that term since college; it was long out of style, and naturally Emily still used it. "The word," he said as distinctly as possible, "is now fnugled. Can you remember that? Fnugled."

The dispute over slang terms for drunkenness made for an entertaining coincidence: the same day I read that passage, I received in the mail an out-of-print book I'd ordered, Edmund Wilson's The American Earthquake: A Chronicle of the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, and the Dawn of the New Deal (1958), the highlight of which is Wilson's "Lexicon of Prohibition." Wilson explains that the list of terms that follows is of words denoting drunkenness in common use at the time (March 1927) in the United States, organized roughly in increasing order of drunkenness:

lit, squiffy, oiled, lubricated, owled, edged, jingled, piffed, piped, sloppy, woozy, happy, half-screwed, half-cocked, half-shot, half seas over, fried, stewed, boiled, zozzled, sprung, scrooched, jazzed, jagged, canned, corked, corned, potted, hooted, slopped, tanked, stinko, blind, stiff, under the table, tight, full, wet, high , horseback, liquored, pickled, ginned, shicker (Yiddish), spifflicated, primed, organized, featured, pie-eyed, cock-eyed, wall-eyed, glassy-eyed, bleary-eyed, hoary-eyed, over the Bay, four sheets in the wind, crocked, loaded, leaping, screeching, lathered, plastered, soused, bloated, polluted, saturated, full as a tick, loaded for bear, loaded to the muzzle, loaded to the plimsoll mark, wapsed down, paralyzed, ossified, out like a light, passed out cold, embalmed, buried, blotto, lit up like the sky, lit up like the Commonwealth, lit up like a Christmas tree, lit up like a store window, lit up like a church, fried to the hat, slopped to the ears, stewed to the gills, boiled as an owl, to have a bun on, to have a slant on, to have a skate on, to have a snootful, to have a skinful, to draw a blank, to pull a shut-eye, to pull a Daniel Boone, to have a rubber drink, to have a hangover, to have a head, to have the jumps, to have the shakes, to have the zings, to have the heeby-jeebies, to have the sreaming meemies, to have the whoops and jingles, to burn with a low blue flame.

I hate to cast aspersions at Wilson, but I get the sense that somewhere in the making of that list he gave up on his organizational scheme, as it seems unlikely that all the "to have" constructions really denote successive states of drunkenness. But it's churlish to complain about such a valuable gift to posterity. While my friends and I have over the years regularly used soused, lit, tight, and--particularly in college--happy (which could also be turned into a noun: one could bring a bag of happy to a party, for example), the majority of these terms are new to me. At a minimum, I hope to do my part in returning "loaded to the plimsoll mark," "to pull a Daniel Boone," "wapsed down," "lit up like the Commonwealth," and (my favorite) "to burn with a low blue flame" to circulation.

5 Thinking about drink brings me back to Philip K. Dick, with the addition of the subject of a post earlier in the week, Lawrence Block. Part of the fun of reading Block's 1960s novels is entering the world that they incidentally recreate, the early 60s near-suburban world of businessmen who sleep with their secretaries, eat at smoky, dark-paneled steakhouses with deep, red-leather booths, have a couple of martinis at business lunches, and, though always looking out for the main chance, at the same time feel very secure about their place in the world. Dick, despite writing sci-fi, conveys that atmosphere, too--the very normalcy that Gopnik comments on in the New Yorker is a specifically male, post-war boom world, one that despite being propelled into an imagined future shares many assumptions and characteristics with the cozy world that Block's grifters are always attempting to invade and disrupt.

It's not a world that I find at all congenial (despite my love of its patron saint and apostle, Frank Sinatra), but that in no way lessens my appreciation of the way in which it's been almost inadvertently preserved in novels that are ostensibly about other things. A few pages of Block describing hotels and boardwalks and country clubs and I can almost feel the hitch in my lungs and the buzzing in my head on waking up after a late-night poker game with some of the guys from the Elks--that retention of a lost world, however unintentional, is one of the unsurpassed glories of the novel as a form.

6 Finally, writing about the recreation of a lost period reminds me of something that Stacey and I were talking about earlier tonight, Darwyn Cooke's The New Frontier. Originally a mini-series and now available as a beautifully produced single hardcover or a pair of trade paperbacks, it's a retelling of the history of the universe of DC Comics in the 1950s, centered around the formation of the first large-scale superhero team, the Justice League.

