Tag Archives: noir

Review: Mr Suit by Nigel Bird

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Liza is a gangster’s wife who has tired of taking care of her husband Archie, who has been suffering from Locked-In- Syndrome due to a kidnapping that went badly wrong (for him at least). She asks Mr Suit, the crime boss who accidentally shot Archie, to put him out of his misery. He does as he’s told, but various complications, such as Archie suddenly remembering where he’s hidden the proceeds of the kidnapping, result in the world’s slowest getaway, in a canal boat along Regent’s Canal, but events soon catch up with Liza and she’s forced into a showdown with Mr Suit and his henchmen.

Mr Suit is a bit of a departure for Nigel Bird, whose short collection Dirty Old Town rather impressed me last year. It’s a blackly comic noir tale with barely a likeable character in sight (they’re all trying to get one over on each other) and its tongue firmly in its cheek. This novella is short and snappy and good fun while it lasts. It isn’t as deep or layered as many of Bird’s shorts, but it races along brightly and will definitely keep you glued to your Kindle for its short duration. Highly recommended.

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Short story: The Accident

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John sneered up from beneath the car and said: “Christ, Rog, did you do this intentionally?”

“What makes you say that?” Roger asked.

John shook his head and ducked back under. “Because this is the kind of fucked you can only get by going over a speed bump slowly or mounting a surface that’s too high,” he replied, his voice slightly muffled by the vehicle that covered him. “You’re a good driver, mate. So when I see this kind of damage I hafta ask.”

Roger sighed softly and shrugged. “A bit stupid of me.”

“Can say that again.”

Roger did a circuit of the jacked-up car, looking at the flat tires and the scratched-up bumpers. It didn’t look good from this angle. “Prognosis?”

John cleared his throat. “Back bumper’s hanging by metal threads. You’ve put a hole in the exhaust and that’s barely hanging, and you’ve somehow fucked three of the tires so they’re flat. And then you drove home on the things, so the rims are fucked along with the tires.”

“Can you fix it?”

John scoffed. “This is a garage job – I don’t have the tools or the time to fix it. Frankly I feel under-qualified just looking at it. And I’m only doing it as a favour to you.”

“Fair enough,” Roger said and did a second circuit of the car. He huffed constantly as he assayed the damage. “Went over one of those low roundabouts. Not low enough, I guess.”

“Don’t sound like you.”

“Thinking about other stuff.”

“Such as.”

“Trouble at home.”

John paused momentarily. “What?”

“It’s gotten worse.”

John poked his head out from under the car again. “Worse?”

“Yeah.”

“Shit,” John said, looking uncomfortable. “Owt I can do?”

“No more than you’ve done already.”

“Huh?”

“Can you fix marriages and cars?”

John went back beneath the car. “Marriages? Pfffff, can’t even fix my own.”

Roger paused. “Angela’s having an affair.”

“Really?”

He crouched and looked at the top of John’s head. “That’s why I pranged the car.”

John tilted his head so he could see Roger. “Shit, mate. Sorry,” he said and paused. “I guess something like that would make anybody lose control.”

“I didn’t lose control.”

“But, you said…”

“I said it was a bit stupid of me.”

John looked at something directly above him and tinkered with it. “Expensive way of venting steam,” he said, his voice stiff.

“I wasn’t venting steam.”

John angled his head back at Roger. “So you’ve inflicted all this damage for no reason?”

“No. I had a reason.”

John pulled at a piece of metal and threw it to one side. “Which was?”

Roger took a mobile phone from his pocket and prodded the screen. “I wanted you to look at the car.”

John paused. “I don’t understand.”

Roger got on his knees and crept towards the car. “This should explain it.”

John reached out from beneath the vehicle and Roger put the phone in his outstretched hand. He stood up and brushed the knees of his jeans.

John looked at the text, tried to speak but stuttered.

Roger looked at the jack. “Actually I wanted you beneath it.”

John screeched a rapid stream of words, reached out and hooked both hands around the foot of the car, trying to pull himself out. Roger kicked the jack away. The car seemed to hang in the air forever, and Roger worried for a split-second second it wasn’t going to fall at all. Then it dropped with violent finality. John squealed as the vehicle struck; bones cracked loudly, followed by a wheeze as the air rushed from his lungs. Two unmoving hands poked out from beneath the car body. The mobile lay on its back next to Roger’s right hand. The message on the screen read: I wanna see you, babe. Meet me tonight. The wife’s away. Make an excuse for Roger. John. Xxx

Roger squatted on his haunches for a view of the corpse. He saw a strip of bloodied hair in the light, but the rest was in shadow. It was good enough.

