City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit by Elmore Leonard

"I knew it," Clement said.  "You got no higher motive'n I do, you talk about laying things on the table, see where we stand.  You don't set out to uphold the law any more'n I set out to break it.  What happens, we get in a situation like this and then me and you start playing a game.  You try and catch me and I try and keep from getting caught and still make a living.  You follow me?  We're over here in this life playing and we don't give a shit if anybody's watching us or not or if anybody gets hurt.  We got our own rules and words we used and everything else.  You got numbers, all these chicken-fat dicks that'd rather play the game than work; but I got the law to protect me and all I got to do is keep my mouth shut, don't associate with stupid people and there's no way in hell you're gonna lay this one on me... or any of the others."

A judge is killed in his car near the northern border of the city of Detroit.  He's hated by almost everyone, this judge: criminals, lawyers, cops.  He's capricious and cruel, and prone to make suggestive sexual remarks to women.  But the judge's death is a McGuffin, and the mystery of his death is easily solvable; he got into a rage road tiff with a man who just happened to be notorious killer and "Oklahoma wildman" Clement Mansell.  Dedicated cop Raymond Cruz quickly ties Clement to the murder, but Clement's walked on similar charges.  Soon the two men find themselves hurtling toward a violent confrontation, one that threatens not just them but also Clement's beleaguered girlfriend Sandy, the sexy defense attorney Carolyn Wilder, a bunch of Albanian gangsters, and a pot dealer named Sweety.

Driving around Detroit, you can get a sense of how Wild West narratives might operate there with ease.  So much of the city is simply abandoned, rotting in, like civilization has disappeared within local radii, taking with it law and all social convention.  Having once been a much larger city, it gives the distinct impression of a place that's been emptied; you can imagine two men facing each other down a deserted street with a tumbleweed blowing past.  That's essentially what Clement goads Raymond into doing: abandoning the pretense of a law that guides their actions and embracing the "high noon" logic of the Wild West.  Both he and Raymond are caught up, he says, in a "kind of game," but if their conflict will be resolved, both will have to break out of the game's rules.  It's not so different from your standard "We're not so different" speech, but Leonard is cynical enough to suspect that Clement is essentially right.  Raymond fantasizes, over and over, about reaching out and killing Clement in a fit of rage, and the visions seem like a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Now that I think about it, the murdered judge isn't just a victim of narrative expediency; he's actually embraced Clement's belief in operating outside of law.

This is my first Leonard book.  I know he's revered by a lot of people.  His style of anti-writing is often thought of as a kind of antidote to pretentiousness of all kinds, and it does have a kind of muscular propulsion to it.  He's very good at banter and dialogue; Clement's speech, in particular, sparkles with grit.  But in many ways it seemed to take its cues from cheap television.  There are lots of wisecracking secondary cop characters, and a hot defense attorney that just can't help her attraction to Raymond.  The wisecracks are good, and the hot defense attorney is compelling, but I couldn't shake the sense that I was reading a novelization of an especially good episode of NYPD Blue.  But I guess there are worse things a book could aspire to than that.

Symposium by Muriel Spark

I've read 5 or 6 Spark books now, and I never cease to be amazed at how cold she is to her characters. Not just in the way that many authors are mean, putting characters through their plot-required paces for some grand purpose. Rather, Spark treats so many--maybe most--of those who people who novels with barely contained contempt. A particularly worthy supporting character may earn pity. Unless you're Fleur Talbot, if you find yourself in a Spark story, prepare to get the sharp end of the stick. Everything is fair game: appearance, weight, intelligence, dreams, naivete, being too kind, not being kind enough. Anyway.

And Symposium is definitely not a kinder breed. Bookended by a dinner party involving all the novel's principals, it's a nasty, intermittently funny piece of work that delights in tearing the characters to shreds. To a man or woman, everyone--Hurley Reed, philistine painter; Lord and Lady Suzy, crushing boors;  the Utzingers, mutually involved in a bisexual cuckold; the Sykes, who I don't actually recall; and Margaret and William Damien, cheery, wealthy newlyweds--has something singularly unpleasant to hide or to flaunt.

