"Toronto" "Noir"... Again

A while back, I ranted about what I felt was the, um, dubious selection process employed by the editors of Toronto Noir, Akashic's first foray into the Canadian crime scene. At the time, I was disappointed that so few "crime" writers had been chosen for the project, the editors instead opting for more "literary" writers.

One of them claimed he'd tried to include more genre writers; at least a couple of crime writers told me their queries had been ignored. What the hell, as Dan Turner might have said.

But that was long ago and far away. Recently, I've read two noirish books by Toronto -- or at least Toronto-area writers -- that have stuck in my craw. Hell, they might even be accused of being "literary." But don't let that scare you. They're actually readable. So maybe the editors were on to something.

Although, going back to my copy of Toronto Noir, I see neither of these two writers made the cut, either. Still, in a better world, maybe they'll be allowed to participate in Toronto Noir II.

Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall (could he sound any more Torontonian? He sounds like a subway station) is an award-winning journalist from the Queen City, and while there is a crime novel of sorts in Ghosted, his first full-length stab at fiction, it’s buried under the rubble of a crazy, blackhearted maelstrom of desperation, suicide, drugs, Bob Seger, memory and delusion.

Fortunately, there’s enough gloom and doom and crime here – everything from gambling and drugs to murder and horse theft -- to keep noir fans happy, but this is, more correctly, a novel of bleak self-discovery and dark redemption. Mason Dubisee, a Toronto journo and would-be novelist whose life went off the rails years ago, staggers home after years of gambling, booze, drugs and squandered talent to be taken in by childhood friend and drug dealer Chaz. The action follows Mason’s quixotic struggle as a vendor of hot dogs near Toronto's City Hall, a coke-fuelled gambler on a major losing streak, an addict sweating through recovery and eventually, a potentially lucrative career as a professional writer of suicide notes. It’s the latter that ultimately puts Mason in the crosshairs of Seth, a charming but sadistic sociopath – and finally lights a fire under the sputtering plot.

Lucky for us, the finely rendered rogues’ gallery of memorable but damaged characters -- the beautiful wheelchair-bound junkie Willie; the sad, shy, guilt-ridden Warren; the unloved, obese Sissy; the suicidal performance artist Soon, and Chaz, the always amiable criminal, among others – and a barrage of pop culture namedropping (hey, it’s a Toronto novel, after all) will keep patient readers turning the pages. In fact, with its lovingly drawn but fucked-up characters, ruminations on the act of writing, the fragility of life, the lies we tell ourselves to keep on going and a GOTCHA! climatic confrontation between Mason and Seth that finally KrazyGlues all those disparate threads together, this bleak, frequently nasty literate novel comes off like a film noir pounded out by a pissed-off John Irving suffering from a nasty hangover.

Shaughnessy will be touring the States, hitting NYC, Philadelphia, Chicago, Iowa City, San Francsco and Portland and who knows where else in the next few days, and I'll warn you right now: he's a man who likes to talk to a man who likes to talk. If you'd like to download and view his full itinerary, click here.

But I digress...

I'm not even sure if London, Ontario qualifies as "Toronto area" (certainly not to anyone who lives in London, anyway), but since at least a few, mostly American reviews have tagged fantasy author R. Scott Bakker as a "Toronto" writer despite his residence a couple of hours drive west, that's good enough for me.

And Bakker's foray into crime fiction should be good enough for you. Disciple of the Dog introduces private eye Disciple Manning, and it's one hell of a debut. Because, you see, Disciple's not your average gumshoe.

As though being named Disciple (and living in Newark) isn't enough of a handicap, he's also cursed with perfect memory.

Cool, right?

But it t'ain't necessarily so. As Manning puts it, "You wonder why I'm cynical. I've literally seen it all before. The truth is we all have, every single one of us past the age of, say, twenty-five. The only difference is that I remember."

There's a price to pay for all that total recall, you see. It seems you can't forget anything. Even if you want to. And it's left poor Manning with a pretty dim view of not just humanity, but life itself. "We keep waiting for something Shakespearean to happen," he explains, but we end up with "the Jerry Springer Show. Squalid. Cheap. Mean-spirited."

Which probably explains his disastrous relationships with women, his periodic substance abuse binges and the occasional suicide attempt. Only pot-smoking, the task of journal-keeping that his latest therapist has foisted upon him and the slight chance that a case will expose him to something new that will actually challenge his "mangy capabilities" keep him from just turning out the big light.

