Crime Fiction, S/D

I've read pair of stark's parkers (sparkers?): killtown (which is actually "the score" iirc?) and of course the hunter. Gotta read more. Killtown was ridiculous but amazing.

Got my dad a Kerrigan novel, I should look into him.

Read manchette's "3 to kill" and dang it was good. too bad about the movie adaptation of "the prone gunman".

Sciascia's "To each his own" is great. the ending is about as cheery as "the friends of eddie coyle".

Is Killtown the one where they blow up a whole town, more or less? My fave Parker novels are probably The Green Eagle Score, The Outfit, The Sour Lemon Score.. but I have time in my life for all of them. Even the ones he wrote after he resurrected the character many years later. My favorite NON-PARKER stark/westlake novels are probably... 357, Lemons Never Lie, and The Ax. The Ax is kind of the bleakest thing I've ever read. A black comedy so black as to be devastating.

The Hot Rock is also fun.

I've heard about those books but could never find them, ty for the tip

I found out about him quite by accident: finished the true-crime book I was reading while I was out of town and stopped by a local used book store to grab something else, found the Godine Double Detective volume of his from the 70s and got my mind blown - then I was working w/the Granta ppl (obligatory disclosure) and they sent me all these new paperback editions and I've been feasting on them. He is seriously incredible. highly recommend this one.

You might enjoy "Nobody's Angel" by Jack Clark. Originally self-published by a Chicago cab driver, later reprinted by Hard Case Crime. Pretty grim.

you know who I like generally is loren d estleman. whiskey river and the amos walker stuff I've read is good. motown was ok but for all its attempt at sweep felt a little thin.

i've never read him. i'll try!
i never got into James Lee Burke. I think I tried to watch that "Electric Mist" movie w Tommy Lee Jones twice and could not stay awake.

also, i am a big fan of Paul Cain.

The Axe is amazing.

There's an American Library (or whatever they're called) collection of 3 or 4 David Goodis novels that's really great.

Also recommended: Ian Rankin.

I remember describing the plot of The Ax to my Dad once as we were talking about what we were reading. He seemed unamused.

The Hook has a similar feel, and is also interestingly self-reflexive in that it's about a pulp novelist.

The Ax by Westlake, right?

I can recommend Kitakata's Tha Cage for a Japanese spin on crime.

excellent thread revive

ian OTM re Paul Cain ... Fast One is cut from the same OG Black Mask cloth as Red Harvest ... be careful, though, some recent editions are shoddily edited and typeset

in a somewhat similar vein, Horace McCoy's Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye is like a longer, more pretentious Jim Thompson novel ... not as coherent as They Shoot Horses, Don't They? but more entertaining

really glad ppl were so responsive to the initial bump, all the suggestions have been fascinating imo

I think I tried to watch that "Electric Mist" movie w Tommy Lee Jones twice and could not stay awake.

best thing about that movie was levon helm as the ghost of general hood. i was just reading about it on wikipedia and i forgot there was another burke adaptation, heaven's prisoners, w/alec baldwin. back in baldwin's post-vv underrated leading man/pre-comedic sleazeball supporting guy phase.

lol raymond chandler is top 10 trending on U.S. twitter today - at first it was bc of some like bachelorette contestant w the same name but it's been subsumed by actual chandler discussion

lol

I just finished re-reading The High Window, The Lady in the Lake, and The Little Sister ... I had forgotten how much the last of those is influenced by Chandler's Hollywood experiences and how nasty he is about the movie biz

Thanks for the revive. Am wondering if anyone can recommend novels about terrorists, esp. left-wing ones. I raided my library's booksale and found a novel about infiltrating an animal rights group. Can't remember what the book was but it got me thinking I'd like to read more plots like this.

could this have been "Oh No, Not My Baby" by Russell James? I never finished it, but there was something like that.

Joe Lansdale's "Savage Season" touches on left wing terrorism. His Hap and Leonard series is also a good answer to the Willeford/Leonard question. James Crumley and Jon A. Jackson also fit in there for me.

I've been meaning to get more of the NYROB-republished Georges Simenons - I read 'Dirty Snow' years ago and it was fantastic. Hyper-bleak European noir.

Read the first Ross MacDonald Lew Archer novel last week, 'Moving Target' - it's good, fascinating how it straddles modern elements - race issues, homosexuality, etc. - while being set firmly in the postwar era.

Started "Tishomingo Blues" because of the Leonard poll.

Am wondering if anyone can recommend novels about terrorists, esp. left-wing ones.

Try 'The Good Terrorist' by Doris Lessing

just started reading my first wahloo/sjowall novel today, the laughing policeman.

on the leftist terrorist tip, have not read but really want to: alan burns' docu-novel about the angry brigade

Laughing Policeman is great; how are you liking it? I also enjoy the movie w Walter Mathau, which I saw before I read the book.

