”As I sucked a lobster claw, I thought about how to do them. Always pick the easiest, quickest and cleanest method. In this case, a shot in the head w”As I sucked a lobster claw, I thought about how to do them. Always pick the easiest, quickest and cleanest method. In this case, a shot in the head was the best solution. The bullet rips apart the brain, and the victim doesn’t even have time to kiss tomorrow goodbye. The muck--blood, bone fragments, brain matter--sprays from the side opposite the entry wound. I’d sit in the back seat of their car and smoke them. First the driver. Then the guy beside him. With a silencer. When I executed Luca in Central America, the blast was deafening. Almost ruined the sense of wonder and power you feel when you pull a trigger and take somebody’s life.”
Giorgio Pellegrini is a psychopath, and like all well functioning psychopaths, he understands morals; he’s just completely devoid of morals. They get in the way. They hinder living life the way he wants to live it.
He likes older women. Well, he doesn��t like them all that much; he just lusts them. He likes them best in their forties, starting to show the first crumbling signs of aging, cellulite, crows feet, and the slackening of what was once firm flesh. He likes them feeling insecure and feeling special that this man ten years younger still wants to sex them up. He lets them pay for things. He cheats on them without regret. He’s moving through life, riding a storm of violent crime, but he likes to come home to a comfortable, pliable woman.
As he gets older, he starts to realize that all the dirty dealing with crooked cops, criminals, and revolutionaries is leading him right back to prison. It is time to go straight. It is time to open a restaurant and settle down with an upscale woman. He finds the right lawyer to help him make this happen, but he soon discovers that the lawyer needs little favors done for his friends. The type of little favors that Giorgio is oh so good at. He doesn’t really mind as long as at the end of the road he gets what he wants; otherwise, the lawyer better watch his ass. One should never renege on a psychopath.
Massimo Carlotto is the grand master of Italian noir. He has a series called his Alligator series that I’ve really enjoyed, but Giorgio Pellegrini is his first creation. A psychopath who cuts a new slice through the serial killer genre. In Gang of Lovers that I read and reviewed recently, he intersects with the Alligator crew, and that is when I decided it was time to circle back and read the books that focus on his lurid adventures. There is lots to enjoy here. The rampant sex, the crimes, the violence, and the hardboiled talk... Italian style. The next Giorgio Pellegrini book arrived at my house yesterday, At the End of a Dull Day, so I will be cuing up his next psychopathic tendencies very soon. I have a feeling that going straight is going to prove impossible for Giorgio.
”I’ve never been able to stand it when other people waste my time. Especially when it comes to sex. Absolutely unacceptable. The time that belongs to ”I’ve never been able to stand it when other people waste my time. Especially when it comes to sex. Absolutely unacceptable. The time that belongs to lovers is always stolen from lives built on other affections, passions, and routines. Structures that are at once exceedingly complex and yet so delicate that a clandestine affair can destroy them merely by announcing its existence.”
It’s been ten years since I read a Massimo Carlotto book. There have been long droughts between his Alligator books being translated into English, which certainly contributed to why it has taken so long for me to read another book by my favorite hardboiled Italian author. This is actually the seventh Alligator book, but the fourth to be translated into English. I’m not sure what the story is with the first Alligator books. Are they just not very good?
This is also, interestingly enough, the third book in the Giorgio Pellegrini series and the first book I’ve read in that series. Marco “The Alligator” Buratti is about to meet Carlotto’s other major character, the Dapper Dan of crime... Giorgio Pellegrini. So, I’m already thinking to myself, is Carlotto about to eliminate one or the other of his important characters? Is this going to be a Reichenbach Falls situation?
This book parachutes me into the end of a gang war that Buratti and his associates, Max The Memory and Beniamino Rossini, have been caught up in for a while. Fortunately, that wraps up fairly quickly because what I really want is for the guys to get back to what they do best...investigate crimes that the police struggle to solve.
Someone is extorting money from people who are conducting secret, adulterous love affairs. Even those who have been the most discrete, the most careful, are being targeted by what has been referred to as The Gang of Lovers. One of those blackmailed people, a woman who refused to play ball even when they kidnapped her lover, years later wants answers. Her lover never returned, and she wants to know what happened to him. She wants a salve for her guilt, but the truth is rarely the bearer of happiness in situations like this.
Thus begins a game, and oh does Giorgio Pellegrini, the King of Hearts, like to play games. Marco is still recovering from the death of a friend and is just beginning to reclaim his relationship with music. ”The blues can be cruel; without you even noticing, the blues will dig a hole inside you, will slap you in the face with memories, or push you into a pit of nostalgia.” Max the Memory is more worried about stuffing himself with the local cuisine of Padua than dealing with his own feelings of loss. Beniamino Rossini is brooding and suffering over the dramatic suicide of his wife. Needless to say, the guys are not on the top of their game. They need to be tough, but also clever, if they are going to trap a man like Pellegrini.
Massimo Carlotto made a mistake as a young man of 25. He came upon a murder victim, and instead of reporting the crime, he fled the scene. By fleeing he looked guilty of murder. He was acquitted of all charges for lack of evidence at his first trial, but when he was tried again, he was sentenced to 18 years. He became a fugitive and fled to France and later Mexico. After three years of running and looking over his shoulder, he was captured and extradited back to Italy. The court of public opinion was on his side, even as the criminal courts were not. Despite the lack of evidence, he was re-tried and sentenced to 16 years. Fortunately, in 1993, President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro pardoned him.
Carlotto pulled his life back together and became a writer, publishing his first book in 1995, and man, did he have some real life experiences to draw upon to produce gritty, real characters, who are a confusing blend of cruelty and kindness with an evolving sense of morality and honor. The Italian influence on the hardboiled genre definitely adds some kinks to old established formulas in the same way that Italian directors did on the western genre with their spaghetti westerns.
When I next feel the itch for a Carlotto book, I’m going to backtrack a bit and read the first Giorgio Pellegrini novel, The Goodbye Kiss. There is also a 2005 movie adaptation of the book that should prove interesting as well.
