The Book You Have to Read: “King Suckerman,” by George Pelecanos

(Editor’s note: This is the 164th installment in The Rap Sheet’s continuing series about great but forgotten books.)

By Steven Nester
King Suckerman reads like a blaxploitation blast from the past, with its references to that film genre, the soundtrack of the era (this tale is set in 1976, and the U.S. bicentennial is only days away), the vocabulary of young black inner-city America (with a profusion of the “N” word), and the glorification of the urban anti-hero. But beneath all of that, inextricable from the nonstop action in this 1997 George Pelecanos masterpiece, is a spot-on critique of racism, cultural appropriation, personal responsibility, and the hypocrisy of popular culture.

The themes in King Suckerman are seamlessly integrated into the story’s action. That’s as true when Real Right Records owner Marcus Clay admonishes a young employee for filing Jimi Hendrix albums under Soul, not Rock—really, a racial commentary here—as it is when the blasts of bicentennial fireworks blend with the gunfire of the good guys liberating themselves from the threat of nihilistic criminals at the book’s conclusion.

This adventure begins at a small-town North Carolina drive-in movie theater, where Wilton Cooper, a cool and manipulative ex-con, witnesses Bobby Roy “BR” Clagget—“a white boy, wanna-be-a-black-boy cracker” who sports an afro, four-inch heels, and a shirt with “Tarzan swinging on the vines”—strut into the projection building and murder his boss in cold blood. Cooper wants a trigger man for an upcoming dope deal, and in Clagget he sees talent, as well as a kid much in need of direction. Cooper approaches him, and after a smooth Q & A, the sure-handed sociopath expertly plays the stone-faced kid, calls him his “little brother,” and seals the deal for Clagget to star in the blaxploitation flick playing in his head.

Pelecanos’ plot revolves mostly around Cooper and Clagget’s crime spree, but a lesser story line, one quite salient on a thematic level, is the much-anticipated premiere of the blaxploitation movie King Suckerman (“The Man with the Master Plan Who Be Taking It to the Man”). It’s the talk of Washington, D.C., but the film turns out to be a huge disappointment to all, save for a few people. The audience expected the movie to offer the standard blaxploitation trope of anti-hero pimp as badass role model, but King Suckerman turns that stereotype upside down. In the end, the character of King Suckerman dies broken and behind bars, the film bombs, and a crestfallen BR is told the facts of life. “Little Brother?” says the nihilistic Cooper, who knows what he’s talking about. “That was the real deal.”

Delving deeper into the movie, Rasheed, the “woke” employee of Marcus Clay who miscategorized Hendrix, sees things differently. He recognizes racism and the perpetuation of stereotypes for profit, and fires off this bit of wisdom: “Those white producers tryin’ to exploit our culture, showin’ us what our ghetto thing is all about. And us, givin’ them our money like stone suckers.”

Then Rasheed explains it from the angle of a film fan who wants escapism and the kind of empowerment that can only come from fantasy. Outside the theater, he schools a coworker in this exchange:

“You know that picture’s not gonna do any business.”

“Oh yeah?”

“’Cause it tells the truth. And the brothers out here, they don’t want the truth.”

Back in the real world, where Cooper and Clagget live, the truth gets lurid quickly. Before they visit a biker gang to score some cocaine for an out-of-state associate, they pay a $20,000 finder’s fee to Eddie Marchetti, the creep who brokered the deal. Marchetti is a small-time fence and weed dealer who wishes to make it big, but his intelligence and gangster pretense are laughable. His right-hand man, Clarence Tate, runs the business due to Marchetti’s incompetence; but even so, Marchetti treats him, and his own girlfriend, Vivian Lee, with a lack of respect that’s as breathtaking as a punch to the gut.

Cooper and Marchetti are conducting business when Marcus Clay and his Greek pal, Dimitri Karras, approach them. Karras is a D.C. weed dealer in need of a pound. A slacker of little consequence, he’d rather play pick-up basketball and get high than find a job. Clay, meanwhile, is a Vietnam vet. (These same two characters will appear in subsequent Pelecanos novels. But in King Suckerman, they make their bones as stand-up guys who take personal responsibility for their actions and finish what they start.)

(Right) Author George Pelecanos

As this scene develops, Marchetti begins to throw his weight around and berate his associate, Tate; then he slaps Vivian. Karras, in turn, belts him. Clay disarms BR and knocks his front teeth out. As Clay and Karras leave, Clay impulsively grabs the $20,000, and Karras steers Vivian away from her toxic relationship. Karras and Clay know full well that they’ve put themselves into a position only violence can solve.

Cooper, Clagget, and their associates move rapidly to conclude the dope deal, which under Cooper’s direction becomes a massacre. A meeting is arranged for the return of the $20,000 to Cooper, but everybody knows that’s a pretense for an ambush, and King Suckerman, the book, ends even bloodier than the movie. By the close of this tale, Clay and Karras have grown a set, and more importantly, Karras has grown up.

It’s interesting to imagine how King Suckerman might be viewed, were it first released in our present age of “wokeness.” Pelecanos’ frequent use of the “N” word could be denounced as racist, and because King Suckerman was written by a Caucasian it might be shouted down as cultural appropriation. But the novel is not a cheap or shallow representation of lower-income African Americans. It’s the story of the melting pot, of interactions between African Americans and Caucasians, and a hard excoriation of stereotypes, as exemplified by BR Clagget, and the titular King Suckerman.

The tag line of King Suckerman, the motion picture—“The Man with the Master Plan Who Be Taking It to the Man”—may sound clumsy and redundant, but Pelecanos, who’s published 21 books and was part of the team behind HBO-TV’s The Wire, is neither of those. Exactly which “man” is Suckerman taking it to? The overlords of the society that oppress him? Or, more likely, to himself, “the man with the plan,” and the obvious sucker for the meretricious lure of the criminal life so glorified in popular culture.

The Book You Have to Read: “Tender Is Levine,” by Andrew Bergman

(Editor’s note: This is the 163rd installment in The Rap Sheet’s continuing series about great but forgotten books.)

By Steven Nester
Author Andrew Bergman exhibits real chutzpah when he combines kitsch, high art, and the mob in Tender Is LeVine, his third—and as far as one can tell, final—Jack LeVine mystery. Divorced, alone, and drinking too much, New York City private eye LeVine is a “depressed dick” in desperate need of a psychic kick in the pants. Luckily for him, he’s jolted from the middle-aged blues when violin player Fritz Stern asks for Jack’s assistance, making the summer of 1950 the most interesting one in his life.

Stern is a tentative, self-effacing, German immigrant who possesses “the nervous attentiveness of a refuge who had never stopped escaping.” His manner doesn’t give LeVine much confidence in his story, and it’s a whopper: Stern and several others in the world-famous NBC (Radio) Symphony Orchestra believe their maestro, octogenarian Arturo Toscanini, has been kidnapped and replaced with a look-alike. This might be too preposterous for anyone to swallow, especially since Toscanini is one of the most recognizable men in the world. However Jack needs to get his act together and start making some money, so he takes the case.

LeVine’s initial stop is at 30 Rockefeller Plaza (aka Radio City), the home of NBC, to pay a visit to Sidney Aaron, the executive who oversees the orchestra. Aaron looks like he “had made it on his own, leaving numerous casualties in his wake,” and he’s the first of many barriers LeVine will face in his quest. Aaron pooh-poohs the notion of Toscanini’s snatching; however LeVine, ever the skeptic, just has to ask: “If you’re so positive this claim is bullshit, why did you want to see me?” Aaron fast-talks around that point, but LeVine knows a lie when he hears one. So the next morning, he and Stern try to drop in on the Maestro at his Westchester home, only to be put off by a couple of torpedoes. When Jack spots those two guards tailing them back to Manhattan, he’s convinced something is actually amiss.

His suspicions are fatally confirmed when Fritz Stern is murdered on a deserted west side dock later that same day. Aaron then finally tells Jack that Toscanini has been grabbed, and he hires Jack to look into the matter, showing him a ransom note written on stationary from a mob-owned hotel in Havana. When Jack flies down to Cuba to investigate further, this tale becomes interesting, developing a convergence between its plot and the theme of old-school criminals who, to survive, must adapt to a fast-changing crime-scape, involving the rising gambling town of Las Vegas.

Tender Is LeVine is long on action and plot twists, but as with Bergman’s first two LeVine novels—The Big Kiss-Off of 1944 (1974) and Hollywood and LeVine (1975)—it’s also a nostalgic appreciation of a place that no longer exists, post-World War II New York City, and is therefore a lamentation on the passage of time; yet this story is more so, because the cultural changes are not only evident but imminent—and deadly. In Havana, notorious American mobster Meyer Lansky allows the P.I. to connect some of the dots he’s encountered. The NBC Symphony, LeVine learns, is a money-losing organization, and in 1950, television is beginning to overtake radio as the premier in-home source of entertainment. NBC wants to jettison Toscanini and, to add a little class to Las Vegas, it hopes to relocate the NBC Symphony to a hotel that Lanksy, his criminal associate Lucky Luciano, and executive Aaron are planning to build in Nevada. Toscanini would never go for such an idea. Hence, the plastic-surgery-altered stand-in. The bonus from this scheme is a quick fortune the ransom demand would provide to all of those involved.