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Does anyone ever feel like reading crime fiction has made it more difficult to love crime/thriller/detective films? I know there are lots of great noir films; I don't dispute that. But I feel so often that many movies, especially more recent ones, are just too obvious, or direct, or hackneyed. which is probably an overly negative assessment, and I wonder if my standards would be lower if i hadn't spend the last x years reading crime fiction and mysteries etc. maybe things would seem more tense or new/exciting to me.

I do. It's not as bad as the huge gap between written science fiction and movie science fiction though.

I think you're right. I'd actually really love a solid noir thriller/detective/crime cable series, maybe like an adaptation of Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther series or something similarly ambitious.

my favorite crime pics are mostly '50s-'70s. In recent years no one even seems to be trying. you get certain noir tropes in movies but a lot of them are wasted in superhero movies, where a lot of things and time are wasted imo.

we are in a golden age of crime shows on TV tbh

some are deceased like the bridge (season 2 mostly) but broadchurch, happy valley, true detective season 2 (haters to the left idc), mr robot to an extent (albeit nontraditional), fargo, top of the lake...good times for all that

american crime too to an extent

Sciascia's Day of the Owl is talky and short on action but it taught me more about the Mafia in 120 pages than everything else I've read and viewed ... it seems very much of a specific moment in Italian history; I can't imagine how hard it must have hit its original audience

Equal Danger is also talky and short on action but more suspenseful and more of a pure mystery-as-novel-of-ideas, like a collaboration between Borges, Dostoevsky, and Simenon ... it snapped my head back in ways I don't expect from crime fiction

definitely going back for more

there are certainly good crime tv shows on these days, far above the law & order/CSI standard nonsense. i particularly enjoyed "Line of Duty" recently. Both seasons, but I think the second season even more. One thing I appreciated about it was its density. It wasn't afraid to have lots of things going on and lots of characters. I think a lot of crime and thriller films (and tv too) are too streamlined, without enough weight or density to the plotting and characters.

this layering and somewhat oblique approach to storytelling is also something i appreciate about the current season of true detective. if it's that hard to follow (which it apparently is for some people!) maybe they just need to put down their phones and actually WATCH it? idk.

i am really interested in this new season of TD, moreso for the people who are actively angry abt it on my facebook wall (i should start a thread about what white folks get equally angry about on facebook: cecil the lion, ferguson, true detective season 2, charleston, conan o'brien losing the tonight show, etc. i'm white btw.)

i guess what i meant w/r/t a cable series was an adaptation that took on a dense crime novel and let it unfold slowly. i think those kerr novels would be perfect, though there's one scene involving a grape crushing machine in the third novel that would probably make people stop watching.

my dream is a true detective style ongoing series covering alan furst's espionage novels but i think that's probably out of the realm of possibility.

What do y'all think of red riding series by d peace? Thinking about reading the 2nd one.

i read the first and i liked it well enough but not enough to read the others. it was a bit too on the nose somehow though dang it sure seems prescient in the wake of shit like jimmy savile.

Kpunk seemed to feel it didn't come into its own till the 2nd one
Plus it's abt Yorkshire ripper who I was just reading about recently

Bernie Gunther novels would be amazing on HBO but I imagine the budget would be off the charts.

the red riding series is fucking great, albeit occasionally incomprehensible

(the movies were p good too imo although they made some things a bit too simple in reaction to the absurd sprawl of the four books)

xposts to ian: yeah, the laughing policeman was really good. liked the low-key portrayal of the grinding mundanity of the investigation and the strained interactions of the cops on the job. did not know about the matthau adaptation... bruce dern too!

followed that up with another swedish crime novel from around the same time by a guy called olle hogstrand about a criminal gang using maoist terrorism as a cover for blackmailing a tax dodging socialist prime minister. was okay, if a bit convoluted.

also...

I was looking for novels about bombers, like Weather Underground or Unabomber bombers.

probably not what you're after (& not "crime fiction" per se), but...
christie malry's own double entry

Am wondering if anyone can recommend novels about terrorists, esp. left-wing ones.

Dostoevsky's Demons, Burgher's Theatre by Nadine Gordimer and The Moro Affair by Sciascia (not so much a novel, more of an account)

I never feel Sciascia as a writer of crime fiction - there is v little in terms of procedural, things don't really get solved in any significant way.

I tried Demons, except the translation I had (by Constance Garnett) was called The Possessed and I believe dates back to the 19th or early 20th Century and is now not that highly regarded - got a better one you could recommend?

I never feel Sciascia as a writer of crime fiction - there is v little in terms of procedural, things don't really get solved in any significant way.

well yeah that's kind of the point.

