Brainquake - Samuel Fuller

 Samuel Fuller had a long and controversial career as a Hollywood scriptwriter, director and, ultimately, auteur.   He had an even longer career, almost sixty years, as a novelist.   Brainquake is his last novel, written and published in France in the early 1990s but never published in English until Sam's widow suggested it to Hard Case Crime in 2014.

What a triumph it is, brimming over with Fuller tropes: crime, of course; racism; calculating, predatory women; heroic women; and, ultimately, new life in France.

Paul Page is a bagman.   The trade is almost hereditary - his father was a bookie and bagman.   Mental illness is also hereditary.   His father suffered from brainquakes and so does Paul.   These rosy-tinged hallucinations prevent any attempt at living a normal life.   Paul's early life is so abnormal - he doesn't go to school, his parents have to patiently teach him to speak - that bagman is the only hope for him.   His father's contacts land Paul the best possible job.   For ten years he moves millions of dollars for the Mafia, posing as an independent taxi driver.

He speaks to no one.   He barely speaks at all.   He lives alone, in the house inherited from his parents.   He intereacts with no one except the female Boss and the people he passes the money to.   But then he sees Michelle Troy, a young mother wheeling her baby through the park.   And becomes obsessed.   He is watching Michelle in the park one day - the first time he has seen her with her husband - when, somehow or other, the father is shot dead from inside the pram.

"Sixtyseconds before the baby shot its father..."   That is how you start a thriller of the darkest shade of noir.   And Fuller keeps up that standard for 300+ pages.   And let us not forget that he was well into his eighties when he did so.   The supporting characters are masterfully drawn - the six-foot-plus Black homicide detective Zara, Father Flanagan, the mob hitman who poses as a Catholic priest and has an appropriate method of murder, the Cody brothers, Al and Eddie.   Fuller creates them lovingly but is always prepared to sacrifice them, brutally, where the plot demands it.   Story is everything to Fuller but he doesn't stint on the nuts and bolts of literary craftsmanship.   The prose is crisp, the dialogue punchy.

A fascinating read - rounded off with an excellent afterword from publisher Charles Ardai.   Highly recommended.