Books to Die For

by John Connolly

  In Dora Suarez, Raymond adds the internal workings of a twisted masochist and hired killer, plus a queasy contemporary version of the Hellfire Club. Then there is the figure of Dora herself, dead at the novel’s opening, revealing herself to us slowly and painfully through her diary. This short yet structured novel is English crime fiction’s equivalent to Munch’s The Scream—an eloquent nightmare from which the reader can never completely escape.

  Why isn’t Raymond better known and more widely read? He became an icon for fans of the polar (detective novel) in France, and I’ve heard writers in the United States and U.K. rave about him. Perhaps his vision was too bleak for the world at large, or perhaps his version of the crime story veered too wildly from the accepted and acceptable norm in the U.K. There are, after all, precious few red herrings, suspects, and twists. Instead, Raymond charts a linear course toward judgment and retribution, while the detective sergeant’s soul becomes ever more scarred.

  Back in 1997, the Waterstone’s Guide to Crime Fiction put it well when it said that Derek Raymond was “a disturbing talent” who “deserves to be read by those of a strong disposition and a love of sincerity and savagery.” Those milky, piercing eyes had the power of X-ray. They saw horror lurking just below the surface of everyday existence. These books are novels, but also reports from a front line of casual cruelty in a world lacking empathy.

  Ian Rankin lives in Edinburgh, and is best known for his series featuring DI John Rebus. He has lived in London and France as well as Scotland, and like Derek Raymond once worked on a vineyard. Unlike Derek Raymond, he’s only been married once. Visit him online at www.ianrankin.net.

  A Dance at the Slaughterhouse

  by Lawrence Block (1991)

  ALISON GAYLIN

  * * *

  Best known for his Matt Scudder and Bernie Rhodenbarr novels, Lawrence Block (b. 1938) has published more than sixty novels and 100 short stories. In addition, he has written five books for writers, the most recent being The Liar’s Bible (2011). First published in the 1950s under a pseudonym while writing in the paperback porn genre, Block’s debut under his own name arrived in 1957 with the short story “You Can’t Lose.” He has been the recipient of multiple prizes for his novels and short stories, including the Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master Award in 1994 and a Lifetime Achievement award from the Private Eye Writers of America in 2002.

  * * *

  “I couldn’t think how I knew him.”

  —Matt Scudder, A Dance at the Slaughterhouse

  A middle-aged man and a teenaged boy watch a boxing match together. They could be father and son, though they don’t look very much alike. At one point, the man ruffles the boy’s hair—a simple, affectionate gesture. But it’s one that sticks in the mind of another spectator, private detective Matt Scudder. He’s seen that gesture before, but where?

  We’ve all had experiences like this, those fleeting moments of déjà vu. But rarely do they take us to the obsidian-dark terrain traveled in Lawrence Block’s unforgettable, Edgar Award–winning novel. To give you an idea of how not-for-the-faint-of-heart A Dance at the Slaughterhouse is: the gesture Scudder recognizes turns out to be one that he’d seen, months earlier, as part of an investigation he’d done for a friend.

  He’d seen it in a snuff film.

  Talk about a challenge for a writer. Snuff films: the stuff of bad B-movies and urban legends. In less skillful hands than Block’s, such a conceit could have been exploitative, over-the-top, laughable even. But here, it is terrifying. And it is real.

  Later, as Scudder re-views the pilfered snuff film with his girlfriend—the clever, good-hearted prostitute Elaine Mardell—she nervously cracks jokes at the start, and then goes completely silent as we hear, in the simplest and barest of terms, what is happening on-screen. It is a scene that will haunt you long after you’ve finished the book, not just for the horrifying events that the couple witness, but for Elaine’s reaction to them. When Scudder stops the film at the halfway point, this very worldly woman seems to be in a pain that’s close to physical.

