• Double Barrel Bluff, by Lou Berney (Soho Crime):
Shake Bouchon, a onetime wheelman for the Armenian mob in Los Angeles, is at it again, and this third (perhaps last?) installment in Lou Berney’s franchise is a doozy. Shake’s former boss and gorgeous ex-lover, Alexandra “Lexy” Ilandryan—who is now a capo di capo herself—has been kidnapped while enjoying
a solo vacation to Cambodia. Shake is blissfully ignorant of this turn until he’s suddenly dragooned from his sedentary life by a mob enforcer, the Freudianly skewed Dikran, who demands his help in rescuing Lexy.Meanwhile, in the jungles of Cambodia, Lexy is being held captive by a couple of knuckleheads, Ramos and French, who are waiting for their own gangster leader to appear and cut a deal for her release. This happens to be Bjorn, a Cambodian who speaks “flawless hipster American” and who really should’ve been a better planner; Bjorn has no idea who he’s grabbed or the consequences that might follow. Considering what readers learn about Bjorn’s lineage later in this story, he is in the wrong business.
It doesn’t take long for the whole abduction scheme to begin unraveling. Shake’s wife (and erstwhile adversary), Gina, arrives in Cambodia, along with Lexy’s second in command, who circles the circumstances like a shark and spots an opportunity to replace her as number one. Oh, and add to those plot twists an expatriate hippy girl named Mitch, and Ouch, a Cambodian godfather with CIA connections. If the success of this overseas free-for-all doesn’t convince author Berney to keep Shake alive for readers, then nothing will.
• Ash Dark as Night, by Gary Phillips (Soho Crime):
It’s the long, hot summer of 1965 in Los Angeles, and Harry Ingram is in it up to his neck. This Black crime photographer and part-time process server happens upon a traffic stop in the city’s racially charged Watts neighborhood that quickly turns fatal. Cops beat the motorist, and when a young Black activist confronts them, he’s shot dead—and Harry documents the entire scene. The police then proceed to pound on Harry and take away his
camera, a Korean War-era Speed Graphic. But while he recuperates in a hospital bed, his lover, Anita Claire, finds that camera, and the photos he snapped with it are published, putting Harry squarely in the unwelcome sights of the LAPD.Once released back onto the street, Harry achieves plenty of notoriety and exposure (a bad thing for a man whose avocation is playing gumshoe), but that doesn’t stop him. An invitation to find the missing partner of a local businesswoman takes Harry on an odyssey through the underbelly of Los Angeles, where it comes as no surprise that even the police are corrupt—and they aren’t the only ones.
As this story progresses, Phillips adds complication upon complication. He eventually has Harry walking a fine line between crime and retribution, after he discovers that Anita, who also happens to be an associate of L.A. mayor Tom Bradley, has a sideline as a Robin Hood-like bank robber, assisted by her interracial parents.
Phillips, probably best known for creating private eye Ivan Monk (Violent Spring), recounts actual events—racial tensions and violence—that are a tragic part of this country’s history, and still haunt us today. However, a significant appeal of this novel and its predecessor, 2022’s One-Shot Harry, comes from how the author re-creates the past, dusting off a Los Angeles that no longer exists. Mid-20th-century demands for racial equality are brought more to the fore in this second Ingram novel, and it will be interesting to see in future installments of this series how Phillips’ intrepid lensman makes it past the age of Motown and Stax, and documents the country’s social/cultural evolution into the era of Superfly and Shaft.
• The Devil Raises His Own, by Scott Phillips (Soho Crime):
Novelist and screenwriter Scott Phillips has concocted The Devil Raises His Own with a touch of film director Robert Altman’s historical irreverence, choice of ensemble cast and meandering plot line, giving readers not just a slice of life, but a slab of life looked at from many angles. “The good old days,” Phillips tells us, is bunk.
It’s the year 1916, and Hollywood is just in its formative stages. After being found innocent of murdering her abusive husband back in Wichita, Kansas, Flavia Purcell flees to Los Angeles, where her grandfather
Bill Odgen (the main character from Cottonwood, Phillips’ 2004 novel) now owns a photography studio. There she learns the business, but this being Hollywood—where dreams die and reality sets in hard and fast—Flavia and Bill soon find themselves in the nascent pornography business. (A warning for readers: this book features sex, but when it does [people must make a living somehow], it’s not even close to the full-frontal nuts-and-bolts, lascivious variety that’s so prevalent today.) As the city endures a succession of murders, Bill and his resourceful granddaughter find themselves mixed up in events as complicated and ominous as any found in old black-and-white pictures.While The Devil Raises His Own is classified as “noir,” that’s true only in the way Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays (a very dark take on the same town) is noir: the people in its pages make choices, sometimes bad ones, and must live with the consequences, dealing with what life has arbitrarily dished out. Vaudevillian losers of high birth; a washed-up actor getting a second chance as a child star’s punching bag; cinematic performers on the way up and on the way down—they all find roles here. Phillips offers a cross-section of pre-World War I America through his focus on early Hollywood, for it was there to which so many people with big dreams went to see them thrive … or die.