To Each His Own, the Sciascia novel I read yesterday, is certainly free of police procedure ... even the amateur detection is pretty shaky, and at the end the story goes off the genre rails altogether when SPOILER ALERT the detective disappears with no explanation and in the aftermath his friends just sit around talking trash about him

I can't wait to read more by this guy, but yeah, he doesn't observe the conventions very well at all

More typical crime fiction I've read recently:

John Sandford, Winter Prey -- long on chasing and shooting, short on plot complications and sympathetic characters; there were some good action scenes, but I doubt I'll read more of the series

Jeffery Deaver, the first two Lincoln Rhyme books -- I'm tired of the whole 90s serial killer thing, so the first novel didn't do much for me; the second, once he had all his series characters set up and could just run with them, was more fun and more suspenseful; I'm looking into the third now, but that might do it for me

Much better stuff mentioned earlier in the thread: the entire Wahloo/Sjowall series is great; Alan Furst, though spy fiction rather than crime fiction, is also excellent; I support nomar's idea of a Furst TV series, but to be perfect it would need to have been shot in black and white around the time they made Casablanca

Fans of The Demons might be interested in Camus' adaptation for the stage, a much quicker read

I never feel Sciascia as a writer of crime fiction - there is v little in terms of procedural, things don't really get solved in any significant way.

well yeah that's kind of the point.

― Joan Crawford Loves Chachi, Thursday, 30 July 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Said in response to him being listed on a crime fiction thread.

I've been enjoying Sandford in a very low-rent, airplane-trash kind of way. He's not as good as, say, Thomas Perry, but when you need a few hundred pages of chases and shootouts, he'll get the job done. He really doesn't seem to do much with the Minnesota setting of his books, though - I don't know any more about the region (other than street names) after a half dozen of his books than I did before.

I tried Demons, except the translation I had (by Constance Garnett) was called The Possessed and I believe dates back to the 19th or early 20th Century and is now not that highly regarded - got a better one you could recommend?

― the top man in the language department (誤訳侮辱), Thursday, 30 July 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I read Richard Pevear/Larissa Volokhonsky. I'd be vary of reading any criticisms of older translations (saying this because I've done it myself in the past). Often they are right but Garnett has her defenders, many criticisms are driven by the need to get 'new' translations in the market and keep things churning along. xp

I was looking for novels about bombers, like Weather Underground or Unabomber bombers.

I guess the earliest classic novel on this theme is Conrad's The Secret Agent

Am curious about Reed Farrel Coleman: big-upped by Pelecanos, drives a big-rig on the side, sounds like working-class noir. Anyone?

― Well, because whatever happened changed him. (Dr. Superman), Monday, 28 June 2010 23:27 (5 years ago) Permalink

5 years late and god knows if Dr Superman is here (where oh where can he be??)

but i am reading the first of Coleman's "Moe Prager" novels now-Walking the Perfect Square--I had honestly never heard of him (i wasn't closely following him at the time he had his "break thru" with the James Deans.) I saw him speak on a panel abt "hardboiled" and "noir" fiction and he seemed quite smart and well spoken. I also have a soft spot for crime fiction set in NYC. so, really, i'm not very far into the book but I've enjoyed the first couple-dozen pages and I'm sure i'll have more thoughts later.

just started the last good kiss by james crumley and shit is LIT

more crumley on deck - the mexican tree duck - as well as a ross thomas called the fools in town are on our side that i've been trying to find forever (w/o resorting to amazon) and finally was able to request from the library. copy is a 1971 first edition that's 16 years older than i am.

new James Ellroy The Enchanters is so good. the vibe is whiskey & dexadrine & no sleep for three days straight

I’m a Marilyn fan and did not expect to enjoy Ellroy’s dyspeptic version of her because, well, it’s Ellroy & it’s going to be gross. but the level of lore he’s woven in is nuts and I have to admit it’s almost classic-Ellroy level good. The amount of research it must have taken to be able to riff like this and resolve 75 plot threads cohesively? highwire shit. Hats off.

That being said I dunno if I could recommend it to anyone who isn’t already an Ellroy diehard. It prob won’t win him any new fans.

*dexedrine

also i read somewhere that Ellroy still writes all of his books longhand

Jordan Harper, She Rides Shotgun - solid B+, kind of feels like a novel cousin of that movie Shot Caller.

I saw a copy of that James Ellroy book at the library today but passed.

I like the Jordan Harper — apparently it was reissued in paperback under the title A Lesson In Violence, which is the edition I have. His kinda-sorta follow-up, The Last King Of California, is also really good.

I just read Tana French's latest, The Hunter, which is a sequel to her previous one. It's really good, and/but there's a character who'll have you literally tapping your foot going "Just fucking die already."

found Lady in the Lake (2019) by Laura Lippman a good read