  “Her upper arms were pressed against her sides and she was trembling slightly,” Scudder informs the reader. “I said, ‘I don’t think you want to watch the rest of this.’ She didn’t respond right away, just sat there on the couch, breathing in and out, in and out. Then, she said, ‘That was real, wasn’t it?’”

  It is a true loss of innocence, and we fall along with her. After Elaine heads off to bed, Scudder watches the rest of the film, describing it in the same unflinching way. Unlike Elaine, we cannot leave the room. We cannot look away. And for this awful information, we will never be the same.

  Like Scudder, we need to see this thing through to the end, and that we do. Convinced that the stranger at the boxing match is the same masked man he’d seen sexually torturing and killing another young boy on tape, Scudder sets out to find and capture the man and his female accomplice before the new boy—the boy that the stranger seemed so kindly and comfortable with—meets the same fate. In doing so, the inherently moral ex-cop embarks on a labyrinthine path through the darkest corners of New York society, high and low.

  In Block’s world, evil does not discriminate along class lines. For all the petty thieves, drug dealers, and street hustlers Scudder comes in contact with on his quest to save the unknown boy, they all seem to have aspects to their personality that are admirable, whether it’s a good sense of humor, an inbred loyalty, or a strong will to survive. A wealthy, locally famous widower, on the other hand, is a study in cowardice, and he is guaranteed to make the skin crawl.

  Scudder’s encounter with the widower—and the horrific tale that he tells—is one of the many shocks to the system this book delivers. But it is the characters—all rich and multidimensional—that truly resonate. And none so powerfully as Matt Scudder himself.

  A recovering alcoholic who has made some tragic mistakes in his lifetime, Scudder has grown and changed throughout Block’s series, and by now he is a man whose every move revolves around self-restraint. Comfortable as he is in his own skin, Scudder often seems at war with his instincts, whether it’s the intense desire that justice be served, the intense desire to drink . . . or simply intense desire. Like the rough-edged, pre-Giuliani New York in which the book takes place, Scudder is at once sophisticated and base—anger, passion, excess, and empathy all doing battle beneath that sober, controlled exterior.

  Most human beings are a mass of contradictions, and Scudder is, above all, human. Despite his many weaknesses, he is compelled to do good at all costs. One of the most heartbreaking aspects of his character is his frustration with his own limitations, such as the painfully honest moment, late in his investigation, when he raises his hand at an AA meeting. “I’ve felt like drinking all day,” he says. “I’m in a situation I can’t do anything about and it feels as though I ought to be able to . . . I’m an alcoholic and I want everything to be perfect and it never is.”

  Indeed, the world Scudder finds himself in is about as far from perfect as you can get. By the book’s chilling climax, he is trapped in a type of nightmare, face-to-face with the worst kind of living, breathing monster. His investigation has led him to the truth, and it is an ugly one. But the question remains: What will he do about it? Will Scudder stand back, stay in control, and let the wheels of justice grind at their own pace—or will he let his anger and hatred overtake him in the same way that he once allowed himself to be consumed by alcohol?

  Without giving anything away, I will say that A Dance at the Slaughterhouse’s conclusion is possibly the most satisfying I have read, in any book, ever. And the story itself, for all its compassion, and cruelty, and brutal, heartrending contradiction, is one that will stay with me, always.

  And to think, it all started with that one, simple gesture.

  USA TODAY best-selling author Alison Gaylin began her career with the Edgar-nominated Hide Your Eyes and has since been published in the United States, the U.K., France, Germany, Norway, the Neth
erlands, and Japan. Her latest book, And She Was, is the first in a new series featuring Brenna Spector, a PI blessed—and cursed—with perfect memory. Its sequel, The Murder Mile, is due out in the winter of 2013. A graduate of Northwestern University and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, Alison lives in upstate New York with her husband and daughter. Visit her online at www.alisongaylin.com.