He smiled, stood and left the garage, closing the door on the way out.

For the next three days The Gamblers is free

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That’s right, you heard correctly. Call it my little Valentine’s gift to you readers.

If you can’t give your love the gift of love then give them a little murder, betrayal, and £750k of drug money to play with.

Give them The Gamblers free in the US, the UK, and anywhere else with an Amazon store.

Review: Wee Rockets by Gerrard Brennan

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Joe the leader of a gang of Belfast yobs called the Wee Rockets has decided it’s time to leave the gang. Not because he feels in any way bad about what he does, but because he’s growing faster than the other gang members, and he’s worried that this will make him easier to recognise. At the same time, concerned local citizen and vigilante wannabe, Stephen McVeigh is desperate to do something about the Wee Rockets gang and stop them from attacking innocent pensioners in the area. He starts investigating, which brings him into contact with Joe and Joe’s mother, with whom he starts a relationship. Joe eventually passes the Rockets leadership over to Liam, a fat loser who desperately wants to be respected. The moment Liam takes control of the gang he ups the ante and, instead of playing safe like Joe, he gets them to move into robbing stores and younger people, because the takings are bigger. And when Joe’s criminal father also appears on the scene after many years away, the scene is set for mayhem that ultimately leads to fatalities.

Wee Rockets is the first Brennan that I have read and I must say that I was impressed by the confidence and fluidity of his writing. He is very good at fast scene-setting and renders his characters nicely in only a few sentences. The dialogue is also spot-on, with a nice grasp of how people really speak. The plotting is well handled, though I did have a few minor issues with the ending, which leaves one particular character still walking the streets when he should really be behind bars after all the mayhem he has caused. But, like I said, it’s a minor issue rather than a big deal, and is more than offset by Brennan’s confident storytelling abilities and his excellent characters. I like the fact that Joe, despite his occasional sentimental moment, remains a scumbag throughout. I also like the way that Liam’s transition from fat loser to remorseless gang-leader is realistically handled in terms of motivation. Like so many of Blasted Heath’s other publications this is an excellent crime thriller and marks them out as one of the most exciting new publishers around. Highly recommended.

Review: Hogdoggin’ by Anthony Neil Smith

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The sequel to Yellow Medicine finds Billy Lafitte, former police officer, suspected traitor, and full-time bad guy, riding with a biker gang led by the brutal and savvy giant Steel God. Lafitte has worked his way up to second in command and has God’s respect. But when a call comes in about his ex-wife, Lafitte decides to turn his back on the gang and go and find out exactly why he’s been called back.

Meanwhile, his nemesis, Agent Rome, an FBI agent with a serious grudge against Lafitte, is still trying to pursue his man despite being warned off the case by his employers and his wife. But Rome doesn’t listen and decides to use Lafitte’s emotionally fragile ex-wife as bait to lure him in.

After an ill-fated trip back to Yellow Medicine, Lafitte decides to get back to his family by any means possible, but things go increasingly wrong. Leading to his capture and torture by some idiotic rednecks.

When he decides to call on Steel God for help everything gets really bloody, leading to a showdown, and serious carnage, at a hotel surrounded by the police, with Agent Rome in tow.

Smith’s sequel improves on Yellow Medicine in a number of ways. Firstly, in dispensing with Lafitte’s first person narration it broadens the scope of the story. Rome is no longer the one dimensional FBI guy he appeared to be in the first novel – his run-in with Lafitte at the end of the YM has affected him both professionally and personally and his reasons for pursuing the man seem more believable this time around. Other characters get the opportunity to breathe and Smith does a good job of bringing them to life. Also, the use of multiple character perspectives propels the tale at a faster clip than the first novel managed, especially during the final chapters, which are superbly paced, and Smith’s muscular, clipped prose helps bring it all together in fine style. Fans of noir and hardboiled fiction will find plenty to enjoy here, but it’s written in such a way that fans of more ‘mainstream’ thrillers will get a kick out of it, too. Recommended.

