The publishing history certainly adds to this novel's appeal. Released in England but banned in the USA for 40 years except in a milquetoast version titled The Fifth Grave , it sports a 1st person narrator that's a mutt mix of shamus and hoodlum, fouling up lines like "if blondes were poison, I'd have died thirty years ago" (Pan UK, G456, reprint 1961, p.16) between gulps of rotgut.

But don't get the idea Karl Craven is incompetent. Between lying around naked in his hotel bed--it's hot in Paulton--and slammin' down shooters in the roadhouses--drinkin' makes everything easier--Craven's out to solve his partner's murder (a la Miles Archer), do a little intervention kidnapping of a client's starry-eyed niece from the local religious cult, and keep a slangy-mouthed dame away from a thug named Pug who is less "civilized than an orang-outang" (p.27). During this course, he exposes the outrageous graft of the police chief, gets the lawyer who's pulling all the strings murdered, strips back the "miracles" of Solomon's Vineyard--that's the local cult who grow grapes and resurrect their dead leader through ritual sacrifice--and bruises it up bigtime with The Princess.

Ah, the Princess.

She's the wicked bauble of the book, first spied in the opening paragraphs with "breasts the size of Cuban pineapples" and a smile that says "we could have fun together, big boy" (p.7). And lots of ouches follow. She's sado-masochistic, you see, and Craven gleefully joins in, since "blood always excites me" (p.59). There's no top/bottom matchup here; this is bed-bound Greco-Roman wrestling. Being pre-Penthouse Forum dated, it's a minus on the Erect-O-Scale, yet it still rang the censor's call bell. Author Latimer probably figured he'd KO the genre by combining its two biggest selling points: sex and violence.

On the violence card, there's plenty of shootouts and fistfights, but the squeamish standout is when Craven throws down with Pug through cell bars, ultimately trapping Pug's head between them and "punched his face, using both hands . . . I beat his face to a pulp . . . [then] I kicked his head a few times; but it wasn't worth it. He was out cold" (p.149).

Like Craven says in the last line of the book, "being a detective toughens a fellow up" (p.160).

This one opens like a James M. Cain primer, but hold on, because it corkscrews into a tangled up, fervent brew that keeps the characters on shaky toes and the readers guessing.

This time it's a TV repairman looking for reception with the barely-legal niece of a barely-ambulant, very rich uncle. He'll die soon and Shirley'll inherit, but she "was soft and eager, and hungry for life" (Hard Case Crime, ISBN 0843957700, reprint c.2007, p.45) and Jack had bills to pay and bone in his Carhartts. The covert blunder here is not that they cut off the old geezer's oxygen, but they go against the established work ethic and shortcut earning the rewards. Button up the hairshirts and wait it out, you nippers.

What is fascinating about this novel is the sucking whirlpool of fumbles and misconceptions that cut through all the logical planning of the initial crime and start a ravaging attack of misconstrued questions, mistrusted emotions, and hurried, stupid mistakes. There's always the see-saw of money verses love which leads to the bitter pill of author Brewer's title: Jack, you shoulda never given her reason to be vengeful, and your greed for coin cross-eyed you into seeing Phyllis Dietrichson instead of merely inexperienced sincerity.

Straining coincidences lie just under the surface in this yet another nod to Indemnity/Postman matchmaking of grifter meets grifter, grifter kills grifter's husband, grifter hooks grifter on heroin, grifter hooks himself on heroin. First person narrative is as detached as this person's implausible code of behavior. And Mona, for a title character, she's an unfocused shadow of preposterous dreaming gone nightmare and that's about it. Joe is snappy and sharp, but he needs to be softened up and bruised with a good noir bludgeoning. The marriage-to-smack ending was a surprise, but fit about right for a Joe who would fall head over bollocks after his initial tumble on the beach blanket with she of the "ravenously hungry" mouth. Is this really first post-coitus dialogue?

"Now I'm used to money. . . I couldn't go back to the way it was before."

"It could work. We could make it work, Mona." (Hard Case Crime, ISBN 0843953497, reprint c.2004, p.44-5)

Sorry for the parental advice, but I'd say these kiddies are rushin' inta things.

