Books to Die For

by John Connolly

  After that, I snapped up every Easy Rawlins novel as soon as it came out. But Mosley wasn’t content just to stay with the one series. (And what a great one it is. While many series start to flag and become repetitive after the first few entries, the Easy Rawlins series just seems to improve. My favorite—so far—is Little Scarlet, Mosley’s ninth.) Whereas most writers jump genres with all the grace and elegance of a Chinook helicopter airlifting Americans from an embassy roof in Saigon, Mosley deftly and nimbly follows his own muse. Science fiction, comedy, parable, polemic, even erotica, he’s done them all, using whichever format best fits the story he wants to tell. And all to an astonishingly successful degree.

  Which brings me to Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned. Mosley’s eighth novel, it was a shift away from Easy Rawlins. Socrates Fortlow is a murderer and rapist, freed from an Indiana prison, who has moved to Watts in L.A. to try and live as decent a life as he can and make peace with, and atonement for, his violent past. He carries an accumulation of his life’s violence and rage within him, and struggles not to resort to using his massive fists, his “rock breakers,” to settle arguments.

  This short novel comprises fourteen chapters, sequential but not too closely connected, in which Socrates finds himself in various situations that test his hard-won philosophy. He turns a young man away from crime. Runs a killer out of town. Tries to resist the wrong kind of woman. We follow him as he manages to get a menial job, a struggle that becomes an almost Herculean task, as he comports himself with dignity while having only a few cents in his pocket. And in the process, while wrestling with the always present demons of his past, he manages to find his own kind of peace in his own sort of community.

  It’s no accident that this lead character has been given the name of Socrates, the father of Western philosophy. Written in the aftermath of the L.A. riots and the Rodney King beating, this hulking ex-con becomes a contemporary inquisitor, asking difficult moral questions of a society that has retained a dogmatic grip on the letter of the law but has lost purchase on its fair and compassionate spirit.

  “First you got to survive,” Socrates says at one point. “Then you got to think; think and dream.” And he does, recounting his dreams vividly as they inform his waking life: his boyhood self walks along a shore with his aunt Bellandra while she tells him about God:

  “He ain’t black. If he was there wouldn’t be all this mess down here wit’ us. Naw. He’s blue. Blue like the ocean. Blue. Sad and cold and far away like the sky is far and blue. You got to go a long way to get to God. And even if you get there he might not say a thing. Not a damn thing.”

  Or when asked to undertake what he sees as an impossible task, he tells of another dream:

  “It was like I was a child seein’ lightnin’ for the first time. The light show made me all giddy but the thunder scared me down to my boots.”

  After the dream he resolves to do something, the best thing he can possibly do to make things better: try.

  I may have given the impression that this novel is a sentimental slushfest. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The prose is staccato, as hard as the life Socrates is leading, but not without passages of beauty and lyricism, especially in the roughest and most unexpected of places. Just like life, really.

  Socrates Fortlow appeared in a couple more novels. They were good but, I think, not as good as this one. There was even a movie made of it, directed by Michael Apted and starring Laurence Fishburne. I didn’t see it. Deliberately, I might add, because I didn’t want anyone else’s vision of the book to get in the way of mine.

  This novel, for me, is a direct line to the heart of what I love about crime fiction and good writing. No one is born bad or born evil. No one is born good. We’re all made and shaped by heredity and environment. And in turn, we then go on to shape the heredity and environment of others. Our stories are ours alone to tell. We sometimes get the endings we deserve. We always get the endings we create.

  That was the message I tried to impart to the guys I worked with in prison. Hopefully they listened to it.

  Hopefully, so did I.

  Martyn Waites is the Newcastle-born author of the critically acclaimed Joe Donovan mystery series. More recently, he and his wife, Linda, have collaborated, under the pseudonym of Tania Carver, on a hugely successful series of novels featuring Phil Brennan of the Major Incident Squad and psychologist Marina Esposito, the most recent of which is Choked. Visit him online at www.martynwaites.com.

