The Politics of Murder: Organized Crime in Barry Goldwater's Arizona by Dave Wagner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

”It was true that Phoenix had a history of high-profile assassinations, some of them operatically staged message murders. The killers used a truck bomb to scatter the remains of the socially prominent gangster Willie Bioff across his neat suburban lawn. They decapitated Gus Greenbaum, the state’s most powerful crime boss, and then turned the knife on his wife. A year before Bolles’s murder, a pair of gunmen from Chicago Heights used a .22-caliber pistol to kill an accountant only hours before he was to tell a grand jury what he knew about land fraud in Arizona. As they stepped over his body, the gunmen dropped a few coins.”


Don Bolles’s exploded car.

I arrived in Phoenix in 1985, almost exactly 9 years to the day after the Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles was murdered. ”He had parked the new Datsun in the fourth space from the left in the front row, where a bundle of dynamite, fixed with magnets to the bottom of the car, just under the driver’s seat, awaited him. Bolles opened the door, slid into the driver’s seat, and turned the ignition key. As he backed the car out of the parking space and put it in a forward gear to drive off, Robinson, watching from the cab of his pickup, stabbed a button on a remote-control device. It ignited a fuse cap in a bundle of dynamite that blew out the bottom and the door on the driver’s side of the car.”

The first meaningful conversation I had in Arizona was with a Phoenix native who couldn’t wait to fill my ear with all of his paranoid conspiracies surrounding the death of Don Bolles. Even with the help of copious amounts of alcohol, I had a hard to swallowing what this guy was pedaling, but the longer I lived in the state of Goldwater Arizona, I started to hear more and more about the shady deals that had engulfed Arizona in the past and still held sway over the present. Paranoia is only paranoia if your wrong.

It turns out my conspiracy obsessed acquaintance was right on the money.

You can’t walk (Nobody walks in Phoenix. The temperature at cement level is like walking on the surface of Mercury.) or drive around Phoenix for very long without going past a school or a building named after Goldwater. He was the Sam Houston of Arizona and was venerated by all levels of society. His disastrous run for the presidency cost the party not only the top spot, but several house and senate seats as well. If you haven’t seen Lyndon B. Johnson’s Daisy commercial that forever changed the scope of presidential elections, check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riDyp... It will curl your toes, even now, fifty years later. Johnson won in a landslide. He convinced the American population that Barry Goldwater was a warmongering psychopath.

Well, maybe not a psychopath, but a case could be made that he was a sociopath.

So what exactly was going on in Arizona that eventually led up to the murder of Don Bolles? The first thing that you need to understand is that organized crime didn’t just exist in Arizona; it controlled Arizona, and at the center of that control was Senator Barry Goldwater.

Most of the dirty dealings in Arizona revolved around land fraud deals, but also extended out to prostitution, racketeering, skimming casino coins, and murder.

A Detective McCracken taped a conversation he had with Prosecutor Berger, and I think it pretty much sums up what was going on and why cases that were made against certain individuals disappeared.

”BERGER: It wouldn’t work, anyway. You find you can’t get the cases filed. You can’t get the work done. Now, cases get thrown out of court, and you don’t understand why, you know?

MCCRACKEN: Yeah.

BERGER: And the reason is very simple. The goddamn lid is on the son of a bitch all the way to the top.”

The Arizona powers-that-be even had conversations about putting a hit on my favorite Arizona politician, Bruce Babbitt, who found himself governor of Arizona by a confluence of strange events. Babbitt was elected Attorney General in 1974. When Governor Raúl Héctor Castro resigned to take an Ambassadorship to El Salvador, Wesley Bolin, then Secretary of State, took his place. Arizona does not have a Lieutenant Governor position. When Bolin died in office, Secretary of State Rose Mofford couldn’t serve as governor because she was appointed not elected to her position. This meant that Babbitt was the highest elected official in the state and thus became the 16th Governor of Arizona. Sometimes a series of strange events can even pry the lid off of a state like Arizona. He was elected to two more terms and eventually served under President Clinton as Secretary of the Interior. I had the honor of buying his books before he left for Washington. He was expected to run against John McCain for Goldwater’s seat, but elected to concentrate on a run for the presidency instead. Babbitt was very popular in the state and probably would have beaten McCain. One wonders, if McCain had lost that election, would Senator McCain have ever existed? I also wonder if Bruce thought it was best that he didn’t win that Senate seat. Would it have simply been too dangerous to continue in politics in Arizona?

I’m grateful that he didn’t get slipped the salt or blown up by a stick of dynamite in his car or plane as other inconvenient people had been. One has to speculate, did he have a conversation with Goldwater and work things out?

Bolles took several agonizing days to die. He named his killers. Some of them were brought to justice. The Bolles case still remains open. Goldwater was agitated by the death of Bolles, which seems to indicate that his iron grip on all these demented assholes raping his state was loosening. He still made sure there was plenty of money available to hush the whole thing up, and when money wouldn’t work, there were other, more permanent means of shushing someone up available. Bolles’s death almost convinced me to change my major to journalism.

Dave Wagner lays it all out, exposes the names of those who were involved, and sketches out the enormous web of intrigue and the outright audacity of these criminals who were allowed to operate in Arizona with impunity.

”All of this happened with the cooperation of otherwise conscientious citizens, public servants, and men of private influence. It was a collective act of fealty from witting insiders for whom loyalty was sometimes indistinguishable from obedience. It was the fruit of a system created by Arizona’s strongest men, for whom impunity was the natural reward of wealth and power.”