The conversation at the dinner party is dominated by the unbearable Lord Suzy, who is quite distressed that the burglars who robbed his house also peed on the walls ("It feels like a rape", he says repeatedly, uncomfortably) and we are mercifully pulled from the dinner part to the weeks before, where we get background on everyone, but most especially Margaret Damien, the closest thing the book has to a protagonist.

Margaret is unlucky, always in the vicinity when bad things happen, and, tired of the blame, she's decided to get a piece of the action, by way of poisoning her new mother-in-law. How we get to this point is a masterful exercise in spare but clever plotting, spanning Italy to a convent with unusally profane and media-saavy nuns.

And is this funny? Well, sometimes. But much like The Finishing School, the mood here is so bleak and unsympathetic that you can hardly read for the characters, so the plot, twisting and unfolding, is the real draw. I laughed at the cursing nun, but what is one to make of a story in which everyone is a fool, and the last event is the only decent character being murdered by Suzy's gang of roving burglars? The tragedy is the irony, as Margaret is once again close to ground zero without being the bomb--but I can't say I really laughed.

The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer

Over 1,300 posts on Fifty Books Project, and not one mention of one of the luminaries of American literature, Norman Mailer. Maybe he falls a little outside our purview, or maybe he’s overlooked nowdays as one of the “great male narcissists [who] dominated postwar American fiction”¹, as David Foster Wallace called them, for their supposed misogyny and nearsightedness... or maybe it’s just because there’s a lot of reading to do and only so much time in which to do it.

I had never read Mailer either, in spite of having a copy of The Naked and the Dead sitting on my bookshelf for a few years, but The Executioner’s Song caught my attention in the bookstore for two reasons--it was huge, and the premise--a man, Gary Gilmore, is given the death penalty and executed--didn’t seem like enough to support the length. Not to mention that it was a true story and I’d never heard of Gary Gilmore. So my interest was piqued.

In some ways, the single-sentence summary above does the book justice--it is single-minded in the sense that it keeps the execution front and center throughout--but, of course, further explication is necessary. Gilmore spent over half of his life behind bars, beginning as a juvenile. In 1976, he was paroled and sent to live with his cousin Brenda in Provo, Utah, the heart of Mormon country. During this time he struck up a tempestuous, intense relationship with a young single mother named Nicole Baker, and, after an unusually severe fight and breakup, killed two men, execution style, over a two night period. He was caught and sentenced to death, notable because, at the time, the U.S. was currently in the midst of a moratorium on the death penalty, imposed by Furman vs Georgia in 1972.

The death sentence happens less than halfway through the book. The rest is the story of Gilmore’s fight to be allowed to die and the media circus that surrounded him. Because of the moratorium, numerous civil rights groups, including the ACLU, were fighting Gilmore’s execution, even though he wished for his sentence to be carried out, because they feared, correctly, that if Gilmore was executed, many others would be executed in short order.

Normally, in a story like this, there are clearly defined heroes and villains, and, in true stories, if the facts don’t point to a clear dichotomy, the author usually chooses sides and, inadvertently or not, paints one side more sympathetically. Not so Mailer in The Executioner’s Song. As long as it is, the novel is a picture of restraint, with Mailer refusing to cast Gilmore as a misguided saint or his antagonists, such as they are, as anything other than complicated people with (generally) legitimate reasons for the things they do. It would have been far easier as a reader if I could have seen Gilmore as a monster or the ACLU lawyers as hypocrites, but Mailer’s thoroughness doesn’t really allow for such simplistic line-drawing. Even Gilmore’s motivations for the murders are in question: were they emotional responses to his problems with Nicole? Inevitable behaviors for a bad seed like Gary? Indicators of some deeper mental issue? Results of repressed pedophilic impulses? Deus Ex Machinas handed down from unfeeling gods? We’re never told, and the length of The Executioner’s Song serves as a challenge. Mailer seems to be saying, “Here’s all the information. Figure it out.”