For those interested in adding some gritty, sexy, and fiesty reading to the queue, start with the first book in the series translated into English, The Colombian Mule. If any of my Italian friends have read the first three Alligator books, please let me know if you have any idea why they have not been published in English. Thanks.
”The French seem to appreciate best Thompson’s brand of terror. Roman noir, literally ‘Black novel,’ is a term reserved especi***3.5 out of 5 stars***
”The French seem to appreciate best Thompson’s brand of terror. Roman noir, literally ‘Black novel,’ is a term reserved especially for novelists such as Thompson, Cornell Woolrich and David Goodis. Only Thompson, however, fulfills the French notion of both noir and maudit, the accursed and self destructive. It is an unholy picture that Thompson presents.
Thompson’s male leads are almost always schizophrenics, plagued by erratic behavior, haunted by an unpredictable demon; this split personality emerges as well in the writing itself, marking the author as recognizably as he marks his confused characters.”---Barry Gifford
Traditionally, the French have always appreciated American contributions to literature, music (Jazz and Blues in particular), and art more than the country from which these talented individuals were spawned. Americans tend to look on edgy, uncomfortable writing, unusual, groundbreaking music, and complicated, exciting art as forms of degeneration. The French find these aspects of the creative arts stimulating, intoxicating. Experiencing something new or unusual is not something to be suspicious of or condemning of, but exhilarated by. If these artists, writers, and musicians can live long lives, they might, eventually, be seen by Americans in the same way as they are revered in Europe, and then again...maybe not.
Fortunately for Jim Thompson, occasionally Hollywood would come along and buy the rights to one of his books to make a movie. The Getaway is one of those books. Thompson was even asked to work on the script, but was fired over creative differences with Steve McQueen. The movie is loosely based on the book, and I’m sure that Thompson had a movie script in mind that was something closer to the way he originally wrote the story. McQueen was probably more interested in making a movie that would be a box office success. The movie came out in 1972 and was the second highest grossing film of the year, so McQueen may have been right, and Thompson may have been too drunk and stubborn to see reason. I can just hear Thompson while arguing with McQueen saying something like…”Hey, I’m the writer; you’re just a f-bomb actor.” My active imagination sees McQueen pushing Thompson into the pool and then McQueen having to dive in and save a drunk Thompson as he flounders about, unable to find the edge of the pool.
I watched the movie first because I have been wanting to watch some Sam Peckinpah movies and my son had a copy of The Getaway and he, with his film degree, is an astute movie watching companion. So circumstances dictated that I ended up watching the movie before reading the book, but the movie only stoked my interest in the book. The basic premise of the book is used in the movie. The relationship between Doc and Carol is one of the more fascinating aspects of the book and the movie.
When Doc is sent away to prison, it doesn’t even cross Carol’s mind to divorce him or go her own way. She puts her life on hold, waiting for the day that Doc walks out of that prison. Carol was a mousy librarian who blooms under the influence of Doc. Why would she ever want to go back to being who she was before Doc started paying attention to her? ”Reform, Change? Why, and to what? The terms were meaningless. Doc had opened a door for her, and she had entered into, adopted and been adopted by, a new world. And it was difficult to believe now that any other had ever existed. Doc’s amoral outlook had become hers. In a sense, she had become more like Doc than Doc himself. More engagingly persuasive when she chose to be. Harder when hardness seemed necessary.”
When Doc is denied parole after serving four years, all hope leaches out of him. He can’t afford the time it will take to play by the rules. He asks Carol to go see a guy named Beynon on the parole board and make a deal. He is willing to do anything to get out of jail, and what Beynon needs him to do is rob a bank. Trust is something that is hard to come by in the criminal profession, and not only does Doc not trust his fellow gang members (supplied by Beynon), but there is a niggling concern about exactly whether he can trust Carol. What exactly did she do to get Beynon to agree to let Doc out? How far did she go? Did she sleep with him? Does he ultimately care? Does she and Beynon want Doc out of the way?
As a reader and as a watcher, I want Carol to be the loyal Bonnie to Doc’s Clyde. It’s a better story, but we are talking about Jim Thompson, a writer with a notoriously dark view of human interactions. So as the plot unspools, I’m kept on pins and needles, wondering about Carol as well. It’s an aspect that, in my opinion, lifts the movie and the book to a higher level of appreciation.
The ending of the book is odd. One reviewer speculates that Thompson must have been drunker than usual when he dashed off the final pages of the book. I wonder if he was actually trying to get sober when he wrote those pages. He seems to write just fine while snookered, but who knows what he would pound out of those typewriter keys if he were trying to formulate paragraphs through a haze of pink elephants. I enjoyed the finale of the movie better than the book. The baffling conclusion of the book was replaced by a new ending with Slim Pickens, which actually turns out to be an unexpectedly charming final scene.
In my mind, I’ve blended the movie and the book together to form a more perfect union. The story has simply become larger and better crafted with the benefit of several visions. This is certainly a more cerebral Bonnie and Clyde cross country escape with double crosses, double dealing, and plenty of mayhem to make this a classic of the genre.
”It was true that Phoenix had a history of high-profile assassinations, some of them operatically staged message murders. The killers used a truck bom”It was true that Phoenix had a history of high-profile assassinations, some of them operatically staged message murders. The killers used a truck bomb to scatter the remains of the socially prominent gangster Willie Bioff across his neat suburban lawn. They decapitated Gus Greenbaum, the state’s most powerful crime boss, and then turned the knife on his wife. A year before Bolles’s murder, a pair of gunmen from Chicago Heights used a .22-caliber pistol to kill an accountant only hours before he was to tell a grand jury what he knew about land fraud in Arizona. As they stepped over his body, the gunmen dropped a few coins.”
I arrived in Phoenix in 1985, almost exactly 9 years to the day after the Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles was murdered. ”He had parked the new Datsun in the fourth space from the left in the front row, where a bundle of dynamite, fixed with magnets to the bottom of the car, just under the driver’s seat, awaited him. Bolles opened the door, slid into the driver’s seat, and turned the ignition key. As he backed the car out of the parking space and put it in a forward gear to drive off, Robinson, watching from the cab of his pickup, stabbed a button on a remote-control device. It ignited a fuse cap in a bundle of dynamite that blew out the bottom and the door on the driver’s side of the car.”
