Welcome. Noir Journal is once again honored to present a book review by award-winning Irish crime writer Sam Millar.
The Devil’s Concubine, a graphic novel by Palle Schmidt (IDW Publishing, May 2011)
Set in a large European city, The Devil's Concubine revolves around two cool but not too clever hitmen hired by an unknown party to retrieve a mysterious package. When the two hitmen– Jean-Luc and Linda–accidentally shoot their contacts at the exchange without getting their money first, the shit really hits the fan. Chased by the police, a gang of dangerous Rastafaris, and an erratic crime boss out for their blood, the pair bluff and shoot their way through the seedy underworld on their way to the man who hired them–and toward their own destruction!
Hitmen messing up their intended hits is nothing new in hard-boiled crime tales, but the really good ones are able to integrate a gripping and refreshing twist on the genre. The Devil’s Concubine is one of the really good ones.
The art is beautifully rendered and a delicious feast for the eyes, slicing and dicing so quickly we barely have time to blink away the blood from beneath our lids. The two hitmen–the manic and impulsive Linda and the almost saliently silent Jean-Luc–are a marriage made in hell. Perfect noir dwellers down to their last pocket of luck, with holes aplenty for what little of that remaining luck to fall through. The story is told at a breakneck pace with sardonic and ultra-readable dialogue kicked in for good measure.
Not only did Schmidt create the characters, he drew, colored and wrote the entire thing. A remarkable achievement by anyone’s standards.
Overall, The Devil’s Concubine is a compelling must-read book of modern noir, crafted with so much love you know the man put his heart and soul into it. The ending will kill you. Guaranteed.
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Next, Noir Journal welcomes a new reviewer, Richard Reeder. Reeder teaches courses on the writings of Chicago authors Saul Bellow and Joseph Epstein and has also worked for the Chicago city government and remains active in local politics. He has written a collection of memoir vignettes as part of his "Chicago Sketches," which you can read at, A Literary Reeder.
Start Shooting, by Charlie Newton (Doubleday, January 2012)
Charlie Newton’s second novel, Start Shooting, is a story of childhood sweethearts, who after twenty-nine years apart, reunite in a labyrinth of intrigues in modern-day Chicago. Bobby Vargas—the good cop in the novel—and his actress girlfriend, Arleen Brennan, fend off bad cops, most prominently Bobby’s brother Ruben. They also fend off Mexican gangbangers, a rogue CIA agent, Japanese viral terrorists and a psycho Vietnamese orphan who are out to get them.
Bobby, a son of Mexican immigrants, and Arleen, the daughter of Irish immigrants, grew up in the tough neighborhood of Four Corners, around Eighteenth and Laflin. Arleen had a twin sister, Colleen, who was brutally raped and murdered when she was thirteen. A young gangbanger was convicted of the crime and executed. Twenty-nine years later a newspaper reporter decides to reinvestigate the case and Bobby Vargas’ name surfaces as a prime suspect. A spate of current sexual abuse charges are suddenly filed against Bobby, who for seventeen years on the force had nothing but exemplary behavior.
Arleen, returning to Chicago from Los Angeles where she tried an acting career, suddenly gets a chance to audition as Blanche DuBois in a major Chicago production of A Streetcar Named Desire. This looms as her big chance of stardom. The audition is arranged through Bobby’s brother Ruben who asks her to do a few favors that put both her and Bobby in harm’s way.
The plot of the novel is complex and slowly revealing. Chicago is rebidding to win the 2016 Olympics bid, after Rio opted out. Tokyo remains Chicago’s sole competitor, yet ironically a Japanese corporation has emerged as the major financial supporter of the Windy City’s bid.
In the end, the disparate elements of the novel gel together and leave the reader with a satisfying conclusion. A potential 9/11-type disaster is also part of the story.
Newton writes like a guy who knows the streets of Chicago. He understands the city’s greatness as well as its insidious underbelly, that fascinating dichotomy that makes Chicago such a great source for storytelling.
Newton
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Now a review from regular Noir Journal contributor Ann Snuggs.
The Unburied Dead, by Douglas Lindsay (Blasted Heath, February 2012)
Douglas Lindsay's dark, cold The Unburied Dead might be called a police procedural - except society hopes that all law enforcement units are not like the one in Glasgow where Detective Sergeant Thomas Hutton works. This group puts the "dys" in the term, "dysfunctional."
Some reviewers are labeling this tale “black comedy” but these detectives are sad, not funny.
Call it noir.
When a young women is found brutally murdered–one hundred and twenty-five stab wounds–the men and women of the station are under the gun. The higher-ups want this case solved. So does the press.
Heavy-drinking Detective Chief Inspector Jonah Bloonsbury is put in charge of the case. After all, he has come through before to uncover the culprit in highly publicized murder cases–from his big breakthrough as a sergeant some fifteen years earlier, when he followed a hunch, to the Addison case only a year ago–but he's hitting the bottle hard now.
Then a young woman escapes the killer and a few leads begin to develop. Before a case and an arrest can be made, one of the station's own is killed. Did she know something or is it just coincidental? She did resemble the first victim. But, she also knew some buried secrets at the station. Tension mounts as another of the crew is killed while investigating a lead on his own.
The first third of the book is so enmeshed in personal issues of the police–the unburied dead of the title?–that it drags. Don't give up. As the story progresses, the plot twists and turns until the reader is racing around the curves only to find double twists at every turn.
The Unburied Dead is carried by plot rather than the characters. In spite of the amount of detail about their personal lives and sexual fantasies and even some of Hutton's flashbacks to his war service in Bosnia, it is difficult to care much about these people. The psychotic killer is perhaps the most intriguing of the personae.
Fans of dark crime fiction will find Lindsay's latest well-worth time spent to read it. But it doesn't quite make the drop-everything, don't-miss-this category.
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And finally, a quick shout-out for a book I've recently read, Jake Hinkson's Hell on Church Street (New Pulp Press, January 2012). This is noir as dark and dirty and as twisty as it gets. It's got skillfully rendered hypocrisy, greed, murder, and lives spiralling hopelessly out of control. This book deserves comparison to the noir classic The Killer Inside Me, by Jim Thompson. After reading Hell on Church Street as well as Heath Lowrance's The Bastard Hand, I'd say that New Pulp Press definitely seems to be putting out some instant noir classics.
That's it for now,
ML
All books reviewed have been provided as review copies from either the author, publisher, or publicist.
This is a fantastic blog and a wonderful resource for finding out about new. exciting and deliosuly dark writing. I am Irish but have worked and lived in Chicago for long periods of time over the past 12 years and I have based my own novel and some short stories in the very same city. The city has so many textures both in time and space and to me, the city is a character in its own right. Location should be the unspeaking character whose presence sculpts the story to a large degree.
Posted by: MartinFrankson | 02/19/2012 at 03:49 PM