As LeVine talks with Lansky, he’s astounded to find violinist Stern’s college-age daughter, Barbara, approaching their table. LeVine had already met Barbara in New York, and she’s as intelligent and calculating as she is comely. (“She had thick black hair, brown, almond-shaped eyes, a beautifully sculpted nose, and a mouth you couldn’t look at for long without becoming thoroughly ashamed of yourself.”) Barbara admits that at a tender age, she’d been the elder Lansky’s lover. It was a time in her precocious youth which she calls a “totally fascinating episode.” Their affair, though, is long over, and she and LeVine embark on a tryst that very night. But they’ve hardly pulled down the bedsheets, when LeVine is extracted from the hotel with help from a blackjack. He awakens aboard a yacht bound for Miami, Florida, and discovers his fellow passenger is the real Toscanini, who believes the FBI is protecting him from Italian fascist gunmen. From that point onward, things move very quickly and in much better focus, beginning with the next stop: Vegas.

(Right) Author Andrew Bergman

There, LeVine manages to escape his captors, and—disguised in a hideous toupee—commences to snoop. He realizes how deep in trouble he is when he sees Lucky Luciano gambling in a casino. The putatively persona non grata mobster, and Lansky’s wingman—deported to Italy back in 1946—is in the country illegally, and without a doubt is conniving with both Lansky and NBC’s Aaron. After Barbara shows up in Sin City herself, she and LeVine grab Toscanini and then negotiate a cross-country obstacle course to get the genuine Maestro back to New York, and safety.

Released in 2001, this third installment in the LeVine series was a definite late-comer, arriving in bookstores 26 years after the publication of Hollywood and Levine. No doubt that delay was due to Bergman’s intense work schedule as a Hollywood screenwriter and director. His film credits include Blazing Saddles, The Freshman, and Honeymoon in Vegas.

Whether the now 75-year-old Bergman will ever offer up a fourth LeVine yarn is anybody’s guess. Perhaps he’s sequestered Jack in some literary Witness Protection Program until it’s safe for him to emerge once more. After all, in Tender Is LeVine, that Jewish gumshoe managed to foil the grand plans of the most powerful criminals in the world and, at the end of the book, reached an unspoken and undefined détente with them. But isn’t two decades of his silence long enough? With the world as crazy as it is these days, it would seem an excellent time for Bergman to bring Jack LeVine out of the shadows and back onto the gritty streets of Gotham.

The Book You Have to Read: “Not Dead Yet,” by Daniel Banko

(Editor’s note: This is the 162nd installment in The Rap Sheet’s continuing series about great but forgotten books.)

By Steven Nester
Mild-mannered Matthew Kitterman is a self-effacing businessman from Boston, whose life is turned upside down when he returns home prematurely to the “vague aroma of animal rut” and finds his wife, Lana, hosting a party of naked revelers. Shocked, he snaps a polaroid and flees. But violence ensues when one prominent guest believes Lana plans to blackmail him. Lana shoots that man dead (probably in self-defense), and the next thing Kitterman knows is that he’s been falsely accused of murder and is on the run.

It sounds like pretty standard “you’ve-got-the-wrong-man” stuff. But in 1972’s Edgar Award-nominated Not Dead Yet, author Daniel Banko subtly turns the reading experience into one of reader participation—which all mysteries and whodunits are, really, but in this book it’s different. The way information is revealed here allows readers to feel the desperation and confusion that the characters themselves feel, not just to empathize with their predicaments. Paging through Not Dead Yet, you actually experience butterflies, uneasiness, and an odd sense of detachment from safety, making this novel more of a thriller, rather than one in which a crime is expected to be solved. The clues are in front of readers just as they are in front of Kitterman, but sometimes they’re nestled so deeply into the background that one needs to read thoroughly and imaginatively to see them.

Other clues come in the form of enormous tropes—almost like standing at the foot of Mount Everest and seeing only snow—as when a landlocked sailor named Clyde, waiting to ship out, joins the chaotic and quixotic group of misfits and drifters Kitterman falls in with. With the arrival of Clyde, Kitterman’s figurative ship has come in, for later in this book Clyde proves to be Kitterman’s most able cohort. Before Clyde becomes indispensable to Kitterman’s mission, though, the Most Valuable Player Award goes to an adrift widow, Mildred Molnar.

A drinker, and a believer in Kitterman’s innocence, Mildred is a woman looking for adventure and a cause. Her sole goal upon waking up beside a blacked-out Kitterman after their first meeting is to assist in exonerating him. Mildred spent her married life tending to an alcoholic husband who worked in Hollywood, and she’s as game as they get. “I’ve always wanted to be in a movie instead of just looking at one,” she says, and Mildred gets her wish here.

There were eyewitnesses to wife Lana’s crime, of course, but in straight-laced Boston, swingers who have no problem getting it on with strangers in private wouldn’t be disposed to unveil their kinks in an open court of law. Finding that one person who can identify the killer is chore number one, if Kitterman is to obtain a get-out-of-jail-free card; so on the advice of a psychic friend of Mildred’s, the next stop is to assemble a team and re-create the crime scene, with what evidence they already have. Kitterman does have a substantial lead, and that is the dead man’s wallet, in which he finds the business card of a Boston travel agent named Mueller. On the back of the card are several phone numbers, one being that of Kitterman’s home. Mueller appears to be a panderer; does that mean the additional numbers on the card belong to that fatal night’s other witnesses?

Solving this crime sounds like a layup shot, but what would be the point of that? Many people find danger and risk exciting, though it be second-hand. The thrill and anticipation that author Banko constructs is felt and shared with his readers.

Returning to Boston, Kitterman’s group sets up headquarters in a building across the street from his apartment and begins the search for that one crucial eyewitness. Just when their best candidate literally comes into arm’s reach, however, he bolts ... and it’s back to the beginning for everyone.

Now, one more thing about Banko’s images pointing readers and characters in the right direction. Without saying too much, let me just suggest that readers would be wise to not let the slightest detail here pass without some amount of scrutiny. When Kitterman figures out why the pigeons that nest on the roof of his building circle and circle and refuse to return to roost, then the mystery is solved.

The Book You Have to Read: “To Kiss, or Kill,” by Day Keene

(Editor’s note: This is the 161st installment in The Rap Sheet’s continuing series about great but forgotten books.)

By Steven Nester
Barney Mandell once had it all. A for-real heavyweight contender who scored 42 knockouts in a row, he was “sex in purple boxing trunks and six-ounce gloves” in the ring, and “a big beautiful Polack” to his friends and fans. Yet Barney is far from well. Just released from a sanitarium after a self-imposed stay of two years, which followed his catching his wife in flagrante delicto, he begins the process of integrating himself back into Chicago society, but finds things may never be the same.

Urged by his doctor to quit the “sweet science” in order to maintain his mental health, Barney agrees, and he takes the change with equanimity and punch-drunk simplicity. “I took one punch too many, see? And it did something to my marbles,” explains Barney. To Kiss, or Kill is a non-PC tale from 1951 that elicits plenty of empathy from attentive readers as they watch Barney, step by step, get set up for a fatal fall; and plenty of admiration for the talents of author Day Keene (real name Gunnar Hjerstedt) as he makes that happen.

However eager Keene’s protagonist is to be reunited with his beautiful, wealthy wife, the lusty and sharp-tongued Gale Ebbling—who for seemingly no good reason avoids him—the certifiably sane Mandell is filled with trepidation at their impending reunion, with cause. How can he convince his hot-blooded socialite spouse that he’s sane when he believes he’s back-sliding into mental illness, and the circumstances around him support such a conclusion? It ain’t easy, as Barney discovers, especially when supposed friends keep his sanity out of reach … and dead bodies turn up wherever he goes.

Barney’s first stop after he’s liberated from the asylum is a bar, where he self-medicates with whiskey, and it’s there that his travails begin in earnest. He’s propositioned by one Cherry Marvin, a drop-dead-gorgeous brunette who’s slathered in the same perfume his wife favors; but no dice, he’s a one-woman man, and he turns Cherry down. Soon thereafter, he returns to his hotel room, only to be pistol-whipped and robbed. When he awakens, the woman from the bar is with him, naked and beaten to death—only now she’s a blonde.

It’s at this point that Keene launches his characters into their misinformation campaign to keep Barney on edge and the reader on high alert, looking for hints that will reveal the motives behind the relentless and inspired gaslighting to which Barney is subjected.

