Books to Die For

by John Connolly

  Or

  The growing grievance of black gangsters who objected to Goines’s depiction of them in his novels, based on a belief that his narrative and characterizations were a map for the Feds to identify them?

  Daddy Cool is frequently compared to the novels of Chester Himes, but the broad comedy in Himes’s work is not Goines’s style, whose aim was far too lethal for such a luxury. The work of the major mystery writers, including Mosley, owes a debt to Goines.

  His reputation continues as the rappers create their own bloody scenarios from Goines’s life and death. Through writers like Goines, the daily legacy of black urban existence is transformed into bleak art, and a stark indictment of ghetto damnation.

  Ken Bruen (b. 1951) was born in Galway in the west of Ireland. He earned a PhD in metaphysics at Trinity College, then taught all over the world for twenty-five years. After a short detention in a Brazilian prison, Bruen moved to London, where his early novels are set. He is best known for his series of Jack Taylor private eye novels set in Galway, the first of which was The Guards (2001); novels in that series have won Bruen the Shamus Award, the Macavity Award, and the Barry Award. The films London Boulevard (2010) and Blitz (2011) were adapted from his novels of the same name. Bruen’s most recent publication is Headstone (2011), the ninth in the Jack Taylor series. Visit him online at www.kenbruen.com.

  The Wrong Case

  by James Crumley (1975)

  DAVID CORBETT

  * * *

  James Crumley (1939–2008) is one of the most influential crime fiction authors of the last half century. Ray Bradbury’s series detective Elmo Crumley is named for him, and the opening line of his novel The Last Good Kiss (1978) is frequently cited as the greatest opening line in crime fiction history. First published in 1969 with One to Count Cadence, and best known for creating the series characters Milo Milodragovitch and C. W. Sughrue (who appeared together in 1996’s Bordersnakes), Crumley won the 1994 Hammett Prize, awarded for best literary crime fiction, for The Mexican Tree Duck (1993).

  * * *

  I came to crime fiction late. Like a lot of the smugly educated, I felt perfectly justified in belittling what I’d never read. But I had the good sense to boot myself out of the ivory tower, abandoning a fellowship in linguistics at Berkeley to get my heart broken and my nose bloodied.

  First stop, theater. I reacquainted myself with menace through Harold Pinter, with emotional battle through Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee. I was learning, climbing down off the rickety ladder of my arrogance, getting closer to the honest stuff of reckless life.

  Then an offer came up through a friend—a job as a private investigator. “If you want to write, you can’t beat this place for material.” Understatement of my life. Only a nitwit would refuse. A bigger nitwit than me.

  I took to the job, did it well. People talked to me, a skill you can’t teach. And it fed a competitive hunger to get the infamous lowdown that I didn’t know I possessed.

  A year or two into dick work I decided, finally, to pick up a crime novel, see what all the bother was about. I selected Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. I won’t say that I was hooked but, at long last, I got it. If this was crime fiction, it spoke of my world, if from a windy perspective. But in the half that it got right there was far more to admire than there was to dismiss in the half it got wrong.

  From Chandler I wandered the map awhile, from Cain to Thompson to Charyn to Connelly to Burke, skidding along the mystery aisle aimlessly, utter impulse in control.

  I can’t even remember how or when I happened upon James Crumley. But I did. And things stopped cold. That odd giddy sense of This is it came to me as it has only a handful of times as a reader.

  The writing echoed Chandler, sure, with its haunted bravado and tough-guy wit, but also Tom McGuane and William Kittredge, writers who’d expanded my idea of what it meant to live in the West, crafting a language that suited the region’s harshness and beauty, the clarity of its light and the savageness of its history, its contempt for enclosure, its equation of sophistication with something to hide.

  In his wit, his compassion, his skill, his command of language, Crumley showed me once and for all that there was no such thing as “mere” crime fiction. There was great writing and there wasn’t. I knew which one this was.

  Unlike many of my crime-writing peers, it wasn’t The Last Good Kiss I picked up first, but The Wrong Case. And so I met Milo Milodragovitch before C. W. Sughrue. I don’t know if reversing that order would have changed much, but in Milo I found, almost unwittingly, a kindred spirit.