Review: Slammer by Allan Guthrie

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Nick Glass, or Crystal as he’s known to the other screws and cons, is a rookie guard in an Edinburgh prison, having moved there after his wife had an affair. He’s not respected by either the cons or his fellow guards and his family life is hardly idyllic – his wife is a drinker and he’s having to support her and their daughter because she is pretty much unemployable. So far so bad. But when one of the cons decides that Nick is the perfect mule for importing drugs into prison things go from bad to worse. Initially Nick wants nothing to do with it but when the con uses an outsider to threaten his family, Nick has no choice but to comply. But as things get worse and Nick begins to siphon off and use the drugs he’s smuggling his tenuous grasp on reality begins to fracture completely leading to a murderous finale…

Slammer is dark psycho-noir at its finest. As the story progresses, the world begins to fold in on itself. The tale is told entirely from Nick’s point-of-view and initially gives us clues as to when his mind wanders off at a tangent. However, as things progress and the tension ratchets up several notches the barrier between what is real and what’s imagined collapses, leaving the reader struggling for the truth as desperately as the story’s protagonist. Guthrie’s prose is lean and tight and dense, often packing lots of information and clues into as small a space as possible. He drops hints into the story constantly, but due to his skill and suppleness as a writer the reader is often so caught up in the moment that the bigger picture remains a mystery. If you like your crime fiction pitch-black and nasty you’ll do a lot worse than giving this belter a read.

Review: Dirty Old Town by Nigel Bird

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One of the things about the e-book era is that it has re-energised the British crime and dark fiction scene. Novelists and short fiction writers who might have been overlooked by the big publishers – for being too dark, too grim, too violent, too different – have been given the option to self-publish or work with small, independent publishers to produce books that have, in many cases, had some of the big boys on the run. These writers are knowledgeable about their trade, know their history, know how to hook readers from the first sentence, and more importantly know how to use social media and modern technology in a way that many of the more established pros seem incapable of doing. There are a lot of these folks out there: Paul D Brazill, Ian Ayris, McDroll, Luca Veste, along with more established folks like Allan Guthrie, Ray Banks, Nick Quantrill. Also, included with this rather gilded lot is Nigel Bird.

Until recently, Bird had wrote mostly short fiction, although a novella length work, Smoke, was published not so long ago. And until very recently (despite being interested in his work) I hadn’t downloaded any of his collections, due to a very large to-be-read pile and work commitments. But I put this behind me recently by reading Dirty Old Town – a short but strong collection of short fiction.

For such a short collection, there’s a lot of good stuff in here. One Hundred and Ten Per Cent, which goes through the life of a runner as he moves from prison to the race track. It’s compelling, hard and has some lovely little moments of description:

“Everyone has a talent,” Tweed said.

As it happened, he was pretty damned good at taking the faces of cunts like the man on the other side of the table and turning them into modern art.

Nice and pithy. Appeals to a fan of clever, sweary quips like myself. But elsewhere, as in Dirty Old Town, the title story, a subtler but equally clever use of language comes into play:

I didn’t see the stars, but felt them speed through my nervous system, tingling down to my fingers and toes.

Again, nice and pithy. And the rest of the story is just as good. Harsh, unforgiving, and with a nice sense of loss.

A lot of these stories deal with loss: Dirty Old Town, Drinking Wine (Spo-dee-oh-dee), Sea Minor, Taking A Line For A Walk; all these deal with a sense of loss (love, life, future, family, you name it).

Bird has a lot of empathy and sympathy for his characters, even the bad ones, and it shines through on the page. In this sense, his work shares similarities with Donald Ray Pollock whose work I reviewed here.

There are a number of memorable stories in this collection. Bird has genuine talent and is definitely one to keep an eye on for the future. And I think I’ll be reading more of his work sooner rather than later.

Review – The Engagement by Georges Simenon

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Regular readers of this site will know that I love the work of Georges Simenon. I love the Maigret novels, which are harder and darker than their reputation might suggest, but I also love the Roman Durs, of which this novel is one. These novels are equally as dark and cold and mean as their American noir cousins.

The Engagement isn’t a Simenon that I had encountered before, but it’s definitely a high quality addition to his superb back catalogue; one that should appeal to both fans of his previous work and make a perfect introduction for new readers.

