Blessed Am I Amongst Women

The internet really is a wonderful place. You hang out, you meet lovely people, you talk about blowing up hospitals and Kurt Vonnegut. That is to say, you talk about blowing up hospitals, and Kurt Vonnegut. There’ll be no exploding Kurt Vonneguts on these pages, no sirree, ma’am.
  Anyway, Alex Donald was kind enough to host me over at her Multiverse yesterday, where she asked me, among other things, about the meta-fictional elements of ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL and who influenced the novel most, which is when the name Kurt Vonnegut came up. If you’re interested, the interview can be found here …
  Alex was also good enough to read and review AZC last week, with the gist of her opinion running thusly:

“Darkly funny, superbly written, meta-fictional and with more than a passing nod to Paul Auster, Flann O’Brien and (dare I say it) Chuck Palahniuk’s FIGHT CLUB, ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL l fuses literary and crime fiction to create something utterly original.” - Alex Donald

  I thank you kindly, ma’am.
  Meanwhile, over on the other side of the Atlantic, Elizabeth White hosted a guest post from yours truly on her blog, in which I talked about violence in the crime novel, and how the impact of real-life violence alters what you write - or whether you write at all. It also features such searing insights into the contemporary crime novel as the following:

“Meanwhile, it’s also true that the Irish crime novel, in common with most other territories’ crime novels, has for its structure the basic three-act drama of Greek tragedy. To wit: 1) Things Are Mostly Okay; 2) Things Get Screwed Up and / or Someone Sleeps With His Mom; 3) Things Are Mostly Okay Again.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …
  Not all the internet ladies have been so kind, of course. Over at Good Reads, ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL is currently thriving on a 4.29 average from 17 ratings. The average would probably be considerably higher had not one Celia Lynch, bless her cotton socks, given the book a one-star rating, even though the book’s status is ‘gave up’. Now, I know there’s absolutely no rules when it comes to internet reviewing, and that the ethics and standards that apply to professional reviewers go out the window, but isn’t it a bit much, regardless of your reviewing status, to award a rating to a book you haven’t had the courtesy to finish? Mind you, I suppose I should feel chuffed; the only other books Celia gave up on were by Joanne Harris and William Burroughs.
  Finally, and for all of you who have been waiting breathlessly for the Tuam Herald verdict on AZC - it’s in. To wit:

“While the character-coming-to-life device is clever enough, the real beauty of this book is the sharp dialogue, the witty vignettes and the well-sharpened digs. The running commentary on the state of the world is priceless … his delightfully jaundiced take on our current ‘reality’ could provide a political primer for any arriving alien unluckily enough to be beamed down here right now.” - Tuam Herald

  For the full report, including the reviewer’s appreciation of Raquel Welch in her fur bikini, clickety-click here …

  Finally, this week’s reading: Paul Johnston’s THE SILVER STAIN is the latest Alex Mavros novel, is set on Crete and dabbles in the Nazi invasion of that island in 1941; it’s terrific stuff. I’m also reading THE BOOK OF JOB AS A GREEK TRAGEDY by Horace M. Kallen, which is a hoot and a half; and THE GOLDEN SCALES by Parker Bilal, a private eye tale set in contemporary Cairo that may or may not herald a wave of Egyptian hardboiled noir.
  So there you have it: this week’s AZC flummery in full. Do tune in next week, when we’ll very probably be talking about Sophia Loren, Edward Anderson’s THIEVES LIKE US, the new Donald Westlake novel from Hard Case Crime and what it was like to meet Amanda Hocking (lovely person, very unassuming, big Kurt Vonnegut fan).

Hit And Myth

Just how timeless, exactly, are the themes of noir? That’s a question implicitly explored by Gerard Brennan and Mike Stone, co-editors of REQUIEMS FOR THE DEPARTED: IRISH CRIME, IRISH MYTHS, a collection of short crime stories which draws on Irish mythology for inspiration, and features Ken Bruen, Arlene Hunt, Adrian McKinty, Brian McGilloway, Garbhan Downey and Sam Millar, among others. The book gets an outing in the Arts pages of today’s Irish Times, with the intro kicking off thusly:

Star-crossed lovers on the lam. It could be Red and Mumsie in Geoffrey Homes’ BUILD MY GALLOWS HIGH; Doc and Carol in Jim Thompson’s THE GETAWAY , maybe Bowie and Keechie in Edward Anderson’s THIEVES LIKE US, or any number of classic noir tales.
  But Diarmuid and Grainne?
  REQUIEMS FOR THE DEPARTED: IRISH CRIME, IRISH MYTHS is a compilation of contemporary short crime stories based on Irish myths and legends.
  “There are many parallels between contemporary crime tales and Irish mythology,” says Gerard Brennan, who is co-editor of the collection, along with Mike Stone.
  “Consider one of the most powerful icons of crime fiction: the femme fatale. Seductive, irresistible and deadly . . . this description hangs well on the great queen and Irish war deity, Morrigan, who amongst her many adventures steals from the mighty Cúchulainn, offers him her love, and when spurned, engineers his death.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

The Thieves’ Journal*

Shawn Patrick Bagley (right) tags the Grand Vizier for a project Patti Abbott is working on called Fridays: The Book You Have to Read, the gist of which is to refresh people’s memories about great books that might have slipped off the radar. Quoth Patti:

“I’m worried that we are letting some great books of the recent past slide out of print and out of our consciousness. Not the first-tier classics we can all name perhaps, but that group of books that comes next.”

