Now Available! — "Casinos, Motels, Gators" by Ben Boulden

 

Now Available!

My latest book, Casinos, Motels, Gators, which is part of 3 Play’s lineup of story collections, is available now. CMG is a collection of four crime stories—hardboiled, noirish, and darn good—which originally appeared in anthologies and magazines between 2019 and 2021. These four stories are some of my best writing and I think pretty much anyone who enjoys crime fiction will have a good time reading them.   This is how the publisher described CMG:   This exciting new collection, by cult favorite crime writer Ben Boulden, is a modern take on the hardboiled crime story. New York Times bestselling author James Reasoner called “121”—the first story in Casinos, Motels, Gators—a “Manhunt story for the 21st Century.” A high accolade indeed! All four tales are set in the cruel landscape of Utah’s West Desert between Salt Lake City and the Utah-Nevada border town of Wendover. Three stories find the burned-out former FBI agent, Jimmy Ford—a security consultant for a corrupt casino owner—working the wrong side of the street with better intentions than it first appears. The last story, “Asia Divine,” is a bleak murder investigation that reveals a dark secret about love and expectation. Casinos, Motels, Gators is an exemplary collection full of surprising twists, vivid settings, and powerful storytelling—certain to please every reader.

Casinos, Motels, Gators is available in Kindle—it is free with your Kindle Unlimited membership—and as a trade paperback everywhere. Click here for the Kindle version and here for the paperback on Amazon.   If you enjoy Casinos, Motels, Gators—do me a favor and review it on Amazon and/or Goodreads.   Thanks for your support!

Review: "Dust Devils" by James Reasoner

 

Dust Devils
by James Reasoner
The Book Place, 2011

 

James Reasoner’s marvelous crime thriller, Dust Devils—published by Point Blank Press in 2007—received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, and the writer and critic, Ed Gorman, wrote: “Dust Devils is an exemplary modern hardboiled novel with all the merits of the post-Tarantino era but none of the flaws.” Not only does Dust Devils live up to the accolades it received upon its original publication, but it reads as well today, some sixteen years later, as it must have then.
     Toby McCoy is a young drifter looking for work in the dusty, windblown Texas panhandle. On a chance, Toby knocks on the door of a lonesome farmhouse. A woman nearly twice his age, Grace Halligan, opens the door with some suspicion, but agrees to give Toby a job. No more than two weeks later, Grace and Toby, driven by mutual loneliness, make their relationship more personal and physical. But when a pair of gunmen arrive at the farm, Grace and Toby’s secrets are dragged out from the shadows.
     Dust Devils is close to a perfect hardboiled thriller with twist after surprising twist built into the plot. And each twist hits the reader harder than the last until that final, shocking hammer blow. The characters—particularly Grace and Toby—are developed with a realistic flair. Both are likable and curiously mysterious at once. The Texas landscape is painted with a realist’s brush and it is obvious Reasoner not only knows the country where the book takes place, but loves it, too. While Dust Devils isn’t exactly noir, there is an appealing melancholy to the narrative that is as much about the sunbaked landscape as it is about the story.
     Dust Devils needs only a larger readership to claim its deserved place as a genuine hardboiled classic.

Go here for the Kindle version and here for the paperback edition at Amazon.

ONE FOR HELL by Jada M. Davis

Stark House Press released a reprint of a 1952 Fawcett Red Seal original titled One for Hell written by Jada M. Davis back in 2010. Davis is a writer I wasn’t familiar with and after reading it, I really don’t know why. It is terrific and one of the best hardboiled noir tales I’ve read. It resembles the work of two pulp writers, W. L. Heath—particularly Violent Saturday—and Jim Thompson. It has the violence and dark shadows of Thompson and the sociology of secrets that Heath did so well.

Willa Ree is a drifter and a petty criminal riding the rails toward a small Texas boomtown. His plan is simple: fleece the town and move on. What happens is beyond Ree’s expectations. The town is a gold mine, and he just may stick around for a big score. 

One for Hell is pure entertainment. There isn’t a protagonist. The supporting cast, Willa Ree is the main player (and he’s pure bastard), come and go like visitors to an amusement park. One by one they ratchet the pressure on Ree until he is ready to break. And one by one Ree pushes them aside until he no longer can.