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The Walls of Jericho by Rudolph Fisher
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

”’How do I find Negroes? I like them very much. Ever so much better than white people.’

‘Oh Mr. Merrit! Really?’

‘You see, they have so much more color.’

‘Yes. I can see that.’ She gazed upon the mob. ‘How primitive these people are,’ she murmured. ‘So primeval. So unspoiled by civilization.’

‘Beautiful savages,’ suggested Merrit.”



Ralph Merrit buys a house on Court Street in an exclusive white neighborhood bordering Harlem. He looks white. He sounds white, but he ain’t white. Ms. Agatha Cramp, who has no idea that Merrit is playing with her in the conversation above, also lives on Court Street. She is so happy to have this successful lawyer moving into her neighborhood, until someone clues her in to the undeniable fact that he is... colored.

Ralph’s white complexion is so deceiving that he really needs to wear a sign or something warning racist old ladies that beneath that pale exterior is the red blooded, beating heart of a primordial, black man.

Linda Young first works for Ms. Cramp, and it is through her encouragement that Agatha shows an interest in devoting time and money to a Black organization, which leads to the unfortunate conversation with Mr. Merrit. To make matters worse, Merrit offers more money to Linda to come work for him. What audacity this uppity dickty is showing even before the paint is dry on his remodeling. This is simply intolerable. He’s not showing deference as he should, but actually acting like he’s one of them!

Joshua ‘Shine’ Jones has taken a shine to Linda. Just because he is a handsome specimen of a man with enticing, brooding qualities doesn’t mean diddly squat to Linda. She has big expectations for her life, and unless his plans dovetail with hers, she’s going to go her own way. Shine’s friend, Bubber, is about to tell you how good lookin’ she is. ”’Man--oh--man! A honey with high yaller laigs! And did you see that walk? That gal walks on ball-bearin’s, she do--ev’ything moves at once.’” I like the way Shine describes her better. ”And Lindy was sure good to gaze on. Skin like honey--honey with red cherries in it. Clear like thin wax with light behind it. You could almost see through it--you could see through it--you could see red flowers behind it; and when she got excited over anything it seemed that somebody waved the flowers back and forth.”

Now that Merrit has been outed as black, not that he was hiding it, but then he wasn’t advertising it either, what will the insecure white folks of Court Street do? Maybe they will set aside their natural racist tendencies and bring him a plate of cookies, slap him on the back, and invite him to the next neighborhood barbecue.

That would be a negatory.

Just as important, will Shine win his ambitious honey red cherry girl?


Rudolph Fisher

I was reminded of Rudolph Fisher while reading one of Langston Hughes’s autobiographies. Fisher was one of the bright stars in the Harlem Renaissance. Langston said he was one of the wittiest, smartest men he’d ever met, and though his books were good, they didn’t fully capture just how amazing a conversationalist he was in real life. Given the fact that Langston was a bright man in his own right, this is high praise indeed. The vernacular Fisher used in this book made me feel like I was fully immersed in Harlem just as it is blossoming into an oasis for Blacks. I was watching Bubber’s antics as he described this high yaller gal strolling down the street as if she was gliding. I was listening to the conversations between Shine and his work buddies as he hauled a piano up to a third story window. The prose flows so easily that I read most of the book during the course of one afternoon.

When I talk about things such as vernacular it scares some people, but don’t let that hold you back from reading this classic. A glossary of terms is included with the book for those who may find a slang word or two difficult to define.

This book came out in 1928. His next book was The Conjure-Man Dies, which came out in 1932 and is considered the first mystery novel written by a black man. Now isn’t that intriguing?

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The Crystal World by J.G. Ballard
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

”What most attracted his attention, however, like that of the rest of the watching group, was the man’s right arm. From the elbow to the fingertips it was enclosed by--or more precisely had effloresced into--a mass of translucent crystals, through which the prismatic outlines of the hand and fingers could be seen in a dozen multi-colored reflections. This huge jeweled gauntlet, like the coronation armor of a Spanish conquistador, was drying in the sun, its crystals beginning to emit a hard vivid light.”

Dr. Edward Sanders accepts an invitation to visit his friends Dr. and Mrs. Clair in a remote area of Africa. The moment he lands in Port Matarre, he is struck by the ”pervading auroral gloom, broken by sudden inward shifts of light.” The travellers are kept from continuing their journey further upriver by the authorities for reasons that are vague and unconvincing. Sanders specializes in leprosy, so there is very little that scares him. He is determined to continue onward to see his friends, thus he hires a boat to take him upriver.

Queue Heart of Darkness soundtrack.

The forest is turning into something potentially sinister, but it is so lovely, like looking at stained glass lit by dazzling light. It is the most beautiful, post-apocalyptic world that could ever be imagined. ”The sky was clear and motionless, the sunlight shining uninterruptedly upon this magnetic shore, but now and then a stir of wind crossed the water and the scene erupted into cascades of color that rippled away into the air around them. Then the coruscation subsided, and the images of the individual trees reappeared, each sheathed in its armor of light, foliage glowing as if loaded with deliquescing jewels.”

The scientist in Dr. Sanders is intrigued by the spectacle and the need to understand it, but the more time he spends in this new glittering world, the less interested he becomes in the science as he becomes enamored with the spiritual. He meets a priest whose church in the forest is slowly becoming bejeweled. Fortunately, the Christian elements are fairly muted in this tale, allowing me to ignore their insertion without losing my enjoyment of the much larger themes of the story. It is evident that this transformation of the forest is advancing quickly enough that the whole world is in danger of being glitterfied by this unfathomable invasion.

