The Lone Ranger and Toronto

Canada is justifiably lauded for many things, but gritty urban noir isn’t one of them. Unless, of course, you’re one of the cognoscenti who’s read John McFetridge’s (pictured right, in classic ‘having cake and eating it’ mode) ‘Dirty Sweet’ (2006) and ‘Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere’ (2007). Pared-down tales of Toronto’s dark underbelly, the novels have been favourably compared with Elmore Leonard’s Detroit-set stories for their smartly observed characters, sharp dialogue, and a willingness to go beyond simplistic characterisations to explore the complex nature of crime and criminality.
  His latest offering was published last year in Canada as ‘Swap’, but arrives in the US bearing the title ‘Let It Ride’. It’s his best novel yet, a distillation of the elements that made the previous novels such compelling reading, and yet it’s a complex story of interwoven motivations that virtually defies a synopsis. John? Can you tell us what it’s all about in fifty words or less?
  “My publisher would love it if I could,” he laughs. “It’s about how relationships change over time, how the balance of power shifts ... It’s about an ex-marine who comes to Toronto from Detroit to set up a supply line for drugs from a guy he met in Afghanistan who’s now a member of a biker gang. And he meets a woman who’s robbing spas and wants to rob the bikers. And there are cops ...”
  Before John McFetridge, Toronto revelled in the name of ‘Toronto the Good’. Is it true that he’s personally responsible for the steep rise in Toronto crime statistics? Is it even safe to visit Toronto these days?
  “Yes, this is true, the only crime in Toronto is in books, otherwise it really is New York run by the Swiss. No crime, clean streets, all the people friendly all the time. Honestly, though, almost everything that happens in my books has its roots in something that actually happened here, from the closed-down brewery being used as a giant grow-op to the eight bikers killed in one night, to the highest ranking narcotics officers on the Toronto police being arrested for drug dealing.”
  As in all good crime writing, McFetridge’s tales explore how conventional notions of street-level criminality impacts on all strata of society, a pervasive poison that goes right to the top of the power structure. Is there a moral dimension to writing that kind of fiction? Or is crime fiction purely an entertainment that reflects the world we live in?
  “If it accurately reflects the world we live in,” he says, “then I think that’s the moral dimension. I try to show the circumstances that allow the criminals to operate, the ways that they justify criminal behaviour to themselves as being just business, and the internal politics and the restrictions on the police that make it difficult to catch these guys. Any conclusions are up to the reader.”
  McFetridge gets compared to Elmore Leonard quite a lot. Does that ever get boring?
  “It’s certainly not boring yet, though he must be getting tired of the number of writers being compared to him. I think it’s a style of writing that’s almost a genre of its own by now. I think of it starting with Hemingway and short stories like ‘The Killers’ and ‘Fifty Grand’ and then maybe it split into crime and literary with Elmore Leonard, and everyone who gets compared to him in the crime camp, and people like Richard Ford and Raymond Carver in the literary camp.”
  Are there any writers who make him you bite his fingers with envy?
  “Lots. So many. And the great thing is there are more all the time, every year more writers come out with debut books that are so good.”
  That said, McFetridge is of the opinion that there should be more good writers getting published every year.
  “I know of a few very good writers,” he says, “who’ve had a number of books published, who are having trouble finding a publisher for their new work. More and more I see any book that falls outside the easy description, that’s difficult to categorize or take risks - all the things that literature should do - having trouble finding a publisher. I can understand the employees of the publishing companies having bosses to answer to who have shareholders to answer to, so the drive becomes the most amount of profit in the shortest time above all else, but that mentality isn’t really the roots of publishing.”
  To that end, McFetridge has recently taken the radical step of setting up a writers’ co-operative organisation.
  “The idea is a kind of novelists version of the original United Artists,” he says, “a company run by the artists. Democracy sounds like a great idea but it’s messy and hard to work on a day-to-day basis, but I’d like to try. If the co-op members are all people who love books and who love literature and that’s their main priority, then I think it’s possible they could do great things. I’m not suggesting it be a non-profit organization (at least not on purpose) but that the drive for the most amount of profit possible not be the main decision making factor all the time.”
  It’s a fascinating concept, especially given the technological advances of recent years, which should in theory make it a lot easier for writers to connect with readers while minimising the number of middle-men involved in the process. For more info, clickety-click here ...
  Meanwhile, do yourself a favour and check out John McFetridge’s superb ‘Let It Ride’. If its quality is anything to go by, Toronto’s Lone Ranger won’t be riding away into the sunset any time soon.

