Book Review #2

Fade To Blonde - Max Phillips

This may feature every single Hard Case Crime book by the time this experiment is over, as the second week of the year finds me reading Fade To Blonde.  The cover painting, by Gregory Manchess, features a femme fatale clutching a gun out of sight while covering herself with a sheet in response to a man appearing in the doorway.  The tagline, "She was a Little Taste of Heaven... And A One-Way Ticket To Hell!" is as campy as they can get, but the story inside is shockingly contemporary, notwithstanding its early 1950s setting.

Ray Corson gets hired by a blonde to protect her from a man who has been threatening her.  Of course, when the man's as crazy as Lance Halliday, the best defense might be a murderous offense.  But Lance is connected, so Ray might have to get a little respect himself before he dirties his hands.  An aspiring screenwriter, Ray looks for details, and the ones he notices don't thrill him.

The book is written using Ray as the first-person narrator, and excels at stylish wordsmithing.  It reads as if Ernest Hemingway was somehow more anti-social than he was.  The whole thing reads like it invented writing, and you don't want it to end.  When it does though, it ends with a satisfying twist that you kick yourself for not getting, after all, Ray did, and he saw the same things he told you about.  One of the best things about these Hard Case Crime books, besides their sheer awesomeness, is the fact that they cost $6.00, making it a no-brainer to grab one at the bookstore.  Their compact size makes them ideal for stuffing in your pocket when you go out to read a chapter or two when you've got a moment to spare.

Overall Grade: A-

Book Review One

Say It With Bullets - Richard Powell

Published by the Hard Case Crime imprint, you're virtually guaranteed a rollicking pulp tale, and Say It With Bullets does anything but disappoint.  The story focuses on Bill Wayne, formerly of the Army's Air Force in WWII.  Four years ago, his former army buddies shot him and left him for dead in China.  Now Bill's on a scenic tour through the West to have a little chat with each of them, but somebody's knocking them off as he gets near them, and Bill's almost certain it isn't himself.  To complicate matters, the guide to the scenic tour he's using as an alibi for his trip seems to have taken an unhealthy interest in his little vacation.  When the bullets start flying and the bodies start piling up, more questions get raised than answers found.

Written with a sharp wit, the third-person narration never devolves into winking at the camera.  It only reveals to us what Bill knows, which is fantastically frustrating, as we get a complete sense of the nightmare Bill's willingly swaggered into.  Bill, as a main character, is extremely relatable, even for a man bent on hunting down and killing his old friends.  The supporting characters, such as the tour guide and the Deputy tracking him down, are richly illustrated and believable, and the dialogue is never seen as a series of questions and answers.  Single lines of dialogue give us awesome clues as to what might really be going on, while even the four army buddies are presented as well-rounded people, never just simple targets to eliminate one by one.

The breakneck speed of the prose and the relatively short length (just under 250 pages) means you can finish this one on a relaxed weekend, or a few days commute on the subway.  Plus, there's the added bonus of the cover painting by Michael Koelsch, replete with Bill and Holly The Tour Guide pointing a gun off-screen.  The design package of this entire imprint calls to mind the awesome pulp mass market paperbacks of yesteryear, and the kitschy tagline above the title, "When It's Time To Say Goodbye..." might make buyers wary, but rest assured, this is a solid story, well told.

Overall Grade: A-

Other Uses

The other part of this blog is to track my progress in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks project.

I'll be reading an average of a book a week, and posting reviews of every damn one.  So check back often (... or weekly, as it were) for breathtaking, breakneck book reviews ranging from hard-hitting crime novels to anthologies of literary criticisms to books on string theory to Edith Wharton.  It's all here, and I'm reading it so you don't have to.