So when Jonathan and Amanda Bonjour ask him to look into the disappearance of their missing daughter, Jennifer, who had recently journeyed to the small, one-horse town of Ruddick, Pennsylvania to join a doomsday cult, Disciple jumps at the chance. Not because he's heroic or noble or even because he gives a "fawk" but simply because it might not be boring -- and there might a sizable fee. Drugs and bimbos don't come cheap, after all.

And while Disciple may not always the most likable of human beings and the book runs a little long, there's something rather enjoyable about watching this self-destructive scuzzball square off against small town cops, assorted true believers, a slew of neo-Nazis, a sexy journalist who sniffs a career-changing story and the charismatic but possibly insane psychology professor turned cult leader. Toss in a few clever, pulpy plot twists, and Disciple's constant stream of occasionally nasty wisecracks, put downs, wry observations and philosophical asides (and shout-outs to The Tragically Hip) and you've got one of the more memorable P.I. characters of the last year. You might even say unforgettable.

Both Ghosted and Disciple of the Dog are fine, dark stabs at the beast we call noir -- check 'em out!

Is He Rough Enough? Is He Tough Enough? Yes.

True confession time: I've been a fan of Ray Banks and his woe-begotten Manchester ex-con private eye, Cal Innes, for years, ever since I first published "Walking After Midnight," one of his early Cal Innes stories way back in 2003.

I can't claim to have "discovered" Ray, or even to have been the first to publish him, but nonetheless I feel quite pleased for his success, and even a little proud, no matter how misplaced that pride might be, that I may have contributed even a miniscule bit to it. And I've liked his three subsequent novels featuring Innes well enough to name 2007's Donkey Punch (known in the U.S. as Sucker Punch) as one of my picks for January Magazine's Best of 2007.

But nothing prepared me for Beast of Burden, his latest novel. Maybe it was the mood I was in, maybe I was desperate for something good to read after a disappointing spate of shitty books, or -- and this is more likely -- maybe Ray Banks is just one hell of a writer really, finally kicking out the jams.

But, for whatever reason, this is, hands down, one of the most affecting books I've read in a long time.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I'm fucking floored.

I knew Ray was good, but this one just... well, I'm still reeling. As I said about Donkey Punch back then, "What separates Banks’ writing from that of so many other 'new wave of noir' writers is that he actually seems to understand noir and what lies right at its deep, dark heart. He doesn’t have to rely on juvenile, self-conscious shock tactics... to tell his story. Instead, he does it the old-fashioned way -- by creating credible, memorable characters and telling an actual story. Don’t get me wrong: nasty things do happen... but it’s the characters that really matter."

I still stand by that, but Beast of Burden hits so much harder and sets the bar so bloody high, it's difficult to see where Banks could possibly go after this. It's truly mortal stakes he's playing for this time, as Cal, reeling from his brother's recent suicide and suffering from a stroke that's left him partially paralysed, reluctantly goes to work for notorious local mobster Morris Tiernan, who wants him to find his missing son, Mo, a useless piece of crap/wannabe crime lord that even his own father doesn't particularly want anything to do with.

This is no jolly cozy set in a picture postcard of swinging modern Manchester -- this is a cold, ugly rough wind of a novel, and Banks makes this ugly scab of a hardscrabble industrial town come alive, offering no apology or mercy. This is the Manchester the shiny happy trendies and tourists don't see; this is the Manchester of rundown buildings and squats, of boxing clubs and dives, of piss and despair and regret. And the whipsaw first-person narration, split between Cal and his old nemesis, Detective Sergeant "Donkey" Donkin, possibly the most venal, stupid and just plain evil cop to pollute the genre in ages, just cranks up the tension. It's rough and abrasive and unrelentingly coarse, but never feels forced or phoney or gratuitous.

That these two men are on a collision course is a given, but the fact neither truly understands the other's motives rips this story loose from any preconceptions I might have had. This is contemporary noir at its absolute ground zero finest: dark, disturbing and nasty, but tempered with surprising acts of friendship, loyalty and honour and just plain humanity so moving and real that they're a spit in the face of the glib cynicism and shallow posturing that currently taints too much of the genre.

It's hard to believe, in a novel that trucks so much in misery and greed and stupidity and hate, but the ending, when it comes, is still like a knife in the gut. It's one of the most ballsy, most disturbing and yet most moving conclusions to a crime novel I've read in a long, long time.

Beast of Burden goes on sale in the U.S. in a few weeks (or maybe it's already out; books from the U.K. seem to have a hard time crossing the Atlantic according to schedule). But if you give a damn at all for hard-boiled fiction, get this book.

Knock, Knock, Knockin' on Hell's Door

I moderate a mystery reading group, the obviously titled Murder Ink, at the local Barn O' Novels, here in sleepy, sunny Palmdale. It's a fun group, a monthly break from the routine, although most months I'm the only guy in the group. And most of the ladies lean to the lighter end of the spectrum (or profess to).

