Blacktop Wasteland - S A Cosby

 I picked this up by chance in my local library - and what a treat it turned out to be!   I recently lost a week trying to cme to terms with William Faulkner's Absolom, Absolum (great writing but the action pushed so far back I simply couldn't engage).   Blacktop Wasteland is set in a similar landscape but seen from a very different viewpoint.

To start with, the majority of characters are (like the author) black.   Beauregard 'Bug' Montage learnt how to be a wheelman from his long-vanished father Ant.   Indeed he served a manslaughter sentence in youth detention for running down a bunch of crooks threatening to kill Ant.   Now he runs an auto repair shop in Red Hill with his cousin Kelvin and lives in a double-wide with his wife Kia and two boys.   But he still has the car he did the killing with and races it sometimes in outlaw muscle-car drags.

A rival repair shop has opened up in town.   Beauregard's business takes a hit.   Debts are mounting.   Then Ronnie Sessions turns up with a diamond heist for which he needs the best possible wheelman, which is Bug.   Everyone knows Ronnie Sessions is white trash.   He still owes Bug for the last job they did together.   But Bug is desperate for ready cash.   One big score will clear all his problems and allow him to refurbish his shop and thus see off the competition.   And it turns out the hit is much bigger than anyone thought.   Problem is, the jewelry store that held it was a front for mob moneylaundering.

The standout element of Blacktop Wasteland is the way Cosby handles the driving action.   He takes us all the way into Bug's mind as he's doing it, the rational decision-making process and the visceral thrill alongside.   We speed with Bug.   We become totally invested in the outcome.   Despite the brutality, the unsparing treatment of the ripples which spread out from his illegal actions, we want him to win.

Blacktop Wasteland is no mean debut.   I'm looking out for Cosby's next.

Harlem Shuffle - Colson Whitehead

 Harlem Shuffle is a cracking read.   It more than makes up for any disappointment I felt on finishing The Underground Railroad (see below).   Ray Carney and his cousin Freddie are like brothers growing up in postwar Harlem.   Freddie's father Pedro has slunk off to Florida.   Ray's mother has died and his old man is back.   Old Carney is a crook and a heavy.   Ray puts himself through college to avoid following his father's trade.   He opens a furniture store, initially selling previously loved items, then adding a few new bits.   He marries above his station, the beautiful Elizabeth, who has a big future in travel agenting for black folks.   Ray dreams of getting ahead of the game.   An upmarket property, on Riverside Drive, maybe.

Then cousin Freddie rolls around and gets him involved in a heist at Harlem's top hotel.   It's Ray's job to fence the proceeds, which brings him in contact with serious local hoods, bent cops.   All in all it adds up to five years of stress.   Still, Ray is a worker, and an employer now.   He makes a good side income as a fence.   His furniture store expands.   But he can't get accepted into the local trade club for black entrepreneurs.   Maybe he's just too black.   And then there's Freddie...   So Ray comes up with a scheme of his own - to get revenge on the black guy who took his money and failed to deliver.

Finally, Freddie goes too far.   He's smoking dope and copping a snort or two of the good stuff with a white dude called Linus van Wyke.   The van Wyke's are old New York.   An ancestor was the first mayor.   Now, in the early 1960s, they're building skyscrapers next to where the World Trade Centre is due to be built.   Linus ODs.   Freddie brings a fancy briefcase for Ray to keep in his safe at the store.   It's Linus's briefcase, not stolen goods in itself.   What can possibly go wrong.

Beautifully written, note-perfect, with a fantastic pace and superb characters.   It won't win as many prizes as The Underground Railway or The Nickel Boys.   Not because it's too black.   Because it's too damn funny.

The March - E L Doctorow

 The March (2005) came thirty years after the legendary Ragtime (my favourite novel of all time and one of my top five favourite movies).   It is less ambitious, more serious, deeper, but just as satisfying.   By this time in his career Doctorow has refined his technique.   We have fewer main characters but they are subtly drawn and fully three-dimensional.