My memories of Silver Age DC comics are so old, going back as they do to childhood days spent pawing through the footlocker of my father's mildewed Superman comics, that it's hard for me to separate Cooke's story from my at least partially nostalgic memories--so I don't know for sure whether someone who didn't know the rough outlines of the story of the DC heroes would enjoy the book. Regardless, it's rich in character and action, and Cooke's strikingly minimalist, angular art creates a fully believable post-war atmosphere of straight-cut dark suits, narrow ties, and crew cuts, and of an America (and by extension, a superhero population) that was certain its applied might and know-how could completely remake the world for the better. I think it's about as good as superhero comics get.

Plus, Cooke is the only artist I know who has ever drawn Wonder Woman--an Amazon, don't forget--as taller than Superman. That alone is worth a tip of the hat.

Sharpies and frauds

A couple of weeks ago I proclaimed that Richard Aleas's Songs of Innocence (2007) is the best novel that Hard Case Crime has published. The next day my friend Ed from the Dizzies sent me a note saying, essentially, "Really? Lawrence Block's Grifter's Game and The Girl with the Long Green Heart would be hard to top." Uh-oh. There were, after all, five Hard Case Crime books that my subscription hadn't brought me--the Block novels among them. And it wasn't too long ago that Hard Case published a third Block novel, one that reminded me just how much I like his work. Perhaps I should have hedged.

Properly challenged, I ordered the pair from my local bookstore. And Ed's right about at least one thing: they're really good. Both novels feature a grifter looking for a score and falling for a woman (need I note the ensuing disastrous consequences?). But despite their superficial similarities, they're distinctly different in tone, and reading them back-to-back is like watching a master play variations on a theme.

The Girl with the Long Green Heart (1965) tells the story of Johnny Hayden, a retired con artist who is lured back for a sharply designed long con. (You can guess what separates a long con from a short con, but if you want more detail, two great sources are David Mauer's The Big Con and J. R. "The Yellow Kid" Weil's Con Man.) A con novel exists largely so us outsiders can watch a con come together, and Block delivers the goods: there's worthless land in Canada, a mooch who can be induced to smell unearned (and possibly illicit) profit, and a lovely lady to pull it all together. There are deeds to be forged, dummy letters to be mailed from various cities throughout the country, a storefront land office to be furnished and staffed--wheels within wheels, and everything has to work perfectly for the con to succeed, which is what we're rooting for the whole time, morality be damned. Block doesn't excuse our choosing the side of the cheats, but he makes it easier both by making the mark a boor and by reminding us:

There's an old maxim that you cannot swindle a completely honest man. I'm not sure this is entirely true--it would be hard to test it empirically, because I don't think I have ever met an entirely honest man.

Yet even as we're watching the pieces fall into place, we know the plan will fail somehow. You can't write a crime novel about a con that goes off flawlessly--as much fun as these schemes are to read about, it's not the anticipated complications but the dangerous surprises that create the tension and provide the drama. In this case, despite Johnny Hayden's disbelief in pure honesty, too much trust is what opens the door to disaster. To run a con, you've got to trust your partners--and sins of omission, however minor in themselves, can bring the whole game crashing down. And as good as the set-up is in The Girl with the Long Green Heart, the crash is just as impressive.

Grifter's Game (1961) opens as a similar sort of grifter, Joe Marlin, is trying to stay a few steps ahead of unpaid bills:

The lobby was air-conditioned and the carpet was the kind you sink down into and disappear in without leaving a trace. The bellhops moved silently and instantly and efficiently. The elevators started silently and stopped as silently, and the pretty girls who jockeyed them up and down did not chew gum until they were finished working for the day. The ceilings were high and the chandeliers that drooped from them were ornate.

And the manager's voice was pitched very low, his tone apologetic. But this didn't change what he had to say. He wanted the same thing they want in every stinking dive from Hackensack to Hong Kong. He wanted money.

To dodge the bill, Marlin flees to Atlantic City, where he quickly and unexpectedly finds himself a in possession of a big block of heroin--and lovely lady who wants her drug dealing husband dead. From there, events proceed roughly as you might expect. Marlin concocts a satisfyingly multi-layered plan for knocking off the woman's husband, complications ensue, and, almost to the end, Grifter's Game follows through on our expectations: there's love, money, and double crosses, all adding up to a solid, if unspectacular, crime novel.