  The Black Echo

  by Michael Connelly (1992)

  JOHN CONNOLLY

  * * *

  Michael Connelly (b. 1956) is one of the most famous, and critically lauded, mystery writers in America. He is the author of twenty-six novels, including the two series of books featuring LAPD detective Harry Bosch, and the “Lincoln Lawyer,” Mickey Haller, respectively. Since 2008, these series have been interlinked, as Haller and Bosch have been revealed to be half brothers, and the first of the Haller novels, The Lincoln Lawyer (2005) was made into a film starring Matthew McConaughey. Connelly is also the author of three novels featuring Jack McEvoy, the most famous of which is probably The Poet (1996); three stand-alone books; and Crime Beat (2006), a collection of his newspaper journalism. His career received a considerable boost in 1994 when then president Bill Clinton was photographed with a copy of Connelly’s fourth novel, The Concrete Blonde (1994), under his arm.

  * * *

  Of the early Californian crime novelists, four may be regarded as indisputably great: they are Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and Ross Macdonald. What links these writers is that none of them, strictly speaking, could be described as lifelong Californians.

  Chandler was born in Chicago, Illinois, and spent his early years in Nebraska. He received a classical education at Dulwich College, London (his fellow alumni include the writer P. G. Wodehouse and the explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton), and passed summers in Waterford in Ireland. He eventually reached Los Angeles in 1913, when he was twenty-five, and was actually a British subject for almost half a century. Macdonald, admittedly, was born in Los Gatos, California, in 1915, but was raised in Canada and didn’t return to the state until the 1950s. Hammett and Cain, meanwhile, were both born in Maryland, a state as geographically, culturally, and socially distinct from California as it is possible to imagine.

  Yet if we want to explore a fictionalized version of California from the 1920s, when Hammett starts to publish, until the 1970s, when Macdonald’s output ceases, then those are the writers to whom we can usefully turn, at least where the mystery genre is concerned. Yes, they are outsiders, but so is every other non–Native American person in the state. California is the place that is sought out when all others have disappointed; it is the end of the line. As Lew Welch put it in “The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings”: This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go. But the detective in mystery fiction is also an outsider: by birth, or appearance, or personal eccentricity, or race, or gender, but most especially if the detective is a moral protagonist, an honest being, and perhaps nowhere more so than in the Californian crime novel.

  It’s no coincidence that the best of the early private eye stories sprang from the state’s soil, for California has a long and ignoble history of corruption. In 1899, the founding president of Stanford University, David Starr Jordan, wrote an essay entitled “California and the Californians” in which he bemoaned the political situation in the state. The bosses ruled Los Angeles and San Francisco; land use was uncontrolled; and state government was a puppet of the Southern Pacific Transportation Company, to the extent that the Railroad Commission was described as Southern Pacific’s “literary bureau.” Jordan saw little hope for change, and the state did not disappoint in this regard. In 2012, a study by the University of Illinois found Greater Los Angeles to be the second most corrupt metro region in the United States, with 1,275 federal convictions since 1976 for extortion, bribery, conflicts of interest, and election crime. (Perhaps embarrassingly for the University of Illinois, the most corrupt region was Chicago, with 1,531 federal convictions, which suggests that there is much to be said for not asking questions to which one doesn’t already know the answer.)

  If the establishment in a state has been corrupted, if it has been bought and paid for by wealthy and unscrupulous men, then to whom can the poor or the vulnerable turn if they find themselves in a situation of even greater victimhood than the one that they already occupy? Not to the police, because the police function as an arm of the state, and their allegiance is not to justice, or even to the law, but to those who own them. Even when they are not actively corrupt, they are unable to deal with pervasive evil either because they are hidebound by legalities that are too rigid or insensitive to function properly, or because the system in which they operate is inadequate for dealing with the massive task at hand.