The plot is tight and woven with a sophistication of character, morality and corruption. The town has secrets—everyone has something to hide and Ree uses this underlying human weakness to his advantage. He culls his enemies from the herd and eliminates them. He has a girlfriend who is an arch-type of the flawed woman. She possesses strengths and the weaknesses alike, but she is mostly good.

The action is developed with an audacity that separates this novel from so many others of its type. There is a scene in the middle part of the novel that covers 18 pages that changed my view of what can be done with both violence and action in a prose story. It rolled like a freight train and changed Ree from a smalltime hoodlum to a big time psychopath. It was the crux of the story, the beginning of the end for Willa Ree, and the push that leads the reader into his twisted mind.

Everything works in One for Hell. From the plot to the characters to the psychology to the prose and it wraps itself together in a tight weave. Willa Ree spends much of his time trying to guess the actions and motives of other people and the internal dialogue is simple and interesting:

“Maybe the old woman knew. Or maybe she found it, though not likely. Baldy wasn’t a trusting sort of person, and she wouldn’t have guessed he had money in the first place. He sat on the trunk and surveyed the room. Pictures? Too simple.”

One for Hell is solid proof that Stark House is the best publishers of classic crime fiction going. 

This review was written in the long ago, and this is a slightly altered version.

THE GIRL WITH THE DEEP BLUE EYES by Lawrence Block

Jay Walker “Doak” Miller is a retired NYPD detective. He left the job for sunny small town Florida supplementing his pension as a part-time private investigator; performing background checks, routine insurance inquiries, and every so often undercover work for the local Sheriff’s office, which is where the story begins.

The wife of a wealthy businessman, looking to hire her husband killed, was fingered by a small time crook. The Sheriff wants Doak to revive his Jersey accent and play the part of hitman; get it on tape, and accept a $1,000 down payment. Doak readily agrees until he sees the woman, and calls everything off. The problem, he doesn’t tell the Sheriff, and he coaches the woman exactly what to say for the tape.

The Girl with the Deep Blue Eyes is challenging. It is short, written with Mr. Block’s usual literate, stark flair, and remarkably complicated. It is third person from Doak’s perspective, but has the feel of first. It is Doak Miller’s story, and intimately told. There is some cheating—the girl’s (the one with the deep blue eyes) backstory is told in narrative disguised as dialogue, but it works.

The challenge is the novel’s lack of morality, or more precisely, Doak’s lack of morality. He is devious, criminal, selfish, and, as the novel develops and Doak’s character is revealed, it is clear he is a man fallen, rather than falling. His destruction is self-inflicted, and the woman is the tool he chooses to use. It is a cock-eyed version of the film Double Indemnity; here the man is predator and the woman his willing playmate.

The Girl with the Deep Blue Eyes admirably plays off the old black and white film noir without losing its own identity and interest. Its plotting is disturbingly good. Nothing is out of place or unresolved. There is a heavy dose of erotica, and not a single likable character. It is both familiar, and new—

“‘That’s the movies,’ she said. ‘This is life.’”



This review was written for Ed Gorman’s blog and went live on September 15, 2015. I have a few projects going right now, which have been keeping me away from the blog more than I like, but I hope to have some original material soon.

SLAMMER by Allan Guthrie

Nick Glass is a rookie prison guard in a Scottish prison.  He has been on the job six weeks with mixed results—the other guards mock and make trouble for him and the inmates don’t respect him.  At home he has a five-year old daughter and wife.  His wife tends to drink too much, and is just on the backside of an affair.  To say Nick has a little stress is an understatement.

To make things worse Nick is approached by one of the inmates and asked to mule drugs inside.  The inmate gives him two choices: 1) make an easy buck; or 2) his little family gets hurt in a big way.  Nick is in big trouble as he desperately tries to protect his family at home and his own life at work.

Slammer is the sort of novel that creeps up on you in about three pages.  It starts hard and strong and never lets up.  Glass is a regular guy caught in a nasty and impossible situation.  He doesn’t belong in the prison.  He is a nice guy, both weak and sincere.  He, much like his name, is prone to fracture.  And Guthrie makes sure Glass does just that.