Then the last ten pages change everything, with an ending that might be the most stunning I've read in a crime novel. Rather than wrap the book up conventionally, Block takes a real chance, and the close of the novel left me gape-mouthed. In writing about Richard Aleas's Songs of Innocence, I mentioned how unflinching Aleas was about the consequences of his book's events, how by playing everything straight he built up to a shocking ending; Block handles Grifter's Game the same way, to similarly powerful effect. The ending is brutal, astonishing, and totally unexpected--yet at the same time it feels completely right.

After all that, have I answered Ed's question? Is Songs of Innocence better than Grifter's Game? Maybe? Probably?

All I know is that even being neck-and-neck with Lawrence Block is something to be proud of--and that if you like crime novels, you might as well read both and make your own decision. Regardless of which you prefer, I don't think you'll regret it.

Trollope goes digital, Borges goes ghostly, Donne goes on a peace mission

Not a lot of time tonight, so all I've got for you is a collection of odds and ends.

1 In all the writing about Trollope I've been doing this summer, I've neglected to mention Penguin's great new Trollope site, created with the help of the Trollope Society. It's everything such a site should be--especially for a writer as prolific as Trollope--giving a brief synopsis of each novel and major character, information about his Barset and Palliser sequences, and biographical information about Trollope. A particularly nice touch are the eye-catching (though slightly too contemporary?) cartoon renderings of Trollope's characters. But surely Phineas Finn didn't really look as horrid as this?

I also learned from the site that Trollope thought that the ending of Phineas Finn was a bit abrupt and unsatisfying, as did I. In his Autobiography, Trollope admitted:

It is all fairly good except the ending,--as to which till I got to it I had made no provision. As I fully intended to bring my hero again into the world, I was wrong to marry him to a simple pretty Irish girl, who could only be felt as an encumbrance on such return.

If I may be allowed to absurdly mix eras and forms: the ending reminded me of the end of Don Knotts's great comedy The Love God?, wherein Knotts's character ends up not with the vivacious career woman (and bombshell) he's been seeing, but with the lovely young lady from his hometown who has been patiently waiting--and who is as dull as paste. It makes sense for the ethical arc of the story, but it's impossible to believe and makes no damn sense on any other level.

2 I learned about the Trollope site through the ReadySteadyBook blog, where I was involved in the following exchange after blogger Mark Thwaite ended his post by asking if he should give Trollope a try:

Stephen Mitchelmore: No!

Mark Thwaite: Sage, succinct advice as ever, sir!

Levi Stahl: I totally disagree with Stephen Mitchelmore: Yes!

The Palliser novels provide insight into politics, strongly drawn characters--including several fully realized, sympathetic portrayals of strong-willed women--and a drawn-out, sensitive depiction of a marriage of two very different partners who despite their differences (and the strictures placed on them by society) are essentially equals.

Trollope doesn't have the humor of Dickens, the godlike sympathy and understanding of Tolstoy, the fire of Dostoevsky, or the piercing aphoristic insight of George Eliot, but his attention to his characters and the realities of their world make him well worth reading.

Stephen Mitchelmore: But Levi, we do share the same reasons!

3 In With Borges, which I wrote about the other day, Alberto Manguel mentions that he's just one of many people who, over the years, served as readers for the blind master. I imagine them reuniting once a year in a secret library, an invisible college of readers conjuring the Borges who is not in the library, the lost Borges, the one who, in "Borges and I," writes:

It's Borges, the other one, that things happen to. I walk through Buenos Aires and I pause--mechanically now, perhaps--to gaze at the arch of an entryway and its inner door; news of Borges reaches me by mail, or I see his name on a list of academics or in some biographical dictionary. My taste runs to hourglasses, maps, seventeenth-century typefaces, etymologies, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Robert Louis Stevenson; Borges shares those preferences, but in a vain sort of way that turns them into the accoutrements of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that our relationship is hostile--I live, I allow myself to live, so that Borges can spin out his literature, and that literature is my justification.

At the end of a long evening of wine and talk, during which they've tricked him into lowering his guard, the Borges they conjure is swiftly trapped between two covers and filed away in an obscure, rarely visited section of this already obscure library.

As the years mount, and death slowly winnows the circle of readers, the Borges they conjure becomes less solid; what was at their first meeting a gargantuan reference book becomes, by their last, perhaps a single line of poetry.

4 After writing about Borges's admonition to his nephew ("If you behave, I'll give you permission to think of a bear."), I thought that Borges might have enjoyed my favorite Victor Borge joke, which I heard him deliver to a young whippersnapper on the Jack Benny Show:

Borge: How old are you?