The Restless Hands led to a restless mind as I jumped from chapter headings named after each character and found them pretty much auditioning for a Best Seller ensemble performance. However, whatever was gonna happen wasn't really that interesting as Bad Boy comes back to hometown after leaving on the night a young girl was murdered. Immediately, the dead girl's older sister who's been carrying a torch for Bad Boy is attacked by unidentified strangler. The family hires a trenchcoat who rubs his chin a lot, and all the horndogs who dated Rebecca (the living, older sister) are suspect as Bad Boy tries to be Good Boy and Rebecca chainsmokes and looks pissed. If Bruno was trying to stretch his literary chops and write about small town crime, intolerance, and greed, he lost me in his mystery format of third-person omniscient--this is not Thompson's The Criminal--and I bailed about a third into this whodunit potboiler.

Bruno gets a little leaden with his denouncement of suburban, cookie-cutter lifestyle, but it's certainly a congruous baiting--"everybody wanted more" (Ballantine #24657, reprint 1976, p.30)--to the mainspring trap. First-person protagonist Caleb Dawson is a social two-pronger: besides having an editors job at a book publishing house in the City he got by knowing the most influential man in his upper-state burg, he's newly-elected to the Village Board overseeing the police force administration. Sardonic and bitter, he's quick with the pithy comeback yet fully aware of his subservient role under the two definitions of success: wealth and "influence" (p.29).

Under this groundwork, it's entirely plausible Caleb would go along with keeping a quarter-of-a-million worth of jewelry his gimcracky wife found in the shopping mall parking lot. And, if you swallow that, try bites like these diamonds are Big Bosses' Wife's and Caleb sleeps with her, Peepin' Tom neighbor steals jewelry out of bedroom, Good Thug/Bad Thug show up for kidnapping/blackmail goofery, sexual-libertarian poet turns up naked and dead and gets his doggerel published--all under the blanket of Bruno's character-mouthed disclaimer of "how many coincidences are required before they stop being coincidences" (p.73).

Whew.

This is Bruno's final book--his culminating career statement--and, at page 150 out of 188, I was tempted to slug through an' see how it all shakes out around his disheartened opinion of the publishing industry, but the slope was just too soapy for further slathering.

You gotta remember Mike Hammer started out to be a cartoon character named Mike Danger--or was that an old Fireside Theater skit--and ended as a doughy and second-rate TV actor with a harelip. During Spillane's 50-year run, even the 150 million books he sold didn't change the dismissive opinion held by institutional publishers, critics, and academians. But even snubbed, Hammer was up and away the widest-read detective of his era.

Whatever is thought about former WWII pilot & Jehovah's Witness Mickey Spillane as an artist, certain paragons like, oh say, Dirty Harry, Vachss' Burke, or even Jack Bauer, owe him their lives, or at least the spark of it. If you start at Daly or Hammett instead of Chandler, he's Route 66 to the battlefield of depredating crime fixating modern entertainments. Today, the sandbags are so high that Mickey's scandalous violence seems merely like flak overhead. And concerning the sex: that was never really a problem, was it? More of an embarrassment, I'd say. It was just that caveman 'tude, dude, bought by a buncha guys who'd been turned into Neanderthals by The War then out to whitewash the picket fences of the New Deal American Dream. Bullets or brushes, Mike Hammer was a pressure cooker lettin' off suppressed steam.

Vengeance is Mine is about being pumped up. It's that Jerry Lee Lewis swagger; that lizard leer of confidence saying you've kicked sum serious ass in worse places, so bring it on. Maybe it's that longing to break out with the coyotes and yowl. But whatever it is, it is not about civilizing to matriarchal values that historically follow a masculine melee.

Plotwise, Mickey's first three novels--I, The Jury, My Gun Is Quick, and this one--are pretty much the same. I, The Jury is probably the best of the three, if for nothing else than that astonishing finale. Even 007's execution of Electra King in The World Is Not Enough falls short comparatively. Vengeance Is Mine shows its root ball right out of the gate: Mike wakes up with a dead buddy in a room fulla question marks. Sure, he needs to clear his name with the cops. They've taken away his self-respect and his PI license along with his under-the-arm "Betsy". Now he has to rely on his leggy secretary Velda and a weasely little .25 automatic. Natch, he's pissed. Then there's an illegal ring of usual suspects uncovered. Mike gets to shoot some goons--"I pulled the trigger just to watch their expressions change" (Mickey Spillane Five Complete Mike Hammer Novels, Avenel Books, ISBN 051762950X, 2nd edition reprint, c.1987, p.219)--shag some sugar--"she danced close enough to almost get behind me" (p.177)--and indulge in the mystery along with his "blood and lust and vengeance" (Kevin Burton Smith).