The first meaningful conversation I had in Arizona was with a Phoenix native who couldn’t wait to fill my ear with all of his paranoid conspiracies surrounding the death of Don Bolles. Even with the help of copious amounts of alcohol, I had a hard to swallowing what this guy was pedaling, but the longer I lived in the state of Goldwater Arizona, I started to hear more and more about the shady deals that had engulfed Arizona in the past and still held sway over the present. Paranoia is only paranoia if your wrong.
It turns out my conspiracy obsessed acquaintance was right on the money.
You can’t walk (Nobody walks in Phoenix. The temperature at cement level is like walking on the surface of Mercury.) or drive around Phoenix for very long without going past a school or a building named after Goldwater. He was the Sam Houston of Arizona and was venerated by all levels of society. His disastrous run for the presidency cost the party not only the top spot, but several house and senate seats as well. If you haven’t seen Lyndon B. Johnson’s Daisy commercial that forever changed the scope of presidential elections, check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riDyp... It will curl your toes, even now, fifty years later. Johnson won in a landslide. He convinced the American population that Barry Goldwater was a warmongering psychopath.
Well, maybe not a psychopath, but a case could be made that he was a sociopath.
So what exactly was going on in Arizona that eventually led up to the murder of Don Bolles? The first thing that you need to understand is that organized crime didn’t just exist in Arizona; it controlled Arizona, and at the center of that control was Senator Barry Goldwater.
Most of the dirty dealings in Arizona revolved around land fraud deals, but also extended out to prostitution, racketeering, skimming casino coins, and murder.
A Detective McCracken taped a conversation he had with Prosecutor Berger, and I think it pretty much sums up what was going on and why cases that were made against certain individuals disappeared.
”BERGER: It wouldn’t work, anyway. You find you can’t get the cases filed. You can’t get the work done. Now, cases get thrown out of court, and you don’t understand why, you know?
MCCRACKEN: Yeah.
BERGER: And the reason is very simple. The goddamn lid is on the son of a bitch all the way to the top.”
The Arizona powers-that-be even had conversations about putting a hit on my favorite Arizona politician, Bruce Babbitt, who found himself governor of Arizona by a confluence of strange events. Babbitt was elected Attorney General in 1974. When Governor Raúl Héctor Castro resigned to take an Ambassadorship to El Salvador, Wesley Bolin, then Secretary of State, took his place. Arizona does not have a Lieutenant Governor position. When Bolin died in office, Secretary of State Rose Mofford couldn’t serve as governor because she was appointed not elected to her position. This meant that Babbitt was the highest elected official in the state and thus became the 16th Governor of Arizona. Sometimes a series of strange events can even pry the lid off of a state like Arizona. He was elected to two more terms and eventually served under President Clinton as Secretary of the Interior. I had the honor of buying his books before he left for Washington. He was expected to run against John McCain for Goldwater’s seat, but elected to concentrate on a run for the presidency instead. Babbitt was very popular in the state and probably would have beaten McCain. One wonders, if McCain had lost that election, would Senator McCain have ever existed? I also wonder if Bruce thought it was best that he didn’t win that Senate seat. Would it have simply been too dangerous to continue in politics in Arizona?
I’m grateful that he didn’t get slipped the salt or blown up by a stick of dynamite in his car or plane as other inconvenient people had been. One has to speculate, did he have a conversation with Goldwater and work things out?
Bolles took several agonizing days to die. He named his killers. Some of them were brought to justice. The Bolles case still remains open. Goldwater was agitated by the death of Bolles, which seems to indicate that his iron grip on all these demented assholes raping his state was loosening. He still made sure there was plenty of money available to hush the whole thing up, and when money wouldn’t work, there were other, more permanent means of shushing someone up available. Bolles’s death almost convinced me to change my major to journalism.
Dave Wagner lays it all out, exposes the names of those who were involved, and sketches out the enormous web of intrigue and the outright audacity of these criminals who were allowed to operate in Arizona with impunity.
”All of this happened with the cooperation of otherwise conscientious citizens, public servants, and men of private influence. It was a collective act of fealty from witting insiders for whom loyalty was sometimes indistinguishable from obedience. It was the fruit of a system created by Arizona’s strongest men, for whom impunity was the natural reward of wealth and power.”
”’This is a stickup. Everybody stand still!’ Dillianger shouted. Only a half dozen people complied. The rest either didn’t hear him, or couldn’t compr”’This is a stickup. Everybody stand still!’ Dillianger shouted. Only a half dozen people complied. The rest either didn’t hear him, or couldn’t comprehend what was about to happen. Miffed, Dillinger dropped the pillowcase from his stockless Thompson machine gun, pointed the rapid-firing weapon upward, and squeezed out a burst of shots, just missing an ornate chandelier. The discarded slugs burned through the decorative plastered ceiling and knifed into the hardwood flooring of a second-story conference room. A cloud of white dust wafted down from above, creating a ghostly visual that made the famous felon smile.”
To my knowledge, this is the most complete, most definitive John Dillinger biography that has ever been published. John Dillinger’s activities are so well documented that Dary Matera could have almost given us a day by day report on what Dillinger was doing from 1933-1934. His reign of terror is so brief, but made such a lasting, indelible impression on American law enforcement and the American public that he was the most wanted, the most lauded , and the most recognizable celebrity of the 1930s. ”The police hysteria, seen in dozens of historically preserved memos exaggerating The Terror Gang’s activities, numbers, and strengths, was not universally shared by the public. In a time of bank closings, mortgage foreclosures, and thrift scandals, many people were rooting Dillinger on.”
The public is feeling so helpless in the face of the recession that they don’t see Dillinger as a dangerous criminal. They view him as someone who is finally fighting for them against the establishment. They attribute Robin Hood characteristics to him, wrongly, but one observation I read held some merit...at least he is putting that bank money back out in circulation. Yes indeed, he is certainly doing that.