Sounds just about jake to us. The Grand Vizier’s choice? Edward Anderson’s Depression-era classic, THIEVES LIKE US. To wit:

“They steal …”

According to Raymond Chandler, THIEVES LIKE US (1937) is “one of the great forgotten novels of the ’30s”. Given that Edward Anderson published only one other novel (HUNGRY MEN, in 1935), and that Anderson garners little more than a footnote in the margins of American literature, it is perhaps unsurprising that THIEVES LIKE US has been consigned to the dustbin of history.
  Taking its cue from the social realism of John Steinbeck’s dustbowl sagas, and utilising the spare, hard-boiled rhythms of Ernest Hemingway and Dashiell Hammet, THIEVES LIKE US represents a literary masterclass in social critique. Anderson took to the road to research his debut novel, HUNGRY MEN, which chronicled the plight of the transients and hobos who travelled the trains during the Depression of the `30s; his experience had not noticeably diminished his compassion for a disenfranchised, alienated underclass by the time he came to write THIEVES LIKE US.
  HUNGRY MEN won the Doubleday Story prize in 1935; Anderson used the prize money to travel to Texas, where he interviewed his cousin, then a convicted bank robber serving time in Huntsville State Penitentiary. Taking the contemporary exploits of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker as his starting point, the author recounted the exploits of the young jail-breaker Bowie and his lover Keechie as they twist and turn in a desperate, doomed attempt to escape the law, their criminal background, and the eventually lethal suspicions of society at large.
  America had suffered economic deprivation on the scale of the Depression-era ’30s before, most notably in the 1870s and the 1890s. What made the depression of the ’30s different was the mobility of the ravaged underclass; when the communist authorities in the USSR sanctioned the screening of John Ford’s THE GRAPES OF WRATH (1940), in order to demonstrate the folly of capitalism, it had to be withdrawn again when the proletariat marvelled at how even the most deprived of the American poor could afford to drive cars.
  Bowie and Keechie’s battle to establish a life worth living was not a new story to proletarian America, but their cross-country flight and dogged determination to stay one step ahead of the law suggested that – in theory at least – it was possible to escape the ties that bind. The Promised Land beckoned, and all a man and a woman needed was a tank full of gas and one even break …

* With abject apologies to Jean Genet

Flick Lit # 29: Thieves Like Us / They Live By Night

“One of the great forgotten novels of the ’30s,” claimed Ray Chandler. Taking its cue from the social realism of John Steinbeck’s dustbowl sagas and utilising the spare, hard-boiled rhythms of Hemingway and Hammett, Edward Anderson’s Thieves Like Us (1937) is a masterclass in social critique. Anderson took to the road to research his debut novel, Hungry Men, which chronicled the plight of the transients and hobos who travelled the trains during the Depression of the ’30s, and his experience had not noticeably diminished his compassion for a disenfranchised, alienated underclass by the time he came to write Thieves Like Us. Hungry Men won the Doubleday Story prize in 1935 and Anderson used the prize money to travel to Texas, where he interviewed his cousin, then a convicted bank robber serving time in Huntsville State Penitentiary. Taking the contemporary exploits of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker as his starting point, the author recounts the exploits of the young jail-breaker Bowie and his lover Keechie as they twist and turn in a doomed attempt to escape the law, their criminal background and the potentially lethal suspicions of society at large. What made the Depression of the 1930s different to others America had experienced was the mobility of the ravaged underclass: Bowie and Keechie’s battle to establish a life worth living was not a new story to proletarian America, but their cross-country flight and dogged determination to stay one step ahead of the law suggested that it was possible to escape the ties that bind. The Promised Land beckoned, and all a man needed was a tank full of gas and one even break. The latter proved elusive. To hammer home the point, Nicholas Ray’s film They Live By Night (1948) boasts an even more brooding title than that of Anderson’s novel. Even as they flee the system that grinds them down, Bowie (Farley Granger) and Keechie (Cathy O’Donnell) are condemned to a nocturnal, claustrophobic existence in the shadows of civilised society. But They Live By Night differs from the conventional noir tales of greed, lust and cool amorality in the way Ray emphasises the compassion that lay at the heart of Anderson’s novel. Bowie and Keechie may be on the wrong side of the law, no-hopers doomed to failure, but their instincts towards one another, their devotion and mutual tenderness, set them apart from the usual suspects of back-stabbing double crossers. Permeated with a sweetness that resists sentimentality, the film celebrates the naivety and grace of two kids trying to come to terms with a world that is harsher than their worst nightmares prepared them for. Their two-dollar wedding, in a strange, uncaring city, represents a travesty of the hope woven into all marriage vows, and the heart aches.- Michael McGowan