Psycho/social analysis abound around Mickey's machismo, bigotry, and sexual aberrances. Personally, like what Wicked did to Witch West, I'd like to see a trendy re-imagining pressed on Velda. I think--he whispers, peeping around Morrison's "The End" door--she's Mommy.

There is not much to recommend this novel past its great Barye Phillips lurid cover art. It's not particularly bad; it just fizzles out and leaves nary a trail of saltpeter behind. In his debut novel, Williams is tracing out some literary armatures to see how they wobble down his sullied streets. The title is typically misleading: this is not Dogpatch, but a rural community as found throughout the breadbasket of America.

Still a young man, Bob Crane has returned home to claim the inheritance of his Grandparents' farm. His married but arrested-in-development brother Lee Crane is weaseling hot animal sex out of Angelina, an 18-year old (don't believe it) farm daughter with a 12-gauge, trigger-happy Daddy. Bob steps in and marries Angelina to prevent murder, but one of these major characters ends up kissing sand anyway. The novel completes itself with an abruptness that instigates a futile search for torn-out, final pages.

Williams plays Three Card Monte with these creations. Bob, our 1st person narrator, starts out elusive and ends up reliable while Angelina bursts out of her dress and her assumed personality as a Jezebel to reveal unblemished skin and pure desires smeared only by her surroundings and the appetite of others. Lee, well, he debilitates from Lothario to Edward Richardson, reminding us that it is not always the Eves of the world who tempt and destroy, but those tumescent snakes who follow their own feral instincts as well.

Charlie turned out a trio of "girlie" novels to start himself off, this being number three. I skipped Big City Girl, but this is probably the best of the trio. Hill Girl talked about moral crime pronging out from manly-man hubris, sexual obsession and parental Nazism. River Girl is eddying from social malfeasance, as in against-the-law crime. This does not necessarily make it a better novel, just a more complex and sophisticated one.

Our first-person narrator this time is small-town deputy Jack Marshall. He's got a wife, but she's vacationing at the beach with girlfriends and burning through the graft money Jack collects for his corrupt sheriff boss, Buford. The morally righteous are pushing a grand jury to shut down the gambling wheels and flesh beds, so Jack takes a little R-an'-R fishing the boggy Lake Stowe. There he meets Doris Shevlin, wife to some renegade thug on the spook(1) and—BAM! —suddenly Jack's talkin' about an "overpowering impulse" (Fawcett Gold Medal, #g207, c.1951, p.35) to rescue her from this "spent and languid backwater" (p.76). At this point what Jack senses—all the way from head to loins—is a beautiful, trapped woman bedraggled by loneliness and marital neglect. He misses the cultivated cataracts that will note her more a prize than a co-conspirator and soul mate. Well, Jack goes full-bore and unintentionally shoots Mr. Shevlin, then devises a plan to switch places with this then-hunted/now-dead loser he's weighting down with an outboard motor and dumping in the lake. As the police net the lake for the wrong body, Jack's worm-wiggling in bed with Doris in Bayou City. Natch, things go awry and Buford comes after him while the troopers arrest Doris at the hair salon. But Jack is obstinate about his dream and loyal to his girl, so he breaks her out of jail, only to lose her in the ensuing car chase along with the rest of his life to a noose or jail cell.

A lot of the reading time is spent with Jack stumbling around the swamp figuring things out. Atmosphere is held to a minimum with the plot staying overt and straightforward, so all the attention is on the four characters--Jack, Doris, Buford and Dinah, the sheriff's tucked-away moll who takes a shining to Jack as "the world's only defense against dullness . . . the personification of excitement" (p.194). Jack's the young turk trying to scheme his way to a respectable life. Buford is the seasoned milker, an opportunist enjoying his illegal vices and slit-eyed enough to do what it takes to maintain them. Dinah is fast-water rapids—she's got an apartment wall mounted with Buford's guns, a hopped-up Lincoln to race around in, and a wetness for anything modern, fresh, and untried. Author Williams brings her in and out mainly for plot purposes, but she also gives revealing contrast to heroine Doris, who is very withdrawn, quite emotionally un-armored beyond the "contained set stillness of her face" (p.31), surprisingly subservient, childlike in her manner and beliefs, and has degenerated into a helpless, broken-winged victim.