There are moments in The Executioner’s Song that cut deep, like Mailer’s sensitive portraits of the two men Gilmore killed, but even here, he resists the urge to beatify, communicating the facts in flat, affectless prose that works even better than cloying melodrama. Gilmore’s letters to Nicole are the same way--of course, love letters from a man on death row are going to contain some pathos, but Mailer doesn’t edit, and their contents reveal Gilmore’s duality as well as his humanity, his intense longing beside his almost feral brutality. Finally, after Gilmore’s execution, the one spot where a little bit of punch-pulling might be in order, Mailer refuses look away from the grislier aspects of Gilmore’s death--including his autopsy, described in some detail--and the unresolved grief of his victims’ families and Nicole, who Mailer even dares to suggest may someday forget Gilmore, ostensibly her soulmate throughout his time on death row. At risk of hitting the point too many times, Mailer refuses to espouse one simple answer to the questions he raises. It’s what makes The Executioner’s Song worthwhile, what justifies its length, and it’s a good argument for why Mailer, great male narcissist or not, deserves to be part of the “great authors” conversation.

¹The others being John Updike and Philip Roth, who we at 50B apparently love.

Little Scarlet by Walter Mosley

I read Little Scarlet after reading This Year You Write Your Novel. Thought it might give the book some context to see what sort of fiction Mosley turns out. After finishing Little Scarlett, I think he produces work I'd probably enjoy. On the other hand, I had some issues with this book, although they're mostly my fault.

I didn't realize when I bought Little Scarlet that it was book 6 in the Easy Rawlins series, for one thing. With a lot of mystery or crime novels, chronology isn't particularly important, but Little Scarlet picks up immediately following a huge race riot and told me virtually nothing about Rawlins himself. It wasn't until I was nearly 1/3rd of the way through that I realized it was set in the 60's, which made Rawlin's extreme racial sensitivity and (well-rendered) impotent rage more understandable, as well as explaining why most of the white characters in the book exhibit behavior that would be considered inappropriate publicly now, but which, in the 60's, was hardly uncommon.

The story itself is a pretty hard-boiled detective story, as Rawlins investigates the mysterious circumstances surrounding the murder of Little Scarlet, a young girl murdered during the riot. The twists are there, and the character of Rawlins seems like an interesting one. Ultimately though, it was hard for me to get a good read on Mosley from this book. His themes of racial identity are well-integrated into the plot, and the characters are strong. It's just a case of too little information, a situation I'll try to remedy soon.

Red by Jack Ketchum

Major Spoilers Follow.

Perhaps best-known for the bleak semi-true crime story The Girl Net Door, Jack Ketchum has a reputation for being an extreme horror novelist. I picked up Red to see if his reputation was deserved and, while his other books are probably more extreme, Red was more of a morality tale than anything.

Avery Ludlow is a sixty-seven year-old widower who's had a tough life. His wife Mary and youngest son Tim are dead, gruesomely killed by his eldest, Billy in a fit of drunken rage. He runs an old general store that barely sustains him, but besides the store has nothing in his life except Red, an old dog who has himself seen better days. One morning while out fishing, three boys approach him, demanding his money. When he has nothing to give them, they shoot and kill Red just to be cruel, and walk off laughing. The rest of the book has Ludlow following the boys and trying to extract first an apology and then, when that fails, justice.

Because of Ketchum's reputation, I thought I knew where the story was headed from the outset. Old man with nothing to lose takes bloody and over-the-top revenge on the family who wronged him. I spent the middle section of the book watching Ludlow stymied at every turn, and waiting for the moment when his fuse finally disappeared inside his cherry bomb, but the moment doesn't come. While Ludlow does eventually take more drastic measures than, say, I did when my dog was poisoned by next door neighbor, he never picks off the family members one at a time, never tortures the maid, never burns down McCormack's house. The slow burn in this story is even slower, and even when pushed into more extreme action in the finale, Ludlow feels reads like a man possessed. His actions and reactions seem realistic and even, in context, slightly understated for a man in his position.