Not only is the foliage being altered, but so are the animals and even those humans who spend too much time under this sparkling canopy. ”His clothes had begun to glow in the dark, the frost that covered his suit spangled by the starlight. Spurs of crystal grew from the dial of his wrist-watch, imprisoning the hands within a medallion of moonstone.”

As we learn more about Dr. Sanders, we discover that his reasons to travel to this remote part of Africa are not exactly as expected. There are other concerns to be considered, and those further compromise his objectivity regarding of what is really going on. Should he really care if the world ends from this dazzling display of glittering beauty? If only the advancing decay of our own bodies was so beautifully rendered.

The descriptions of this world by Ballard are phenomenally enticing. I’m not sure what psychedelic drugs he was tripping on at the time, but they certainly put kaleidoscopes in his eyes. We are so used to mayhem and destruction appearing so bleak and scary, but what if it is something that glimmers and shimmers? What if it is something so seductive that we want to submit and be part of its bejeweled landscape?

Everytime I read a J. G. Ballard, I always think to myself...why has it taken me so long to get back to reading him? He writes these highly inventive, strangely conceived, intellectual novels that alway shake me out of my perceptions of what I believe reality to be. Kudos to the jacket designer who used Eye of Silence by Max Ernst to convey perfectly the strange world the reader is about to venture into.

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Brown's Requiem by James Ellroy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

”I had wanted a way to express my sense of fair play and my love of beauty. I had wanted to crack wise and kick ass on those who deserved it. I had wanted to express a cynical, world-weary ethos tempered with compassion that women would eat up. I wanted low-level, uncomplicated power over other people’s lives. To be 6’3”, 200 pounds, with a blue uniform, a badge, and a gun seemed like a wonderful ego boost. The streets by day; Beethoven, booze, and women by night.

But I was a terrible policeman and an abuser of power. My dispensing of justice was arbitrary and dictated by mood, I ripped off dope dealers for their weed, smoked it myself, and congratulated myself on my enlightened stance in not busting them. I shook down prostitutes for quicky blow jobs in the back seats of squad cars. Whatever I touched in my search to assert, to be, turned bad.”

Needless to say, Fritz Brown was eventually booted off the force. Fortunately, he was incompetent at hiding his incompetenance, which probably stemmed from his constant state of inebriation. For being, as one girlfriend said, ”a sociopath with a gun,” he does have some interests that runs counter to the rest of his stereotypical life...he loves classical music, and he reads voraciously.

Potentially redeeming qualities. Is there a sensitive soul inside him somewhere to balance out his more brutish qualities?

There are always jobs for tough ex-cops, and he lands a job being a repo-man for one of the biggest car dealers in California. His life is summed up for him by a drunk barstool philosopher: ”You are a man of action and limited thought, the pragmatic diamond-in-the-rough intellect who rips off dumb negros for their Cadillacs, sold to them by the fascist vampire. The karmic consequences will one day become obvious: you are going to get royally fucked in the ass.” Brown is certainly a work in progress.

A guy by the name of Fat Dog Baker shows up and wants Brown to find out what is going on with his sister and her rich, much older, benefactor. The Hollywood script is that the benefactor is paying for cello lessons and schooling in exchange for some rubbing, sucking, and tugging, but Brown soon learns that everything is more complicated than what it appears to be.

And who doesn’t love a hot girl with a cello?

Brown shortly discovers that the man he is working for is so much more than just a concerned brother. Fat Dog is, in fact, in pure James Ellroy fashion, a grotesque and memorable figure. What was supposed to be a surveillance gig with low risk and high pay turns into a descent into corruption and terror worse than anything Brown encountered on the force. This case will lead him to Mexico and back with a trail of bodies oozing blood into the sand.

This is Ellroy’s first novel and is written with a lot less spastic splattering of beaten and battered words that have become the hallmark of his mature writing. There are certainly some cuts that could have been made to make the story zing with more zang, but at this point, it is kind of nice for fans of his work to see his insidious mind working before he slips from the handcuffs, snaps the leg chains, and pulls loose from the weighted guy ropes to write stuff that will blow his readers’ minds.

Hardboiled writing with grit flying at you with enough velocity to bloody your nose, blacken your eyes, and knock out a few teeth.

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What Sort of Fuckery Is This? by Dianne Pearce
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

3.5 out of 5 stars

”Don’t let yourself die without knowing the wonder of fucking with love.”--Gabriel Garcia Marquez”

This is only January, and already I have decided that this book bears the best title of any book I’m going to read this year. Every time I say the word fuckery, a mariachi band starts playing in my head, champagne corks start popping, and the little people in my head who move all those blocks of information around for me in my brain start dancing on the tables. If I let it go on long enough, the tequila starts pouring, and we all know what happens when the tequila starts to flow...clothes start to fall off.

But there is a reason why those workers in my head have bulging muscles, because I send them tons of new information everyday that has to be assimilated and stored properly. Fuckery cannot be allowed to be celebrated for long, so I shut them down pretty quickly with a caravan (If you haven’t seen Stephen Colbert doing the caravan dance...google it now) of truck loads of enlightenment.