Doris can be seen as the moral center of this story, but only if you consider the universe non-dynamic. She represents an enervated value system outdated by sanctioning female passivity and complaisance, the former so graciously illustrated by her fainting spell while Jack rescues her from jail, and the latter by the constant referrals to her self-cut, razor-to-the-wrist defiance of “mutilated hair” (p.213). Doris' influence is not much more than that of a lost puppy, but Jack sees her as a goddess, arising through "reflected stars" (p.39) in the swampwater like Botticelli's wet dream on the half shell. Jack, of course, is love blind to her unchangeable limitations as an I-like-Ike-era wife. Or maybe that's the draw for him, I'm not sure. Anyway, it is Fate's joke that this newly-formed couple suffer into the same position as the one they determined to destroy at the start of this entire machination. As a partner, Doris goes down as baggage in the trunk, and Jack winds up in prison as dismissed and alone as Doris was in that ramshackle cabin on the lake. In the end he says, “at the exact center of the moving wheel there is no movement” (p.280), probably with that same “strange, tight stillness” (p.37) he found so puzzling in Doris' face.

1. Actually, there's no evidence to label Doris' husband a baddie. Author Williams has left any moral exemptions resulting from his murder intentionally ambiguous by keeping this bromidic wife strangely unobservant as to why they've crook walked away from all civilization. If you don't think Jack's major mistake is hanging an anvil around his neck named Doris, or wanting what she symbolizes as a 50s wifey-poo, then read her explanation on page 108.

Copyright 01/25/2011 by Larry Crawford

No, this is not the Harry Whittington Vice President "Dick" Cheney shotgunned while hunting quail in Texas about 5 years ago. This is the Harry Whittington who wrote crime novels and his peers called "king of the paperback originals" (Bill Pronzini). And, yes, this is the same text as A Moment To Prey--and a much easier-found copy--which is Black Lizard's refresh when printing it in 1987. No, I haven't an inkling as to why.

I've always contended that an author who writes more than a hundred books is just repeating himself. Harry wrote over 150 novels and Backwoods Tramp falls into lockstep with my attitude. It's a rollicking 120 pages of strangling clichés hoping they'll seep some original juice. They do. It then becomes a personal matter on how much glossy plausibility you'll lose before you can't see yourself in this novel anymore.

Jake Richards has drawn an early out from pro league ball and taken a career- and mind-numbing job that gets robbed of a hundred Gs one day by a trio of masked goons. One of them says to Jake, “rat on schedyule, huah, Ja-yake?” (Black Lizard, ISBN 0887390374, reprint c.1987, p.24), effectively sidetracking the cops onto Jake who loses his job and all credibility.

A brilliant move of misdirection. Too bad Jake didn't remember how wickedly manipulative this corn dog was before fixating on his confrontation. Or was it the money? Leads find him in the scrub country of Florida rooting through fish camps along the river where he meets Lily Sistrunk. “A hot little backwoods gal,” he thinks. (p.6) “You shivered a little, but had trouble pulling your gaze away . . . She'd developed suddenly, so even though she looked swollen and full, she wasn't quite finished . . . [and] she was looking for something, she wanted something, and she would kill to get it” (p.1-2).

Properly poleaxing Jake, the plot moves forward to Marve Pooser, the cracker ensconced in a remote cabin upriver. He's double-crossed his thug buddies out of the money and is calmly waiting for Lily to bring Jake to his lair. The bulk of the novel plays out here, and this guy's got more schemes than a water moc has bite.

Visualize it this way: these 3 characters form an age-old triangle. They are inside a box of sinful motivations with four corners labeled “greed”, “lust”, “jealousy”, and “pride”. The trio scrabbles furiously inside this box like weasels after mice. They shoot, stab, and pound on each other. There's an early ratpack. Some other guys get chewed by ‘gators. Marve porks Lily in front of Jake. Jake shags Lily in front of Marve. It's not the traditional asp, but a deadly coral snake gets involved. And, even though it's professed and mooned over, the only love found here is self-delusion. In the end they devour each other.

