BLOOD'S A ROVER

I don't write many book reviews these days. I use to do quite a few during my newspaper years, but now I only dabble with the occasional freelance piece, usually for nonfiction works, such as the recent biography of actor Warren Oates. I shy away from reviewing fiction now, especially since I've had my own books published and reviewed. Part of that is karmic fear (what goes around comes around) and part is that I now realize how much work it is to actually write a book. As a result, I'm more reluctant to be critical of someone else's work (plus, the odds are greater now that I might actually bump into the author at some point).

However, while on the road the last two weeks, I read James Ellroy's new novel BLOOD'S A ROVER, the conclusion of his "Underworld U.SA." trilogy, and feel inclined to say a few things about it (coincidentally, one of my first reviews for The Star-Ledger was of Ellroy's memoir MY DARK PLACES).

First off: BLOOD'S A ROVER is long - that's looonnnnggg - topping out at 640 pages. THE COLD SIX THOUSAND, the previous book in the trilogy, published in 2001, was a little longer, but seemed to read tighter. Ellroy's writing style in BAR is probably more accessible than it was in CST - there are fewer three-and-four-word sentences filled with punchy alliteration ("The Deuce was dead. The dealers yawned. The barman yawned. Stray dogs meandered through. They beat the heat."). But Ellroy's headlong pace lags several times in BAR, and I sometimes felt myself stopping to take a breather before gathering the energy to read on.

It also feels slightly padded. Ellroy often halts the narrative to insert diary entries from his main characters. However, a lot of those entries seem to be written in the same voice, despite the fact they come from characters with varied backgrounds. At least three of them use variations on the phrase "I ride the zeitgeist" at one point or another. That is to say they speak like no one else in the world - except James Ellroy.

BAR is also a direct follow-up to CST, and if you're not familiar with the previous book, you may find yourself a little lost, even though Ellroy helpfully drops in several pages of backstory early on. BAR opens in the aftermath of the MLK/RFK assassinations, which were orchestrated by some of the major players in the trilogy, a few of whom are now seeking redemption. Others, like the French/Corsican mercenary Jean-Philippe Mesplede, who took out JFK with a shot from the grassy knoll, have moved on to other evil business, including illegal commando raids and scalping expeditions on Castro's Cuba. Rogue FBI agent Dwight "The Enforcer" Holley (a nickname recycled from Ellroy's 1992 novel WHITE JAZZ, whose main character was rogue L.A. cop Dave "The Enforcer" Klein) is regretting his career as a "right-wing thug," yet planning another assassination and setting up a likely fall guy to take the rap - and a bullet. Ex-Las Vegas cop Wayne Tedrow, son of a white supremacist hatemonger, is racked with guilt over his own role in the killing of MLK. And young "peeper" Don Crutchfield (a name Ellroy borrowed from a real L.A. private detective) is learning at the feet of them all. And like them, he's soon obsessed with the mysterious Joan Rosen Klein, the left-wing radical at the center of all the mysteries, who men kill and die for without ever really understanding.

Throw in Haitian voodoo, the mob, Howard Hughes, J. Edgar Hoover, Dominican Republic casinos, anti-Castro extremists, black revolutionaries, various psychedelic drugs and a 1964 armored car robbery that somehow sparks the whole plot and you have an idea of why it took took Ellroy 640 pages to get it all in, in a way that makes sense. Well, sort of makes sense.

Still, BAR is a James Ellroy novel, and there's only one writer in the world who can pull that off. For scope, complexity and breadth of ambition, no one else comes close. He doesn't always succeed in his efforts, but the arrogance and energy of them can be invigorating in itself. BAR would work better if it were tighter - 100 pages could have been easily chopped - but it's still unlike anything else out there.

Some other quick notes:

- The title comes from an A.E. Houseman verse ("Clay lies still/But blood's a rover"). That's also the long-announced title of Harlan Ellison's yet-to-be completed novel about the adventures of Vic and Blood, the post-apocalyptic duo from his award-winning novella "A Boy and His Dog."

- Dwight Holley is haunted by the death of George Diskant, a Nyack, N.Y., man whom Holley killed in a drunken driving accident. George Diskant is also the name of a celebrated cinematographer who shot some of greatest films noir of the 1940 and 50s, including THEY LIVE BY NIGHT, THE NARROW MARGIN, ON DANGEROUS GROUND and KANSAS CITY CONFIDENTIAL.

- Ellroy isn't always so good with technical details. He repeatedly has his characters use "silencered" Magnum revolvers. Silencers/suppressors don't work on revolvers (what law-enforcement types call "wheel guns"), much less with high-powered Magnum rounds. Any noise abatement at the silenced muzzle is more than canceled out by the blowback through the open cylinder.