Dillinger’s nickname is the Jackrabbit because he likes to vault over the counters at the beginning of a robbery. This can be attributed to a man showing off his athletic poweress, but it also has the benefit of dazzling the bank employees, and most of them have to think as they are witnessing this feat...I can’t do that. To me, that makes the awestruck bank employees more pliable and less likely to feel they can do something to interfere with the robbery.
There were people calling for an amnesty deal to be offered to Dillinger. It is estimated that over two million dollars was spent by law enforcement trying to catch him, over four times the money that he stole from banks. Given those numbers, wouldn’t the government have been smart to offer him a deal and hope that he would retire to be a gentleman farmer? The thing is, J. Edgar Hoover has no intention of even considering offering him a deal. First, this bastard has to be punished. What kind of deterrent will it offer other would be criminals from trying to duplicate Dillinger’s efforts? Second, the FBI isn’t even the FBI yet. It is called Division of Investigation. In 1935, it officially becomes the FBI. Hoover leverages Dillinger’s crime wave into establishing a need to expand and better finance the burgeoning FBI. In other words, for the future of the FBI, Hoover knows that his agents have to be the ones to bring down Dillinger
And local law enforcement just needs to get the duck out of the way.
The famed Texas Ranger Frank Hamer, the one who tracked down and blasted Bonnie and Clyde into oblivion, offers to help bring down Dillinger, but there is no way in hell Hoover is going to let Hamer anywhere near his golden ticket.
Crooked bankers are actually begging Dillinger to come hit their banks to hide their own embezzlement of bank funds. There is evidence that some of these bankers actually reached out to associates of Dillinger to try and arrange a hold up. This leads me to speculate further, how many rat bastard bankers arranged a bank robbery with other criminals to hide their criminal activity? If you can’t get Dillinger, why not manufacture your own hold up? Dillinger is blamed for many robberies that would have been impossible for him to perform. Matera does an excellent job of separating the fact from fiction.
Dillinger is directly responsible for improving law enforcement methods. The two way radio, body armor, better firearms, and an improvement in investigative method can all be attributed to Dillinger.
There are miraculous escapes. There are running gun battles with outgunned law enforcement. There are complete muck ups by the fledgling FBI officers, like the disaster at Little Bohemia. There are beautiful gun molls, like Billie Frenchette, who was probably Dillinger’s soulmate. I think it is another mistake that, after she is captured, they sent her to prison. We are so intent on punishment in this country that we often lose sight of the bigger picture. I believe that, if she had been turned loose and had been tailed by agents, Dillinger wouldn’t have been able to resist coming for her. Eventually, it all has to come to an end, but Dillinger leads them all on quite a ride. It certainly must have felt like something was missing from the American landscape after Dillinger was finally...well you’ll just have to read the book.
”There has never been anyone like John Dillinger before or since. He was indeed America’s first, and most enduring, celebrity criminal.”
”I was Oppenheimer’s dread in microcosm, a miniature atom bomb. A destroyer of small things. Not worlds, nothing so grand, but individual bodies, indi”I was Oppenheimer’s dread in microcosm, a miniature atom bomb. A destroyer of small things. Not worlds, nothing so grand, but individual bodies, individual lives. In little more than a week I’d crossed purposes with mercenaries, gangsters, white supremacists, hillbilly moonshiners, gangbangers, and Feds. Blood had spilled. As ever, blood was the currency of my existence. Blood was the standard.”
Isaiah Coleridge bears the name of a poet, but he doesn’t express himself in romantic verse or ballads (though some may be written about him) or in free verse or pastoral or in bard inspired sonnets. He might know a limerick or two, but that just comes from hanging out with hardcases, gangsters, criminals, and thugs. He is a big fan of Humphrey Bogart. He may have wanted to be like Bogart, but let's just say Bogart’s trench coat would never fit. Coleridge is a mountain of a man. His nickname is Hercules, and after riding along with him on this little adventure, I’d have to say he is aptly named.
”’I have a fondness for the heroic dudes. Hercules, Thor, Beowulf, Gilgamesh, John Henry, That crowd.’
‘My, my. The strongman archetype.’
I spread my hands in a gesture of faux modesty.
‘C’mon, just look at me.’
‘Indeed. Impressive that a macho dude such as yourself is comfortable with the degree of homoeroticism that permeates those mythologies.’”
The one busting his balls in that conversation is his girlfriend Meg. Well, he and I both hope she is his girlfriend. (Her real name is Megara which is also Barron having some fun with the Hercules myth. Megara is a given as a gift to Hercules for saving Thebes. I’m not sure the modern day Megara would be on board with that plan.) She is an acrobat and, when not doing flips and handstands, can put on an evening dress and turn every head in the room. With all that flipping around, sometimes Coleridge finds it hard to pin her down.
Speaking of balls.
”I leaned against him and used my size and weight to casually muscle him into the darkness. My left hand maintained a solid clutch on his testicles, guiding him like a rudder. Old hat move on my part--over the course of a long and sordid career, I’d grabbed more junk than a fluffer in Burbank.”
When you want to have a conversation with a man and know he is really listening to you, well grab him by the balls, and you can steer him, drop him, or just focus his mind with a few ounces of pressure.
So Coleridge is a made man in Alaska, working for the Outfit, breaking a few heads, but mostly just sitting around reading books, playing poker, drinking, and exploring the physical attributes of a series of good looking dames.
Everything is great until the walrus hunt. Yep, he is on a comet trail to the top of the organization until the very moment he decides he is on the side of the sea creatures. He should, by all rights, be dead, bucking a made man like he did, but some favors are called in by his estranged father, and he finds himself exiled to a farm in New York.
New York? Seriously, if you want to put a guy in exile, send him to a farm in Kansas. He’ll be crying for mercy in a week.
The thing of it is, with time for reflection, while scooping up horse shit and slinging hay around, he really decides what he wants to do is help people. Well, animals, too (remember the walruses), and there is going to be an incident with a dog where some very bad people are going to find out just how Isaiah feels about dogs.