Ya'll heard this one before? “You come out with your hands up or I'm burning the shack” (p.73). Yeah, cliché's abound, but bigger problems arise. This is Jake's 1st person story, but Marve is the one moving ideas to action. Author Whittington has to give us Marve's reasons through Jake's ego or after-the-fact explanation. It's awkward, and it starts feeling like just one more trick in the magic act. Lily‘s character does a 180-degree belly flop leading a teary, maudlin end run that goes over like a whale on the beach. Jake believes her lucre-is-filthy speech and bails on the cash, kicking one more cliché toward the slippery slope before it gets away.

I'd say John D. is The Man to compare to in this narrow focus from the crime genre of the pulp paperbacks' heydays. I have no time with him past the McGee series which I read in order then filed in the "Beach Read" bin. Sorry, but I'm a West Coast kinda guy, which means after 77 Sunset Strip, Jim Rockford was my favorite PI. I'm just saying, come on man, did Travis even own a car? Certainly not a mullet-certified Camero, okay?

Now, this is the way a first-person narrating shamus should develop: trudging from one point to another, opening up clue boxes, speculating until a pattern starts to emerge, interrupted by surprises and sidetracked by skirts. Tal Howard is no private dick, however. The personality peephole is pretty tight on him so you don't really know what he's gonna do given the life an' love situations he's bound to encounter. But he's comfortable, trustworthy and likeable.

Baggage-wise, he's toting the decidedly-American guilt of being an unemployed bum. Direction and any aim in life has been starved out of him in the bonechill of the Chosin Reservoir debacle of the Korean War, even sundering him from his doe-eyed and loyal girlfriend back home. Trying to jump-start himself, Tal is following the promise of a hidden and ill-gotten $60,000 from a dying buddy in the POW camp. He's snooping around Hillston for intel and a girl named Cindy when he bumps into another death camp survivor: the ex-Marine, lean an' mean loner, Earl Fitzmartin. Think Dolpf Lundgren without the accent or Robert Shaw as the killing machine in From Russia With Love with actual dialogue. He's rooting around the sixty thou, too, but he's been a busier boy and instrumental in a related but even more covert mystery.

Cindy, or Cinderella of the title, turns out to be a “greedy life” girl named Antoinette Rasis, aka Toni, “a mature woman so alive she made the others in the room look two dimensional” (Dell #62, PBO, c.1955, p.99). She's a nice contrast to Ruthie Stamm, the “for-keeps girl” (p.31) whom Tal attracts and alienates right out of the stall, as she quickly symbolizes for him the purity, trust, and worthiness he feels he no longer deserves.

Things twist up pretty fast. Disappearances turn into murders. Embezzlement becomes extortion. There are no dramatic fights or shootouts until the finale, but Fitzmartin is always creeping around the narrative, booting up the tension “as though he had stepped beyond sanity” (p.176). Brain grunting is at a minimum once Tal first-guesses the deadly dance among the missing players, fingering Fitzmartin for the nastiness, and pointing Cindy/Toni toward the hidden money. It all ends reasonably well, with the girls taking most of the damage. Cinderella does get that bullet and Ruthie is “brutally . . . criminally attacked”(1) (p.188), but the big change is reserved for Tal.

I had come . . . to find treasure. I had thought I would find it buried in the ground. I had found it walking around, with dark red hair, with gray eyes, with a look of pride . . . The money meant nothing. Ruth meant everything.

--p. 146-7

John D. scatters a moral lesson inbetween his divestments of an almost super-human villain, the irresistible draw from both polarities of womanhood, and the fixation on the capitalistic grease called money. Along the way he drops in social grievances like the architectural standardization of America (p.11) and its apathetic and non-imaginative youth (p.50).

And all with the ease of bluffing to the pot on a busted flush.

1. There's no indication she was also raped, but JDM seems to encounter all-powerful, badguy studs victimizing wholesome and desirable women pretty regularly. But another time to investigate that connection, eh?