  Black and Blue

  by Ian Rankin (1997)

  BRIAN MCGILLOWAY

  * * *

  Ian Rankin (b. 1960) is one of Britain’s leading mystery writers, and a major figure in the “Tartan Noir” school of Scottish crime writing. He is the author of more than thirty books, the majority featuring the character of Detective Inspector John Rebus, set in and around the city of Edinburgh, Scotland, in which Rankin still lives. Knots and Crosses, the first Rebus novel, was published in 1987; the seventeenth Rebus book, Standing in Another Man’s Grave, will appear later this year. Rankin has also published two books featuring an internal affairs investigator, Inspector Malcolm Fox. He has won every major mystery award, including the 2004 Edgar for Best Novel for Resurrection Men.

  * * *

  Ian Rankin’s position as one of the great modern crime writers is beyond dispute. The recipient of various awards, honorary degrees, and an OBE, he was, famously, at one point the author of one in every ten crime novels sold in the U.K.

  Also beyond dispute is the reputation of Black and Blue, the eighth of his Inspector Rebus mysteries. The novel encompasses the geography of most of Scotland, and merges four separate plot strands: the impaling of an oil rig worker on a set of railings; a case involving the 1960s killer Bible John and a modern copycat dubbed Johnny Bible; an investigation from Rebus’s own past that may have resulted in the unfair imprisonment of a criminal called Lenny Spaven; and a drugs case involving a local thug called Uncle Joe.

  It includes many of the features one would expect of a Rebus novel: musical references (not least of which is the Rolling Stones–inspired title); Big Ger Cafferty, and Rebus’s ongoing dance with that particular devil; the image of the lonely detective, drinking to forget his troubles; and the fears of his young protégée, afraid that she’ll become too much like her mentor. And her fears are echoed in turn, much like the Johnny Bible case echoes the earlier investigation into Bible John, as Rebus reflects on his relationship with his own mentor, Lawson Geddes, even as he watches one of his junior officers crack under the pressure of being a cop.

  Yet the book is also markedly different in tone, structure, and scope from the previous Rebus novels: indeed, Black and Blue is really where the series comes of age. Bleaker, darker, and intrinsically Scottish in theme and locale, this was the breakthrough novel for Rankin, and one that is still cited to all midlist authors as an example of how, sometimes, it takes a while for a series to catch its readership.

  But my fondness for the book is not due simply to its considerable strengths. Shortly after I completed my degree at Queen’s University in Belfast, a new bookstore called No Alibis opened nearby. I wandered in on one of its first days of trading and hunted around for something to buy. While I’d read classic crime, including Christie, Collins, and Conan Doyle, I had not read any modern crime fiction. The first book I bought that day was Black and Blue. Two days later I returned, buying all the previous Rebus novels, before moving on, in turn, to Dexter and Burke, Connolly and Connelly, Crais and Coben and beyond. My buying habits ballooned as I was introduced to series after series, great author after great author. But the starting point was Black and Blue.

  What struck me most forcibly was that the book was so Scottish, so rooted in the region, stretching across Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, and out to the oil rigs in the North Sea, and yet it was that which I found so refreshing. A state-of-the-union novel for a newly empowered Scotland, it was no massive surprise that it was part of the wider “Tartan Noir” mo
vement in crime writing burgeoning alongside the devolution of political power, almost as if a group of authors were examining their own identity by appropriating the genre and making it very much of their place.

  And, once again, Black and Blue is very much of its place. Referencing the actual Bible John killings of the 1960s as a starting point, Rankin weaves a fictional narrative through real streets, real bars, intertwined with real events, the verisimilitude provided by the latter allowing him to carry the reader along the fictional strands.

  It is also a novel filled with guilt. The Lenny Spaven case weighs heavily on Rebus throughout, the same case that drives his old superior Lawson Geddes to suicide. Rebus himself is described by one of his friends as “the world’s longest surviving suicide victim,” and Rebus’s colleague, Brian Holmes, suffers guilt for his beating of the criminal known as Mental Minto.

