The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett

This is it, the original US noir detective novel from 1930. Hammett published most of his handful of novels around that time but only this one entered and changed popular culture forever via the iconic movie of 1941. What struck me straightaway on reading the book was how perfect the casting of the movie was. It's as if Hammett wrote Kasper Gutman for Sydney Greenstreet, Joel Cairo for Peter Lorre. They speak in the novel like Greenstreet and Lorre speak on screen. As for Mary Astor as the duplicitous sex siren Brigid O'Shaughnessy - well, perhaps the fairest thing is to say nothing. After all, they were hardly going to include the strip search scene in 1941. Bogart, of course, was never first choice for Sam Spade, yet Hammett gave Spade a Bogart-style lip problem.

The thing that makes The Maltese Falcon so revolutionary in both versions is that Spade is morally conflicted. He generally tries to do the right thing but he's not really bothered when his partner Miles Archer gets gunned down. He's already sleeping with Archer's wife Iva, and doesn't give two hoots about her either. He thinks he might be falling in love with Brigid; the next moment he's slapping her around. He's happy to do a deal with Gutman and Cairo whereby Gutman's 'gunsel' Wilmer takes the fall for three murders, and when Wilmer objects he knocks him out.

I can only recall trying one of Hammett's other novels, The Dain Curse. It was many years ago and I didn't get to the end. I don't remember what stopped me. Anyway, I will definitely be reading any more I might come across. I didn't realise there were only five of them, all written over a five-year period in his thirties, so it won't take me long.

The Girl with the Deep Blue Eyes -Lawrence Block

Earlier this year I discussed the extraordinary output of the American pulp maestro Lawrence Block. The novel I was reviewing then, Borderline, was one of his first. This is a Hard Line original, published in September 2015, and there is no appreciable difference. Well, perhaps just one. Here, Block borrows his core idea from noir movies like The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity. He is perfectly open about it. His hero, ex NYPD officer Doak Miller, is a fan of old movies and gets his idea from watching them.

Now living in Florida, Miller does a little PI work to supplement his pension. The local sheriff, no less, has heard that a local woman is looking for a hit man to rid her of her much older, much richer husband. Miller agrees to meet her, wearing a wire. But first he checks her out, sees how gorgeous she is, especially her deep blue eyes. So he meets her as arranged but slips her a script whereby she changes her mind. Miller knows he will sleep with her - he already has one friend with benefits and he's not long in town - but doesn't realise he will fall in love with her.

It gets complicated, of course. Miller meets with the girl's horrible husband. The horrible husband hires him to investigate his wife, whom he suspects is having an affair. Miller also learns about the pre-nup whereby if they divorce there's no big pay-off. The husband has to die for his widow to get her due. It's all a question of how to do it.

Block still writes like a dream. His characters are multi-faceted, with flaws and predilections. They are ruled by sex and, to a lesser extent, money. What grips the reader, though, is the layering of story, each layer, no matter how bizarre, inextricably linked to the main narrative.

An absolute gem. Essential reading for any fan of modern US crime fiction.

Borderline - Lawrence Block

Lawrence Block is eighty years old and has been writing, at a prodigious rate, for sixty of them. Borderline is one of his earliest, from 1958, when he was twenty. It is what Block himself describes as 'mid-century erotica' combined with a significant slice of crime noir.

The border in question is that between Mexico and the United States, which makes the theme alarmingly current in Trumpland America. However it is not about immigration or drug smuggling. It is about a rag-bag of disparate characters who end up in El Paso Texas and get their jollies south of the border in Juarez. We start with Marty, a professional gambler. Then we meet Meg, newly divorced from an under-sexed but rich husband. There's Lily, a teenage hooker on the lam who forms a lesbian double act with stripper Cassie. And finally there's Weaver, the anonymous loser who suddenly finds himself on the front page after murdering a girl. We know they are all going to come together somehow. The how is what keeps us reading. That and the precociously brilliant writing.

The book also operates on a deeper level. Each character is confronted with a personal or moral border which he or she can either cross or not. Marty is smitten with Meg - who wouldn't be? - but he takes her to see Cassie and Lily's floorshow and lets her persuade him to cross his line. Lily is unmoved by sex, presumably because she gets so much of it; she's just stringing her various lovers along until she can get a stash of cash together and dump them all. Weaver can keep his head down, maybe disappear into South America, or he can embrace his new calling and go out in a blaze of notoriety. Guess which he goes for?

I was hitherto only familiar with Block's middle years, chiefly in the Eighties and Nineties. He was still a brilliant writer - talent like his will never fade - but I don't remember huge amounts of sex. That's a pity because he is extraordinarily good at it. I can't remember reading anyone quite as good, though I admit I've never been a huge fan of literary porn. I'm definitely a fan of Block's porn.

I'm also a huge fan of these retro reissues from Hard Case Crime. The covers alone are irresistible. Quarry's Choice, which I reviewed here last year, is one of them, and I'm reading their e-book of one of Max Allan Collins's Nathan Heller series at the moment. They even do comics, for pity's sake! I'm doomed.