Copyright 02/04/2011 by Larry Crawford

This is a first-person narrative from a sailor on a 4-day boozefest in the greater Los Angeles basin. However, it does not feel like the rum-guzzling revelry of, say, Crumley's The Last, Good Kiss. This is more like finding a brown paper bag labeled “Binge” with a plot inside it.

  Swen “Swede” Nelson is “a hell-raising first mate on a tramp steamer” (Gold Medal PBO #225, c.1952, p.30), in port after three years at sea. He's got 15 Gs in a moneybelt and the American Dream of buying a farm and a wife and never leaving the dirt again. So, let's have a drink to a new life . . .

  . . . And wake up to meet Corliss Mason. “Her loveliness was a flame reaching out and burning me” (p.13) . . .

  . . . Then hit a guy so hard “his head plopped like an overripe melon” (p.40), killing him just ‘cause Corliss said he raped her . . .

  . . . Following up with a Buick-encased body dump over the cliff and into the sea, consummated with a first-time boning in the dirt, like “Adam and Eve dressed in fog” (p.55) . . .

  . . . Then off to Tijuana to get married with a honeymoon that “the magic of the madness . . . was gone. All there was between us was flesh.” (p.81) . . .

  . . . Then back to the wife's Purple Parrot Motor Court and the wife of the wife-beater gardener(1), Mamie, who has “womanly intuition” (p.86) that Swede's in trouble and is willing to boff him to prove it. She cries when Swede goes all noble on her ass . . .

  . . . ‘Cause, no matter what, “You marry the dream. It's yours now, for keeps.” Swede believes in loyalty and duty, even though by now he knows his “love was a high-class tramp” or worse. “God almighty. What if I had to kill a man every time I wanted to really arouse her?” (p.98-92) . . .

  . . . Then the cops show up over the cliff-tossed car with the FBI in tow over a much larger and related matter. Everybody around the Motor Court starts looking different to Swede, except Mamie, who, between dope binges her weasleturd hubby orchestrates, is still crying. Swede goes all honest on Corliss, revealing his suspicions about her “Hello sailor. Lonely?” (p.89) past life . . .

  . . . Next thing it's the old wakin'-up-inna-jail-cell scene accused of Corliss' murder . . .

  . . . An' the next thing is breaking away from the bulls and findin' Corliss, who is really Sophia Palanka “a cheap little South Chicago strip-teaser” (p.164) . . .

. . . Which leads to a tidy wrap-up. All the bad people have been severely beaten or killed. The FBI wins the pot of smug smiles for figgurin' it all out. Mamie's still crying, even when Swede gives her all his money an' tells her to “get back in that old routine” (p.176) jus' like he's gonna do by skippering the rustbucket Sally B. out of San Pedro, like, pronto . . .

But the Swede has learned a lesson about dreams, about life, about himself: “the tide waited for no man, knowing life would go on, as it has” (p.177) forever; that his most precious gift is his fierce and unalterable loyalty extended without deceit or judgment to those who he cares about and loves.

Even if his “heart [was] below his waist” and he's a "roaring drunk, filthy, elemental" (p.30) squarehead.

But only on shore leave.

  (1) Swede's description of Meek is a fine example of Pulpfest Purple Prose: “His voice was a rat-tailed file rasping across my nerves” (p.91)

Copyright 02/07/2011 by Larry Crawford

The Face of Evil. Hmmm. Seems to me the only important and noteworthy evil in this book is faceless. That is, the shadowy cartel of power that's pulling everybody's ripcord is pretty much the same here as in any conspiracy theory thinking: the Military-Industrial Complex, the Freemasons, The Albacore Club, the Illuminati, The Fourth Reich, Men in Black, Scientologists. Our first-person hero, Bill Oxford, calls them the “big men” and his mission becomes not let them “gain control of the empire of California”(1) (Gold Medal #393, c.1954, p.74).

Working globally within a ticking-clock timeframe, the story is set as a prologue to an event-to-be, spilling in to the arrival of swimsuit-clad, young college bronzoids(2) to Newport Beach/Balboa Island for Spring Break.

The rest of the novel is pulp opera.