Still, like him or not, if you're attempting to write serious crime fiction these days, you have to read Ellroy. His slow output and occasional stumbles aside, the Demon Dog still leads the pack.

First reviews

Publishers' Weekly, Nov. 2, 2009
(Starred review) Gone 'til November
Wallace Stroby.
Minotaur, $24.99 (304p)
ISBN 978-0-312-56024-9

Tormented lives brutally intersect in Stroby's powerful thriller, the possible first in a new series to feature Sara Cross, the lone woman sheriff's deputy in Florida's St. Charles County. One night, Cross, a single mother who's coping with her son's leukemia and the remnants of a two-years-gone postdivorce fling with fellow deputy Billy Flynn, arrives on the edge of a cypress swamp where Flynn has just shot a 22-year-old black man from New Jersey allegedly fleeing a traffic stop. Sara tries to smother her still-simmering lust for no-good Billy, but her cop instincts drive her toward a dismaying truth that hurtles her into a violent showdown with an aging New Jersey contract killer stricken with a rare cancer. While relentlessly probing the eternal mystery of why bright and capable women fall for dangerous losers, Stroby (The Heartbreak Lounge) explores moral choices that leave his devastatingly real characters torn between doing nothing and risking everything. (Jan.)


Booklist, Dec. 1, 2009 issue
"GONE 'TIL NOVEMBER is rock-solid crime fiction that melds compelling characters, crisp writing, and a finely rendered portrait of Old Florida, the state's thinly populated, less-storied interior. Sara and Morgan, an aging career criminal who has just been diagnosed with cancer, are Stroby's best creations. Morgan is ruthless and resourceful, but he also has a quite dignity and a streak of humanity that may have readers picturing actor Morgan Freeman."

Final cover and early words

Here's the final, slightly tweaked, cover for GONE 'TIL NOVEMBER (due out from St. Martin's/Minotaur Jan. 19), along with some very generous early responses from a trio of terrific writers:

"In GONE 'TIL NOVEMBER, Wallace Stroby’s mastery of character and dialogue is mated to a hellacious narrative engine. His heroine, Sara Cross, is a wonderful creation.”
- George Pelecanos, author of THE WAY HOME and producer/co-writer of THE PACIFIC and THE WIRE

"Just when you think that you can't be surprised anymore, a writer like Wallace Stroby ups the ante, finds a way to use familiar elements in new and surprising ways. This is a first-rate novel, with characters who live on in the reader's mind long after the book is finished. I always expect great things from Stroby, and GONE 'TIL NOVEMBER is a significant addition to an already impressive body of work."
- Laura Lippman, author of WHAT THE DEAD KNOW and ANOTHER THING TO FALL


“In these days of mega formulaic blockbusters, it seems almost impossible to find a novel that not only has depth of characterization, but a compelling plot. GONE 'TIL NOVEMBER achieves both and seamlessly. The novel takes off like a freight train... the writing is a joy, full of beautiful asides, an almost weary compassion and some passages that literally break your heart. Sara Cross is a wondrous character. This novel sings, darkly and irresistibly.”
– Ken Bruen, author of LONDON BOULEVARD and THE GUARDS

Random Readings, Vol. 8

This uplifting installment of Random Readings comes from Don Carpenter's brilliant 1966 novel HARD RAIN FALLING, recently reprinted by New York Review Books. In this passage, a down-on-his-luck ex-boxer named Jack Leavitt - who's gone from orphanage to reform school to penitentiary in short order - contemplates the ironies of lust late one night on his bunk in San Quentin. HARD RAIN is only peripherally a crime novel, but this passage is a noir as it gets:

It struck him with horrible force. His parents, whoever they were, had probably made love out of just such an itch. For fun, for this momentary satisfaction, they had conceived him, and because he was obviously inconvenient, dumped him in the orphanage; because he, the life they had created while they were being careless and thoughtless, was not part of the fun of it all; he was just a harmful side effect of the scratching of the itch; he was the snot in the handkerchief after the nose had been blown, just something disgusting to be gotten rid of in secret and forgotten. Cold rage filled him, rage at his unknown parents, rage at the life he had been given .... Fifteen or twenty minutes on a forgotten bed between two probable strangers had given him twenty-four years of misery, pain, and suffering, and promised, unless he were to die soon, to go on giving him misery for another forty or fifty years, locked up in one small room or another without hope of freedom, love, life, truth or understanding. A penis squirts, and I am doomed to a life of death. It has got to be insanity; there has got to be a God, because only an insane God could have created such a universe.

Black Lizard Lounge #5: THE KILLING

The fifth installment of my ongoing occasional look back at some vintage Black Lizard paperback reprints from the late 1980s and early '90s (for the others, just click on "Black Lizard Books" in the labels at bottom).