  This article was first published in Crimespree Magazine.

The Best Things In Life Are Free … Books

The generous folk at Serpent’s Tail have been kind enough to offer us three copies of Adrian McKinty's THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD to give away, with the blurb elves wittering thusly:

Michael Forsythe might be, as one of his assailants puts it, ‘un-fucking-killable’, but that doesn’t seem to deter people from trying. He’s living in Lima, reasonably well-hidden by the FBI’s Witness Protection Program, but Bridget Callaghan, whose fiancé he murdered twelve years ago, has an enduring wish to see him dead. So when her two goon assassins pass him the phone to speak to her before they kill him, Michael thinks she just wants to relish the moment. In fact, out of desperation, she is giving him a chance to redeem himself. All he has to do is return to Ireland and find her missing daughter. Before midnight. Tenacious and brutal, with the hunted man’s instinct for trouble, Forsythe leaves a trail of mayhem as he tries to end the bloody feud once and for all. THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD pulsates with break-neck action and wry literary references; McKinty’s distinctly Irish voice packs a ferocious punch.

Those dulcet tones? Shurely shome mishtake. Anyhoo, to be in with a chance of winning a copy, just answer the following question.

Is the structure of THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD loosely modelled on:
(a) ULYSSES;
(b) ANNA KARENINA;
(c) THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS;
(d) Sorry, I came over all unnecessary from the heady waft of testosterone. What was the question again?

Answers via the comment box, leaving an email contact address (please use (at) rather than @ to confuse the spam-munchkins), before noon on Thursday, June 19. Et bon chance, mes amis …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: CHASIN’ THE WIND by Michael Haskins

For anyone who has visited Key West, or any Caribbean island, the first thing they notice is a phenomenon known as ‘island time’. Things travel at their own pace. If a beer takes 10 minutes to get to you, so be it. If you have to wait in line 15 minutes while the clerk and a shopper chat, life goes on. What visitors don’t realize is that ‘island time’ is just one outward sign of an entire lifestyle which is totally foreign to most Americans and Europeans. While non-islanders see it as rudeness and slothfulness, locals wonder what all the rush and demands are.
  Michael Haskins gives us a glimpse of ‘island time’ and island life in his debut novel, CHASIN’ THE WIND, which is set in and around Key West’s ‘Old Town’. With ‘Mad Mick’ Murphy, a freelance journalist, as our tour guide, we are exposed to the sultry lazy days and the laid-back bar hopping island nights that most of us secretly envy. One would almost expect Hemingway to walk through the door and start an argument at the bar.
  Mick, who has a supposedly violent past, has spent most of his career writing about Central and South American foreign affairs. He has made Key West his hermitage from the ghosts of his former life in California when he is suddenly confronted with violence and the need for revenge upon discovering the murder of one of his sailing buddies. Haskins takes us on a wild-wind journey of inept local police, mysterious agents from competing ‘agencies’, Cuban espionage and soulless murderers. The story rushes you along the surface so fast you think you are sailing on the Gulf Stream.
  The downside to this is that, because CHASIN’ THE WIND is a thriller, Haskins gives the novel the feeling of a New York minute. Mick Murphy is someone you want to get to know, someone you want to relate with; however, we are never really given the chance.
  The end of CHASIN’ THE WIND has sequel stamped all over it, and I really hope that that is true. Michael Haskins has the wonderful ability to evoke the sights and smells of the island out of thin air, and it doesn’t hurt that he has Mick drinking Jamesons like most of us drink water. Haskins just needs to give us the same feeling for his characters, and to let the ‘Mad Mick’ Murphy series find some island time, so we can get to know the characters, their interconnections, and the plots better. – Josh Schrank

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: THE RESERVE by Russell Banks