  For guilt, in many forms, is intrinsic to crime fiction. It is often the driving force compelling the detective to seek truth, to bring about justice. In Black and Blue, Rebus is so sure of his role in this search for justice that he accuses others of being bent coppers; yet, ironically, he believes that his own lies to protect Geddes, and the bullying of Minto, are justifiable. But this is where Rankin most obviously reflects the real world, for there is no “right” in this book. The killer is punished at the end, but not in the traditional sense. The cops are as corrupt as the villains, and Rebus remains in purgatory throughout, though by the close of the book he finds himself “somewhere North of hell.”

  The novel also carries with it a sense of the frontier. Living near the border regions in the north of Ireland, that awareness of boundaries, even within a city, appealed to me. And, of course, the boundaries are internal as well as physical: many of the characters cross their own moral boundaries, often dragging others across with them.

  Ultimately, though, my love of this book is because it, in part, inspired me to want to write. Coupled with the works of the other authors I’ve mentioned, and many more besides, it convinced me that the crime narrative was the perfect one for engaging with real social issues. All police procedurals are, at their most basic, an examination of past events in order to better understand a present situation. I had not before found a form and genre which better allowed an author to reflect the reality of life, and to engage with the kinds of social changes and issues that were impacting on the newly flourishing Northern Ireland, a place finding its feet and trying to come to terms with thirty years of mayhem. It is no exaggeration to say that I would not have started writing crime fiction had it not been for Black and Blue.

  Brian McGilloway was born in Derry, Northern Ireland, in 1974. He is currently head of English in St. Columb’s College in the city. His Inspector Devlin novels have been short-listed for a CWA Dagger, the Ireland AM Irish Crime Fiction Book of the Year, and the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year, while the first Lucy Black novel, Little Girl Lost, was awarded the McCrea Literary Award by the University of Ulster in 2011. The fifth Devlin novel, The Nameless Dead, was published earlier this year. Brian lives near the Irish borderlands with his wife and their four children. Visit him online at www.brianmcgilloway.com.

  The Ax

  by Donald E. Westlake (1997)

  LISA LUTZ

  * * *

  Donald E. Westlake (1933–2008) was a prolific writer of novels and short stories, most of them in the mystery genre, and operated under more pseudonyms than many convicted fraudsters. He was a committed writer from his youth, and began writing soft-porn novels under the pen name Alan Marshall at the end of the 1950s before finally publishing his first novel as Donald Westlake, The Mercenaries, in 1960. He won Edgar Awards in three different categories, and many of his works were adapted for film, most famously his 1962 novel The Hunter, written under his Richard Stark pen name, which became the basis for John Boorman’s 1967 film Point Blank, starring Lee Marvin, as well as Ringo Lam’s Full Contact (1992) and the Mel Gibson vehicle Payback (1999).

  * * *

  I came to Donald Westlake embarrassingly late, and I admit to lying on a few occasions when asked if I’d read him. It was my secret shame that I’d never picked up a Westlake or Richard Stark book. My early crime writing heroes were Jim Thompson and Patricia Highsmith. It never occurred to me that you could get much better than that. For years, one friend asked me repeatedly if I’d read The Ax. “You really should read The Ax,” he’d say each time, alternating between pity and scorn. Finally, I read it just to shut him up.

  When you think of Westlake, one of his two most famous criminals probably comes to mind—the hard-boiled Parker or the brilliant but luckless John Dortmunder. Each inspired a great, long series of books. Burke Devore, the antihero of The Ax, bears little resemblance to either character.

  Likewise, the book has little in common with Westlake’s other novels, or with conventional crime fiction in general. In a typical crime novel, a highly motivated character does something beyond the bounds of acceptable norms. Twists and complications ensue, all the way up to a surprising and thrilling conclusion.

