Author: Derek Raymond

2006, Serpent’s Tail (originally published 1984)

Filed under: Mystery

Find it at Goodreads

I’ve had a tough time finding a book to follow up my last great read, as is usually the case. I’ve started about half a dozen, but none of them held my attention past fifty pages, until I came across this piece by A.L. Kennedy about the 1984 mystery novel He Died with His Eyes Open, the first in the “Factory” mystery series by the British crime writer Derek Raymond.

Kennedy says, “I’ve read He Died With His Eyes Open twice. I don’t know if I could stand to read it again. Like all of Derek Raymond’s work, it has a remarkable and disturbing physicality.” It’s true. Raymond’s world is a grossly imagined one full of lecherous pub governors, filthy apartments, and sadistically violent criminals, though not sociopaths… his characters have more complex psyches than simply amoral monsters.

For a modern mystery reader, this book might be unsatisfying. It’s relatively sparse on plot, following a lone, unnamed detective in the Unexplained Deaths unit at London’s Metropolitan Police. When a middle-aged drunk turns up messily beaten to death, the detective takes it a bit personally and sifts through the victim’s life to find out why. Luckily, the victim left a long series of journals on tapes (thus the cover), and much of the novel simply transcribes these tapes.

There’s a quote at the end of this reprint from Drive author James Sallis, who calls Raymond’s Factory series “literature truly written from the edge of human experience.” That should give you a decent idea of the kind of book we’ve got here. Raymond’s plot essentially sketches out a straight line, and though there’s a rather absurd reveal at the end, the oomph of the novel comes from the messy lives it depicts.  …
Continue reading »

Author: Max Allan Collins

2013, Hard Case Crime

Filed under: Mystery

Find it at Goodreads

Popular depictions of the comic book industry tend to focus on awkward, unwashed readers, hyper-vigilant defenders of their chosen realm of escapism, and the perpetually scoffing retailers who feed their habit. Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons, the cast of Comic Book Men, Dave Lizewski from Kick-Ass; not exactly an intimidating lot. And to the extent film and television depict the writers and artists behind the comics, it’s more of the same stereotypes, but with thwarted ambitions added in.

That pervasive, if inaccurate, image of the subculture would seem an unlikely setting for a murder mystery. But anyone who’s studied the history of comic books, read Gerard Jones’s excellent Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book, and Alan Moore’s excoriation of the industry as founded on vice, knows better. The origins of the medium more closely resembled White Heat than The Big Bang Theory.

Seduction of the Innocent, from Hard Case Crime, is the third in Max Allan Collins’s trilogy of mysteries set in the comic book industry and featuring protagonists Jack and Maggie Starr. As the title alludes, it takes place in the mid 1950s, when Fredric Wertham’s alarmist book of the same name was published, shortly before the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency led to the creation of the Comics Code Authority and the bankruptcy of EC Comics. Collins covers the history in a gossamer thin veil – Werner Frederick stands in for Frederic Wertham, Bob Price for Bill Gaines, Hal Feldman for Al Feldstein – then twists the narrative by having the controversial doctor murdered in his hotel room, setting off an investigation that peeks into the turbulent lives of those very real artists. …
Continue reading »

Author: James M. Cain

2012, Hardcase Crime

Filed Under: Mystery

Find it on Goodreads.

When we meet Joan Medford, the young heroine of Cain’s posthumously published novel, it seems he has hit the bottom. Joan has just returned from the funeral of her abusive husband, whose death she is implicated in. Her young son is staying with her sister-in-law, a woman who makes clear her plans to keep him. Already beaten down by life at just twenty-one, Joan’s situation is so desperate that the job she takes as a cocktail waitress at a local bar, where she is alternately pawed by drunken guests and pressured to solicit herself to the client by a fellow waitress, seems like a stroke of great fortune.

Even this luck cannot hold, though, as Cain has more in store for Joan than even these travails.  Unfortunately for Joan, the bottom is far deeper than she thought. …
Continue reading »

Author: Benjamin Black

2012, Henry Holt

Filed under: Mystery

Find it at Goodreads

Foolishly, I disagreed with David L. Ulin about a book. Specifically, this book, which Ulin panned in a recent review. I set out immediately to read it… and I didn’t like it either. Although, in my defense, I disliked it for different reasons than Ulin.

My only previous experience with Benjamin Black, the crime-writing pseudonym of John Banville, was the novel A Death in Summer, which I found to be excellent. Summer had little tension, but what Ulin might call its “propulsive style” captivated me.

Going into Vengeance, I was expecting more of the same, i.e. not much plot but expansive, immersive prose (which is the formula Ulin complains about). Unfortunately, Black’s prose was not nearly as enjoyable as in Summer, and that was what let me down.  …
Continue reading »

Author: Ben H. Winters

2012, Quirk

Filed under: Mystery

Find it at Goodreads

The Last Policeman starts with a terrific premise. An asteroid will hit the Earth in six months, wiping out all human life. The scientists announced their findings three months ago, and civilization has crumbled in the intervening time.

As the book opens, newly appointed Detective Hank Palace investigates a suspicious death in a McDonald’s bathroom. It looks for all the world like a “hanger”—one of the suicides that have become commonplace since the world became doomed. But Palace, despite the evidence, decides that it is in fact a murder, and begins to investigate it as such. So far, so good.

Except for this: why, exactly, does he investigate? That question is never satisfactorily answered. In the end, the book fails on almost every level, and it all starts with that first why. …
Continue reading »