Still, stubborn cuss that I am, I keep trying to occasionally slip some harder, darker fare into the mix -- a Chandler or Hammett here; a Robert Parker or Mosley there. And we try to mix things up a bit, ranging from new or newish writers to old classics (Doyle, Sayers, etc.) to off-the-beaten track cross-over stuff (Elizabeth Lowell, Isaac Asimov).

So, when someone suggested we "do" a Ken Bruen ("that Irish guy you're always talking about"), i jumped at the chance. Jack Taylor, the alcoholic ex-Guard turned Galway eye, the gumshoe with all the heart and hurt of a dozen dead poets, is one of my favourite P.I. series; a literate, uncompromising stroll to the abyss and back that gets me every time. And so I oh-so-subtly lead them to one I hadn't yet read, figuring it would be a good way for me to both catch up on the series (and revisit Galway, the "dirtiest city in Ireland") and meanwhile maybe ruffle a few smug suburbanite feathers.

Oops.

The Taylor series has always been on the dark side, but Priest (2007), the fifth in the series, is something else again, a bruising, brutal blast of sustained white hot rage and bottom of the glass despair as bleak and black as it gets.Taylor doesn't so much go for a look at the abyss this time -- he jumps in and does a few laps. This isn't slipping into darkness; it's a headlong dive.

In fact, the book kicks off with Taylor just finishing up a little dip, and he's dripping wet. He's fresh out of the looneybin, his mind short-circuited by prolonged abuse and raging guilt over the death of a child, with few prospects and fewer friends, facing a hollow and hopefully (but probably not) alcohol-free future. Meanwhile, a nun has just discovered the severed head of a priest in the confessional -- a priest recently accused of child molesting.

And then things get dark. Before the book is finally nailed shut, there will be murder done and a grisly sort of reckless, wild justice meted out, hearts and lives shattered, drinks drunk (or not drunk) and blood spilled, poetry and music (Springsteen, Cash, Zevon) evoked. And souls forever fucked.

Taylor's (and Ireland's) complicated relationship with the Catholic Church, the lies and wreckage left behind by Ireland's economic success, and his own thundering despair -- they're all here, all ratcheted up to ear-bleeding volume. I thought The Magdalen Martyrs, a previous book in the series, where Taylor took on the Church's systemic abuse of unwed mothers and his own tormented relationship with his mother, was fierce, but this one screams like the mother of all banshees.

What was I thinking?

And Taylor's a far cry from an affable character. In the hands of a weaker writer than Bruen, he'd probably be detestable and utterly unreadable. But Bruen does it with seeming ease, one of the freshest, most distinct voices in crime fiction today. He doesn't so much have style as an M.O.: the plots in the Jack Taylor series seem almost assembled, not written, a swirling jangle of stream-of-consciousness rants, random encounters, chance meetings, out-of-nowhere lists, quotes, fever dreams, newspaper clippings and poetry snippets, and even, sometimes, a little detective work. Holding it all together is Bruen's skill and fierce vision, and of course Taylor, a black hole of a hero if there ever was one.

So, yes, Taylor can be obnoxious and a bully, stupid and mean-spirited and nasty to those who would try to love him, a mostly charm-free, self-pitying grade A fuck-up whose tragedy is that he knows he's a fuck-up, but can't seem to keep the decks from tilting. But there's something about him. And there's always a tiny, tiny sliver of hope, of redemption, a compassion in each book that keeps me reading.

Of course, that tiny splinter invariably and inevitably becomes infected and has to be lanced, but hey, this ain't no Lifetime movie.

Long before Bush and Cheyney made torture fashionable, Taylor was doing it to himself.

He's a one-man weapon of self-destruction; a man whose adult life has been one long Sunday morning coming down, puncuated by lost weekends and bad choices. Because his real battle, of course, is not with the Church or the powers that be, with corrupt cops or Celtic Tiger criminals in their shirts and their ties, but with himself. His alcoholism, his obsessions with past crimes, real and imagined, his burning guilt as he slowly circles the last exit to Hell -- rarely has someone conjured up such a vivid and poetic sense of noir and somehow managed to transform it into an ongoing series. And it ain't that pretty at all.

But therein, maybe, lies its beauty.

I can hardly wait to see what the ladies' reactions will be. May God have mercy....

Toronto Noir: World Class, My Ass (Maybe)

Okay, true confessions here. I haven't read Toronto Noir yet, the latest in Akashic's acclaimed "noir" series, which is due out in May. But I've been hearing about it for a while. Quite a while.