Whippersnapper: I'm six!

Borge: Shame on you! When I was your age, I was twice that old!

5 Having written recently about the Thirty Years War, I was surprised to learn yesterday from John Stubbs's John Donne: The Reformed Soul (2007) that Donne served as chaplain to the delegation that King James sent to Frederick and Ferdinand, the chief warring parties, in 1619. The mission, however, was doomed from the start, as it had been

entirely seeded and nurtured by a Spanish subterfuge. Spain's great aim in the Bohemian crisis was to keep England from sending military and financial aid to the Protestant rebels: the neutrality desired by the Spanish was assured by massaging King James's diplomatic ego. The great Machiavellian Spanish ambassador, the Count of Gondomar, reassured his masters that "the vanity of the present King of England is so great that he will always think it of great importance that peace should be obtained by his means, so that his authority may be increased."

Actually that's the sense I get of the whole war: if you were involved, you were probably being double-crossed.

For his part, Donne in the years to come would be a strong voice against English involvement in the war, despite anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish public sentiment. Donne surely took up that position at least in part because it was the position of the King, in whose good graces Donne needed to stay--but it's also not hard to trace that preference to Donne's youthful memories of the horrors of war and his seeming general distaste for sectarianism and the violence it often entailed.

6 Finally, it seems fitting to follow Donne, the poet of love in secular and religious guises, to a couple of fun throwaway lines from Lawrence Block's Grifter's Game (1961):

I lighted her cigarette. She was poised and cool but not at all subtle. She leaned forward to take the light and to give me a look at large breasts harnessed by a lacy black bra. Eve learned that one the day they got dressed and moved out of Eden. It has been just as effective ever since.

Some notes on sex in words

1) A while back I praised Lawrence Block's Lucky at Cards (1964), a sharp little crime novel about a card cheat. In that post, I neglected to mention the book's one real flaw--one which bedevils many a writer, crime and otherwise: the sex scenes.

The success of noir frequently depends on the ability of an author to convey the powerful pull of a dangerous woman, and Block holds his own there:

I saw the legs first--long and slender, and a skirt bending at the knees. I folded my cards and had a look at the rest.

She wasn't quite beautiful. The body was perfect, with hooker's hips and queen-sized breasts and a belly that had just the right amount of bulge to it. The hair was the color of a chestnut when you pick the husk from it. She had the hair bound up in a French roll. It was stylish as hell, but you started imagining how this female was with her hair down and spread out over a white pillow.

The face was heart-shaped, with a pointed chin and wide-spaced eyes. Green eyes. There were little tension lines in the corners of those eyes, and matching lines around the mouth. Her mouth was too full and her nose was a little too long, and that's why I said she wasn't beautiful, exactly. But perfection always puts me off. There's something dry and sterile about an utterly beautiful woman. This one didn't put me off at all. She kept me staring hard at her.

But when they get to bed . . .

The room was on a high floor, so no one could have seen us, but we never thought about that at the time one way or the other. The lovemaking was too fast, too furious, too compulsive. There was deep need and dark hunger, and flesh merging with flesh, and an orchestral swell out of Tschaikovsky that led to a coda of pure Stravinsky.

That vital dissonance was always there. That harsh and bitter beauty that tossed the conventional harmonies out the window.

Suddenly things are all cloudy, portentous, and overblown.

I don't mean to take Block in particular to task here. What he's succumbed to is the inherent peril of the sex scene in any kind of literature. Too much specificity starts to sound like porn; too little tends, it seems, to create a sort of vacuum, into which such pretentious nonsense as Hemingway's earth-moving orgasms begin to creep in. It's inherently difficult. I think Murakami, for one, usually handles sex pretty well, if only because he keeps it within the affectless range of his ordinary prose, letting it be simply something else that might happen to a person--though, of course, it can end up, even for his characters, being much more.

2) Block at his worst at least never describes a penis as a "blade of flesh," as Max Allan Collins did in a passage I've already taken him to task for. Good god, it's been months and I still can't purge that horrid phrase from my mind. Sorry to make you suffer with me.