The zeppelin, an iconic image of the 1930s, is a recurring image in Russell Banks’ THE RESERVE, which is set in the Adirondack Mountains in 1936. Jordan Groves is an artist and pilot who late one evening lands his water-plane on the lake near the luxury holiday retreat of the Cole family. There he meets Vanessa Cole, the femme fatale of the piece, an emotionally unhinged divorcée who, Siren-like, attempts to lure Groves away from his wife and children and on towards his own destruction. Vanessa and the zeppelin, which Groves encounters on one of his flights, are equally beguiling to the self-obsessed artist: both are beautifully designed symbols of freedom, both are to all intents and purposes empty. The same, unfortunately, can be said of THE RESERVE.
  Banks has written superb novels in the past, such as AFFLICTION and CLOUDSPLITTER, but where those novels had a real heft and depth, THE RESERVE is virtually weightless. Conceived as a noir thriller, and celebrated as such by no less a light than William Kennedy, it is no such thing. The writing has at times a poetic fulsomeness, particularly when Banks is describing the bucolic hinterland of the Adirondack semi-wilderness, but all too often it is flabby where it should be spare. Moreover, the great noir writers, such as James M. Cain, employed plots akin to Greek tragedy, and rendered them streamlined and focused by eschewing all but the essential details. While the hubris that eventually leads to Groves’ downfall is very much a staple of Greek tragedy, Banks unfolds his story with a melodramatic clumsiness more appropriate to a Mills and Boon romance.
  The characters too are less than believable. The author requires his readers to make a leap of faith early in the narrative but strives too hard to generate compelling characters in order that we will follow. The result is grotesque exaggerations that belong only in poorly conceived fiction. “He was probably a builder too,” Vanessa muses about Groves, “judging from his house and outbuildings, which seemed handmade to her … he cuts his own firewood to heat his house and studio. His arduous travels to distant, difficult lands – Greenland, Alaska, the Andes – were legendary. He was strong and lean and hardhanded …” The fictional Groves is a caricature of his contemporaries, Hemingway and Dos Passos, and while it is possible that Banks is subtly parodying the artistic machismo that pervaded the era, the reader is entitled to ask how relevant the exercise is now, particularly as the central issue is Groves’ flaws, not those of his peers.
  Writers should always think long and hard about making their central characters artists or sculptors or creative minds of any kind, as there is a very real danger the reader will presume there is at least an element of autobiography involved. If that is the case with THE RESERVE, then Russell Banks should be commended for having the courage to offer us such a repellent self-portrait in Jordan Groves. Whether or not the exercise justifies an entire novel is another matter; when it comes to noir, less is more. THE RESERVE might well have made for a satisfying short story, but as a novel it is a zeppelin – a good idea in its conception, but flimsy and unwieldy, and as prone to crash and burn when reality finally muscles in on the theory. – Declan Burke

This review was first published in the Sunday Business Post

We Just Want Your Extra Time And Your … KISS

Patti Abbott is working on a project 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. Last week we did Edward Anderson’s THIEVES LIKE US. This week we’re picking – trumpet parp, if you will, maestro – Horace McCoy’s KISS TOMORROW GOODBYE.

“One of the nastiest novels ever published in this country,” declared Time Magazine. “The real nihilist of the hard-boiled school, the laureate of the blank wall,” claimed Geoffrey O’Brien. The writer was Horace McCoy, the novel KISS TOMORROW GOODBYE (1948). By then French writers such as Sartre, Andre Gide and Andre Malraux were ranking McCoy alongside Faulkner, Steinbeck and Hemingway; Simone de Beauvoir went so far as to suggest that McCoy’s THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON’T THEY? (1935) was “the first existentialist novel to have appeared in America.”
  McCoy earned the existential outlook the hard way. He fought as a pilot in WWI, winning the Croix de Guerre in the process. From 1919 to 1930 he worked as a sports editor for The Dallas Journal, and also co-founded the Dallas Little Theatre. Then the Depression hit. Finding himself out of work, McCoy wrote short stories that were published in Detective-Dragnet, Detective Action Stories and Black Mask, and struggled to become a Hollywood actor.
  His experience of Hollywood during the Depression provided the material for the downbeat melodramas THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON’T THEY?, NO POCKETS IN A SHROUD (1937), and I SHOULD HAVE STAYED HOME (1938). He finally found work in Hollywood, but as a screenwriter for B-movie westerns; by the time the French writers ‘discovered’ his novels in the ‘40s, McCoy was “broke, depressed and fat from too much food and booze.”
  KISS TOMORROW GOODBYE offered redemption. McCoy’s most ambitious work, the novel follows Ralph Cotter, a Phi Beta Kappa scholar who remoulds himself as a viciously immoral killer after his breakout from prison (pausing only to head-shoot his partner, so he won’t slow him down). Once out, Cotter organises shakedown of a corrupt small-town police chief, dupes a millionaire’s daughter into falling for him, and generally engages in a relentless one-man assault on the mores of middle America. An unusual blend of rapacious action and contemplative self-examination from the reprehensible anti-hero, KISS TOMORROW GOODBYE prompted Kirkus Reviews to predict, “This will probably be quarantined from libraries but … this has a literate, nerve-lacerating, whip-lashing effectiveness.”
  Amen to that. – Declan Burke