You want a Canadian city that justifies a noir anthology, think Montreal. Seriously.

Or Vancouver. Halifax. Hull. St. John's. Yellowknife. Moncton. Sudbury. Even fucking Moose Jaw.

But Toronto? The Queen City may be a lot of things (just ask any Maple Leafs-blue Torontonian) but "noir" is not the term that immediately springs to mind. Smug, superior, self-conscious, nice, bright, clean, self-involved, anal, touristy, squeaky, brassy, well-scrubbed, tight-assed horn-tooters, T.G.I.M., world class-obsessed, faux-American... sure. The city the rest of Canada loves to hate... you bet. But noir?

Still, like I said, I haven't read it. And lord knows, the heart of darkness knows no municipal limits. After all, there's even been a Twin Cities Noir in the series. And a city whose most distinctive landmark is a giant dork certainly ought to be able to get it up. But now that the list of contributors have been released, I'm not being reassured here.

Instead of the usual reliable, if rather predictable, suspects (Bruen, Connelly, Gary Phillips, Block, Rozan, Oates, Estleman, Parrish, Abbott, Lippman, Coleman, etc.) that have made this series so consistently entertaining, the editors, Janine Armin and Nathaniel G. Moore, have opted for a slew of mostly unknown (even by Canadian standards) writers. I assume they were looking for Canadian writers, which is fine, but still...RM Vaughan, Nathan Sellyn, Ibi Kaslik, Heather Birrell, Sean Dixon, Raywat Deonandad, Christine Murray, Emily Schultz, Kim Moritsugu, Mark Sinnet, George Elliott Clarke, Pasha Malla, Michael Redhill?

Who are these guys? Was there some PC checklist? ("Okay, we got a Jew, we need an Arab. And where's our Sikh?")

Sure, they've got Peter Robinson, Gail Bowen and Andrew Pyper to reel in the curious, but the CanCrime scene is a hell of a lot stronger than that. Maybe old school champs like Engel and Wright declined, but where are writers like John McFetridge? Michael Blair? J.D. Carpenter? Mary Jane Maffini? Rosemary Aubert? John Swan? Marc Strange? Giles Blunt? All of them have written tough, often dark and certainly impressive stabs of crime fiction over the last few years, and yet not one of them shows up in these pages. Were they even asked to participate? Or weren't they "Toronto" enough?

(And, of course, even while they're all loudly touting Toronto's much vaunted multiculturalism in all the pre-release publicity, it's quite telling to note that there's not one single French-Canadian contributor. Sad, but typical. "The more that Toronto changes...")

Talk about world class disappointing...

Then again, I haven't heard of either of the authors either. I fear they may be Toronto literary types - or would-be Toronto literary types -- out to "transcend the genre." Certainly nothing in the short bios of Janine and Nathaniel on Akashic's pages suggests any previous connection whatsoever with any sort of crime fiction; much less noir.

Those who can, do. Those who can't, "transcend."

I hope I'm all wrong, and Janine and Nathaniel know exactly what they're doing, and we'll have a solid collection of noir tales that will introduce a whole slew of new and exciting voices to crime fiction readers around the world, giving the CanCrime gang a much-needed and well-deserved shot in the arm and the damn thing will sell a zillion copies.

We'll see...

Another Hell of a Book: Money Shot

I know, I know... there's not much point blogging about a book that won't even be officially released until next month. But some stuff is just too good to wait.

As part of the fallout from last week's signing of Meg Abbott's kick ass anthology HELL OF A WOMAN, I moved my ARC of Christa Faust's MONEY SHOT to the top of my TBR file. The verdict? YIKES!

I had fun that day, meeting the assorted writers, and got to wander the streets of Santa Monica for a while with Christa. Lemme tell ya, that woman is something else. That day she was the Betty Boop of noir, decked out in vintage drag (I suspect she has plenty more personas hanging in her closet), walking the walk, talking the whatever, obviously pleased to be the first female writer to be published by Hard Case Crime and then, in the same breath, dismissing it as simply "I, THE JURY with tits."

Yeah, right.

Well, I'm hear to tell you that not only does MONEY SHOT come equipped with tits, but it also comes with balls. Big ones.

It's the story of a former porn star, Angel Dare, now running a talent agency for adult film stars in LA's porn industry, who gets involved in a nasty case of white slavery, smuggling and various shades of murder and betrayal. When the book kicks off, she's locked in the back of a crappy Honda Civic, shot and left for dead, convinced she's on a one-way ride to Hell.