You Were Never Really Here - Jonathan Ames

Pushkin Vertigo is a new imprint focusing mainly on classic crime fiction (including Vertigo itself) but also including some contemporary work such as this, from 2013 (Pushkin Vertigo Originals).

Ames is an American journalist, author and screenwriter, creator of the TV series Bored to Death. "You Were Never Really Here" is actually halfway between a short story and a novella. It took me just over an hour to read. I like that - tell your story without padding, leave it at precisely the length it needs to be. Within the eighty-odd pages of this big-print/small-format paperback he has polished his prose to a stiletto edge. For example:

He had come to believe that he was the recurring element - the deciding element - in all the tragedies experienced by the people he encountered. So if he could minimize his impact and his responsibility, then there was the chance, the slight chance, that there would be no more suffering for others. It was a negative grandiose delusion - narcissism inverted into self-hatred, a kind of autoimmune disorder of his psyche...

Joe, the hero, is off the books - off every imaginable book - ex-FBI, ex-Marine, ex-human being save for his role as carer for his octogenarian mother. He earns his crust by fighting a very specialized niche crime, rescuing young girls kidnapped for sexual purposes. He operates through a whole series of cut-outs. His handler contacts a bodega owner who puts a misspelled notice in his window to notify Joe that he needs to call in.



This case is a big case. The daughter of a state senator has been abducted. The senator has received a text telling him where she is. All Joe has to do is get into the brothel and rescue her. Which he does, with considerable malice aforethought. The brothel, however, is run by powerful people. There are consequences for Joe. His cut-offs are cut out - with extreme animus. Joe uncovers the secret. And resolves to seek revenge.


We don't see the revenge. That is another story. Maybe Ames will tell it, maybe he won't. But we have been given all the pointers we need to imagine what Joe's revenge will be, and that is better than reading about it. That freedom to imagine the very worst is the genius of this little book, why the short format is perfect for the author's purpose. It's the best of its kind that I have read since Point Blank.

Dreaming of Babylon - Richard Brautigan

Dreaming of Babylon, subtitled "A Private Eye Novel, 1942", is Brautigan's skewed take on a hard-boiled private eye thriller.  C Card (no first name given) wanted to be a cop but failed the exam.  He is now a completely failed gumshoe, in hock to family and friends, reduced to bumping into blind beggars and purloining some of the spilled coins for himself.  Now, inexplicably, he is offered a paying job by a glamorous femme fatale who puts away beer like there's no tomorrow without ever needing to go to the lavatory.

Card's problem is that he spends his life dreaming of Babylon.  OK, it's not an entirely accurate dream of the historical empire - sometimes he's a band leader on Babylonian radio - but it's a rich source of escapism for a private dick down on his luck.  Even now his luck seems to be changing, his first resort is always to slip into a Babylonian daydream.  This naturally gets in the way of his efforts to borrow a gun with bullets in it.  And even when he's hired, why is everyone else trying to steal the same corpse.

Wild, wacky, brimful of typical Brautigan diversions.  Great fun from a forgotten master.

The Double - George Pelecanos

Some people say George Pelecanos is best known as one of the writers on The Wire and, latterly, Treme.  I had definitely read at least one of his noir crime novels before then, but I'm damned if I can remember which one.  I think it might have been Soul Circus.  Anyhow, this is his latest, barely a year old, and it's a classic.

The Double is the second novel featuring Spero Lucas, ex-marine turned private investigator.  There are a number of storylines but the main one concerns a woman who had her painting (The Double) stolen by an ageing stud.  The title of the painting is a metaphor for the story.  It's not a double but the two sides of one man's personality, and hunting for it reveals the conflicting sides of Spero's personality, to him as well as to us.

Once you read Pelecanos's prose, you will recognise his dialogue in the TV series.  He has crafted a unique voice for himself, not so extreme as Ellroy, nor so flamboyant as Elmore Leonard, but crisp and hard and utterly compelling.  I get the impression Pelecanos is not as well known in the UK as he should be.  Now that Elmore has passed and Ellroy seems to have got stuck, there really is no better crime writer operating in the US today.

Murder Clear, Track Fast - Judson Philips

Another classic Penguin greenback from my favourite purveyor of classic American hardboiled crime fiction.

It's 1961 and attorney Don Channing is delegated to solve the Fails case, one way or the other.  Jerome Fails was murdered last year, shot slap between the eyes.  His mother is convinced Jerome's wife did it, but no one else who has investigated the case agrees.  Mrs Fails senior says this is because they've all fallen head over heels for the lissom Mrs Fails Junior.

The Fails fortune is at stake - and most of that fortune is invested in the Fails bloodline, stabled at Saratoga.

Channing finds himself caught between two classic femme fatales, both widows, but which one is the black widow?  Channing struggles to make sense of the conflicting evidence - until he wakes up, his second day in town, with a dead woman in the bedroom.

Philips unravels his plot with consummate skill.  He leads into the bizarre world of racehorse mania without once belabouring us with his research.  He tells us this is how things are organised in Saratoga in August and we believe him.  I cannot fathom why Philips isn't held in the same esteem as Hammett or Ross Macdonald.  He really is of that class.

By the way, isn't Bernard Hodge's cover art frankly superb?