3) I tend to side with those who choose simply to pass over the details--the waves crashing on the shore approach. I like, for example, the following scene by Anthony Powell in A Buyer's Market (1952), wherein the narrator, Nick Jenkins, having just come from a funeral, loses his virginity in the back room of an antique shop to a rackety left-wing revolutionist named Gypsy Jones--later referred to by Jenkins's best friend as "La Pasionara of Hendon Central." Though Powell is without a doubt circumspect to the point of obscurity in this passage, it is of a piece with his presentation of Jenkins's thought processes throughout, and it seems particularly suited to this situation, when Jenkins, viewing himself as, in a sense, late to the having-had-sex party, thinks on the event:

The lack of demur on her part seemed quite in accordance with the almost somnambulistic force that had brought me into that place, and also with the torpid, dreamlike atmosphere of the afternoon. At least such protests as she put forward were of so formal and artificial an order that they increased, rather than diminished, the impression that a long-established rite was to be enacted, among Staffordshire figures and papier-mache trays, with the compelling, detached formality of nightmare. . . . I was conscious of Gypsy changing her individuality, though at the same time retaining her familiar form; this illusion almost conveying the extraordinary impression that there were really three of us--perhaps even four, because I was aware that alteration had taken place within myself, too--of whom the pair of active participants had been, as it were, projected from out of our normally unrelated selves.

In spite of the apparently irresistible nature of the circumstances, when regarded through the larger perspectives that seemed, on reflection, to prevail--that is to say of a general subordination to an intricate design of cause and effect--I could not help admitting, in due course, the awareness of a sense of inadequacy. There was no specific suggestion that anything had, as it might be said, "gone wrong"; it was merely that any wish to remain any longer present in those surroundings had suddenly and violently decreased, if not disappeared entirely. This feeling was, in its way, a shock. Gypsy, for her part, appeared far less impressed than myself by consciousness of anything, even relatively momentous, having occurred. In fact, after the brief interval of extreme animation, her subsequent indifference, which might almost have been called torpid, was, so it seemed to me, remarkable.

A "brief interval of extreme animation." Now that's as good a brief definition as I've heard . . . unless, that is, you're Sting.

4) Of course, for those willing to attempt writing about sex, it can provide fodder for plenty of comedy, or pathos--or both. Kingsley Amis chose the "both" option in this passage from The Old Devils (1987):

Most of those whose marriages have turned out less than well, say, might have been considered to have their ideas of how or why but not to know much about when. According to himself Peter was an exception. If challenged he could have named at least the month and year in which he and Muriel had been making love one night and roughly halfway through in his estimation, what would have been halfway through, rather, she had asked him how much longer he was going to be.

The whole thing, especially in the context of the rest of the novel, is sad, but it's the "in his estimation" that elevates it simultaneously into the realm of comedy.

5) According to his biographers, when it came to sex, Kingsley Amis ought to have known. A review in the Literary Review of a new biography by Zachary Leader explained that Amis's operating philosophy seems to have been

If it moves, fuck it. If it doesn't, drink it.

From that review I also learned that once, when Amis fell asleep on the beach, his first wife wrote on his ample stomach

One Fat Englishman. Will Fuck Anything.

Need I have specified "first" wife?

6) Thinking of sex as comedy has reminded me of a favorite poem, Robert Herrick's "The Vine" (1648):

I dreamed this mortal part of mine
Was metamorphosed to a vine,
Which crawling one and every way
Enthralled my dainty Lucia
Methought her long small legs and thighs
I with my tendrils did surprise
Her belly, buttocks, and her waist
By my soft nervelets were embraced.
About her head I writhing hung,
And with rich clusters (hid among
The leaves) her temples I behung,
So that my Lucia seemed to me
Young Bacchus ravished by his tree.
My curls about her neck did crawl,
And arms and hands they did enthrall,
So that she could not freely stir
(All parts there made one prisoner).
But when I crept with leaves to hide
Those parts which maids keep unespied,
Such fleeting pleasures there I took
That with the fancy I awoke;
And found (ah me!) this flesh of mine
More like a stock than like a vine.

I owe my knowledge of this poem to Campbell McGrath, who included it on his syllabus for an extremely good poetry writing class I took as a freshman in college. If you don't know McGrath's work, Spring Comes to Chicago (1996) is a good place to start; I owe him at least that much of a plug in exchange for his introducing me to Herrick.

7) And, finally, speaking of sex in possibly inappropriate places (like the classroom): at my office, someone has recently put on the fridge a magnetic poetry set specifically geared to an office. Last week someone arranged

Office affairs teach collegiality.

This week, it's become

Office affairs teach ennui.

I have to admit: I have my doubts about both sentiments.