• The Last King of California, by Jordan Harper (Mulholland):
As wildfires consume Southern California’s long, flat Central Valley, and war erupts among the area’s white-trash dope purveyors, Luke Crosswhite—heir-apparent to the throne of the criminal Combine gang—returns to the fold. Unsure whether to prepare to be groomed for the crown (the king, his father, has been incarcerated for a slaying Luke witnessed, yet he still calls the shots), Luke needs time to sort things out. Meanwhile, prospects are looking up for the gang’s crank-dealing business—that is until the vicious Aryan Steel gang rolls in. Its leaders demand not only a 10-percent payoff from the Combine for doing business in the neighborhood, but want Luke’s family’s gang to
purchase their product, as well. The Combine’s de facto boss, Luke’s uncle Del, nixes any such deal, which is understood clearly as throwing down the gauntlet.Amid all of this, young lovers Pretty Baby and Callie (the latter being an old friend to Luke) hope to escape the Combine’s hold over them at last. Their scheme involves ripping off an associate in a drug deal, and then handing him over to police. Unfortunately, that associate owes money to Aryan Steel honcho Beast Daniels. An all-out war ensues and the death toll mounts. As an initiated gang member, Luke must obey orders even though his future holds much brighter—or in the world of gangbangers, much darker—promise. When Del orders him to kill Callie in retribution for her actions, Luke realizes that the gang’s motto, Blood Is Love, cannot be taken lightly. Traveling to visit his father in prison, Luke is left to wonder, Just who is the last king of California?
Like Harper’s 2023 thriller, Everybody Knows, The Last King of California (published originally in Great Britain two years ago) is a most discomfiting tale of the American West.
Last but not least, one work from the non-fiction shelves ...
• Son of the Old West: The Odyssey of Charlie Siringo: Cowboy, Detective, Writer of the Wild Frontier, by Nathan Ward (Grove Press):Speaking of the American West, that expansive region has provided so many things: tall tales, legends, and more than a few rich myths. But its 19th- and early 20th-century history also contains a goodly number of real men and woman who lived large in spirit, bravery, and what might be called spunk. Buffalo Bill Cody, Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, Belle Starr—they all made their marks on the growing country. This list wouldn’t be complete, though, without Charlie Siringo, a cowboy, bounty hunter, sleuth, and eventual silent-movie extra who has often been overlooked by writers and filmmakers focused mostly on the Old West’s lawless particulars. Nathan Ward (previously the author of The Lost Detective: Becoming Dashiell Hammett) seeks to correct that slight with this non-fiction work—first published in late 2023, but released in paperback last fall—that supplies a deeply researched account of Siringo’s adventures and accomplishments.
Born in Texas in 1855 to an Irish mother and an Italian father, Siringo participated in his first cattle drive at age 12. He went on to survive a fusillade of beer glasses flung in a Dodge City saloon by the aforementioned Sheriff Masterson; chase after cattle rustled by Billy the Kid; witness Chicago’s deadly Haymarket massacre of 1886; and join the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, for which he investigated mining corruption and pursued outlaws, among them Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He also penned a variety of books, including A Texas Cow Boy: Or, Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck of a Spanish Pony (1885), which readers ate up—and which helped mold the public’s image of the leathery range rider. After leaving the Pinkertons in the early 1900s. he engaged in a lengthy dispute with that agency, claiming it had sabotaged the publication of his cowboy memoirs.
Without a doubt, Charlie Siringo was an American original, and Ward does him justice here. Son of the Old West gives a generous accounting of this cowboy-detective’s long life (he died in 1928, just short of his 74th birthday), at the same time providing a history of the West from the post-Civil War era through the age of steam to the wonderment of the motion-picture industry.
Other 2024 Favorites: The Queen City Detective Agency, by Snowdon Wright (Morrow); and The Arizona Triangle, by “Sydney Graves,” aka Kate Christianen (Harper Paperbacks).
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