  While I love stacks of engrossing, action-packed, plot-driven crime novels populated with dynamic and ruthless characters as much as the next gal, the one that I call my favorite is not one of those, exactly. It skips most of the dependable pleasures of the genre in favor of something harder and more mundane. If it’s extraordinary—and I think it is—that’s because it’s the most ordinary crime novel I’ve ever read.

  The Ax is neither hard-boiled nor colorful, nor is it even suspenseful in the usual sense (though it does maintain a brand of cavalier tension that only Westlake could pull off). The protagonist wants something, so he kills a number of people to get it. That’s a reasonable enough premise for a crime novel, and we could expect things to get complicated from there. But surprisingly, that’s as complicated as the plot gets.

  Burke Devore, an ordinary, responsible man, has been looking for work since his job as a project manager at a Connecticut paper mill was eliminated by corporate downsizing eleven months before. In a shriveling industry, Devore can count the number of potential new jobs on one hand. For every job that’s available, there’s always a better candidate. Eventually, he finds his dream job at a paper-processing plant in Arcadia, New York, except the position is already filled. With mounting debt and a family to take care of, Burke has only one idea left: eliminate the competition. Literally.

  It’s tough to think of another work, including any of Highsmith’s, that treats a criminal transformation so matter-of-factly, without even an occasional wink or nudge to lighten the mood. It could be argued that a few recent TV series (hi, Dexter) have drawn inspiration from The Ax—but, if so, inspiration was all they drew from it. Burke Devore may have broken bad a decade before Walter White cooked his first batch of meth, but the similarities end there. The pleasure of Breaking Bad lies in the increasingly twisted consequences of its hero’s decision to do wrong in order to do right by his family. By contrast, Burke Devore’s path from milquetoast to murderer couldn’t be straighter.

  Devore manages his project just as you’d expect a project manager to do. He puts out an employment ad in a trade journal to identify other applicants and then whittles down the list of prospects to the seven most likely to beat him out of the job. And then he sets out to kill them, one by one.

  What follows is not a series of surprises and increasingly intricate plot points, or entanglements with alluring women and compromised accomplices, but a straightforward account of Devore’s steady progress toward his mundane goal of landing a secure job. Some of the killings go smoothly, some do not. He’s questioned by the police, and lies to his wife about his missions. Through it all, despite the grisly acts, he remains steadfastly, disquietingly normal. He’s just a guy who wants to work at the only thing he’s qualified to do.

  So where’s the interest? What makes this story more than just a bunch of stuff that happens? Westlake hints at it in The Ax’s two epigraphs. The first is
a relatively long section from Henry James’s The Art of Fiction, concluding with, “The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.” The second is a chilling quote by Thomas G. Labrecque, former CEO of Chase Manhattan Bank: “If you’re doing what you think is right for everyone involved, then you’re fine. So I’m fine.”

  To me, The Ax, more than any other crime novel, attempts to represent the kind of life that real people live. For most of us, life is not about a big heist, or crimes of passion, or hunting down a clever serial killer in Iceland. For an increasing number of us, normal life is about managing to get by. Crime may not often enter our lives, but Westlake uses it to ask such vital questions as, “What are we willing to do to get what we want or need?” and, “What norms are we willing to transcend in an effort to remain normal?”

  Devore’s motivation isn’t so open-ended. Unlike Parker or Dortmunder, he explains himself quite plainly. And this is where The Ax, in addition to being a hell of a great read, is even more pertinent now than when it was written:

  The end of what I’m doing, the purpose, the goal, is good, clearly good. I want to take care of my family; I want to be a productive part of society; I want to put my skills to use; I want to work and pay my own way and not be a burden to the taxpayers. The means to that end has been difficult, but I’ve kept my eye on the goal, the purpose. The end justifies the means. Like the CEOs, I have nothing to feel sorry for.

  Lisa Lutz is the author of the Spellman series of comedic crime novels (beginning with The Spellman Files and Heads You Lose (with David Hayward). She lives in rural New York. Visit her online at www.lisalutz.com.