Mandell is held by Chicago police, but is quickly sprung by a very intriguing character, an agent with the U.S. Treasury Department who’s been trying to locate him, and whose motives for doing so are unclear. Just as soon as Barney believes explanations are forthcoming, his hopes disappear: that enigmatic agent is murdered (with a gun belonging to Barney), not long after he’d dropped the name of Barney’s long-missing Uncle Vladimir, a physics professor with very deep pockets. It’s obvious that Barney is a wanted man, but by whom and for what reason is what holds readers’ interest. When the red-hot typewriter of Day Keene starts banging away in high gear it gets one thinking that Gale Ebbling, so noticeable by her absence, is at the core of this mysterious and murderous matrix. Gale can only run for so long before the reader, the plot, and the author require that she appear with explanations to make this narrative come together.

Barney finally catches up with Gale at her hotel, and at first listen, never has the sweet music of love sounded so ominous. Barney hears the cries of vigorous lovemaking in the room, but they turn out to be coming from a parrot, Gale’s replacement for the bird Barney throttled when he found her in bed with another guy. This new feathered mimic is obviously repeating something it heard back when Mandell’s marriage was in limbo. But Barney can’t seem to put two and two together—unlike readers, who will be spinning theories on why these mismatched people became a pair in the first place.

As a society woman, Gale could have had her pick of eligible men—she’s the one with dough and class—yet she chose an addled and weary pug, a guy whose only virtue is his appeal as arm-candy. Barney’s no Gene Tunney, the close-but-no-cigar-intellectual heavyweight champ who married an heiress to the United States Steel fortune in 1928, so there must be something about her attraction to “a punk from the wrong side of the tracks made boudoir-presentable by limelight” than isn’t obvious. It only starts to make sense when the couple travel to Gale’s family’s estate to visit her socially prominent but cash-strapped father.

As adept as Keene is at scattering breadcrumbs for readers to follow, his expertise as the author of more than 50 novels and countless radio-drama scripts is belied by his sex scenes, which leave plenty to be desired. Behold this howler, which would more likely prompt Barney to call an exterminator, when he should instead be imploring the Greek god Eros for strength and stamina as Gale rips the clothes off his body: “…[H]er fingers felt like little white mice with hot feet racing across his chest.” And there’s no mistaking, even to an all-talk high school Casanova, just what is getting bigger when Barney observes Gale naked in the shower “with growing interest.” For sure, one wouldn’t read this book for edification or to prepare for a GMAT in English Literature; it’s value is that it offers a brief escape into imagined danger, and then a sense of relief as the story concludes. Keene had a genuine talent for compelling readers to turn pages.

How the crime/detective genre came to dominate the pulp-fiction market during the mid-20th century is a story for another time. It should be remembered, though, that Keene, like countless others—including the great Edgar Allan Poe, from whose agony and innovation all pulp-fiction writers sprang—wrote principally to make money, not art. He was among a legion of authors-for-hire who, at the fastest pace possible, created portable and captivating entertainment that could fit into the pocket of a commuter’s gray flannel suit. While the pulp-book trade is often deemed to be lowbrow in nature, such smirking snobbery fails to note that it was this genre, and others like it, that often provided an essential stop on a reader’s journey from Dick and Jane to, perhaps, Finnegan’s Wake. Helping readers to make take that step, that leap was an art in itself.

READ MORE: “Nothing But Lip Service,” by J. Kingston Pierce
(Killer Covers).

The Book You Have to Read: “La Donna Detroit,” by Jon A. Jackson

(Editor’s note: This is the 159th installment in The Rap Sheet’s continuing series about great but forgotten books.)

By Steven Nester
Retiring from the mafia is not easy—even if one survives to old age. A Detroit mob boss with the stomach-churning name of Humphrey DiEbola wants to do just that in La Donna Detroit (2000), the eighth entry in Jon A. Jackson’s Detective Sergeant “Fang” Mulheisen series. Fang himself doesn’t appear often until nearly the end of this book, but readers won’t miss him all that much—plot-wise there’s no need for his presence. La Donna Detroit is a character study and a post-mob handbook for aging torpedoes, which on the surface reads as a basic mafia back-stabbing revenge drama. Fortunately, the tale never veers towards that, nor towards a flat-footed procedural, even when Mulheisen shows up. The action here focuses on DiEbola’s plan, which will require plenty of patient scheming as he gets all his ducks in a row as nicely if they were floating past in a shooting gallery. The first and most crucial step is to find and groom someone to take over the business once he fakes his death; and DiEbola believes he has his patsy.

Helen Sedlacek is a successful, intelligent young woman with “gallons of black hair” and the scruples of a robber baron. She is without a doubt her father’s daughter, her old man being the Serbian crime boss whose murder is the MacGuffin in this book. Helen has been able to make a decent living in a man’s world without getting involved in the family business, but that soon changes. This tough little cookie is drawn into the perilous action after her father is murdered, prompting her and lover Joe Service, a freelance hit man, to deliver some street justice to the capo who ordered thar killing. Revenge is served even colder when the pair makes off with millions of dollars in mob cash—but as usual, a recovery team of thugs is hot on their trail. With unexpected results.

Seven installments of the Mulheisen series were published prior to this one, so La Donna Detroit backtracks just enough for late-arriving readers (such as me) to be clued in; for instance, the hit on Helen’s dad was made and the money taken in a previous book, allowing this one to be read as a standalone. There are, however, enough plot twists and complications here to compel readers to stay on the ball. In flashbacks, we see Service hospitalized after he and Helen take it on the lam. Helen grabs the loot while Joe is laid up, and DiEbola—who’s already next in line to be king—fills the interregnum and locates Helen. He’s not out for revenge; he just wants to talk business. Like an angel of redemption, DiEbola brings Helen back into the fold and cuts a deal.

DiEbola has known Helen all of her life. Without her, he wouldn’t have risen to capo di capo, so at the very least he owes her something for that. He’s been an uncle to her (“Unca Umby”), and Helen trusts DiEbola not to harm her. He tells Helen that he tried to dissuade the killers from making the hit on her father, and that he has big plans for her. DiEbola wants to take Helen to the head of the class, starting with her running his knock-off cigar company—maker of the premium La Donna Detroit brand—as well as other of his legitimate businesses. However, as Sedlacek is introduced to louche Detroit society—the slobs and the players—and their doings, a group of rogue government law-enforcement agents are leaning on the hospitalized Service for intel on the international drug trade. Their selling point is simple: Service is a fugitive from the law and a man wanted by the mob, with law enforcement guarding his recovery room 24/7. With no one to turn to save for this renegade group, Service is finally convinced to escape from the hospital, and is eventually talked into blowing up a jet with a drug kingpin on board—as well infiltrating the mob and killing DiEbola. However, luck, opportunity, and old-school allegiance to the criminal organization prevail, and after fleeing the rogue agents, Service makes his way back to DiEbola and Helen, who by this point is DiEbola’s right-hand woman. All the while, DiEbola has been putting together the components of his escape, and in organized crime, there’s no such thing as a clean getaway.

(Left) Author Jon A. Jackson

DiEbola hosts a poker game that ends in a massacre, during which he makes his getaway. Among the dead is one of DiEbola’s henchmen, whose corpse is DiEbola’s stand in. Service returns to the fold to aid DiEbola’s flight aboard a cabin cruiser, across Lake Michigan to Canada. This is Mulhiesen’s cue to enter the stage. He assembles the clues to the massacre at the poker table and DiEbola’s possible involvement, and he’s also able to solve a murder that happened decades in the past, one that involves an adolescent Humphrey DiEbola.

The old days of mafia honor are disappearing, and the machinations of La Donna Detroit show the new ways taking hold. Classic thugs and enforcers are out, along with blackjacks and cement overcoats; gangsters with MBAs are rushing to fill the void. Author Jackson delivers the story of this nefarious evolution with humor and insight and a curiosity that should lead newcomers to search out other entries in his series, which began with 1977’s The Diehard.

Favorite Crime Fiction of 2018, Part III: Steven Nester

Steven Nester is the longtime host of Poets of the Tabloid Murder, a weekly Internet radio program heard on the Public Radio Exchange (PRX). In addition, he is a New York-based freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Rap Sheet, January Magazine, Shotgun Honey, Yellow Mama, Mystery Scene, and Firsts Magazine.