The Engagement is about Mr Hire, an overweight and slightly creepy man, who runs a legal, but hardly ethical, postal scam. Hire is a furtive and shy individual who keeps himself to himself, ensuring the suspicion of those who live and work in the block of flats where he resides. So when a prostitute is brutally murdered in the area all eyes are focussed on him. There are reasons for Hire’s odd behaviour but, because the police are brought in and nobody thinks enough of him to ask the reason why, they automatically assume that he is guilty. As the story progresses and the tension ratchets up to almost unbearable levels the reader is genuinely unsure what Hire’s fate will be.

For a writer who has been lauded for the ‘psychology’ in his novels, there is surprisingly little in The Engagement. Most of what goes on is rendered in clean, camera-eye prose that gives little insight into the psychology of the characters. And yet, Simenon’s brilliant word choices and descriptions give us all the information we need to know about the shy and reserved Hire, the conceited and unpleasant concierge and the other characters, mostly unpleasant, who populate this tale. Also, his effortless handling of the tension is a lesson to any writer who wants to know how to create a page-turner with minimal fuss, and without drawing attention to his writing. The Engagement is a superb read and comes  highly recommended to those who like their stories dark and diamond hard.

Potted book reviews – part 1

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Whilst in Thailand recently I did quite a lot of reading. Here are a few reviews of books that I hadn’t read previously.

Bordersnakes – James Crumley
Crumley’s novel brings together his two great private eyes, Milo Milodragovitch and CW Sughrue, in a complicated plot that marries two separate stories that see the detectives working together (Milodragovitch is pursuing a banker who has stolen his inheritance and Sughrue is trying to find out who shot him and why). However, most of their work seems to involve drinking heroic quantities of alcohol followed by chasers of almost industrial quantities of cocaine with a bit of sleuthing intermixed with the driving. The plot is almost secondary to the interplay of the characters and the beautifully textured layers of the writing. Crumley’s ability to evoke a sense of place is on a par with Chandler and Ross MacDonald and his dialogue is profane and razor-sharp. The plot is a bit scruffy, but when you can write as well as Crumley can and can sketch characters as finely wrought as Milodragovitch and Sughrue then that’s a minor concern. If you can hunt this one down (I think it’s out-of-print in the UK) then I heartily recommend it.

The Black Angel – Cornell Woolrich
Cornell Woolrich is an author who is considered one of the major exponents of the noir genre. Experts of the genre certainly consider him as important as Jim Thompson and David Goodis. Unlike these two authors, Cornell Woolrich seems to have fallen out of favour with the reading public. Much of his work is now out-of-print and if you want his work you will need to scour secondhand bookstores. The Black Angel is one you’ll need to pick up in secondhand bookstores. The plot involves a spurned wife discovering the corpse of her husband’s lover, whom she had planned to confront. She leaves the scene of the crime without telling the police and awaits the return of her husband. When her husband is charged with the woman’s murder she vows to find the murderer and clear his name, assisted by a list of names and a scrap of a matchbook she finds at the scene of the crime. She plunges into the seedier side of New York, amongst drunks, drug dealers and other criminal types, and leaves destruction in her wake. Woolrich is considered the master of suspense by his acolytes, but I honestly didn’t get him. He uses thirty words when only a few would suffice and some of his sentences are purple beyond belief. His plot has some logic holes that I could drive an 18-wheel truck through. Woolrich’s ability to get into the narrator’s head is well done and it’s certainly not without moments of incredible tension but, on the whole, I have to say that The Black Angel was not for me. I certainly won’t discount reading more Woolrich, but I have put his other books at the bottom of my current To Read pile.

My favourite crime novels – number 12

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The Grifters – Jim Thompson’s The Grifters is not really a thriller as such, it’s more of a drama set amongst criminals. It concerns Roy Dillon, a young con-man, and the emotional triangle between him, his mother, and his girlfriend, both of whom like the con. The thing that makes it so compelling is that Roy, for all his faults, is likeable and he is genuinely torn between life as a con-artist and a life as an ordinary, law-abiding citizen and is torn between his mother and his girlfriend. And the suspense is cranked up and amplified by this simple set-up. The Grifters also has one of the great femme fatales in Lilly Dillon, Roy’s mother, who is a truly venal, grasping creature and yet utterly human. The ending, which Lilly instigates, is truly great. It elevates what is already a fine novel into something far superior. It is somehow both ice-cold and heartbreaking. It encapsulates Jim Thompson’s brilliant aphorism: Life’s a bucket of shit with a barbed wire handle