The titular march is General Sherman's devasting sweep through the South, the decisive and destructive culmination of the American Civil War.   I don't know how accurate Doctorow's take is (it is thirty years since I read Shelby Foote's definitive account) nor how many of the characters are historical.   It makes no difference.   Doctorow gives us confidence in his narrative.   We follow Pearl, the slave girl who can pass for white, other displaced and debased Southern women.   The Yankee surgeon, Wrede Sartorius, the renegade rebels Arly and Will, who hijack the negro photographer Calvin.   Not all the characters stay with the march; not all survive to the end.   But through it all the focus is on William Tecumseh Sherman himself, the maverick who wishes he could live alongside his troops.   He cannot sleep, he bears the deepest of personal losses - and he knows that history will mark him as the villain of the piece.   And we also have two brief cameos by President Lincoln himself - a man who suffers even more than Sherman.   The suffering is where Doctorow brushes genius in The March.   I have not read all of Doctorow, who is grossly underpublished in the UK, but what I have read favours the comic over the tragic.   Here, in this late work (he died in 2015) we get the subtle autumnal tone of history, literally marching on.   There is a transcendant paragraph at the very end which sums it all up: "the shadows began to lengthen as the afternoon wore on.   The green of the land grew softer, and the road,, in a slow descent, passed into a valley.   And then there was a dark, thick grove  of pine where some of the war had passed through..."

That is how a master ends a masterpiece.

The Colorado Kid - Stephen King

 In 2004 the creators of the yet-to-appear Hard Case Crime imprint wrote to the greatest living US writer to see if he would be interested in maybe a couple of quotes for their noir reprints.   The reply came from King's agent.   Would they like to publish his short mystery novella The Colorado Kid?   Oh yes they would, and publishing a major writer - as major as it is possible to get - gave Hard Case instant credibility.   King continues to publish with them.  Joyland is reviewed on this blog and Later sits on my to-be-read pile.

Mine is the 2019 reprint, which includes Charles Ardai's introduction, which is great, and illustrations which are variable.   The story itself ... I called it a novella above, because of its length, but in tone it is a long short story.   It is essentially an account of a 25-year-old mystery (thus set in 1980) told by two old geezers who run a smalltown newspaper in Maine to their twenty-year-opd summer intern.  Back in 1980 two teenage runners found the body of a forty-year-old man lying on the beach.   Naturally this drew the attention of the then middleaged newsmen.   The police weren't interested as there was no obvious foul play involved - the man died because some steak got stuck in his gullet.  But other elements of the case intrigued the journos.   Why did the man carry no wallet, no ID?

Eventually another intern, who was working with the police back in 1980, comes up with a clue to the man's identity, which only reveals more odd facts.

Werewolves in their Youth - Michael Chabon

 A collection of nine decent-length short stories by Michael Chabon, Werewolves in their Youth distills the charactersistics that make Chabon one of the best US writers of recent times - wit, elegance, the eye for the telling detail, the nuances of speech, etc.  Oddly, the title story was my least favourite; no particular reason, just that Stephen King does these things better.   On the other hand I loved 'The Harris Fetko Story', a skewed take on the Great American sports hero, and 'In the Black Mill', a Lovecraftain pastiche which Chabon cleverly links to perhaps his bestknown novel Wonder Boys.   I single out these two and have given my reservations about 'Werewolves', but I enjoyed all the stories here and recommend the collection wholeheartedly.

City on Fire - Don Winslow

 City on Fire is the first in what Winslow says will be his swansong trilogy.   A year or so ago Winslow announced he was ceasing to be an author in favour of full time political activism.   in fairness, he does both equally well.

Winslow has always been fundamentally a series writer.   He began with a series and his greatest achievement has been his Cartel trilogy, which certainly brought him prominence on this side of the Atlantic.   It is how me and most of my friends found him.   Is City going to equal Cartel?   Hard to say.   It is certainly a major achievement and clearly has the potential to become a masterpiece.

Winslow openly says it is a take on the Iliad.   Instead of Troy we have Winslow's birthplace, Rhode Island.   Instead of hero warriors we have ruthless mobsters, Italians, Irish, and African American.   We begin with the arrival of Helen - or in this case, Pam, an out-of-town beauty spotted enjoying the beach.    Pam unwittingly causes the break-up of old alliances.   Hitherto, the Irish and the Italians have kept to their distinct patches and the black mobsters are purely fringe players.   Rivalry over Pam changes all that.   Paulie Moretti wants her but the useless Liam Murphy wins her - and corrupts her.