• The Sinners, by Ace Atkins (Putnam):
As if continuing the adventures of Robert B. Parker’s Boston private eye, Spenser, weren’t sufficiently time-consuming, author Ace Atkins also pens a series about Quinn Colson, a former U.S. Army Ranger and current sheriff of Mississippi’s (fictional) Tibbehah County. One hell of a series it is, too. The Sinners, the eighth Colson novel, really hits it out of the park. Colson may have finally put his nemesis, corrupt businessman Johnny Stagg, behind bars some while back, but crime abhors a vacuum, and Stagg has since been replaced by one Fannie Hathcock, a red-headed strip-club proprietor we got to know in Atkins’ previous installment in this series, The Fallen (2017). In The Sinners, Hatchcock’s able bartender, Ordeen Davis, is murdered by Heath Pritchard, an old-school marijuana grower who likes “racin’, growin’ weed, drinking and screwin”—not necessarily in that order. Hamp Beckett, Colson’s deceased uncle and law-enforcement predecessor, consigned Pritchard to their state’s notorious Parchman prison 23 years ago, but now he’s returned—and he wants what he figures is his share of the family pot business still being carried on by his not-too-bright nephews, stock-car neophytes (and comic-relief providers) Tyler and Cody Pritchard. As one might expect, Hathcock is upset at Davis’ death, especially since it comes on top of other trouble she’s already been having with the Pritchard boys and moves her closer into conflict with the Dixie Mafia. Meanwhile, Boom Kimbrough—Colson’s wingman, fellow vet, and the designated best man at the sheriff’s impending nuptials—has gone to work for a trucking enterprise that’s also caught up in the drug trade, and a determined federal agent wants Kimbrough to don a wire and help her bring down his employer. As they might be in real life, the obstacles thrown in Colson’s way here are reconciled in a bittersweet manner that lends this book the resonance of reality.

• Swift Vengeance, by T. Jefferson Parker (Putnam):
Californian Jeff Parker boasts of an elegant prose style, and there are few other fiction writers who can come anywhere near to achieving his concision and beauty of expression. Parker also claims a firm grasp on the development of plot and characters, with 24 novels to his credit as proof. Saying much with little causes readers to want more—and Parker is happy to deliver. In this second tale starring Roland Ford (introduced in last year’s The Room of White Fire), this San Diego cop turned Marine turned private investigator endeavors to help Lindsey Rakes, a stressed-out ex-U.S. Air Force drone pilot, who has received the most gruesome death threats from a mysterious figured identified only as “Caliphornia.” It seems that would-be assassin intends to exact revenge upon Rakes for the deaths she caused in the Middle East during her military service. The handwriting on the menacing notes resembles that of Rasha Samara, a Saudi landscape architect she’s dated during her divorce from husband Brandon Goff. But the angry Goff might just as well be the source of the threats. Rakes goes into hiding for her own protection, while Ford works with an FBI specialist to identify her would-be assailant. The beheading of one of Rakes’ former Air Force colleagues, who had also been terrorized by Caliphornia, raises the stakes all around. While tackling international issues and the violence that may derive from them with confidence and prowess, Parker brings enough verisimilitude to his escapist fiction, that one can’t help feeling both thrilled by his storytelling … and on constant alert for dangers ahead.

• Pirata, by Patrick Hasburgh
(Harper Perennial):
A crew of louche ex-patriots killing time and abundant brain cells on a Central American beach find themselves in a most un-mellow situation; yet despite the violence, debauchery, and broken families, this book makes the life of a surf bum seem rather attractive. “Part of the deal with expats in Mexico is that we get to be whoever we want to be—as long as we don’t cause too much trouble,” opines Nick Lutz, a California used-car salesman turned slacker. After being shot in the head by a would-be client determined to hijack some wheels, then seeing his young son injured in an automobile accident and losing his wife, Lutz flees south of the border in hopes of finding a new life. It’s all good—until a pretty femme fatale named Meagan dumps her abusive boyfriend, Winsor, who also happens to be Nick’s drinking buddy. When she seeks refuge for herself and her two boys in Nick’s casita, Winsor doesn’t take too kindly to the disruption of his love life. Not too kindly at all. Suddenly dead bodies begin to appear, together with a distinctly unfriendly FBI agent; and in short order Lutz must fight for the few things that are genuinely important to him. Amid everything else, he realizes that his ex-wife back in the States, who now has custody of their child, may have had a hand in his attempted murder. Hasburgh created the 1987-1991 Fox-TV series 21 Jump Street, so it’s little wonder that Pirata moves quickly and credibly, tempting one to chuck it all and head to a beach with a board and suntan lotion.

Finally, one work from the non-fiction stacks …

• The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century, by Kirk Wallace Johnson (Viking):
Edwin Rist, a 22-year-old home-schooled prodigy from upstate New York, brings unwanted scrutiny to the arcane and sometimes secretive circle of salmon-fly tiers when his “crime of the century” (at least in that world) unravels in Johnson’s The Feather Thief. Brilliant and protean, an extremely talented flautist with an intelligence bordering perhaps on Asperger’s Syndrome, Rist broke into Britain’s Natural History Museum at Tring, in Hertfordshire, in June 2009 and stole hundreds of brightly colored bird skins, putting him in the enviable position of owning one of the greatest such collections ever amassed. He then sought to peddle individual feathers and entire birds to fellow fly tiers at top-dollar prices. Many of those species are protected by law, whether the birds are dead or alive. But Rist figured that some of the world’s best tiers would nonetheless want his rare and otherwise-unattainable feathers in order to create flies in the style of the pastime’s masters. He also convinced himself that he’d acted in the public service, freeing the natural beauty that had been hidden in museums for decades. Over the course of The Feather Thief, Johnson—a master of erudition, concision, and simplicity—will make you slightly conversant in evolution, ecology, woman’s fashions at the turn of the last century, the rise of the British Empire, and exotic birds among many other things, without ever coming across as a prig. And all of that information is wrapped around a story worthy of Arthur Conan Doyle.

The Book You Have to Read: “The Big Kiss-Off of 1944,” by Andrew Bergman

(Editor’s note: This is the 156th installment in The Rap Sheet’s continuing series about great but forgotten books.)

By Steven Nester
Just when you thought it was safe to venture back into the voting booth for America’s mid-term elections, along comes this ardent exhortation to first re-read private eye Jack LeVine’s debut in The Big Kiss-Off of 1944. That 1974 novel is a tightly constructed noir, which at its core is a political thriller. Author and Hollywood veteran Andrew Bergman has the chops and good sense to keep the ideology simple and his P.I. far from the halls of power; instead, LeVine pounds the pavement in search of the schmucks who do dirty for the groysmakht—as that Jewish boy from New York might say.

LeVine lives in Queens, New York, and works amongst the hoi polloi. His office is in a sooty Midtown Manhattan building “supported by the sheer density of cigar smoke and cheap perfume.” Mel, that structure’s obese elevator boy, is a pain in the neck, and the house dick, Toots Fellman, lives up to his job title. The sensible Kitty Seymour is an affable “friend with benefits,” who shares the same interests as LeVine and helps keep his morale up and his feet on the ground. Just when business can’t get any slower, in walks trouble with a bagful of money.

Good girl Kerry Lane’s acting career is currently experiencing an uptick, but she took a flyer from propriety a while back to star in a stag film. Full of regret and career jitters, she hires LeVine at the start of this yarn to retrieve the movie before her Broadway producer boss—Warren Butler, “a straight-laced old fairy” (LeVine is the product of his times)—gets wind of her moral slip and fires her. But of course, it’s not that simple. LeVine’s natural skepticism has him believing that Lane is not being forthright about her motivation for hiring him, and he’s correct: Lane is being blackmailed, and it has nothing to do with her job security. Like the great femme fatale Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon, Lane is good, very good; and LeVine, who ought to know better, has difficulty discerning if she’s “telling the truth or reading from a script.” To get a better grasp on the circumstances, he takes the words of his client at face value and begins the odious task of turning over rocks to investigate on his own.

The first stop in his pursuit of Lane’s skin flick is a deserted and slovenly house out on Long Island. There, LeVine gets a break which at first confuses more than informs, but he’s streetwise enough to see that this investigation may have a political angle. The house is littered with newspapers from around the nation, with articles about the upcoming presidential election (Franklin D. Roosevelt vs. Thomas E. Dewey) neatly clipped from their pages. LeVine’s curiosity is piqued as his understanding of the case becomes heightened and muddled; but he’s also put on high alert. The murders of two greedy errand boys working for Lane’s blackmailer confirm that more is at stake than his client’s job hoofing in a chorus line. By the time LeVine discovers that the trail he’s picked up leads to the White House, it’s too late for anyone to turn back—especially a guy with LeVine’s integrity.

At this point Kerry Lane takes a powder, leaving LeVine with no clear path forward. But a hunch bordering on clairvoyance takes him to the Quaker National Bank in Philadelphia, and to Eli Savage, its president, whose front-page photograph LeVine spotted in the dingy house on Long Island. Savage is a figurehead of WASP money and rectitude (“If the Mayflower slept with Mount Rushmore, Savage would have been the result”), and during LeVine’s unwelcome yet fateful meeting with the banker, he saves Savage from a sniper’s bullet meant for himself. The dust settles, and who should stand in the shadows of Savage’s office but Kerry Lane, who turns out to be Anne Savage, Eli’s daughter. The karma scale is now tipped in LeVine’s favor, and Savage and Anne have some explaining to do.

