The Mark Of Cain

The Swedish wing of the Irish crime fiction cabal, TS O’Rourke, is at it again. For lo! TS follows up his novella CANDY SAYS KILL with another short ‘n’ snappy shot of noir, aka the novella SUNSET STRIP. Quoth the blurb elves:

A travelling businessman meets a beautiful young Latina from the wrong side of the tracks. She follows him back to his hotel on Sunset Boulevard and they have sex. But then everything starts to go wrong. Waking from a drug-induced sleep, he finds his life turned upside-down and all reason gone from his world. Caught in an impossible situation and running out of time, he searches frantically for a way out …

  In terms of his bleak noir vision, stripped-back prose and being something of an early adopter of Irish crime fiction (his first hard-boiled tale, GANGLANDS, was published all the way back in 1996), TS O’Rourke qualifies as the Irish equivalent of Paul Cain. If you’ve an interest in Irish crime literature, you really can’t afford not to check him out …

Here’s One We Made Earlier: Fast One by Paul Cain

Those print-taking mommas over at The Rap Sheet were kind enough to ask us to contribute to their mammoth You’re Still The One series, in which crime-writerly types were invited to nominate the writer or novel they felt has been most unjustly overlooked, criminally forgotten or underappreciated over the years. We picked Paul Cain’s Fast One, to wit:

"The bigger they come, the faster they fall. Ray Chandler proposed that a writer should have a man come through the door with a gun already in his hand should things ever threaten to calm down, and perhaps that’s why he called Fast One ‘ultra hard-boiled’. With a body count of Cecil B. DeMille proportions, Paul Cain’s only novel (he also published a collection of short stories, Seven Slayers) arrived in 1933, after a serialisation in Black Mask. The joins show, much in the same way as gaps appear between explosions in a fireworks display. The terse, virtually monosyllabic prose seems hammered into the paper (Last line: “Then, after a little while, life went away from him.”) as gunsel Gerry Kells wreaks havoc in the criminal underworld of Depression-era LA, his hypnotic paranoia eventually justified as various kingpins conspire to rub him out. Harder than Chandler, bleaker than Hammett, sparer than James Cain, Fast One is an incendiary device in book form."

The big question: can anyone tell us if a movie was ever made from Fast One? Ta.

The Disembiggened O # 312: No Trumpets, There Are None

Quel fromage! Phantom 102.5 FM’s The Kiosk subjected our humble offering, The Big O, to something of a rather vigorous colonoscopy on Saturday and the results – you have been warned – aren’t pretty. If Nadine O’Regan (not pictured, right) wasn’t such a total babe, she’d be off our Christmas card list until, oh, November at least. But she is, so she isn’t, if you follow our drift. In the spirit of interweb openness, accountability and transparency, etc., you can hear the ten or so minutes of the review here or hereabouts, and a big shout-out to Critical Mick for doing the knob-twiddling on the diggery-wibbly technology bit. Meanwhile, The Rap Sheet has taken our prints in their rather wonderful ‘overlooked crime classic’ series, for which we’ve nominated Paul Cain’s Fast One. “Reading Fast One was like travelling to Antarctica,” says this enlightened soul (scroll down a tad), “once you arrived, there was nowhere else to go.” Sweet.