The idea of this anthology is for writers, who must be over 40, to submit stories that have an expletive in the title. Some of the writers I can tell have a wonderful relationship with expressing naughty words, and some, I felt, must have just stepped out of a convent...damn, damn, damn, shit. Well, if you haven’t learned how to embrace the full lexicon of cursing by this age, you’re probably never going to master it. For the most part, these stories are PG-13, but there are a few that venture into R rated territory with little or no fear of hitting NC-17. These stories are mostly about the FUCKERY that is life. For me, every time I have something go well, I prepare myself for at least two, if not three, things of pure unadulterated fuckery to offset the brief moment of glowy goodness.

Once you figure out the rules, you just grab your ankles and hope someone brought lube.

My favorite story is Bitch Delivery for Mister Fucker by Remi Savard. I am absolutely riveted by this story. If you have ever seen The War of the Roses(1989) movie with Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas, you’ll have some idea of exactly what is playing out between this married couple while rope climbing up a mountain side. It is a hardboiled beauty of a story with twists and turns and easily the grittiest story in the collection.

The stories I like the least are the obvious pieces of cathartic writing, either involving a scare or a terrible experience in their lives. I would have rather they added more compelling fiction elements to these events to better disguise the looming presence of the writers’ own obsessions with these events in their lives. These pieces come off stilted and, in my opinion, are better exercises to take to a therapist than as pieces for an anthology. Fortunately, there are not many of them, and when I found them, I skipped them, wanting to move on to a story of more interest.

I liked this: ”I was all nerd when I wanted to be all Gatsby.”--Dianne Pearce I’ve been attempting my whole life to be more Gatsby than nerd and rarely succeeded.

Or how about this assessment of the use of writers in Hollywood: ”They’re like dogs on a leash, horses under the whip, cocks in a condom. They’re told the shit to write, it gets bastardized from gestation to birth by too many fucking opinions and unqualified interlopers, and then at the end of the unholy mess we deify directors and actors. It’s the ungodliest of fucks.”--Les Zig

Or how about this visual.
”Now,
all I can do here
is hold my old cock
while I’m pissing,
and wag it at the midnight trains.
--William Butler

I’m not quite to this point yet, but it does seem a distinct possibility that in the future I could be wagging my cock at a passing midnight train, especially if the aforementioned tequila is involved.

”Shakespeare, Where the Fuck Art thou?” by Paulene Turner really fucking pissed me off. The character in this story gets an opportunity to time travel, and what does she do?...plans to go back and assassinate Shakespeare. ”I’m not just doing this for myself, but for all students who have suffered under his pen across the ages.” What the fuck? Every time I review a Shakespeare play or really anything to do with Shakespeare, I’m always hit with many, many comments of people who can’t wait to share with me how much they loathed Shakespeare in high school. I often wish that high schools would quit exposing the bard to all this unmitigated hatred, but then I remember that I was a hayseed when I first experienced Shakespeare in an English class at Phillipsburg High School, and it was a moment that tripped the light fantastic. I was mesmerized by his use of language in a way I could barely understand, but I wanted to understand it. I can only hope there are still a few people like me who find Shakespeare through a reading curriculum and develop a lifelong crush on the language master. So to all you burgeoning time travellers, leave Shakespeare the fuck alone, or I’ll launch my Ninja midgets after you.

I would read a few of these stories each morning before chaining myself to the computer to produce my own slew of words and usually enjoyed my time meeting these writers. Who doesn’t need a bit of fuckery first thing in the morning?

”’Well we...trick your dick.’

‘Trick my dick?’

‘Yeah. A dick trick.’

‘How?’

‘Well, you do wake up with a boner every morning, don’t ya?’

‘Always.’

‘Well, when you get your morning hard-on, just...stick it in.’

‘Brilllliant!’ I say.”--Felix Pire

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Under Occupation by Alan Furst
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

”I’ve read them all, by way of getting to know you. They’re good, Monsieur Ricard, The Waterfront Spy, The Odessa Affair, all of them, and you have something in common with Ambler. Your hero is not a detective, not a government agent. Like Ambler’s Latimer, he’s caught up in the politics of his time. One is sympathetic to Latimer, a rather stodgy college professor thrown into the middle of a secret operation because he writes romans policiers, his way of escaping academic publication. That’s what makes the Ambler novels good. I grew tired of policeman heroes, Simenon’s Maigret and Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie’s detective; I prefer the amateurs, like Latimer. And like you, Monsieur Ricard.”

Paul Ricard is going about his life as best he can under the occupation of the Germans. He is still able to live in his beloved Paris, and he doesn’t want to live anywhere else. He spends most of his days working on his novels and his nights wrapped up in bedsheets with his lover, Romany. She, he suspects, is an aristocrat, possibly a countess, trying to stay out of the clutches of the Germans. Life, despite the circumstances, is pretty good for Ricard.

It all changes when a dying man on the street thrusts a schematic into Ricard’s hands. The war has found him. #TheManWhoKnewTooMuch

There are choices to be made. Is it best to wait for the Americans, or is it more important to do his part? His life is pretty good, better than most, so should he keep his head buried in the fantasy world he creates in his novels, or does he have an obligation to offer his help?

He takes the schematic to the resistance, and his life quickly becomes far more interesting than his novels.

I’ve been reading Alan Furst’s novels since I received a review copy of The World at Night. I wrote up a paragraph of why I liked the book and displayed it below the book. The book became a bestseller in our store for a couple of months (my first experience with the power of a review). We couldn’t keep it or his other books in stock. There is an insatiable need for the type of books Furst is writing. Each one is like watching an alternative version of the movie Casablanca.