A teenage girl goes missing, and because she is black, nobody but her grandparents care what happens to her. She is mixed up with some lowlifes, and being an astute observer of the general tendencies of bottom feeding morons, Coleridge, part Maori, so a man of color himself, starts his investigation by looking for those guys. Of course, he isn’t done with the Outfit; one cannot just walk away from the mob and become a gumshoe. He has some unfinished business over the walruses, or should I say the guy he embarrassed feels like he has unfinished business with Coleridge.
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Laird Barron. What is with the eyepatch, you might ask? He survived cancer as a child, but his right eye did not.
What I really like about this book is that Laird Barron is a student of mythology, pulp fiction, and hardboiled fiction. He leaves us little clues about his reading resume all throughout the book. One that I particularly like is a minor character named Blandish. The name kept niggling around at the back of my brain until I finally locked it down. The classic hardboiled novel Orchids for Miss Blandish. In a normal novel, that might be just a coincidence, but in a Barron novel that is definitely a signpost to a reader like me.
Coleridge has an astute understanding of what motivates people to do the things they do. ”It’s always about money, drugs, or sex.” He is a natural to become an equalizer (sans Jaquar), a Beowulf who slays the monsters (sans Viking war ship), a defender of helpless animals (a bulkier and more serious Ace Ventura), a savior of damsels in distress (St. George sans lance).
I had a blast reading this book and have already queued up the next book in the series, Black Mountain. If you like hardboiled novels, you won’t go wrong with this one. Barron kept me guessing. I had no idea what Coleridge would do next. Barron’s writing style is fluid and glitters with wit and nuance. He has created a character that, sometimes in the same sentence, scared me, inspired me, and had me chuckling. What a way to spend a Sunday afternoon!
“Ricky Mendoza, Junior, wasn’t my real name, just one I took as my legal back when it seemed smart to. Like, the real me died back when I changed it a“Ricky Mendoza, Junior, wasn’t my real name, just one I took as my legal back when it seemed smart to. Like, the real me died back when I changed it and what’s left of me just floats.”
Everybody calls him Ghost.
Sometimes a man has to move on from a name and start over. A new name is like shedding your skin. It is a chance to redeem and be someone closer to whom you wanted to be before things went sideways.
Ghost is an addict who doesn’t use.
A man takes a chance on him, teaches him how to crack safes, and now Ghost is about to disappoint him.
”Betraying this man, I’ve never hated myself so much in my life as now. I feel shame bursting up inside me, telling me, once a junkie, always a junkie. Telling me, I can’t ever be loved, or trusted, Telling me, I’ll break his world and everything in it if I haven’t already stolen it first. It’s what I am. Stupid. Selfish. Worthless. I grab a big breath and use it to try to kill this negativity inside me. Or at least get it quieter. Because if I don’t, I’ll spiral. And I can’t do that. Not now.”
The DEA calls him and needs a safe popped at a drug house. Ghost has lost the ability to smell, and he knows what that means. The Big C is back, growing tumors in his brain, but before he checks out he decides he needs to do something to help others. It is 2008, the housing crises is cresting, and people, good people, are losing their homes.
He takes $887,000 from the safe.
He’s going to pay off some mortgages. He is a street wise Robin Hood on a mission of self-destruction.
Time has become compressed. Between the DEA and the drug dealers Rooster and Glasses, from whom he stole, he knows it is only a matter of time before they catch up with him. He has to keep moving and stretch his life. He has to steal more.
Glasses wants out. He has a son now who turns him all gooey inside. ”I feel like there’s a secret room inside him, a room inside a room even, one that I can fill up with good things and advice, stuff he should know if I talk to him at night like this. The more I do it, the more I can build a voice in the back of his brain that will guide him through everything even when I’m not here.”
The streets have left their scars on Glasses. Rooster has taught him a lot. Glassas wants to pass his knowledge to his son without his son having to experience the streets. He has to get his son away from all of this, and the only way he can do that is if he burns Rooster down. The DEA has frozen all his assets, all that money Glasses put into Best Buy stock when it was cheap. The only way he gets it back is if he gives them Rooster.
Oddly enough, Ghost and Glasses both end up working for the DEA, but pulling strings from different ends. As Ghost drives around LA, listening to a mixtape from his dead girlfriend, Rose, and Glasses contemplates how best to stay alive while playing the role of Benedict Arnold, little do they know they are on a collision course that will leave one or both of them dead.
”It’s Rose’s fault that I think stories are one of the most powerful things in the world. More powerful than knives and surgeries. More powerful than bullets. Because stories live past you. Stories can get into other people and live there too. Stories are like glasses, kind of. They change how you see the world.”
I’ve never read Ryan Gattis before. Not only was I impressed by the deft way he handled this duel plot, but also how he humanized monsters. Because most people, even bad people, aren’t monsters once you peel back the bark they have built between themselves and the world. They have been hurt. They have been forced to hurt. They are caught in a tragic play, and survival is paramount. They are capable of terrible acts, but they are also capable of extending compassion, as well. They are broken human beings who, if given the choice, would live a different life, but early on the street grabbed them and never let go. They learned to survive and became people they were never meant to be. This is a hardboiled, gritty, street wise novel that is not only heart pounding thrilling, but also incredibly moving.
FSG sent me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
”I realized I’d been grateful for the madness. Without it, memories swelled, bruised and blossomed, until I thought I must be wearing them on my face ”I realized I’d been grateful for the madness. Without it, memories swelled, bruised and blossomed, until I thought I must be wearing them on my face like black eyes. I turned and looked out the window.
Gray Britain.”
Aidan Waits has been assigned the graveyard shift. He is still a cop, but skating on thin ice. Waits’s career has burned down to the filter, and all that remains is for his boss to let it drop to the pavement and grind out the last sparks with the toe of his tasselled shoe.
The thing of it is, those issues that make him a bad cop are the very things that are going to make him the perfect guy for an undercover mission into the sleazy Manchester underground.
Let me be more specific: a mission where he has every chance of ending up with a hot spike of juice in his arm or to be wedged into the trunk of a burning car or to be deep sixed somewhere he would never be found. Remember that guy Aidan? I wonder whatever happened to him? Did he blow town? Blow his brains out?