  The answer that mystery fiction gives us comes in the form of the private eye, himself a descendant of the Western hero, the gunfighter who cleans up the corrupt town when the law cannot or will not do so. (Hammett’s Red Harvest [1929] is essentially a Western in which an unnamed operative sets two rival gangs against each other so that they destroy themselves utterly, and is arguably the point at which the Western novel metamorphoses into the private eye novel.) So we have the knight-errant that is Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, the empathetic Christ figure that is Macdonald’s Lew Archer, and the avenging angel that is Hammett’s Continental Op. They are all outsiders, even in this state filled with outsiders, but they are relatively untarnished, and their interests lie in justice, not law.

  All of which is a way of putting Michael Connelly into some kind of context. He, too, is an outsider in California: born in Philadelphia, and raised in Florida from the age of twelve, he moved to Los Angeles in 1987, when he was already thirty-one, to take up a position as a crime reporter with the Los Angeles Times. In 1992, he published his first novel, The Black Echo, featuring the LAPD homicide detective Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch, still Connelly’s most iconic creation. Bosch, although a policeman, is himself an outsider. He may carry a detective’s badge, but he is at one remove from his own department. When we first encounter him in The Black Echo, he has been demoted from the Robbery-Homicide Division to the homicide desk at Hollywood Division because of the shooting of a suspect. Despite being partnered with various detectives over the course of the series, he remains a solitary figure. His relationship with his superiors is confrontational to the point of outright rebellion. At one point, he even temporarily retires from the LAPD to become a private investigator, but something is slightly unsatisfying about the two PI novels in question, Lost Light (2003) and The Narrows (2004). Bosch’s outsider status comes across most powerfully when it is contrasted with the institution of which he is nominally a part: the LAPD. He is at his finest when he is most restricted.

  As with all the best detectives, Bosch’s personal life is a mess, although he does manage to console himself by bedding a respectable number of women. He is divorced from the former FBI agent and ex-con Eleanor Wish, who first appears in The Black Echo, and whose own story is followed in subsequent novels. He has a daughter, Maddie, and a half brother, Mickey Haller, the hero of Connelly’s “Lincoln Lawyer” novels.

  Reading back over that last paragraph, it strikes me that it’s almost a simulacrum of one of Connelly’s own. When I first began reading him, I was thrown slightly by his style, or a perceived absence of it. I had been profoundly influenced by the novelist James Lee Burke, whose use of language—lyrical, poetic, and steeped in metaphor—is unparalleled in the genre. Connelly’s prose style is closer to the journalistic, which is perhaps unsurprising given his background as a Pulitzer Prize–nominated reporter. It eschews showiness, and reminds me of the editorial edict presented to most news journalists: if you find a particularly lovely turn of phrase in your news story, take it out, because it will distract from the purpose of the piece, which is to communicate and explain. This is not to say that Connelly does not write well: he does (and, like most writers, he can’t resist the occasional flourish), but for the most part h
e favors a style that is studiedly unassuming, which seems rather appropriate if one has met the author under discussion. His prose does not draw attention to itself. It is a tool to be used carefully, sculpting character and action.

  I come from a journalistic background myself. Like a lot of journalists, I went into the field because it was a way to be paid to write, but journalism is a discipline, and I found it stifling at times. Writing fiction gave me a freedom that I was denied at the newspaper, and I sloughed off what I considered to be the stylistic shackles of the news desk at the first opportunity. Connelly chose a different path, adapting what he had learned as a journalist to the practice of fiction.

  All of these facets of Connelly’s craft were already present in The Black Echo. As a first published novel, it remains a stunningly accomplished piece of work, and is certainly one of the finest debuts in the genre, unsurprisingly winning the Edgar for Best First Novel. In The Black Echo, Bosch, a Vietnam veteran who served as a “tunnel rat,” hunting the Vietcong in their underground bases, becomes involved in the investigation into the death of a fellow tunnel rat named Billy Meadows, and discovers that the death may be linked to a bank robbery carried out using tunnels beneath the city. He teams up with the FBI—and the aforementioned Eleanor Wish—to catch the thieves.