I devoured his books. They are sexy, exciting, lyrically written novels about normal people trying to do extraordinary things under remarkable circumstances.

Given my long reading history with Alan Furst, it does pain me to say that some very important elements are missing from this novel. The plot is vintage Furst. I was practically having to wipe dripping saliva from my chin when I read that he was placing a writer of spy thrillers at the center of his new novel. All the pieces are here for another satisfying Furst experience, except it seems he himself is missing.

If anyone knows if Furst has been kidnapped and replaced by an alien host body, please do inform me. I would appreciate knowing if he has permanently escaped to the South of France and just sent the outline of his novel to the publisher to be uploaded into a computer software program to write a simulation of a Furst novel. Something drastically went wrong.

The book is short, barely breaking 200 pages. The writing is stilted and lacks all that lyrical, lush grace that I’ve come to expect from Furst. This feels like the outline of a novel, the first Furst draft without all those beautiful nuances that make his novels so enticing and fulfilling experiences. Any editor worth a pillar of salt should have read this and said, Alan, this is critically underwritten.

Am I disappointed? Hell yes, I’m disappointed. I save Furst novels for when I need a mental boost of oozing, thrilling goodness. So, if you haven’t read a Furst novel, don’t begin here. Most people consider The Polish Officer to be one of his best novels, and I don’t disagree. See Furst at his best before you see him at his worst.

I hope this is an anomaly and that the next Furst novel sees him back on top of his game.

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The Charleston Knife is Back in Town by Ralph Dennis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

”You can beef about the deficiency of political correctness, but twenty years from now they’ll be beefing about our lack of political correctness on some subject or another that we now think we are hip to. And too much political correctness is the enemy of truth, and certainly there are times when fiction is not about pretty manners but should ring the true bells of social conditions and expression. Erasing what is really going on, even in popular fiction, doesn’t do anyone any favors. Righteous political correctness has its place, but political correct police do not.”--Joe Lansdale from the Introduction

Interestingly enough, the publisher, Brash Books, was so worried about offending some readers that they put an additional word of warning after the introduction. ”This book was originally published in 1974 and reflects the cultural and sexual attitudes, language, and politics of the period.”

I understand the need for these warnings for there are many self-righteous, PC people who spend each day hoping that they will encounter some poor bastard who happens to say something that doesn’t conform to their socially elite vision of proper conduct. They pounce on books or magazine articles that may have been written 50 or a 100 years ago and deem them unfit to be read by a modern reader because they contain scenes or references that are racist or sexist. The perception of political correctness has been warped from its original intention by those who embrace it and by those who loathe it.

Correctness is a word that raises the hackles of a majority of people. ”The noun ‘correctness’ connotes approval and radiates authority. It indicates, with an imperative tone, that something should be done in a particular way. In this regard, the term political correctness can evoke the feeling of being talked down to and even subordinated.”--By Dr. Anna Szilágyi

Political Correctness is a terrible name for something that is so important to defining how we see ourselves. Once something becomes political, you’ve already lost half the people who will never embrace anything their political rivals deem important. We all dislike being corrected, so the use of the word correctness is like waving a red flag in front of an enraged bull. All the person sees is red.

Therefore, we all need guidelines to help us navigate modern culture without insulting someone, and with the added sensitivities of what has been referred to as a snowflake generation, it is not difficult to insult someone. Truth is deemed by some to be less important than being politically correct. It may be more important, in my opinion, to work on basic manners. Maybe Political Correctness should be changed to Proper Manners.

So my problem is, I perfectly understand both sides of this hot potato issue and find myself appalled by racist and sexist comments, but also very uneasy at the idea of censoring the past. So as I read a book like this, a book that was written for a male audience back in 1974 with the idea that it was meant as entertainment for an accountant who for a few minutes every day could add some spice to his dreary world by riding along with Jim Hardman and Hump Evans, I can understand the appeal. They are men of action. Men who are standing in the breach, defending those who can’t defend themselves, drinking too much, and chasing trim. (Trim is a perfect example of a word in regular use in the 1970s that is not acceptable for use today.) The accountant probably wonders daily how his life became so boring and daydreams in Walter Mitty fashion about something, anything, exciting occuring in his day. Maybe Ralph Dennis helped bring some color to the dull palette of his life.

I wonder if Ralph Dennis would be amused by Joe Lansdale defending him or the publisher’s note of warning? Books are obviously still dangerous things, and certainly, I hope a few hardy souls venture into the Hardman/Evans novels to experience the grit and lexicon of the 1970s and emerge without suffering any undue harm or needing a language detox to re-enter our PC world.

You might be asking yourself, this is all fine and good, Jeffrey, but what the fuck is the book about? Here is my flash revie.

Hump Evans attends a gambling party after a boxing match, and he, along with many heavy hitters in the underworld and boardrooms of Atlanta, are robbed by five brash kids. Jim Hardman and Evans attempt to find these kids before the hitman called The Charleston Knife can give them a permanent smile below their chins.

”On our way out, passing the platform, Heddy squatted and did a bit of farewell crotch-whip at us. Hump gave her the peace sign and we went outside, away from the smoke and the scent of all that green rank fantasy.”

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The Cabinet of Curiosities by Douglas Preston
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

”There, impaled on the horns of the triceratops, hung a body, naked from the waist up, arms and legs hanging loose. Three bloody horns stuck right through the man’s back. It looked as if the triceratops had gored the person, hoisting him into the air.”