Their story goes like this: Savage is a supporter of Republican presidential candidate Dewey, a former racket-busting prosecutor and now the governor of New York, who seeks to replace FDR just as World War II is coming to an end. Roosevelt supporters are appalled at the thought of a Dewey presidency, being convinced that he doesn’t possess the ability to safely steer the free world through the postwar rubble and the rising communist threat. The blackmailers hope to use Anne’s bad judgment in making that stag film as leverage to force Eli Savage to drop his deep-pocketed backing of Dewey, thus simplifying FDR’s path to victory. But it won’t be that easy. A sit-down at Manhattan’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel between LeVine and members of the Allied Forces military brass, who attempt to dissuade our hero from doing his job, only adds fuel to the fire of his search. “My politics are strictly for LeVine,” he insists.

LeVine realizes he may be in the position of determining the outcome of America’s 1944 presidential race, so he devises a plan to prevent Democrats from weaponizing the porno flick. At the same time, he keeps Savage and Dewey in the dark as to the identity of the blackmailers, lest they use that knowledge to headline underhandedness by the Democratic Party and perhaps throw the country into chaos. LeVine tells Dewey he thinks mobsters are behind the extortion, but Dewey’s not buying it. A New York City cop who’s no friend of LeVine raises additional doubts, suggesting to Dewey and Savage that the election is being tampered with. His proof is that the investigation of the blackmailer’s pair of errand boys has been sidelined by higher-ups. That, Dewey believes; but with no hard evidence (except for what LeVine won’t tell him), he focuses on getting the film and getting elected.

LeVine’s ultimate plan to preserve truth, justice, and the American way, as well as his own scruples, requires a magnificent bluff. He schedules a sham national radio address, during which Eli Savage will reportedly discuss politics … and ethics. If the stag reel isn’t returned to Savage, the blackmail plot will be revealed across the airwaves. It’s a swift plot turn on author Bergman’s part, and it works.

Andrew Bergman has successfully hopped back and forth over the years between screenwriting (Blazing Saddles, The In-Laws, The Freshman) and novel writing (which includes two sequels to Big Kiss-Off: 1975’s Hollywood and LeVine and 2001’s Tender Is LeVine). His career harks back to a time when some of the finest novelists, such as William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald, toiled for the Hollywood establishment. Unfortunately, those two literary geniuses were accused by the literati of copping out for big paydays; the now 73-year-old Bergman hasn’t had to endure such caviling.

The Big Kiss-Off of 1944 concludes with Anne and Eli Savage, plus LeVine and Kitty Seymour, all sipping highballs around the swimming pool at Eli’s estate. Thinking of the future, the banker sounds out LeVine for a position with the Dewey campaign, reasoning that the shamus has a “common touch,” which could be useful in the election run-up. LeVine, true to character, takes umbrage and shoots from the hip. “Be the house prole, you mean. Translate what the dumbbell on the street means when he moves his mouth,” says the rankled P.I. Jack LeVine is no martini-swilling thin man. He’s a self-described “balding Jewish bullfrog,” who knows his place in the world and is quite comfortable there, thank you. LeVine isn’t the Cadillac of gumshoes, but he’s a hardworking and honorable stiff, as dependable as a beat-up Checker cab. Pay the fare and he’ll take you where you need to go.

The Book You Have to Read: “Homeboy,” by Seth Morgan

(Editor’s note: This is the 155th installment in The Rap Sheet’s continuing series about great but forgotten books.)

By Steven Nester
Seth Morgan updated the jewel-heist storyline in his acclaimed 1990 debut novel, Homeboy, by taking it to the way down low of San Francisco’s Tenderloin District where pimps, porn queens, and junkies comprise the curdled cream of society. The English language can barely contain this fast-moving white-trash picaresque as Morgan’s adventurous and unrelenting, jive-slinging and look-at-me-write! narrative plunges breathlessly forward with the unquenchable cravings of an addict—which is what the author was. Homeboy zigzags through the late 1980s underworld, following strip club barker and junky/dealer Joe Speaker, together with a large and intriguingly conceived supporting cast of “hookers, hustlers, thieves and thugs,” as Morgan’s story moves from the street, to strip joints, and eventually to prison. For a lucky few, that journey ends with serendipitous redemption and self-revelation. For most, however, it does not.

Rosemary Hooten, “a she-devil bike bimbo and certified Satan’s Slut,” bears the nom du putain Rings’n’Things, in recognition of her plethora of piercings and tattoos. As this book opens, Rings witnesses the murder of her friend and fellow sex worker Gloria Monday, who had already been beaten badly by her lover, well-married California Supreme Court Justice Lucius Carver Bell, after he failed to retrieve from Gloria his wife’s family heirloom: a necklace featuring the infamous Blue Jager Moon diamond. Subsequent to the justice’s empty-handed exit, local kingpin pimp and porn tycoon “Baby” Jewels Moses, an obese parasite “pawnbrokering dreams,” arrives and finds the necklace. Recognizing his opportunity, he promptly kills Bell’s low-rent inamorata and then sets out to blackmail the prominent jurist. The fly in the K-Y Jelly, though, is that Rings’n’Things now has the goods not only on Bell, but also on Moses. As if those weren’t plot complications enough, Joe Speaker soon robs Jewels’ gambling den and stumbles upon the Blue Moon. He takes that sparkling prize, unaware of its value or provenance. Or the dangers it will bring his way.

With San Francisco’s criminal realm nettled by politicians’ efforts to clean the streets in advance of the coming election season, the search for Bell’s wayward gem turns deadly—even for those who write about it.

Author Seth Morgan was born in New York City to a family of privilege and old money. (His father was soap fortune heir, poet, and onetime Hudson Review editor George Frederick Morgan.) Yet not even exclusive boarding schools could make him into something suitable for polite society, so Morgan set his own course. Prior to penning Homeboy, he was a heroin addict and alcoholic who himself worked as a strip club barker in San Francisco. He was also rock singer Janis Joplin’s fiancé at the time of her death, in 1970. Later in that same decade, Morgan served the greater part of three years in prison for armed robbery. Publishing a popular novel might finally have turned things around for him; instead, it was all downhill from there. He died in October 1990, at age 41, the victim of a drunken motorcycle crash in New Orleans, just months after Homeboy saw print.

Judging by the abundance of voice, literary invention, and characterization Morgan poured into his only finished novel, one might think he knew his life would be short. The plot and action hurl along through these pages, aided by coincidence and fate, like the work of a Brontë sister on crack. It’s recommended that readers surrender their judgment to the machinations of this book in the same way addicts submit themselves to dope. Morgan channels Valley Girl drolleries (“fer shur”) and exhibits a Joycean flair for lusty portmanteau, labeling fashionable prostitute wear “peek-a-boo whoredrobe.” He flirts with Shakespearean-lite when describing a junkie-hooker’s abject endgame, the woman strung out on heroin (“the bitter seasoning of her direful days”), imagining that she will “hijack a shopping cart and join the Tenderloin’s mad hag legions, hank and hair like her of what had once some dim yesternight been dream flesh.” The fabled and cursed Blue Moon possesses a pedigree that makes the Hope Diamond seem like a dime store rhinestone; but Morgan writes that its beauty, its “cold colors washing the lights from his rings the way dawn enfeebles streetlamps,” simultaneously beguiles and damns all who come in contact with it—including Joe Speaker.

Everything hits the fan for Speaker when a robbery results in homicide—and that’s just the start of his troubles. Speaker tosses the pricey necklace he’s found into a shark tank in a Chinese restaurant for safekeeping, and then allows his loose-lipped sidekick to die at the hands of police in order to keep him quiet. One feeble ray of hope shining on Morgan’s protagonist is a tenacious cop named Ricardo Tarzon, whose skin in this game is a beef with Baby Jewels. Tarzon’s daughter, Belinda, is a street-level employee of Jewels, and following the cop’s failed rapprochement with her, and her ensuing slaying by Jewels, Tarzon plans to even the score. Accomplishing that will require that he recover the Blue Moon; and to do that he must keep Speaker safe.

(Right) Author Morgan photographed on the back of 1990’s Homeboy.

After Speaker is sent away to prison for car theft, he can keep his secret no longer. Tarzon, Jewels, and the entire San Francisco underworld seem to know that he’s hidden the Blue Moon, and efforts to get him to divulge its whereabouts begin. Homicide Lieutenant Tarzon’s power is limited in the penitentiary; but that’s not the case for Baby Jewels, whose tentacles extend through the bars to wrap around Speaker’s throat in search of information. Fortunately for Speaker, he has a guardian angel in the joint—one with some juice, and nothing to lose. An elderly lifer named Earl, whose relationship with Speaker is closer than the junky barker imagines, keeps him safe during a cell block uprising, but in the process, literally takes a bullet for the young felon.

Quickly, loose plot threads are laced together like a Victorian bodice. The love of Speaker’s life, a stripper known as Kitty Litter, is revealed to be carrying his child—and both parents are elated. Speaker discovers the truth behind Earl’s devotion to him (a twist that might have been right at home in a romance yarn), and the Blue Moon is not only located, but is sold to fund a drug-rehabilitation program. Although it is at times prosaic and a little corny, with over-the-top elements and Pink Panther-on-junk twists tossed in, Homeboy reinvents the gritty world of sex and dope. It doesn’t glorify that lifestyle, but uses it to showcase the triumph of Joe Speaker’s resilience.