So his assignment is to infiltrate the charmingly urbane Zain Carver’s drug operation and keep an eye on Isabelle, the seventeen year old daughter of the MP David Rossiter. She is the kind of waif that Carver likes to take under his wing. He likes to surround himself with beautiful people like Sarah Jane. ”The truth is that she was a cruel kind of beautiful. Someone you might remember on your deathbed, wondering where your courage had been on the day you met, wondering why your courage only ever surfaced at the wrong time and for people who weren’t worth it.”
Isabelle could become Sarah Jane. At seventeen and with her pedigree, even Carver knows he might be playing with a flame too hot to handle.
Carver likes the image it conveys, sending these gorgeous women out to pick up his cash drops. He is into expensive booze, fashionable clothes, and women as glittering adornments to showcase his success.
With his rap sheet hanging around his neck by a strand of rusty barbed wire. it isn’t hard for Waits to convince Carver he is a dirty cop and that he is desperate enough to do anything he needs done. It isn’t a hard transition. Being on the wrong side of the law might be more natural for Waits than trying to be on the right side of the law.
So Aidan, can I ask you a couple of questions?
”’Do you have a drug problem?’
‘When I can’t get enough of them.’
‘So you were stealing them for yourself?’
‘No fucking comment.’”
No H for Waits. SPEED is his game.
Everything is complicated enough, and then he meets Catherine/Cath/Cat. The better one knows her, the shorter her name becomes. She is one of the beautiful girls picking up Carver’s drug money. As things go sideways and bodies start clogging up the investigation, Cat is right in the middle.
”I tried to remember everything. The sparkling drops of moisture on the table, the alcohol in the air, the half-heard conversations. The look on Catherine’s face. She was staring at the wall again now, but her eyes were filling. I wanted her to look at me, to trust me again, but I knew that she couldn’t.”
Aidan may want to protect her and may even at times think he can, but the fact is he can’t even protect himself. The only ally he has is a transvestite in a turquoise wig named The Bug, who is such a cultural icon of the underground that young men consider it an honor to get HIV from him.
The publisher is making all kinds of comparisons to Dennis Lehane and Don Winslow, which isn’t really the company that I would put Joseph Knox with. I keep catching glimpses of Raymond Chandler peering around the edges of some of those hardboiled sentences. Sometimes hardboiled can become almost campy, like say a Bernie Gunther novel, but Knox keeps his language cool and hip. The atmospheric grime and grit of Knox’s Manchester is cloying and alluringly menacing. This is Urban Noir with all the broken glass, lost souls, and trampled dreams that one would expect while taking a stroll through the underbelly of a city. I absolutely love it!
I also discovered that Joseph Knox has worked in bars and bookstores (my two favorite places to hang out) and is a voracious reader.
So in other words, he is one of us.
His lyrical and stylish prose and the deft pacing of his story have me already looking for his second book. Highly Recommended!
”We're going down, down in an earlier round And Sugar, we're going down swinging I'll be your number one with a bullet A loaded god complex, cock it a
”We're going down, down in an earlier round And Sugar, we're going down swinging I'll be your number one with a bullet A loaded god complex, cock it and pull it
We're going down, down (down, down) Down, down (down, down) We're going down, down (down, down) A loaded god complex, cock it and pull it.”
---Sugar, We are Going Down by Fall Out Boy
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The first time I met Bonnie and Clyde, they looked like this. Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty 1967.
John Dillinger has always been my favorite Depression Era gangster. He was cool, suave, charming, and organized. He was made for Hollywood. Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, and Machine Gun Kelly had the best nicknames, evoking danger and romance just by letting their names trip across your tongue. Alvin “Creepy” Karpis was the only one of the Big Four named as Public Enemy #1 (Sorry Machine Gun Kelly, you didn’t make the cut) to be captured alive. I’ve always sort of been dismissive of Bonnie and Clyde because I’ve always perceived them as just a couple of bungling, murderous kids who never really became organized enough to be true gangsters.
Jeff Guinn completely changed my mind.
They were not criminal masterminds, not even close to the same class as say a John Dillinger, who planned and did careful reconnaissance before committing to any bank job. Dillinger was always after the big score. Get enough in one job to not have to work for a while and at the same time minimize risk. Bonnie and Clyde were much more likely to knock off a gas station or break into a hardware store for just enough money to keep them in gas and food. Just a couple of inept kids, right?
That case can be made, but these inept kids killed somewhere in the neighborhood of nine police officers and numerous civilians. They squeezed out of more tight spots than Houdini and led law enforcement on a merry chase from Texas up to Minnesota and back. Two years of sleeping in stolen cars and constantly moving like a pair of murderous gypsies kept them just out of reach of the law. They had no illusions about how all this was going to end, but until then they were going to sell a lot of newspapers.
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Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. The real ones.
”Thanks to the media. Clyde and Bonnie had quickly come to be considered the epitome of scandalous glamour. But in person Clyde was short and scrawny, and Bonnie’s looks were ordinary. They were both crippled, Clyde from cutting off two of his own toes in prison and Bonnie as the result of a car wreck nine months earlier in which her right leg was burned so badly that bone was visible in several places. She hopped now rather than walked. Clyde often had to carry her. They had little in common with the glittering images of themselves that mesmerized the public.”
Soaking wet, Clyde might have weighed 127 pounds, which made him an easy target for bullying while he did a stint in prison. A fellow prisoner by the name of Crowder made his life a living hell. He was much larger than Clyde and had no problem overpowering him and raping him repeatedly. Prisoners were also expected to work long hours on the prison farm in debilitating heat. It was not unusual for men to choose to disfigure themselves rather than work the grueling hours for the prison farm. Clyde was no exception and cut off two toes, including his left big toe. He had no idea that his mother had arranged clemency for him, and he was released within a few weeks. This kind of bad luck, bad timing, followed Clyde around for the rest of his short life.
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They put Clyde Barrow in prison as a petty crook and sent him out as a gangster.
It is no surprise that Clyde swore he’d never go to prison again, which changed the game. With the option of surrender eliminated from consideration, Clyde became a very dangerous man to try to apprehend.
