Nobody Move by Denis Johnson

He put his fingers around the phone in his lap. The phone slipped away with a clatter that echoed in the concrete cylinder, and he let himself collapse toward it. He had his mouth by the phone. He had a finger on the button. He needed to make his finger press it. He couldn't make it happen.

No problem. If he could keep his eyes open, he wasn't dead. Lying on his belly he stared at the red spectacle of his life as it traveled past his face and headed away from him through the dust. That's all he needed to do now. He needed to keep seeing his blood.

Jimmy Luntz is competing with his barbershop chorus in the city of Alhambra outside Los Angeles when Gambol, a stooge working for a man who holds Luntz's gambling debts, picks him up and drives him far out of town. The plan is to break one of his legs or arms but in the woods seven hours north Luntz manages to overtake Gambol and shoot him in the leg. While tossing the gun into a river, he encounters Anita Desilvera, a woman who's recently been framed by her husband and a corrupt judge for embezzling two million dollars. The pair gravitate toward each other, both on the run, and together they might be able to make off with the stolen money and escape from Gambol and his associates.

Nobody Move is a love letter to the hard-boiled fiction of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. The prose is brisk and filled with quips, and the story is violent: one of the best moments comes when Anita rips out the wheelchair-bound judge's colostomy bag and hits him in the face with it. (In case you're wondering, it does, in fact, burst.) To me, it was most reminiscent of No Country for Old Men, a book about ordinary people whose mixup with criminal elements thrusts them into a race against time, against violence, and for a great deal of money, and which is equally indebted to Chandler and Hammett. And like No Country for Old Men, I only had an approximate sense of the causality behind the various twists and turns. To his credit, Johnson knows that sometimes even hapless Luntzes get the better of wizened criminals like Gambol; violence is difficult to control and luck more likely to run out than remain.

The main thing a book like this has to do is be fun, and it is. It just zips by; I read the whole thing yesterday. But the pared-down prose robs you of some of the expected joys of reading a Denis Johnson book, and I liked the novel best when there were flashes of Johnsonian weirdness, as when Anita--having, spoiler alert, just killed her husband--sees his apparition copying her movements across a river. Or the fact that one of the goons is, without explanation, called "the Tall Man" for pages before you find out he's five-foot-eight.

The thing that connects it best to books like Angels or Jesus' Son is that it's about a couple of real down and out losers. Luntz is a loser because he has a gambling addict (and a member of a barbershop chorus), and Anita is made a loser by her husband (although she's also clearly an alcoholic), but Nobody Move is driven by the tantalizingly equivalent possibilities that they'll make off with a million dollars or be unceremoniously shot. You might even read the title, which might as well be the title of an Elmore Leonard novel, as a subtle hint at the explosive possibilities of crime to punish and reward.