THE KILLING by Lionel White

BLACK LIZARD EDITION: 1988

ORIGINAL PUBLICATION: Dutton, 1955

THE STORY: A group of criminals band together to pull off a $2 million racetrack robbery.

THE BOTTOM LINE: A seminal heist novel from one of its greatest practitioners.

"That's why this thing is going to work. We don't want a lot of hoodlums in on it. ... It's what I've been telling you guys since the beginning. We aren't a bunch of dumb stick-up artists. We aren't tough guys. We're supposed to have brains."

So says ex-con Johnny Clay to the crew he's put together for a racetrack robbery in Lionel White's 1955 novel THE KILLING. And he's right, his co-conspirators are pretty much a bunch of Average Joes in need of money, albeit with unique skills and special access. One is a track cashier, trying to support a high-living wife. Another is an aging bartender plagued with gambling debts. A third is an otherwise good cop in deep with a loanshark. Bringing them all together is veteran criminal Johnny Clay, fresh from a four-year stint in prison and now imbued with "a sort of grim purposefulness which he had always lacked."

Johnny's purpose is to rob the racetrack during the "Canarsie Stakes," gaining entrance to the money room while a sharpshooter picks off one of the horses to create a diversion. It's an operation that should work like clockwork - and does until that trouble-making wife entices her petty criminal boyfriend into robbing the robbers.

THE KILLING is probably best remembered for its 1956 film adaptation, written and directed by then-neophyte Stanley Kubrick, with additional dialogue by novelist (and Black Lizard favorite) Jim Thompson. It was originally published under the title CLEAN BREAK, as part of Dutton's "Guilt-Edged Mystery" line, though all of the post-1956 editions - and there were many - retitled it as per Kubrick's film. For the prolific White, a former crime reporter, it was the first of his novels to make it to the screen, though others would follow, notably Jean-Luc Goddard's 1965 PIERROT LE FOU, based on White's 1962 book OBSESSION. Aside from the ending, the film of THE KILLING is amazingly faithful to the book, with much of White's dialogue intact.

As the novel begins, the planning of the robbery is already under way, with an address scrawled on the back of a winning ticket leading to a late-night meeting in a furnished room on New York's East 31st Street (in the film, the racetrack is located in California, in the novel it's on Long Island). It's not until Chapter Two that we meet Johnny, just out of jail and reunited with his faithful - and patient - girlfriend, Fay. In some ways, the characters are archetypes, but they're sharply drawn. White has only to sketch them quickly and, for the purposes of the plot, they're good to go. All the backstory is conveyed through dialogue, or brief interior thoughts.

THE KILLING is a lightning-fast read, only 155 pages in the Black Lizard edition, and as lean and mean as they come. One can see the influence it had on Donald E. Westlake's "Richard Stark" novels, which were to begin seven years later. Reading it in 2009, it doesn't seem dated at all.

The book's manipulation of time - with multiple versions of the same events told from different viewpoints - is retained in the film, though its best-known homage would come almost forty years later, in the fractured chronologies of Quentin Tarantino's RESERVOIR DOGS and PULP FICTION. The novel is crafted as carefully and painstakingly as the robbery itself - though much more successfully, of course. It seems effortless, the work of a total pro, and it ends, as does the movie, with a nerve-wracking near getaway at an airport (LaGuardia in the book), though the finale lacks the ironic twist - and classic last line - of Kubrick's film.

Even more than W.R. Burnett's THE ASPHALT JUNGLE, THE KILLING is the granddaddy of modern heist stories, and the blueprint for dozens of novels and films that came after it. Fifty-four years after its publication, it remains a cornerstone of American crime fiction.

Thought for the day ...

"To buy books would be a good thing, if we also could buy the time to read them."
- Arthur Schopenhauer 1788-1860

Summer (and fall) in Asbury

And if you didn't take my word that the Asbury Park Boardwalk came back in a big way this summer (and continues to this fall), here's another Shore native to give it his endorsement. That's the Wonder Bar behind him. No word if he stopped in for a cold one.

Also, to update the availability issue, signed first editions of both THE BARBED-WIRE KISS and THE HEARTBREAK LOUNGE are now available at the Asbury Galleria, inside the Grand Arcade between Convention Hall and The Paramount Theatre.

The Galleria also has an ongoing Morro Castle exhibit, in honor of the 75th anniversary of the fire that claimed 137 lives on the passenger liner. The smoking hulk beached just outside Convention Hall on Sept. 8, 1934 and remained there for six months until it was hauled away and cut up for scrap metal. A monument to the disaster was unveiled on the boardwalk last month, along with some rare home movie footage (below) shot from the beach after the ship came to rest.

Home movie footage of the luxury liner Morro Castle disaster