The novel opens with Glass in the office of the prison psychiatrist.  It is a mandatory visit and Nick is less than pleased to be there.  The psychiatrist is an instrument Mr Guthrie uses to foreshadow and then define the undoing of Nick.  He is a skewed sentiment of sanity in a dark and insane world.  A world that envelopes Nick and threatens to destroy him.  And Nick is the perfect object—he is prone to fantasy, and as the novel progresses, he begins to mistake his fantasy for reality.  It is a trip into hell.  A trip the reader knows is coming with each progressive sentence, paragraph and page, but is helpless to stop.

Slammer is a wonderfully executed novel.  It is reminiscent of Guthrie’s first novel Two-Way Split, but its execution is better (amazingly).  It is short, 263 pages, but it does not lack meaning or story.  The prose is hardboiled, lean and smart.  The dialogue is crisp, and the atmosphere is weighty and oppressive.  It is a fine example of the new noir: a hopeless, distraught and shameless (in a good way) vision of the human condition.

This is an encore post.  It originally went live on November 23,2009.

"Revenge is Bitter-Sweet" by H. A. DeRosso

H. A. DeRosso is best known for his dark Westerns. His better work is unusual—it tends toward dark, but it has vibrant and visceral settings and descriptions. His protagonists tend to be indecisive and lost. His work is frequently, and correctly, compared with Cornell Woolrich’s bleak and violent noir.

His Westerns are amazing. They were original in an era when the genre was cluttered with stereotypes and cheese, but he was also an accomplished writer of pulp crime. His crime stories vary from readable to damn good; an example of the later is his 1960 story “The Hired Man”. I recently found a crime story he wrote in the collection Alfred Hitchcock’s Death Bag. It is titled “Revenge is Bitter-Sweet” and, while it isn’t as good as “The Hired Man,” it is an entertaining and well developed story.

Will Owen is bitter and angry. Another man caused his father’s death and the woman he loves is lost to him. The story opens with a late night appointment in the woods. Will is anxious, and nervous. He is waiting in the dark night to get a long awaited revenge for his father’s death.

“Revenge is Bitter-Sweet” is a twisty story with a surprise ending—it opens rushing down one avenue and quickly turns down another. The climax, and the twist, is planted early in the story.  The author didn’t cheat. I guessed the surprise before it was revealed, but it didn’t bother me. The writing was good enough to make it work.

The protagonist is a believable character that displays emotions relevant to us all—sorrow, anger and guilt in shifting shades. The setting is brilliantly conceived and executed to support the thematic emotions of the story. It is a dark and gloomy rural wilderness that matches the internal sufferings of the protagonist. A place that is likely very much like Mr DeRosso’s native Wisconsin.

The prose isn’t exactly hardboiled, but it is far from delicate. There are passages that feel like a dark and masculine poetry—

“The car stopped. The lights winked out. The night shadows dwelt in unruffled peace again.”

Best of GT: "Terrorists" by Stephen Marlowe

A week or so ago I was cruising through the back posts on Gravetapping, and there were several I found to be really quite good. More than I ever would have thought. In a moment of extrement vanity I decided, and I am now executing that decision, to repost a few of the posts I thought were particularly interesting. This is the first. It is a little story I have read once or twice since I wrote this article, and my opinion of it hasn't changed, except I think even more of it now than I did when I wrote this. I hope you enjoy reading this little flash from the past as much as I did.

I recently read a short story by the late Stephen Marlowe titled “Terrorists”. It was published in the January 1956 issue of Accused; I read it in the 1997 anthology American Pulp. It is a hardboiled private eye story.

Chester Drum is a Washington D.C. private detective, and on a late and warm August night as he walks past his office he notices a light inside. He makes a routine check with the elevator operator who tells him the cleaning staff should be done. Drum then takes the elevator to his floor and quietly approaches his office; inside he finds a cleaning woman with a very cold war tale.

Her son is involved with a Puerto Rican youth group and they plan to assassinate the Secretary of State. The group is concerned with an independent Puerto Rico, but the mother tells Drum the boys are being used by a socialite Red—a communist—who cares nothing for Puerto Rico or the youth group, but is using them to further her own cause; the embarrassment of the United States and the advancement of Soviet-style communism.