The investigation into the mystery begins with the finding of 36 dismembered bodies under a construction site, but the mystery itself dates back 130 years ago. One of the bodies has a note sewn into her dress with her name and address written in her own blood. She knew she was going to die, but she couldn’t bear the thought that no one would know who she was when and if her corpse is ever found.

There is something damned poignant about that.

Special Agent Pendergast is assigned to the New Orleans office, which doesn’t seem to slow him down from poking his long, aristocratic nose into this odd finding in New York. It isn’t a murder case, after all; the murderer should be long dead. This is more of a case for archaeologists, not curious FBI agents. He is rather a strange duck though. ”The whole thing was a joke. The FBI agent looked more like an undertaker than a cop, with his black suit, blond-white hair, and movie-cliche accent. He wondered how such a piece of work ever got his ass through Quantico.”

Pendergast is a font of the type of information that some would call trivia, but those of us who strive to be renaissance people tend to see it as our palace of knowledge that allows us to make more connections with everything we experience and everything we read...enhancing our enjoyment of travelling, reading, and all other aspects of life. Pendergast is my kind of weird.

Pendergast enlists the aid of Nora Kelly from the Museum of Natural History, the site of Preston and Child’s fantastic first book in the series…Relic. After all, this is a case more suited to an archaeologist than a detective, though really aren’t archaeologists and detectives basically doing the same work? Kelly has no idea how much helping Pendergast is going to fuck up her already tenuous hold on a career at the museum. There are powerful dark forces that are manipulating events from the shadows. Every day the construction site is put on hold while Kelly investigates the sparse evidence still remaining with the bodies is costing some rich bastard more money.

What becomes readily apparent is that the more recent deaths by a serial killer called The Surgeon are somehow related to these ancient murders more than a century ago. How is that possible? And what is Pendergast’s connection to the primary suspect in the construction site murders?

A murderer is reaching across history for yet another series of victims.

The Preston and Child books are cerebral and yet action packed. They are well paced stories that allow readers to feel like they are learning something, even as their heart rate escalates as the situation for our heroes becomes more tenuous. Stopping the forces of evil, whether they reside in the boardroom or skulk about in the fog of night prove equally dangerous.

Highly recommended for those readers who want more from their pleasure reading than the standard best seller list drivel.

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The Gun by Fuminori Nakamura
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

”The thing was that I had found it. The same way that, for instance, some people found pleasure drawing pictures or making music, or they relied on work or women, drugs or religion, I felt like I had discovered what I was passionate about. And for me, that thing was nothing more than the gun. There was nothing wrong with me. That’s what I realized. And I started to relax--I lit a cigarette and leaned back in my chair.”

Nishikawa stumbles upon a dead man in the street. When corpses are in coffins slathered with makeup to make them look as if they are sleeping peacefully, they hold a certain amount of fascination for some people, but finding a sprawled dead body in the street...well, you’ve stepped right in the middle of death. Moments ago someone was alive and now they are departed. This is raw death before the ensuing packaging for disposal can begin. As interesting as a corpse with a bullet hole through its head would be, Nishikawa is more mesmerized by the shiny metal object in the man’s hand.

He picks it up, taking it with him. It is a revolver with four bullets. Over the next several days, he can’t stop looking at it, stroking it, and thinking about using it. ”Once again, its overwhelming beauty and presence did not disappoint. I felt as though I might be transported--that is to say, that the world within myself could be unlocked--I felt full of such possibilities.”

When you consider that there are more guns in the United States than there are people and there are nearly zero guns in Japan, the chances of Nishikawa finding a gun on the street are astronomical, but if he were walking around the right neighborhood in the United States, he might see a small arsenal within the space of a few blocks. I can remember one time I was in LA and pulled into a convenience store to get gas. This was back in the day when you had to prepay, but the pumps were not necessarily set up for credit cards. I was waiting in line at the register behind this kid who couldn’t have been more than ten. He was pulling stuff out of his pocket, trying to find enough change to pay for his Mountain Dew, and among the many things he plunked on the counter was a revolver...as casually as if it were a stick of gum. The attendant merely gave it a glance. He probably had a sawed off shotgun clipped under the counter, so that peashooter was not something worthy of worry.

I grew up with guns. To me, they were just a tool, like a hammer or a screwdriver. We had a rifle in every vehicle in case we needed to put down a cow that was suffering with a bullet behind the ear or scare off some coyotes who were trying to bring down a newborn calf. We did hunt some, but hunting was more for the leisure classes who seemed particularly fascinated in proving their manhood every year by killing something. During most hunting seasons, we just tried not to get shot by some city slicker from Denver who had more gun than he had brains.

People are fascinated by guns. They might be afraid of them, or they might be obsessed with them, but rarely are people neutral about guns. I get asked frequently by people what it is like to shoot a real gun, as most of the guns they have used have been pixelated on TV screens while playing a video game. Nishikawa should have gone his whole life without ever even seeing a gun, but here he is polishing one every night like a blue barrelled cock. The need to release, to spray those bullets into someone, something, is becoming an infatuation. It isn’t enough to simulate it happening in his brain anymore; he needs the real thing. It is porn versus real life.