Clyde and Bonnie both grew up on the wrong side of the tracks in West Dallas. The one thing they knew was they would do anything to not be poor. When Clyde got out of jail, he tried to go straight, but the local sheriff and his deputies made it impossible for him to keep a job. Any time there was a car stolen or a burglary, they would come haul Clyde out of work to question him. It didn’t need to happen twice before an employer was telling him to hit the bricks.
What’s a guy to do?
The public should have been afraid, not enamored, with Bonnie and Clyde, but the Depression Era was a time when people were becoming very aware of the difference between the haves and the have nots, and Bonnie and Clyde represented a thrilling, romantic rebellion. For people trapped in their honest but meager lives, they could live vicariously through them by just buying a newspaper or, for those who wanted even more sensationalized stories, by picking up a copy of True Detective.
When some undeveloped pictures were confiscated in a raid on a Barrow gang temporary abode in Joplin, the press and public went wild. Most were just pictures of them goofing around, but those pictures did as much to shape their legacy as the true stories about their exploits. ”The Joplin photos introduced new criminal superstars with the most titillating trademark of all--illicit sex. Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker were young and unmarried. They undoubtedly slept together--after all, the girl smoked cigars. Whether they’d even heard of the term or not, the Freudian implications did not escape journalists or their readers.”
They were demonized and deified in equal measure.
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Buck and Blanche Barrow. Blanche was sultry and naturally more glamorous than Bonnie, which caused some friction.
Clyde’s older brother, Buck, and his lovely wife, Blanche, were part of the gang off and on. Other members came and went, too. A Raymond Hamilton had the best influence on Clyde. He brought planning and organization to the gang and allowed them to knock off more lucrative targets. Unfortunately, Clyde and Raymond were in a constant power struggle for control that insured they could not get along for extended periods of time. Clyde had the same problem with his older brother, Buck. It was going to be his show or no show at all.
Bonnie was a poet. You won’t be confusing her with T. S. Eliot or Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson, but there is a poignancy in the fact that she felt the need to express herself, to make sense of her life with words.
The End of the Line
You've read the story of Jesse James Of how he lived and died; If you're still in need Of something to read, Here's the story of Bonnie and Clyde. Now Bonnie and Clyde are the Barrow gang, I'm sure you all have read How they rob and steal And those who squeal Are usually found dying or dead. There's lots of untruths to these write-ups; They're not so ruthless as that; Their nature is raw; They hate all the law The stool pigeons, spotters, and rats. They call them cold-blooded killers; They say they are heartless and mean; But I say this with pride, That I once knew Clyde When he was honest and upright and clean. But the laws fooled around, Kept taking him down And locking him up in a cell, Till he said to me, "I'll never be free, So I'll meet a few of them in hell." The road was so dimly lighted; There were no highway signs to guide; But they made up their minds If all roads were blind, They wouldn't give up till they died. The road gets dimmer and dimmer; Sometimes you can hardly see; But it's fight, man to man, And do all you can, For they know they can never be free. From heart-break some people have suffered; From weariness some people have died; But take it all in all, Our troubles are small Till we get like Bonnie and Clyde. If a policeman is killed in Dallas, And they have no clue or guide; If they can't find a fiend, They just wipe their slate clean And hand it on Bonnie and Clyde. There's two crimes committed in America Not accredited to the Barrow mob; They had no hand In the kidnap demand, Nor the Kansas City depot job. A newsboy once said to his buddy; "I wish old Clyde would get jumped; In these awful hard times We'd make a few dimes If five or six cops would get bumped." The police haven't got the report yet, But Clyde called me up today; He said, "Don't start any fights We aren't working nights We're joining the NRA." From Irving to West Dallas viaduct Is known as the Great Divide, Where the women are kin, And the men are men, And they won't "stool" on Bonnie and Clyde. If they try to act like citizens And rent them a nice little flat, About the third night They're invited to fight By a sub-gun's rat-tat-tat. They don't think they're too tough or desperate, They know that the law always wins; They've been shot at before, But they do not ignore That death is the wages of sin. Some day they'll go down together; And they'll bury them side by side; To few it'll be grief To the law a relief But it's death for Bonnie and Clyde.
We all know how it ends. Guinn writes that final scene in Bienville Parish, Louisiana, the best I’ve ever seen it described. It is gruesome and heartless, born out of a real fear of these outlaws who had proven themselves to be as dangerous and unpredictable as trapped animals. 130 rounds were poured into that 1934 Cordoba Gray, 8 cylinder, deluxe sedan Ford with the greyhound radiator cap, which had been stolen in Topeka, Kansas, and forever now known as THE DEATH CAR. When the legendary Texas Ranger Frank Hamer walks up to the car and puts one final blast into Bonnie, a few expletives escaped my lips. I felt a flare of anger that attests to the difference between knowing people and just knowing they existed. Last night, I heard Bonnie’s screams in one of my nightmares, and the men who were there that day heard them for the rest of their lives.
If you want to really meet THE Bonnie Parker and THE Clyde Barrow, then the only way you are going to do it properly is to read this book.
”Sutton is the first multigeneration bank robber in history, the first ever to build a lengthy career--it spans four decades. In his heyday Sutton was”Sutton is the first multigeneration bank robber in history, the first ever to build a lengthy career--it spans four decades. In his heyday Sutton was the face of American crime, one of a handful of men to make the leap from public enemy to folk hero. Smarter than Machine Gun Kelly, saner than Pretty Boy Floyd, more likable than Legs Diamond, more peaceable than Dutch Schultz, more romantic than Bonnie and Clyde, Sutton saw bank robbery as high art and went about it with an artist’s single-minded zeal. He believed in study, planning, hard work. And yet he was also creative, an innovator, and like the greatest artists he proved to be tenacious survivor.
He escaped three maximum-security prisons, eluded cops and FBI agents for years. He was Henry Ford by way of John Dillinger--with dashes of Houdini and Picasso and Rasputin. The reporters know all about Sutton’s stylish clothes, his impish smile, his love of good books, the glint of devilment in his bright blue eyes, so blue that the FBI once described them in bulletins as azure. It’s the rare bank robber who moves the FBI to such lyricism.