  Crumley got a great deal right, of course—the petty bribes to phone-company insiders, the indifferent lies offered to witnesses to speed things along, and the one thing every PI sooner or later tells his client: “You’re not paying me to believe you, you’re paying me to find out what happened.”

  But, like many PI novelists, Crumley also indulged in the macho excesses that in lesser hands so often seem laughable. For example, if a hypothetical private detective blew away the columns to a witness’s house so the whole front of the place collapsed, just because said witness was a mouthy punk—in leathers and lavender eye shadow, no less—he wouldn’t just spend a few hours in the pokey like Milo. He’d do real time and get his license yanked.

  But something in Crumley’s handling of that scene and all the others like it, with their rough-and-tumble antics and bullying swagger, made it all seem not just acceptable, but true, even necessary. He set a tone that kept you off-balance, a tone that blended a kind of sly irony with heartsick desperation, an understanding that the battle for the good is fought by ingeniously flawed men doing the ridiculous in the service of some angry, inscrutable truth.

  From my own tattered Catholicism I recognized in Crumley’s world the warring angels of crippling sin and unearned forgiveness. Shame and guilt haunt every reflection, every exchange, not just because so many drunks populate the pages. The drunks form a chorus, representing an open acceptance of the weakness of our nature, as the Roman rites before the grave put it so neatly.

  In Crumley’s fiction, drunkenness stands for the restless truce each person makes with what he can bear and what, in the end, does him in, and each drunk is broken and mended in his own unique way.

  Lee Child has sniffed at the “bullet in the heart hero,” the protagonist whose forward momentum suffers the relentless drag of a ghost of pain or loss. Don’t cops and lawyers and hit men and, yes, PIs just do what they do because, after all, it’s their job?

  I’ll admit, I’ve often cringed at the tortured motivations of my fictional avatars. They never seem to find the competitive juice of the adversarial system, the pride in a job well done, or the fear of being thought inadequate—with the threat of not getting paid—more than enough reason to raise their game. Always worked for me.

  But Crumley, for my money, got to something wiser than a writerly trick. Milo’s bullet in the heart would doom any number of lesser men, and the ghost he carries on his back isn’t a burden. It’s him.

  When he’s all of ten years old, his parents crown one more stinking mean fight with the father going for his shotgun, only to accidentally blow off his own face when the trigger catches on the open bolt of his Remington .30-06.

  Milo’s mother, a hypocritical harpy, eviscerates every drunk she can name—at the risk of too much information, another touch that resonated. She excoriates none of them more than her dear, dead husband, and dumps the departed’s clothes off at the Salvation Army. Milo hunts down the derelicts who’ve bought them, buying every item back so he can burn it in a ritual of grief and mercy. In so doing, he gets a bit more than he bargained for:

  I learned that they were men also, that they had lives full of chances too, not all of which had gone begging. And they still had dreams, dreams and lies enough to live with them. Unlike my mother, they were honest drunks, not too often ashamed. In their odd moments, drunk or sober, they knew who and what they were; they had looke
d at the world for a long steady moment, and found it wanting. As they took on individual faces and histories, I began to see them, both in the bars and at work—many did work, shoveled Meriwether’s shit like white niggers—and the more I saw them, the more I preferred them to sober citizens. And I understood the defiance in the pathetic motto: I ain’t no alcoholic, Jack, I don’t go to no fucking meetings. And they needed no army for their salvation.

  Ten years later, when he’s off in Korea doing everything imaginable to avoid combat, Milo learns that his mother, after checking herself into a posh rehab facility, has wrapped a nylon stocking around her neck and hanged herself, leaving her son to wonder at the family legacy of pitiless luck.

  Crumley reminded me, as no other writer had, that justice, like drink, is a balm for suffering, not a cure, and we never escape it. And so when Helen Duffy enters Milo’s office, asking to find her brother, he experiences not just the call to adventure but a rumbling in his crotch. And, ironically, his conscience. She’s the most beautifully confused woman he’s ever seen, a “woman so strong that she could believe in hope and trust and families and love, a woman who had survived without luck.” She might just offer him a chance at something new: a cleansing, a renewal. He thinks this even as he lusts for her and she lies to him, and continues lying until he’s left with nothing but the choice to forgive her or not.