He has girlfriends. He seems to be a reasonably attractive guy. One of his girlfriends he calls Toast Girl (he can’t remember her name) because she fixed him toast for breakfast after a night of desultory intercourse. Another one is named Yuko. ”Today she had again been wearing a short skirt, and when she leaned forward I had seen her pale breasts. I felt satisfied with the way I had behaved today. Tomorrow, I thought, I would ask her out for a drink. But then again, if we ended up doing it, I felt as if the fun would end for me there. I wanted to have sex with her, but once we had done it, I would probably get bored.” These scenes reminded me of the Bret Easton Ellis novel Less than Zero. World weary kids who think they’ve done it all and seen it all, and nothing interesting is ever going to happen to them again.

Nishikawa is not stimulated by his university studies nor by the flocks of beautiful girls. He has too much free time on his hands and lacks the imagination to know how to fill that time...until he finds the gun.

The tension mounts nicely as we start to realize that Nishikawa is going to do something stupid. I found myself running the possibilities through my head and not liking any of them. He has changed as a person, having that gun on his person. He feels more significant, as if the gun has made him taller and stronger. He does realize that his relationship with the gun has changed. ”I’m not the one using the gun, I thought. The gun is using me.”

The story takes on more weight being set in Japan than if it had been set in the United States. They have such a different cultural relationship with guns than we do. Last year, nearly 40,000 Americans died from gun related deaths. (Interesting enough about the same number of people are killed in car related accidents. It is sort of staggering to think that if we eliminate guns and cars from our lives nearly 80,000 more Americans each year would live longer lives.) If a pandemic hit the United States and killed that many people, there would be panic in the streets. There would be a consensus among all Americans to do something to keep more people from dying from whatever the threat might be...well, except for guns. We love our guns. We love our guns more than we love our children’s lives. Somehow gun ownership became political, and like with anything political in the modern era of American politics, that means that a consensus on sensible gun control is impossible to achieve.

Oh and by the way, the number of Japanese killed by firearms every year is nearly zero. Even lower if Nishikawa had never found that gun.

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The Poriferous Darkness by Lars Boye Jerlach
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

”Before we get properly acquainted please allow me to introduce myself: My name is Thaddeus C. Noble and I currently reside in an unfinished stone tower, on the otherwise uninhabited island somewhere along the North Atlantic coast of the United States of America. Although, when I say that the island is uninhabited it is not strictly true. Besides the ever present sea, I do have a companion. He is a jet black Raven that I perhaps for obvious reasons named Poe.”

In the dead of night, Thaddeus has a hood thrown over his head. He is bound and bundled off without a by-your-leave from his captors. He awakes to find himself on an island with the aforementioned bird, a well stocked pantry, a stack of bottles, and no indication as to why he has been placed in captivity upon these rocky shores. While exploring the island he finds a pool of a heavy liquid that is not water but seems to be a living entity with the texture of liquid silk. While immersed in this pool, he dreams, or does he really see the truth? The blending of his mundane life and these fantastical stories becomes the story of his life. He soon puts the bottles to use. He pens missives of his plight and relates stories that his feverious imagination believes to be true. He places these letters into the bottles, seals them with wax, and flings them out in the ocean in the hopes that someone will someday read them.

Thaddeus is, by his own admission, an ordinary man, certainly not a rich man or a man who will be missed. He walks through life as gray as the sidewalks he trudges upon. He even avoids the bawdy house, located so conveniently at the end of his employer’s block, though someone so devoid of human contact would certainly benefit from even the purchased caresses of a demimondaine. ”Not that he didn’t have the urge. As a matter of fact, the young soft skinned girls looking down on the street from the upper windows, scanning the street with vacant eyes, looking for something or other to occupy their weary minds, were quite frequently unwitting but amenable companions in his nightly fantasies. However, the main reason he didn’t go was because he was deeply afraid that none of the girls would notice him, and although he was used to an exceptional high level of abandon, he nevertheless feared that the spurning or avoidance of a girl of easy virtue would exceed the amount of rejection he could bear.”

Of course, what someone needs to explain to Thaddeus is these girls of easy virtue will never ignore him, especially with a fistful of proffered cash.

So the question remains, why would someone kidnap such a nondescript man and go to all the trouble of Robinson Crusoeing him?

And why won’t the damn bird talk to him?

Thaddeus knows he can talk. He knows he can understand him, but Poe steadfastly refuses to converse with him. With what Thaddeus is seeing while immersed in the pool, he would relish the ability to chat with someone, even a raven, about what exactly he is seeing. Thank goodness the whale talks to him, but the whale seems decidedly less informed than what Thaddeus knows Poe can tell him. Poe could be the key to understanding everything.

Wait, a talking whale? Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned that. You’ll start to believe this reviewer has become as barmy as Ahab.

As far as the bird, if I were Thaddeus I might start to consider what raven soup will taste like with maybe a side salad of wild lettuce.

I have known Lars Boye Jerlach for a number of years. I harass him. He harasses me. He takes time out of his busy schedule to read some of my desultory attempts at writing. He loves words. If words were a prostitute, he would lavish all of his money on her. If words were cake, he would be corpulent. If words were Scotch, he’d be a drunk. He is, without a doubt, a Sesquipedalian.

Before everyone burns up the internet googling the word, I will supply the definition. A sesquipedalian is described as someone or something that overuses big words, like a philosophy professor. I take exception with the concept of the word “overuses” though. In an age of diminishing vocabulary, I must say it is refreshing to find myself luxuriating in the opulence of words, many of which have nearly disappeared from our vocabulary. I did have to blow the dust off of a few of these words before the meaning became clear, but after reading several recent novels that failed to challenge my knowledge of vocabulary, I was enjoying and, yes, occasionally laughing at the audacity of Jerlach to use some of these words like... nugatory or how about tintinnabulated?