Willie “The Artist” Sutton stole an estimated $2million dollars over the span of his forty year career and spent more than half of his adult life behind bars. J. R. Moehringer takes us from his childhood until his death. The story is told from the vantage point of Willie Sutton aged 69 on the day he is released from prison and as his memories unfold the reader is allowed to ride shotgun with Sutton as he guides us through his career. One thing that really struck me is that just before World War One the United States was in a depression and then experienced several more depressions long before the Great Depression of the 1930s. Willie was one of those guys born in an Irish borough, achieving only an 8th grade education, and every time there was even a slight downturn in the market he was among the first group to be let go from his job. The disparity between rich and poor was a wide chasm and he and his friends, growing up barely able to keep food in their mouths, were well aware of the disadvantages. The uneven playing field that people, by dint of birth, found themselves fighting against their whole lives is the same rigged machine that exists today. The rich just keep getting richer, the middle class is shrinking, and the poor are losing all hope of climbing the rungs to prosperity.
Willie has a natural animosity towards the banks and the Wall Street tycoons. The name Rockefeller rarely leaves his mouth without being preceded and followed by a handful of expletives. It is beyond ironic that when Willie gets the call that he has been pardoned in 1969 it is Nelson Rockefeller that secures his release. "Death stands at your door, hitches up its pants, points its baton at you--then hands you a pardon."New York loved Sutton, thought of him as a Robin Hood character because he used guile rather than violence to rob banks. He meets a doorman who happens to be a fan. ”Three greatest Willies in New York, my old man says--Willie Mays, Joe Willie Namath, and Willie the Actor.” Willie loves New York and spends most of his life, while not in prison, in the city. He casts a jaundiced eye on his own relationship with his home city. ”New York, he says. No matter how many times you see it, you never quite get over how much it doesn’t fuckin need you. Doesn’t care if you live or die, stay or go. But that--that indifference, I guess you’d call it--that’s half of what makes the town so goddamn beautiful.”
Willie was a lifetime reader, a fact that endeared him to me. He started out reading Horatio Alger books because they were predictable and reassured him that if he worked hard he would eventually succeed. After being laid off numerous times regardless of how well he performed his duties it didn’t take him long to realize that Horatio Alger was selling a load of crap.
They raised his familiarity with subjects to the point that he was comfortable reading the regular editions of Cicero, St, Augustine, Bronte, and one of his favorite authors Proust. For a man marking time, obsessed with time, Proust was a natural fit for a man stacking every hour in prison. The police knew that Willie liked books and after one of his escapes bookstores were on the list of sites to be staked out. Yep that would be me, FBI’s MOST WANTED JEFFREY DEAN KEETEN snagged at a bookstore.
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Like John Dillinger, cops liked to be photographed with Willie Sutton.
Sutton was in love with one girl for most of his life. A girl named Bess Endner was the object of his affection. A girl not only unattainable, but existing in a life of security and wealth so far removed from Sutton that the air was too precious for him to breath. The bisection of fantasy and reality that surround his relationship with Bess are difficult to unravel. A reporter who spent most of his professional career following the exploits of Willie Sutton finds himself hitting inconsistency not only in his “relationship” with Bess, but with details regarding Sutton’s criminal career.
How many of the contradictions in Sutton’s memoirs, or in his mind, were willful, and how many were dementia, Reporter doesn’t know. HIs current theory is that Sutton lived three separate lives. The one he remembered, the one he told people about, the one that really happened. Where those lives overlapped, no one can say, and God help anyone who tries. More than likely, Sutton himself didn’t know.”
Willie lived long enough to control his own legend. His most quoted line that I had heard, but couldn't have attributed to Sutton is;
"Willie, why do you rob banks?" He was asked by a reporter. "Because that's where the money is." He famously replied.
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I know he looks harmless lady, but that little old man is a notorious bank robber.
I was absolutely transported by this book. It is a book of many layers, sprinkled with politics and a clear eyed view about crime. It gives us an extensive overview of the risk versus reward of the profession. There is philosophy. ”Whenever an Indian is lost or sad, or near death, he goes and finds the place of his birth and lies down on top of it. Indians think that gives a man some kind of healing. Closes some kind of loop. And hookers with a heart of gold. ”Her touch is surprisingly gentle, and skillful, and Willie is quickly aroused. She drags her rich chestnut hair up his chest, across his face, like a fan of feathers. He likes the way it feels, and smells. Her hair soap, Castile maybe, masks the room’s other baked-in scents. Male sweat, old spunk--and Fels?” There are hardboiled statements straight out of Chandler or Hammett. ”A safe is like a woman. She’ll tell you how to open her, providing you know how to listen.” There are beatings by cops, there are narrow escapes, unexpected kindnesses, soul tearing betrayals, and hair raising robberies. The book delivered exactly what I wanted; and best of all, even though this is a novel, Willie Sutton really existed.
I worked as a loan officer in a bank for a year and interesting enough they had to do a back ground check on me, my father, and my grandfather before I could go to work there. I had these visions of sitting there before the bank president. He looking at me over the top of his bifocals and saying "we are so sorry Mr. Keeten, but there was this little incident with a bank in Oklahoma back in 1936." I was as it turned out hired, but there was a small part of me rooting for my grandfather, who I never knew, to have done something nefarious. After experiencing how banks think about their customers, talk about their customers, and screw the people most in need with higher interest, maliciously so, I probably have more sympathy for guys like Dillinger and Sutton than I should. I've always had an adage to get away from untrustworthy people and I couldn't leave the banking business fast enough. On a moral scale I'm not sure much more than a sheet of paper with a financing degree separates most bankers from a bank robber.
Watching my father deal with banks, especially through the 1980s farming crisis, I learned pretty quickly there are no rules. The friendly grin you see one day from a banker can turn into a shark smile the next day. Believe me, there are reasons why the banking industry is heavily regulated and I can assure you they spend a lot of time trying to figure out ways to bend the rules to their advantage. I didn't experience finance on the epic scale that is Wall Street, but what I observed on the smaller scale made it pretty easy to project what was going on further up the food chain.
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