It’s apparent that Seth Morgan wrote about the sort of world he knew best, and without a doubt he lived there, too. He doesn’t take cover behind his art: what you see is what you get, full-frontal Morgan, unashamed of revealing himself and most likely reveling in the talents that brought this book to fruition. Homeboy seems to be a cathartic document about a life Morgan needed to share and from which he would never escape, save for dying.

The Book You Have to Read: “Hollywood and LeVine,” by Andrew Bergman

(Editor’s note: This is the 154th installment in The Rap Sheet’s continuing series about great but forgotten books.)

By Steven Nester
Private investigator Jack LeVine possesses the “wise and forgiving heart of a Talmudic sage,” but he’s no antiquated milquetoast. Screenwriter/director Andrew Bergman’s trench coat-clad retro-noir novel Hollywood and LeVine (1975), the second book in a trilogy, avoids caricature and cliché, giving its story the power to intrigue the most demanding readers of noir; yet its locale, its place in history, along with its plot circumstances and stage dressing, will satisfy anyone who craves the invigorating company of a slap-some-sense-into-you, old-school shamus.

For a while at least, the end of World War II seemed like a great time to be in the P.I. business. New York City’s LeVine has been making bank checking up on how the wives of GIs returning from the battlefields amused themselves while their husbands were off protecting democratic values. However, as quickly as the soldiers came home and the party started, those vets “combed the confetti from their hair … and commenced to brood.” Peacetime inflation set in, and with the champagne ceasing to flow, a deep sense of paranoia descended slowly upon the land.

By early 1947, Jack LeVine is finally down to his last dollar. It’s then that he is approached in his Manhattan office by an old friend, Walter Adrian. The pair had been fellow travelers two decades before at the City College of New York, a hotbed of leftist thinking ever since the days of Sacco and Vanzetti. The practical LeVine had eventually cooled toward “Uncle Joe” Stalin and his brutality, got his gumshoe license, and chosen to save civilization one worried or confused client at a time. Meanwhile, Adrian has become a successful (if never Oscar-winning) screenwriter, spreading hope for a better world through popular culture. Shortly after they reunite, Adrian invites LeVine out to Los Angeles for a visit—and a paycheck.

Yet when LeVine arrives in Southern California, he discovers Adrian and his Hollywood clique running scared.

Remember, the United States’ early postwar years brought not only a turn away from political isolationism and the kickoff of the nation’s “baby boom,” but also the birth of the Cold War and the concurrent fear campaign remembered as McCarthyism. Led by a self-promoting U.S. senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, that last effort made the federal government complicit in a witch hunt for homegrown communists and “red” spies—real and imaginary—wherever they might exist. McCarthy’s dubious investigation focused principally on government employees, college educators, and labor union activists, as well as members of the entertainment industry, especially those living and working in Tinseltown. McCarthy and his nationalist-crusader cohorts sought to “blacklist” anyone at the major film studios who they’d convinced themselves were “communist sympathizers,” thus undermining those people’s careers.

It’s against this backdrop that Walter Adrian draws Levine west. Adrian suspects that Warner Bros., the studio for which he’s worked since 1938, is giving him the cold shoulder. His contract is up for renegotiation and he is being offered considerably less money than was included in his previous agreement. What’s more, a theatrical play he’s written is attracting exactly zero interest from producers, and he is concerned that he’s being followed. Adrian declines to offer an explanation for his perceived fall from grace, but the balding, divorced, and Blatz-drinking LeVine is no chump. He figures Adrian is concealing crucial information, and he’s seasoned enough to realize that such secrecy may bring unfavorable results. “I didn’t think he was holding out on me for any malicious reason,” explains Levine. “That’s what bothered me: it’s the ones with good intentions who get pushed off the tops of buildings.”

When Adrian in fact ends up swinging from a rope on a deserted movie set, his death is labeled a suicide. LeVine doesn’t buy that explanation for a minute. More likely, Adrian was among the first to have felt the wrath of the anti-communist blacklist, and fell on his sword—or he might have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. This being an era marked by secrets and betrayals, perhaps Adrian knew too much about something he wished he knew nothing about. To get to the truth, LeVine dives headfirst into Hollywood culture, and the discrepancies he finds can be ludicrous.

“If this was communism, it looked pretty good to me,” LeVine opines as he calls on the palatial homes of Adrian’s well-paid socialist pals. Nonetheless, the disdain studio managers exhibit toward writers—the bedrock of the movie business—is painful. Those wordsmiths are deemed disposable, a perception made clear to the P.I. when a talent agent “stuck a polished shoe up on his desk, careful to place the heel on a script.” Readers who’ve dug deeper into Hollywood history may recall a resounding put-down of screenwriters attributed to legendary studio chief Jack Warner, who allegedly called them “schmucks with typewriters.” Is it any wonder that Hollywood scripters of that time often felt like doormats in a B movie?

The case unfolds swiftly and engagingly. LeVine finds Adrian’s beautiful red-headed wife, Helen, to be a grieving yet very merry widow, but not somebody he considers capable of any foul play. In an obligatory confrontation, L.A. police warn LeVine to stay clear of their inquiries, which of course only intensifies his interest in them. Author Bergman, whose screenplay Tex X was the basis for Mel Brooks’ classic Western satire, Blazing Saddles (1974), possesses a sly sense of humor. He combines historical context with spot-on parody when, in this novel, he introduces a young Republican congressman from California named Richard Nixon. Eager to build a reputation, Nixon—in “a stern hand-on-the-Bible voice”—questions LeVine and Warners studio boss Johnny Parker on behalf of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), an investigative body of the U.S. House of Representatives that, just like McCarthy’s Senate council, was charged with rooting out subversives. Amid all of this, LeVine learns of the theory that Adrian was murdered to prevent him from naming fellow Communist Party members in the movie biz. That solution would give the matter closure, placing any resolution behind the impregnable “Iron Curtain.” However, patience and some solid snooping lead our man LeVine in a different direction.

The shamus spots cowboy actor Dale Carpenter rushing into Johnny Parker’s house. In the process, a scrap of newspaper falls from a folder in Carpenter’s hands, and this supplies LeVine with a critical first piece of the puzzle. He follows that clue to a small-time Colorado cop who has blackmailed his way into federal law enforcement and the Hollywood craft unions, and then to a man that cop arrested years ago for rape—someone who’s now a studio executive. When LeVine closes in on Adrian’s killer, the FBI agent who has been leaning on Parker to identify commies in the motion-picture industry suddenly accuses Helen Adrian of being a Soviet agent responsible for her spouse’s slaying. And as it becomes clear that Helen is slated for extermination as well, Bergman really pulls out the stops. He teams LeVine with Humphrey Bogart at a party where Helen is abducted. Bogart, a stand-up guy no matter what fiction he might appear in, aids LeVine in a middle-of-the-night car chase to rescue her from a certain death, and to flush out the guilty parties—even though some of them are bound to escape punishment in the end.

The palpable divisiveness of our political scene in 2017 might lead readers to feel a sense of relief that, as bad as some things are nowadays, at least they’re better than in the early postwar years, when fear and intolerance bred mob rule, censorship, and tyranny. Hollywood and LeVine reminds us of just how bad those old days could be. Putting the message ahead of the fictional narrative in this fashion may seem underhanded, unfair to unsuspecting and impressionable consumers. But altruism takes many forms. Percy Bysshe Shelley advised artists of their responsibilities, saying that “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Temper this with Ernest Hemingway’s admonishment, that if “you want to send a message, call Western Union,” and perhaps a coexistence between fact and fiction can be reached. As a work of fiction, Hollywood and LeVine perfectly blends entertainment with edification.

READ MORE: “Hello Dahlia!” by J. Kingston Pierce (January Magazine).

Favorite Crime Fiction of 2017, Part V: Steven Nester

Steven Nester is the longtime host of Poets of the Tabloid Murder, a weekly Internet radio program heard on the Public Radio Exchange (PRX). In addition, he is a New York-based freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Rap Sheet, January Magazine, Shotgun Honey, Yellow Mama, Mystery Scene, and Firsts Magazine.