The story is swift and, as expected from Marlowe, exciting. The plotline is sleek and straight and there really aren’t any surprises to a twenty-first century reader. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a good story, because it is a terrific story, but rather it means it is a story of its time. A small capsule filled with the popular fear and turmoil of the 1950s.

The plot can easily be traced to two events that occurred in 1950. The era of extreme paranoia brought on by McCarthy with his wild accusations of communist spies everywhere, and the failed assassination attempt on President Truman by three Puerto Rican terrorists.

I make this point not to weaken“Terrorists,” but rather to make the point that fiction, including popular fiction, is a mirror of the culture that creates it. Go into any used bookstore or library and take a novel from the shelf and you will find a nugget of truth about the time and place it was written; not the whole truth, but rather an image that represents the truth and atmosphere of the era. The fiction of the 1950s was saturated with communism and paranoia, just as the fiction of the 1980s was ripe with greed, drugs and Vietnam.

“Terrorists” is a brilliant example of both entertainment and place. When it is read it grabs the reader by the ear and jerks him into a past that only exists in memory and archive; it is a capsule that helps the reader’s understanding of where he came and, hopefully, where he can go or, at least, avoid returning. It also allows the reader to understand how little civilization has changed over the past fifty years; the enemies have changed (maybe), but the fear is very much alive.

And it does it all in a brilliantly entertaining fashion. Can it get any better? Maybe it can, because Chester Drum can be found plying his trade in no less than 20 novels.

ONE FOR HELL by Jada M. Davis

Stark House Press released a reprint of a 1952 Fawcett Red Seal original titled One for Hell written by Jada M. Davis back in 2010.  Davis is a writer I wasn’t familiar with and after reading it, I really don’t know why.  It is terrific and one of the best hardboiled noir tales I’ve read.  It resembles the work of two pulp writers, W. L. Heath—particularly Violent Saturday—and Jim Thompson.  It has the violence and dark shadows of Thompson and the sociology of secrets that Heath did so well.

Willa Ree is a drifter and a petty criminal.  The novel opens with Ree riding the rails toward a small Texas boomtown. His plan is simple: fleece the town and move on.  What happens is beyond Ree’s expectations and the town looks better to him by the minute.

One for Hell is pure entertainment.  There isn’t a protagonist.  The supporting cast, Willa Ree is the main player, come and go like visitors to an amusement park.  One by one they ratchet the pressure on Ree until he is ready to break.  And one by one Ree pushes them aside until he no longer has the ability.

The plot is tight and woven with a sophistication of character, morality and corruption.  The town has secrets—everyone has something to hide and Ree uses this underlying human weakness to his advantage.  He culls his enemies, the weaker ones first, from the herd and eliminates them. He has a girlfriend who is an arch-type, flawed at that, of woman.  She has all the strengths and the weaknesses and most are both—a desire to trust, to love and believe.  She is the light of the story and the hope.

The action is developed with a solidity and audacity that separates this novel from so many others of its type.  There is a scene in the middle part of the novel that covers 18 pages that changed my view of what can be done with both violence and action in a prose story.  It rolled like a freight train in the dark hard night.  It changed Ree from a smalltime hoodlum to a big time psychopath. It was the crux of the story, the beginning of the end for Willa Ree, and the push that leads the reader into his twisted mind.

There really isn’t anything flat in One for Hell.  Everything works.  From the plot to the characters to the psychology to the prose and it wraps itself together without the reader really knowing that it is happening.  Willa Ree spends much of his time trying to guess the actions and motives of other people and the internal dialogue is simple and interesting:

“Maybe the old woman knew. Or maybe she found it, though not likely. Baldy wasn’t a trusting sort of person, and she wouldn’t have guessed he had money in the first place. He sat on the trunk and surveyed the room. Pictures? Too simple.”

One for Hell is proof that Stark House is one of the best publishers of classic crime fiction.  This, like all of its releases, is still fresh and vibrant all these years later and it is going to be on my bookshelf for a very long time.