Of course, the story does end in bloody recompense for the boys and their family, and justice is served, but none of it comes directly by Ludlow's hand. That's where the morality of the story lies: The family is eventually undone, not by Ludlow's machinations, but by their own greed, paranoia, and bloodlust. Blood begets blood, or something like that. Red was a taut, pulpy little thriller, and I just wish I'd read it before I nailed my neighbor's cat to her barn door.

The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi

"Tell me about this Monster of Florence."
"You've never heard of him?"
"Never."
"Isn't the story famous in America?"
"It's completely unknown."
"That surprises me. It seems...an almost American story. And your own FBI was involved - that group Thomas Harris made so famous, the Behavioral Science Unit. I saw Thomas Harris at one of the trials, taking notes on a yellow legal pad. They say he based Hannibal Lecter on the Monster of Florence."
Now I was really interested. "Tell me the story."

The Monster of Florence, co-written by Douglas Preston, an American crime writer, and Mario Spezi, an Italian journalist, sounds intriguing from the very first page. And for the first third of the book, it mostly is. The book is written from the first-person perspective of Preston, and in the first part of the book, he focuses on Spezi's experience with the case. Mario Spezi has been researching and writing out the Florentine serial killer since the "first" killing in the 1970s.

The killer had an unusual modus operandi - he would prey upon couples having sex in parked vehicles in the Tuscan countryside. He typically crept up to the window of the car, shot the male to incapacitate (and kill) him and then killed the female. He would then drag his female victims out of the car and mutilate them before leaving the bodies out in the open. The killer would make unusual and calculated cuts on the females. At first he removed their vaginas, and in the later killings, sometimes a breast too. It was speculated that the killer had surgical experience based on the precision of the injuries, as well as a deep-seated hate of the female gender.

Spezi was called to the scene of the first discovered crime in the mid-1970s and became fascinated and horrified by the crime. Later, an earlier killing of the same type was linked to this and the legend of a serial killer stalking Florence was born. The Monster of Florence killed 8 couples during his reign, mostly young unmarried Italian couples living at home who parked on dark country roads for a little privacy on the weekends.

The first third of the book focuses on the killings themselves, the feelings and tensions in Florence during the 10 year reign of the Monster, and Spezi's experiences with the investigations of each killing. As the book moves chronologically into the future however, it loses focus. Rather than remaining a tightly wrapped narrative, Preston starts to incorporate a host of characters, one after another. The four page long "Cast of Characters" at the book's beginning should have warned me that this would happen. The Monster case was the largest and most involved criminal case investigated in Florence up to that time. As more and more investigators, prosecutors and laymen became involved and were introduced by Preston, the book began to plod.

Preston and Spezi devote most of their time in the last half of the book to describing the various trials and generally terrible theories that the Italian criminal justice system can come up with to explain how their arrested suspects could have masterminded or participated in the killings. At the end of the book, when they themselves are accused of obstruction of justice and actually particpating in a coverup of the crimes, it does not give the book the jolt of energy it so desperately needs.

This was a slow read. While I buzzed through the first half of the book in a few days, the second half was painfully dull. The more cockamamie characters Preston and Spezi introduced, the less interested I was in the outcome of the criminal trials.

The Monster of Florence does not have the characteristically tight dramatic writing style of a legal thriller but then neither does it have the necessary excitement of a crime drama. It would be hard to characterize this book as anything other than disappointing.

Holes by Louis Sachar

My middle schoolers love this book, which I think is a feat in itself because I would have guessed that they would have giggled so uncontrollably at a book called Holes that they never would have read it. But Louis Sachar is the kind of author who possesses a child's imagination or at least the ability to create characters and situation children will find appealing.