Danny Ryan is our Achilles.   His father was once a major player in the game but became a drunk after being dumped with Danny by his showgirl mother.   The Murphys took over the docks and associated rackets.   Danny is now married to Terri Murphy.   He isn't given a seat at the top table.  He doesn't mind, he doesn't particular want to be a mobster.   But then Pat Murphy, the son and heir, is taken out in revenge for Paulie Moretti...   Terri falls pregnant, gives birth to the first Murphy grandson, then falls ill...

The characterisation and plotting are, as always, superb.   We never really know what is going to happen next or how characters will repsond.   Winslow has given himself an epic canvas and fills every inch.   The prose is nowhere near as punchy as in earlier works like Savages or Gentleman's Hour; that would be tiresome in an epic.   Instead it is terse but polished, always pitch-perfect.   I was enthralled, beginning to end.   A top writer on top form.

Cesare - Jerome Charyn

Jerome Charyn is 85 years old and has been publishing novels for more fifty years.  So why am I only just hearing about him?  Why has he been so disgracefully underpublished in the UK?

Congrats to Oldcastle/No Exit for getting hold of Charyn's 2020 novel Cesare.  They have published and publicised it well.   Cesare is the teenaged naval cadet Erik Holdermann who rescues a man being attacked by hooligans - only to learn that the man is Admiral Canaris, Head of the Abwehr.  Canaris is a man of honour who repays his obligations, and Erik becomes 'Cesare' to Canaris's Caligari (referencing the expressionist silent movie, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari), assassinating his master's enemies.

Erik is Aryan but was brought up by prostitutes in the Berlin ghetto and educated at a Jewish school.   He is adopted by the wealthy Baron von Hecht and becomes besotted with the baron's half-Jewish daughter Lisalein.  By the time war breaks out Lisalein has married the Nazi Valentiner, formerly her father's accountant.  She and Erik smuggle Jews out of Berlin.   Ultimately, inevitably, the Gestapo catch up with them both.

They are reunited at Theresienstadt, the concentration camp 'paradise' which the Nazis created to mask the Holocaust.  Also here is Benhard Beck, the Jewish cabaret artist who was the orinal Mack the Knife in Brecht's Threepenny Opera.  He colludes with the commandant in maintaining the myth of the camp - until the Red Cross finally turn up to inspect it.

Cesare is an astonishing book.  It is violent, comic, and makes no bones about the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust.  The fictional characters are as convincing as the 'real' people.  Erik, Lisalein and Beck are benificent monsters; Canaris, who was executed by the Nazis a month or so before their defeat, is a martyr.  I hope Cesare opens the floodgate for mass publication of Charyn's backlist.  Meanwhile I have tracked down an ominibus of his Isaac Sidel novels from the mid-Seventies.

Blackwood - Michael Farris Smith

 

Michael Farris Smith has just released Nick, a prequel to The Great Gatsby.  This, however, is original fiction in his personal strand of Southern Noir or Southern Gothic.  His setting is not Rust Belt America but something far older, which has been declining for a much longer time.

It starts in 1956, when young Colburn is coming up twelve and finds something really nasty in the woodshed.  Twenty years later Colburn is back in the unnamed town looking for answers.  It is  1976 and wherever it is has become so godforsaken that artists can have shopfronts for free - which is what Colburn does.  He makes sculptures out of scrap.  Also foraging for scrap is a drifter family, so debased that they don't even have names.  Celia has a bar from which she befriends the young buy of the family.  She also starts an affair with Colburn.

In Colburn's absence the valley has been taken over by the invasive kudzu vine.  It has swallowed up the house where Colburn used to live, swamped everything, hidden secrets.

People start disappearing without trace.  First the woman who might have been the feral boy's mother.  Then twin brothers.  Then Celia.  The town sheriff has never had so much work to do.  He makes no headway at all.  But when Celia goes, Colburn kicks in.  He finds out...

It's a great read.  I especially enjoyed the vagueness of it all.  I'm not even sure what state it's supposed to be.  I wondered why it should be mainly set in 1976 - I mean, it's not as if these forgotten corners of America have recovered in the years since.  But all is explained in the last couple of short chapters.  For once, continuing the story after the denouement really pays off.  I am very keen to read more of Michael Farris Smith.