Bill Oxford is a fixer for the “big men”; a schemer that can “cut your throat for a dirty dollar” (p.18), though he'd never use such an uncouth weapon as a knife. He's called in to “put this guy in a sling” (p.23) when a candidate named Ringling Black announces possession of damning evidence against the corrupt opposition. While laying the groundwork for his attack, Bill gets in a fight “like a hand grenade going off” (p.6) in an oceanfront bar for makin' cutesy eyes with the girlfriend of a square-built trucker named King McCarthy. But, more importantly, he gets a bruised introduction to “the whirlpool of Nile Lisbon” (p.16).

She's the assistant district attorney and respected by all in her community, but Bill immediately notices “her private hell” (p.11) behind the facade, especially watching her “parted lips tormented with passion, with a held-in frenzy” (p.7) while trading blows with King. Subtextually, this is a billboard for twisting up sex an' violence, an' respect, an' success, an' all sorts of fun things like deep, dark secrets. She is certainly the cipher of the book and Bill is immediately head over heels bein' dragged.

Then there's Ann Field, the "sin-scarred girl" (p.105). She enters the narrative carrying a readymade torch for Bill and a longing for lost youth, dreams, purpose. She hates him—in the past, Bill whored her out for a gangbang cruise on a boatload of high rollers headed for La Paz—she loves him—what else could explain her robbing Ringling at gunpoint for the evidence she thinks will help Bill—she gets the gold-hearted-brass-balled hooker role for the mushodrama scenes.

Bill's been slimed up for too long and Nile's perceived love is a handbuzzer to his shame and guilt, unwinding his moral coil. Deciding to double-cross his crooked employers, Bill rips off an end run with the evidence, trying to make the goalposts of a TV exposé spot. He's slowed down by getting the stuffings kicked out of him in another fight with King—his third and decisive win puts King in the hospital —plus the fix against him is too strong so the cameras are all cold. It doesn't matter. Bill's shown his mettle while facing certain extinction. He's finally worthy of a goddess' love and the renewel of his life as celebrated with the Spring Break revelry.

This book is screwy. Intentions, motivations, attitudes, and moral stances are either incomprehensible or clichéd. For instance, Nile's obvious S&M furied excitement(3) never feels true, and 1950s prissy censorship is not to blame here. By her own admission she's feels “in hell” (p.43) without a man, but demands “a complete man” (p.148) to love. He's gotta be some impossible Ali/Gandhi mix of secular godliness that certainly entails physical superiority “against another man” (p.115), with the reward being Nile's unadulterated devotion to anything Her Man might do or say. This still doesn't explain her blood-‘n'-bonin' fixation, nor does Nile's closing revelation that “if I ever found my complete man, the strong man, he wouldn't need me” (p.150) explain anything except there's a big, dark dysfunction blocking any mental clarity. It just makes the most intelligent character in the novel look pretty stupid.

  That she's mysterious is fine, but making obsessive behavior as abstruse as the Sphinx debilitates her needed habitation of this novel. I mean, come on, she's the center of this carousel—all three males are in love with her—and, as a result, all the characters dilute as their archetypes start overwhelming their fleshouts: Ringling Black the Ringmaster a la Martyr; King of the Jungle McCarthy; Bill Oxford as Odysseus. Similarly, the actions ring off key as well. Black's shooting seems more like a convenient toss-off. Bill's penultimate defeat turning into conclusive victory feels staged. For a county prosecutor, Nile never exhibits any fuss about the big bosses' criminality. And leaving the novel with the USC football team ratpacking some hoods like Tommy Trojan was the saver of the world is misplaced patriotism. It's just all so mechanistic and over-wrought—Bill's constant self-analysis and inner dialogues sound as if he's reading from author McPartland's character outlines—that the necessary edges of chafed emotions become about as sharp as sponges.

Summing it up, Nile gets one thing right when she says, “it's still melodrama, but thanks for the explanation” (p.122).

(1) Seems to me it's already lost if Bill thinks of his state as an “empire”.

(2) No gremmie/hodad surfer terminology here to point out there's no real interaction with the 10,000 or so Breakers except Bill throwing out some pick-up lines and showing off his fistwork.

(3) In the second fight between Bill and King, she's screaming in a “husky” voice, “Kill him, King! Kick him to death!” (p.69). And this is after she's banged Bill once and they're interrupted going for round two.

Copyright 02/12/2011 by Larry Crawford