  This constant battle between guilt and solace, crime and comfort, insight and blindness, threatens to split Milo in two at every turn—and that seesaw pressure propels the action forward as much as any external event. It also renders him capable of appraising human nature with a cold but uncritical eye.

  In Amos Swift, the fat, jolly pathologist who smokes illegal Cubans to escape the antiseptic stench of the morgue, Milo recognizes a man who has decided that he’d rather take his chances with the dead than the dying.

  In the wife of a professor whose tastes have turned to young men, Milo sees what he thought he’d left behind when his divorce work dried up, one more sign of a dead marriage: “She stood framed in the saffron glow, a tall woman, her long hair growing lank in the damp air, her strong hands strangling her waist with the cord of her ragged robe.”

  Even the inanimate world speaks of something lost. From the reflections of colored lights in the wind-rippled pools of rainwater dotting a motel parking lot, he imagines a city flickering at the bottom of a black sea.

  But the most honest and telling details always zero in on Milo’s own broken soul. In the span of two paragraphs we get Milo recounting the shameless routine of divorce work—bribing motel night clerks, bugging rooms where illicit trysts end in a camera flash, “startled faces and scurrying bodies frozen in the explosion.” Then we see him waiting in his truck, hoping to follow up on an earlier invitation from a voluptuous bartender, Vonda Kay, “the biggest breasts and the sweetest disposition west of the Big Muddy . . . the most comfortable one-night stand in town, as warm as freshly baked bread, as loving as a puppy.” He imagines taking her home where they can “have breakfast, smoke a little dope, and sleep comforted by the creek, the soft brush of the spruce needles, the placid warmth of two old veterans, our nerves ruined in the front lines of love and failure.” But she walks out of the bar with another man, and Milo heads home alone.

  This all might turn maudlin, of course, or at least too terribly sad, if not for Milo’s sneaky, savage, Falstaffian wit. The laughs come like the drinks, as balm and consolation, a wink in the eye of the shit storm.

  When I read this book I realized how much of the urgency I felt in myself as I did my job wasn’t mere competitive juice and righteous giddyup. It came out of a dark well of shame and bitterness. Like Milo, I felt compelled to get people to talk to me because “they were somehow guilty, and I was somehow the law.”

  But the opposite was also true: I was guilty, and they were the law.

  David Corbett is the author of four novels: The Devil’s Redhead, Done for a Dime (a New York Times Notable Book), Blood of Paradise (nominated for numerous awards, including the Edgar), and Do They Know I’m Running (Spinetingler Award, Best Novel—Rising Star category, 2011). David’s short fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, with two stories selected for Best American Mystery Stories (2009 and 2011). Mysterious Press/Open Road Media reissued his first two novels, plus a story collection, in May 2012, and Penguin will publish his book on the craft of characterization in early 2013. Visit him online at www.davidcorbett.com.

  Last Bus to Woodstock

  by Colin Dexter (1975)

  PAUL CHARLES

  * * *

  Colin Dexter (b. 1930) is the creator of Inspector Morse, the Oxford-based police detective with a taste for Wagner, real ale, cryptic crosswords, and bamboozling his faithful sidekick, Detective Sergeant Lewis. Morse first appeared in 1975, in Last Bus to Woodstock, and went on to feature in twelve subsequent novels, the last of which, The Remorseful Day, was published in 1999. Awarded the Order of the British Empire in 2000, Dexter was handsomely decorated by various crime writers’ organizations throughout his career, eventually receiving the Crime Writers’ Association Cartier Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement in 1997. The TV series Inspector Morse, with John Thaw playing Morse, ran to thirty-three episodes between 1987 and 2000, with Dexter making a cameo appearance in almost every episode, and finally receiving a speaking part in 1993.

  * * *

  I can remember very clearly how I discovered Last Bus to Woodstock, one of my favorite books.