We read some of Sachar's Wayside School stories the other day, and I was impressed how well their absurdity stood up--like the story about how the teacher brings in Janie-flavored ice cream and everyone loves it but Janie, for whom it tastes like nothing because it's what she tastes all the time. That's just clever enough to make me smile while still being a simple enough twist that a sixth grader can understand it; it manages to be surreal but not random.

Holes, I found, has too few of the moments that make the Wayside stories so enjoyable and relies instead on a Santa's bag of quirks, gimmicks, and nonsensicalities that don't really cohere. It's a shaggy dog story about a kid named Stanley who is wrongly accused of stealing a basketball stars' shoes and is sent to a camp where he's made to dig holes, supposedly to build character but in fact so that he might discover a treasure buried in the area by notorious outlaw Kissin' Kate Barlow. There are poisonous lizards, a kid named Zero, a gypsy curse, a deadly nail polish, and all manner of ridiculous details that might have worked well in the constraints of a short story. In a novel, however, they come off as the literary equivalent of flipping through the channels; though you might catch the conclusion of each show it doesn't mean you've really absorbed the material. Sachar jumps through innumerable hoops to tie the plot together at the end, but the focus that is one of juvenile fiction's strongest traits is sorely lacking.

Of course, you might say that I'm making the mistake of approaching this book as an adult--when, really, the proof of its success is in the fact that it can make a room of hormone-mad seventh graders quiet, if only for a few brief minutes.

The Tenth Justice by Brad Meltzer

The last crime-related novel that I read that I will admit to liking is The Rainmaker by John Grisham. As you can tell by my reading list from this year I'm not exactly a literature snob (as most of my books are embarrassing) but I loathe the formulaic writing that the crime genre is known for and therefore stay away from it when possible. My Criminal Procedures professor (whose name is also Chilton) decided that for our class he would have us read a fictional novel about the Supreme Court and then write a paper on it to see if we could catch what was and was not accurate about the Court inside of Meltzer's work. Fair enough, I guess.

The Tenth Justice's protagonist, Ben Addison, is bright and ambitious, making his way straight out of Yale into the position of a Supreme Court clerk for the fictional Justice Hollis. When Ben starts out, Hollis is in Norway vacationing for the last month of summer. On his second day there, a big death penalty appeal lands in his and Lisa (his co-clerks lap) and in the middle of their scurrying to figure out the perfect solution, a man calls claiming to be an old clerk of Hollis' named Rick offering his welcome and extending the opportunity to give advice. After helping Ben with the appeal, Ben falls into trusting Rick and incidentally slips him the outcome of a huge merger case weeks before the decision becomes public, which leads to a stock scandal. When Ben realizes that Rick has pulled a fast one on him, a wild goose chase begins for Rick, who has disappeared with the exception of occasional threats delivered to Ben, Lisa, and Ben's roommates, who have all managed to get involved and put themselves on the line for Ben in trying to help him. Eventually, Rick returns, trying to bribe Ben into becoming his partner and giving him the results of another decision involving rezoning expensive historical property. There's a lot of violence and carrying on while Meltzer drags his feet trying to figure out how to close the novel, where eventually the good guy wins but not without a slap on the wrist for breaking the Court Code of Ethics, of course.

The only likable character in the book is one of Ben's roommates, a goof off named Ober that doesn't belong at his job at the Senator's office at all and is constantly scheming up business ventures such as starting the first non-Jewish deli which he would name Christ! That's a Good Sandwich. In the middle of all the ridiculous wire tapping and lie detector test taking that fills up this book, Ober decides he's a failure and hangs himself. This did not make me happy. Without his antics and laughable suggestions for solving Ben's problems the rest of the book was irredeemable.

I read the book while working a football security shift for the school on Halloween and between an angry girl dressed as a cowgirl getting in my face and having drunk locals (read: scary rednecks) try to sneak into the building it kept me entertained enough, I guess.