• August Snow, by Stephen Mack Jones (Soho Crime):
August Snow is a former Marine and ex-cop who, after winning a wrongful-termination lawsuit, takes his pile of cash and returns to his old Detroit neighborhood, Mexicantown, a once-thriving haven for families that was cruelly hit by years of “white flight.” Snow is the kind of guy you want watching your back. He also believes in redemption. As he recalls his late father saying: “We are defined by those we could have helped and chose not to …” In this, his debut outing, the protean Snow is asked by a former foe, Eleanor Paget, to investigate improprieties at her private wealth management bank. But Snow isn’t ready to tackle detective work again, and turns her down. When Paget is subsequently found dead, an apparent victim of suicide, Snow has more than a few doubts about the circumstances. A man of intelligence and curiosity, he launches his own probe of her demise. This brings him into contact with crooked cops, the FBI, Russian assassins, a dysfunctional family circle, and international money laundering. As interesting as the case being tackled here is, it’s Snow—a “Blaxican” (the son of an African-American policeman and a Mexican mother)—who draws and rewards the reader’s attention most. He is at heart a mensch, a person exhibiting integrity and honor, and the 800-pound metaphors of second chances in this book drive that home. Author Jones is a Detroit-area poet and a playwright whose love of language makes every page of this novel resound with meaning. Plans to turn August Snow into a TV series protagonist may have been disrupted by the fact that the Hollywood heavyweight spearheading that idea was now-disgraced film producer and Miramax co-founder Harvey Weinstein, but it’s said Jones is working on a second Snow novel.

• Down to No Good, by Earl Javorsky (Story Plant):
This paranormal noir gives one the sensation of walking through a darkened room, stepping tentatively with care and trepidation so as to not trip over the furniture, bang one’s head, and be cast as a fool. But once readers wrap their minds around Javorsky’s darkly blithe thriller and sense the geography of the world he has created, the humanity of his narrative will draw them in as quickly and completely as did Thorne Smith’s Topper series. A follow-up to 2014’s Down Solo, this new novel finds ex-junkie and single-dad private investigator Charlie Miner still adapting to his Twilight Zone metabolism, which allowed him to survive being shot dead by multiple bullets. After hearing a “voice” tell him how to heal his wounds, he arose from a slab at the morgue, stole clothes from a corpse, and kept on keeping on. Not only did Miner resurrect himself, but he now possesses another superpower: the ability to leave his body and “roam.” Miner can also enter the bodies of others, “like a hermit crab, taking over an abandoned home.” In Down to No Good he is called in to help his old pal, Los Angeles Homicide Detective Dave Putnam, after Tamara Gale— “psychic to the stars” —begins giving the media vital information about several murders, making the LAPD appear clueless. Putnam, who is privy to Miner’s extraordinary secret, wants the P.I. to gather some insights into Tamara and Philip, her unctuous and lethal husband, who’ll stop at nothing to promote themselves. You might think Miner’s skills would make him the perfect crime solver. But Javorsky tempers his protagonist’s abilities with discretion. Miner isn’t given an all-access pass to every room or person—he is nowhere near that cartoonish. Nor is he so flawed and humanized a character that, like Mike Mignola’s Hellboy, he verges on being an antihero. Charlie Miner has a mission—to save lives in order to stay alive—and a sense of humor that makes him an engaging enigma.

• The Fallen, by Ace Atkins (Putnam):
Ace Atkins has definitely made it in the world. The Robert B. Parker estate commissioned him to take over the long-running Spenser series of private eye novels. He’s won the Edgar Award three times, and is a respected journalist. Yet The Fallen—the seventh book in his series starring Quinn Colson, a former U.S. Army Ranger and current sheriff of Mississippi’s Tibbehah County—is proof that success hasn’t spoiled Atkins, and that his man Colson will be around for some time to come. The story finds Colson on the trail of a sophisticated gang of former Marines turned bank robbers, who disguise themselves in Donald Trump masks and warn bank patrons, “Anyone moves and I’ll grab ’em by the pussy.” It’s only their misfortune to knock over the Jericho National Bank, giving Colson clues as to how he might bring their run on financial institutions to a close. The sheriff, though, can’t focus solely on that goal. His old nemesis, Johnny Stagg, a local politician who prospered in the gambling and prostitution business, might have finally been incarcerated, but the vacuum he left behind is promptly filled by one Fannie Hathcock, who’s opened a strip club of her own in Jericho. Then there’s the matter of two missing teenage girls; Colson’s younger sister, Caddy, and the drama of her keeping her nose clean while running an outreach program; the so-called Dixie Mafia and its tentacles reaching all the way to the statehouse; and Maggie Powers, a childhood friend of Colson, whose move to Jericho kicks up romantic sparks. All of this would tax any normal gent’s capacity as a father figure and guiding force in a small town. However, it’s all part of a day’s work for Quinn Colson. Any loose ends Atkins leaves in these pages are intentional, clearing up troubles from previous books and setting traps to be sprung in future entries in this fine series.

• Fast Falls the Night, by Julia Keller (Minotaur):
Over a 24-hour period, America’s too-often-ignored opioid epidemic turns a hard-luck former coal-mining town in Raythune County, West Virginia, into a graveyard of dead junkies in Keller’s sixth Bell Elkins novel. Elkins, the county’s chief prosecutor, discovers that cheap heroin flooding the area around Acker’s Gap, the county seat, has been cut with lethal quantities of an elephant tranquilizer, and as more overdoses are reported, it’s up to her and the local sheriff’s department to find the source—as hopeless a task, Keller writes, as “finding a needle—make that a syringe in a hay stack.” EMTs do what they can, treating near-dead junkies with a dwindling supply of Narcan, but residents of the town are conflicted about the plight of these victims, some choosing to do no better than bid them a hateful farewell: “good riddance to bad rubbish.” The sufferers, though—who’ve come to see dope as “the quickest way out of Acker’s Gap”—aren’t all luck-starved white trash; a few are prominent citizens. While the sheriff’s department tries to identify the distributor of these tainted narcotics, Bell Elkins is also struggling with the decision of whether to leave West Virginia, the home to which she returned eight years ago, in order to take a job with a Washington, D.C., law firm. She must contend, too, with her sister, Shirley, who did time for killing their abusive father. An unrepentant alcoholic (“Who needs stained-glass windows if you had liquor bottles on a lighted shelf?”), Shirley here drops a figurative atom bomb into her relationship with Bell; and that information sets up a situation to be dealt with in a coming installment of this series by Keller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. The heroin problem in Appalachia and other rural areas is a hot topic in fiction, but few have handled it as beautifully as this author.

• Gangster Nation, by Tod Goldberg (Counterpoint):
Rabbi David Cohen, the mobster and hit man once known as Sal Cupertine, is back in Gangster Nation, Tod Goldberg’s follow-up to 2014’s wonderfully over-the-top Gangsterland. It’s now September 2001, and although David/Sal has become firmly ensconced in his Las Vegas synagogue and the profitable doings of the Jewish mob, things aren’t getting any easier for him. An obsessed FBI agent (whose associates Sal had killed) is closing in, the plastic surgery on Sal’s face is failing, and the pain he feels for having abandoned his wife and son in Chicago more than three years ago is becoming unbearable—to the point that the former hit man is planning a return to the Windy City. During his time studying the Torah and ministering to the congregants of his Vegas temple, Sal has become a very sage man, wise about the plights of others … as well as his own. “If Sal Cupertine came to Rabbi David Cohen, what would David tell him?” he muses, as he places his predicament onto a larger stage. Yet Cupertine remains a gangster, working the angles whenever he can, convinced that life (and the new PATRIOT Act) is basically a con and a scam. That’s the kind of jaded thinking that might force a man to make mistakes—just what a fake rabbi can ill afford.

The Book You Have to Read: “The Big Fix,” by Roger L. Simon

(Editor’s note: This is the 153rd installment in The Rap Sheet’s continuing series about great but forgotten books.)

By Steven Nester
From the get-go, Roger L. Simon’s The Big Fix (1973) is not your father’s private-eye novel; nor is Moses Wine—a 30-year-old, down-at-the-heels Los Angeles gumshoe—anyone’s idea of a leading man. It’s the early 1970s. Wine, divorced with two young boys, his ex-wife shacked-up with a California love guru, drives a 1947 Buick in which he lugs around the corpses of 1960s idealism and his youth. A generation or two removed from the masters—Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald—The Big Fix is a book worth noting. No mash-up of tropes, in The Big Fix Simon had the chutzpah to ditch the fedora fetish many neo-noir writers employed, but which only kept the genre embalmed, and instead updated the field with subtlety and wit, making it relevant to a time when the P.I. is a character who’s in flux as much as the era in which he lives. As one character remarks to Wine:

“You don’t look like my idea of a private detective,” he said. “But then nobody looks like anybody’s idea of anything anymore …”

Wine is smoking dope and playing Clue by himself late one night when there’s a knock on his door. Nothing good ever comes of these kinds of entrances, but he answers the summons anyway. Impatiently waiting on his threshold is Lila Shea, “a barefoot Grace Kelly” who’d “moved through the sixties like a wine taster, sampling each vintage and moving on.” The last time Wine saw Lila was in 1967, when they were in flagrante delicto in the back of his hearse during a protest turned violent at Berkley. Now, though, she’s campaigning for Democratic presidential contender Miles Hawthorne, and she needs more than Wine’s vote.