  I’d been on a long tour of Italy with one of the songwriters with whom I’m lucky enough to work. As was often the case with these trips, friends from back home would send out stuff to help me pass the time, including videos of U.K. TV shows so I could continue my viewing on the tour bus as I traveled through foreign parts. One such video was an early episode of the TV series Morse. When I eventually got round to viewing it, two hours, including adverts, positively flew by.

  There was one scene, not too far into the episode, where Morse and his faithful sidekick, DS Lewis, having been to view the scene of the crime and examine the victim, drive back through the Oxfordshire countryside and pull in alongside a cornfield. The scene with all of its colors—the yellow of the corn, the greens of the trees, the blues of the sky, and the maroon Jaguar—was very potent and emotive. Morse and Lewis were just standing with their backs to the camera, staring at the view. It was quite a lengthy scene considering that there was no dialogue, just Barrington Pheloung’s hypnotic score. It was calm, relatively quiet, with no movement whatsoever—well, maybe just a gentle breeze idling through the corn and the bushes. The scene was clearly set up to allow Morse, Lewis, and the TV audience to reflect on the loss of life and consider what had been discovered so far. I thought it was extremely brave television and I was intrigued to discover if it was the director of the production or the author of the original work who had been responsible for the innovative approach.

  The very next day I found a bookstore in Milan specializing in English-language books. As luck would have it they had two Morse titles, Last Bus to Woodstock and The Dead of Jericho, and the author of the series was Colin Dexter. I discovered that if the scene in the TV series had come from the director, then the mood created was most definitely the work of the author.

  In 1973 Colin Dexter, then in his midforties, an ex–classics master, senior assistant secretary of the Oxford Local Examinations Board, and national crossword champion, took his young family on holiday to Wales. It rained nonstop. To while away the time he read both of the crime novels that he found in the guesthouse. (He has always been too discreet to reveal the titles.) The thought struck him that he could do better, and so he started to write. The first words he put to paper were:

  “Let’s wait just a bit longer,” said the girl in the dark-blue trousers and the light summer coat. “I’m sure there’s one due pretty soon.”

  Colin Dexter returned to Oxford, completed his story, had it typed up, and sent it off to
Collins, which, with its famous Gollancz yellow-jacketed detection series, was one of the top crime publishers of the day. After five months of silence Dexter contacted Gollancz again. He pointed out that they had the only copy of his manuscript, and asked if they could send it back, “please.” Gollancz returned the manuscript along with a lengthy critique, pretty much telling him not to give up his day job marking examination papers.

  Next Dexter sent his manuscript to Lord Hardinge of Penshurst at Macmillan. Lord Hardinge was just coming down with flu, so he took the manuscript home with him and retired to bed. He read the book overnight, contacted the author the very next day, and told him that he wished to publish Last Bus to Woodstock exactly as it was.

  In Last Bus to Woodstock (which didn’t make it to TV until the final episode of the second series in 1988), Sylvia Kaye, the girl in the dark-blue trousers and the light summer coat, ends up dead in the car park of the Black Prince public house, and Morse and Lewis embark on their first investigation.

  Sylvia Kaye is trying to catch a bus to Woodstock. She and another girl, whom she may or may not have known, seem to be in a hurry. Each has a rendezvous, one secret and one not. They ask a lady already waiting at the bus stop for the time of the next bus, and subsequently decide to hitch a lift. One ends up dead in the car park, and one doesn’t. Morse and Lewis then have to discover the identity of the other girl, and their investigation throws up enough suspects and illicit affairs to make even Lady Chatterley’s lover blush.

  Let’s see now: there’s Bernard Crowther, a university lecturer; his wife, Margaret; and Peter Newlove, a friend of both Bernard’s and Margaret’s. Then there’s Jennifer Coleby, who works with Sylvia (they may or may not have known each other); there’s Jennifer and Sylvia’s boss, Mr. Palmer; and that’s before we even consider Sylvia’s porn-distracted “boyfriend,” John Sanders. Morse and Lewis are further confronted by a couple of suspect letters, which Morse takes great pleasure in dissecting in exacting detail; a genuine suicide; flat tires; flat batteries; flatmates (of Jennifer Coleby, that is; in this case, Sue Widdowson, a nurse); and not one, but two seemingly realistic confessions.