Yeah, it sounds about par for the neo-noir course these days -- plenty of titillation and more than a spot of gratuitousness. The same ol' yadda yadda.

But it turns out MONEY SHOT is my kinda noir. The grown-up kind that has real people and a real story, not just shock tactics and cardboard pawns disguised as characters. The lady knows her stuff.

Sure, in a story set in the world of hookers and porn and stripping, junkies and killers, you'd expect to have your nose rubbed in it. But there isn't an ounce of fat here -- it's a tight ice-hard blast of pure noir; the sorta thing that takes heed of not just classic noir but also the times we live in; a big ballsy update to the genre that never feels like pandering or refried nostalgia.

There are desperate people here, circling the drain, living, breathing (and lying) characters who -- except for their occupation -- wouldn't be out of place in a James M. Cain novel, or a 1946 RKO B-noir. But they're also defiantly of the here and now, as real as tomorrow's headlines. These people are rough, they're tough... and they're fatally flawed. They're damned and doomed, too fucked to live, too hard to die without a fight and too blinded by greed or lust or hate to know it.

I'm not joking about the hard part, either. The combo plate of noir and hard-boiled is served here straight up, with style and tits and balls and without apology.

I didn't even know I was going to say anything until the words came out of my mouth.

"End of the line, bitch."

Then I shot him.

The book's due in late January. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Neo-nah...

I dunno.

After reading a spate of recent books by some of the more highly touted (or is that highly tooted?) practitioners of the "new noir," I've noticed something.

Not in all of them, mind you, but in enough of them to be disturbed by what seems to be a developing trend. I hope not. Maybe I just hit a bad string of books (and no, i don't want to name them). But...

Many of these books have increasingly little to do with the classic noir films and novels their authors all claim to admire and adore so much (but may have never actually read).

If the original noirs were usually about normal -- or at least identifiable characters -- being drawn into the darkness, that's long gone. So many of the recent noirs I've read are populated by amoral sociopaths who are already plenty dark.

Like, really, really, dark.

In the original noirs, the main characters were usually just more-or-less regular joes: migrant workers, insurance salesmen, professors, news hawks, coffee shop waitresses. B-girls, cut-rate private eyes, mildly bent cops, low-level crooks. The sort of people you'd meet in a bar or on the street. Or getting off a hay wagon. Just regular schmucks, with more-or-less normal levels of intelligence. And their fall is presented as tragedy, with one bad decision, one moment of weakness, one fatal flaw serving as the catalyst that ignites a world of hurt.

Nowadays, though, the characters are more often big shot celebrities, serial killers, globetrotting hit men, cannibal dope fiends and the like, over-the-top sociopathic cartoons who seem to exist mostly in books. And these guys are usually criminally clueless. These books aren't presented as morality plays, but as clusterfucks of stupidity and venality. These characters come pre-doomed and pre-damned; dumbfucks who seem compelled to make one obviously bad choice after another -- the sort of stupid choices that owe more to plot machinations than anything.

What happens to them isn't some slow, inevitable tragic fall from grace into the darkness of the abyss, but more a turned-to-eleven amplification of atrocities and bad luck, betrayals and misunderstandings and coincidences that, again, only exist in fiction.

Certainly, things are more graphic and there's far more obscene language, violence and sex than in the old noirs, which is to be expected, I guess. But so much of it just seems so strained and self-conscious; like a bunch of little boys trying to out-do each other. These neo-noirs aren't presented as tragedy at all, but as comedy of the cruelest sort, the "grown-up" equivalent of slipping a frog down a girl's back.

And what's with all the torture and mutilation going on? Is Cheyney secretly moonlighting as an acquisitions editor?

Chainsaws! Woodchippers! Cruxifiction!

Like, "You fed a guy's testicles into a Waring blender? Fine, I'll do that, too, but I'll toss in some Coors Light and then make my guy drink it! And then gerbil him to death!"

I may be imagining this, but it seems to me that there's also a growing contempt among the authors for their own characters, a kind of mean-spiritedness that's creeping in -- a condescending sort of self-righteous authorial stance being adapted that says "Yeah, they're all scumbags, so I make them go through all kinds of shit. Cool, huh?"

The old noir characters, whatever their flaws, had souls of some sort. Hell, the books themselves had soul, and you got the sense that the authors -- and readers -- cared about these characters on at least some level. The characters who inhabit this cynical new breed of noir too often are unlikable two-dimensional cardboard cutouts who exist only to be put through their paces by an author with one hand down his (or her) pants for the edification of their like-minded buddies.

All the meanness and carnage of these soulless wallows comes off more like pornography than noir, at least to me.

Makes me wonder who's getting off on it.