It seems that Howard Eppis is causing trouble. The leader of the Free Amerika Party and author of Rip It Off, Eppis is a thinly disguised version of ’60s radical Abbie Hoffman. To everyone’s consternation, he’s planted the kiss of death on Senator Hawthorne’s political aspirations by endorsing him. Sam Sebastian, Hawthorne’s L.A. County campaign manager, wants Eppis found and silenced. But Eppis has gone to ground and no one can locate him, except maybe the “People’s Detective,” Wine. Our hero starts out well enough; however, before he can earn his fee of $300 a week plus expenses, pretty blonde Lila Shea and her car sail over a cliff near Wine’s home. Suddenly the task of tracking Eppis seems to be the least of this P.I.’s problems, as he goes all in to find Lila’s killer—if only to save his own skin.

Simon’s plot components exhibit all the weirdness Southern California has to offer, and are as entwined as pythons around their prey, beginning with the dysfunctional family of Oscar Procari Sr. After the wealthy Procari pulls the plug on a devil-worship church fronting his gambling joints, his son is found dead and Eppis really goes missing; yet their presences are still felt, keeping the reader confounded as to whether they are MIA, DOA—or perhaps living under assumed identities. Procari stays in the gambling business, and bets heavily when he changes the game to politics.

The loose acquaintanceships that introduce new characters in this tale bedevil any linear path to crime solving, keep readers on their toes, and put Wine’s patience and sleuthing to the test. Wine does uncover plenty in the course of his investigation—except the whereabouts of Eppis. And things turn deadly when Eppis announces his plan to blow up a Los Angeles freeway in the name of candidate Hawthorne. Now that his actions appear more like sabotage than support, Eppis’ very existence comes into question.

Hawthorne’s Democratic primary opponent, California Governor Arthur Dillworthy, is supernumerary, and never makes an appearance in the book. However, Simon knows when not to leave well-enough alone and describes the hapless pol with a vividness that is spectacular, calling him a man who “looked like an interior decorator from a smallish Midwestern city whose clients were beginning to desert him.” Timidity and desperation were never combined with such clarity and imagination, and this portrayal would likely turn any noir writer, whether dead or alive, green with envy.

With 10 novels to his credit—eight of which have starred Moses Wine—as well as two non-fiction works and a handful of screenplays (including one for the 1978 film adaptation of The Big Fix, starring Richard Dreyfuss), Simon is a deservedly acclaimed contributor to the modern detective-fiction genre. He’s also a Hollywood insider who knows the territory, and those who might inhabit it, such as the notorious Procaris. Wine, we learn, was sent on a fool’s errand in The Big Fix. It’s not until well into this yarn, after the P.I.’s Buick dies suddenly and he abandons it in California’s Mojave Desert, along with its cargo of memories, that clues finally start to add up for Wine in this oft-neglected, yet still-fresh gem of a novel.

READ MORE: “Moses Gets Moll’d,” by J. Kingston Pierce (The Rap Sheet); “Has Anyone Here Seen My Old Friend Moses?” by Kevin Burton Smith (January Magazine).

The Book You Have to Read: “Where Murder Waits,” by E. Howard Hunt

(Editor’s note: This is the 151st installment in The Rap Sheet’s continuing series about great but forgotten books.)

By Steven Nester
As Richard Nixon’s presidency unraveled in 1973 and Watergate burglar/thriller writer E. Howard Hunt faced a stretch in federal prison, the marketing department of Fawcett Gold Medal Books thought to squeeze every penny it could from this notorious novelist’s oeuvre by reissuing Where Murder Waits, this time under his real name. First published in 1965, and attributed to the pseudonymous Gordon Davis, Where Murder Waits is a bitter rebuke to 1961’s failed Bay of Pigs invasion, which Hunt had had a role in planning while employed by the CIA. Although he tells no tales out of school and only reiterates some familiar gripes about the debacle, Hunt does describe the complications endured by dispossessed foreign nationals plotting a return to their Cuban homeland. With Fidel Castro’s regime firmly ensconced in Havana, however, the only intrigue that occurs is between members of the exile community who wish to unseat him.

Patrick Conroy is a man with a past. Born Patricio Conroy in Cuba, wounded and imprisoned after the failed expedition that landed at the Bay of Pigs on the island nation’s southern coast, Conroy is now a lawyer living under the radar in Miami, Florida. Battle injuries resulted in “a contained grace to Conroy’s movements that inspired desire in women and confidence in men”; and while he’s content, makes a “sturdy martini,” and enjoys a fulfilling bachelor love life, there seems to be something lacking in his existence.

Conroy’s reputation is known to former contrarrevolucionarios, and though he no longer has an active interest in taking up arms against Castro, he’s approached by an organization of displaced patriots—the Exile Committee—wishing him to take on a task. It seems money raised by the group for an insurrection has vanished from a Panamanian bank, along with the group’s treasurer. Conroy is asked to recover the cash, but he demurs. The next knock on his door is delivered by an FBI agent, who talks to Conroy about his possible Neutrality Act violations, which could result in his disbarment and a revocation of his U.S. citizenship. Conroy is incensed by the threats that agent has made against his liberty, something he figures he earned in combat. He observes that fewer exiles are willing to step into the breach, and is disheartened to see the zeal of counterrevolution diminish among members of the exile community. To many of them, Cuba is simply the place their parents once lived, and Conroy sees the “younger generation maturing in an alien land and accepting exile as a fact of existence.” Feeling the anger of exiles who are harassed for their patriotism and grit, Conroy finally accepts the mission to track down that lost money.

The Cuban Revolution (1953-1959) turned various South and Central American capitals into settings resembling Casablanca during World War II, and as Conroy travels between Florida, Panama, and Brazil, he must tread lightly and mind his manners. Any insurgent group operating in a foreign country is suspected of trying to bring revolution or unwanted attention to that region, and from the time he boards an airplane for Panama, Conroy is under surveillance not only by foreign agencies, but also by the CIA. In addition, someone close to the bank theft is attempting to thwart Conroy, starting with an attempt on his life in Miami. Since it’s obvious that the theft was an inside job, Conroy’s mission becomes tricky when every insider who had access to the Exile Committee’s money is murdered.

A visit to the Panamanian bank where that dough had been deposited leads nowhere. However, a break that will resound through the remainder of this novel comes when Conroy discovers Javier Ruiz tossing his hotel room. A legendary anti-Castro guerilla, better known as El Machete, Javier was believed to have died during the failed Bay of Pigs assault, but instead spent time in prison, just like Conroy. Javier says he was tipped off that Conroy had located the misplaced funds and was about to abscond with them to Cuba; he planned to stop Conroy. Javier’s anti-Castro credentials are bombproof, and Conroy sure could use his help—as he could that of Javier’s comely sister, Lola, whose husband did die at the Bay of Pigs—to complete his mission. Yet the siblings’ arrival on the scene seems all too convenient, and Conroy resolves to keep a close eye on the pair.

As he investigates, Conroy learns that the last man to hold the money he seeks exchanged it for a diamond, which was easier to transport than cash. When the gem dealer subsequently turns up dead, and the rock goes missing, Conroy must accept, dolefully, that even heroic Cuban freedom fighters are not immune from avarice. In fact, it’s Javier who has the diamond, and he intends to keep it as recompense for his betrayal and imprisonment in Cuba so many years ago. Further, he wants his sister, Lola, to flee with him to freedom. She refuses her brother’s entries, though, for she and Conroy have fallen in love. There is a bloody standoff between the trio, but justice is done—more thoroughly than might have been possible in real life, and this is the key to the complexity of E. Howard Hunt.

Say what you’d like about Hunt, but there’s no denying he was a man of some accomplishment. Biographical accounts suggest he lived out a quasi-James Bond fantasy, as he allowed many of his fictional characters to do. But among the tuxedos and tailored clothing was plenty of dirty laundry. For instance, Hunt devised a plot to overthrow the government of Guatemala in 1954, which resulted in countless deaths. He had a hand, too, in other clandestine and disreputable operations around the globe before the Bay of Pigs drove his espionage career into a ditch. When the chance to work for the Nixon White House came along, this suave spy became a “plumber,” and the rest is infamy.

In Where Murder Waits, Patrick Conroy is given the opportunity to assist—in a small way—a noble cause, and he succeeds. Through the character of Conroy, Hunt showed the world his espionage super-self (an image far superior to what he was becoming: a bungling intelligence has-been), and therein lies the fragile beauty of make-believe. Reality doesn’t always allow people to be viewed in the best possible light; mistakes are made, victories go unrecognized, aspirations are often not realized. Through fiction, though, writers can imagine themselves as better than they are. Hunt was a rather prolific novelist, and he tended to cast his protagonists—and by reflection, himself—in the glow of patriotism, glamour, and triumph. It might have been a bitter pill for him to swallow knowing that, thanks to the Watergate scandal, history was much more likely to remember him (ignominiously) for his involvement in what Nixon’s press secretary, Ron Ziegler, called a “third-rate burglary.”

READ MORE: “The Book You Have to Read: Bimini Run, by E. Howard Hunt,” by Steven Nester (The Rap Sheet).