Saturday, January 18, 2020
Think Fast, Mr. Peters by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1987)
Tuesday, November 12, 2019
He Done Her Wrong by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1983)
Friday, June 28, 2019
Catch a Falling Clown by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1981)
Thursday, June 27, 2019
High Midnight by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1981)
Tuesday, June 25, 2019
Never Cross a Vampire by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1980)
The Howard Hughes Affair by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1979)
Sunday, June 23, 2019
You Bet Your Life by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1978)
Friday, June 21, 2019
Murder on the Yellow Brick Road by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1977)
Thursday, June 20, 2019
Bullet for a Star by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1977)
Friday, August 30, 2013
Lillian & Dash by Sam Toperoff (Other Press 2013)
Let’s get this straight from the start. The cop is paid by the state. The state gives him his badge, his gun, his billy club, and permission to use them, his uniform, and, if he’s lucky, a police car to drive around in. His job is to protect the law-abiding public from criminals. So far, so good. There are times, however, when the crooks and the cops and the state are indistinguishable from one another, when they are all mixed together and aligned against the interests and guaranteed rights of those same law-abiding citizens.We are in one of those times now. Those of you who may have had the ill fortune to have stumbled upon my Red Harvest or even The Glass Key probably know that I have dealt with just this sort of corrupt situation before in fiction. In both cases—I must tell you Red Harvest was based on a real miners’ strike in Montana in which the company, the cops, and the government ganged up on the miners—in both cases my lone detective character is successful in combating the corrupt cops and turning the tide. Remember, though, that’s just what happens in novels. In Montana, the bums mopped up the miners.
In America today the cops and the crooks and, of course, the judges and the pols are all in cahoots again. It happens periodically, usually around union busting time, which for them is all the time. They like to send very dramatic, unmistakable messages. What else is this preposterous Committee deciding who is American and who is not, but a shot across the bow? Sometimes the legal criminality even reaches the level of political murder.
What else was Vanzetti and Sacco if not precisely that? These new thugs dressed up as Congressional cops are surely nothing new. They crawl out of the woodwork whenever they have the chance. But every time they appear, we must each become detectives and reveal that they are really the crooks and not the cops.
If I was trying to turn this current mess into a detective story, I’d see it as an old-fashioned protection racket. I’d set it in Mom and Pop’s grocery store. Gunsels come in and want fifty bucks a week to keep trouble away. Pop tells them he’s never had any trouble. They smash his front window. That’ll be fifty bucks. Pop goes to the police. They’ll watch his store when the thugs return, but they can’t promise anything more. Next week the gunsels return for their fifty; a cop watches from across the street while the thugs break the other front window. The cop across the street smiles.So what’s to be done? And who is there to do it? Certainly not the likes of Nick Charles. He’s too tipsy for the task. He and Nora hobnob in the wrong social circles. A society murder is one thing. The protection racket is a very dirty, roll-up-your-sleeves business. Sam Spade? I don’t think so. There are no beautiful dames involved and no big money to be made in a Mom and Pop grocery. No, the guy I need—the guy we need—is the Op. He’s far tougher than either one of the others and breaking up this protection racket’s going to take a bear of a man, a courageous brute. That’s the Op. He’s also a working stiff, and for me that counts for an awful lot when it comes to a matter of integrity.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Be Cool by Elmore Leonard (Delacorte Press 1999)
You see Get Leo?
Again, a pause and Linda saying, Wait a minute. You're Chili Palmer? You are you were on Charlie Rose at least a half hour. He got you to admit your name's Ernest, and I recognize your voice. I've read all about you the interviews, the ones that asked if it's true you were a gangster in Florida? Or was it Brooklyn?
Both.
I loved Get Leo, I saw it twice. The only thing that bothered me, just a little. The guy's too short to be what he is?
Well, that, yeah. But you know going in Michael Weir's short. What was it bothered you?
He's so sure of himself. I can't stand guys who think they know everything. What other movies have you done?
He listened to his voice come on after a pause. I did Get Lost next. Admitting it.
When she says, I still haven't seen it.
He tells her. A sequel has to be better'n the original or it's not gonna work.
Sunday, October 30, 2011
LaBrava by Elmore Leonard (Arbor House 1983)
He told her Aperture magazine had contacted him about doing a book. Call it South Beach. Get all the old people, the art deco look. He was working on it now. No, he was thinking about it more than he was working on it. He wanted to do it. He wouldn't mind having a coffee-table book on his coffee table. It seemed strange though--ask thirty or forty dollars for a book full of pictures of people who'd never see it, never be able to afford it.
"At the gallery they sip wine and look at my pictures. They say things like, 'I see his approach to art as retaliation, a frontal attack against the assumptions of a technological society.'
"They say, 'His work is a compendium of humanity's defeat at the hands of venture capital.'
"They say, 'It's obvious he sees his work as an exorcism, his forty days in the desert.' Or, another one, 'They're self-portraits. He sees himself as dispossessed, unassimilated.'
"The review in the paper said, 'The aesthetic sub-text of his work is the systematic exposure of artistic pretension.' I thought I was just taking pictures."
Jean Shaw said, "Simplicity. It is what it is." Then paused. "And what it isn't, too. Is that what you're saying?"
He didn't want her to try so hard. "I heard one guy at the gallery--it was his wife or somebody who said I was dispossessed, unassimilated, and the guy said, 'I think he takes pictures to make a buck, and anything else is fringe.' I would've kissed the guy, but it might've ruined his perspective."