If you are feeling anxiety at the thought of wrestling with words, strangle that thought, murder that thought, become a serial killer of such thoughts. Don’t allow such fears to make you miss a good story. Nay more than that, you will miss an experience. So use your fingers to tweezer a few messages from the depths of Thaddeus’s bottles, and if you live on the coast of New England, peer out across the horizon and wonder...where could he be?

”Even the darkness at night is poriferous, like our memory. Enough to allow just a passable amount of light for us to see things that we would rather were kept buried in the impenetrable layers of the cold blackish mud of the river Styx.”

Word of Warning! Do tie a stout cord about yourself before venturing into The Poriferous Darkness. I've heard there are readers who have become lost and are now hurling their own bottled missives into the ocean with the hope that one of us will read them.

I challenged Lars to a thumb war, and fortunately, for a Viking, he has weak thumbs. After much cursing and copious swillings of cheap ale, he shook off his misgivings and decided to answer my questions.

Jeffrey D. Keeten: Your books revolve around an ancient and now nearly extinct form of communication. We have a generation or two of people who have never written or received a letter. Certainly, because people were writing letters without autocorrect, more consideration, more pondering was given to what they were going to write before they ever set pen to paper. Letters have been of such historical importance to scholarship that one wonders if generations in the future will know less about us than our ancestors. Our digital communications are so disposable it is hard to imagine that they will be available for future historians. Are we living in what will prove to be a lost age of communication?

Lars Boye Jerlach: I think about this all the time, especially in lieu of the younger generation mainly communicating in the language of icons, snapchat, and emojis. However, I’m also aware that we historically have passed information in hieroglyphs, sanskrit, runes, and other forms of imagery that in many ways mirrors contemporary iconography. If you look at the paintings in the Lascaux Cave that basically depicts simple forms from the world around the people who painted them, they are not too different from a contemporary approach to utilizing simple understandable images in communication. There’s always a danger that we historically will look back at this age as the era of lost communication, but I have faith in the inherent power of the written word, and I believe that future generations will be able to decipher and understand where we are coming from, although they might have a much depleted “traditional” information to draw upon.

JDK: I think of your books as the Letters trilogy because missives play a major part in the plots of each book. Do you have a more spicy or interesting title for the trilogy? And is this going to remain a trilogy or do you plan to add more volumes to this particular body of work?

LBJ: Although I never intended for the independent novels to be read consecutively, and thus have never really thought about a combined title, you are certainly not the only reader who thinks about this body of work as a trilogy. Besides the structural and formal use of letters that obviously connects the novels, there are several references in the later books that decidedly point to characters and/ or situations in the earlier novels that hopefully bring a self-referential and introspective feel to the entire body of work. At this point I’m not sure that I will add more volumes to this particular body of work, but as my mind often wanders along very similar lines of enquiry I am keeping my options open.

JDK: You work with a small cast of characters, which really helps focus the plot. I have so many characters coming and going in my writing you would think I was Balzac, so I do envy your ability to keep such a tight control on your character list.This small cast also contributes to a general feeling of loneliness. You might be only second to Anita Brookner in your exploration of isolation and people who don't fit in easily to normal society. Where does all this loneliness in your work come from?

LBJ: The subject of loneliness in literature is so profound and complex that it is difficult to address in just a couple of sentences, but I have obviously been influenced by writers in history who have so successfully introduced the concept of loneliness in their work. Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Herman Melville's Ahab, Franz Kafka’s Joseph K, Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way, Ernest Hemingway's Old Man of the Sea, and many existentialist writers, such as Sartre, De Beauvoir, and Camus, have all impacted the way I think about this issue. I have come to think of my characters' inherent loneliness as an intermittent literary loneliness as well as a poetic situational loneliness. I believe that a certain amount of loneliness is of great use to writers, musicians, artists, thinkers, and other creatives, and that there must be a newfound tolerance for not only being alone, but for the sense of solitude that brings a greater understanding of self to the surface.

JDK: Is English your second or third language? Your command of the English language reminds me of Joseph Conrad, who learned English in his twenties and yet left an indelible imprint on the English language. I have this image of you with your OED open on your desk with a magnifying glass dangling on a chain around your neck. I frequently found myself smiling when I would run across one of your more obscure words. I enjoy being challenged by your word choices, but when I was going through college, the mantra was, if there is an easier word...use it. Most of the books being published now feel like they have been written at an eighth grade reading level. You obviously reject the notion of easier is better, and by choosing these more obscure words you leave the seasoning in your sentences. Talk to me about the way you go about selecting words?

LBJ:Though it is my second language, I exclusively read and write in English. I completely understand that I’m swimming against the continuous stream of easy reads, but I fundamentally reject the notion that easier is better. I probably think about the word use in the same way a painter thinks about slight differences in color or a musician thinks about nuances in tonality. I believe a single word can be an incredibly powerful tool when used selectively, and I think a lot about the structure of sentences and how each word fits within the context when I write.

JDK: I have this silver Hopi bolo tie of the man in the maze. The cover of The Poriferous Darkness reminds me of that same motif. I think your choice is perfect to reflect the theme of the book. I guess you didn't hear that orange is the new black. :-) Symbolism is important in your books, so how much did you agonize over the design?

LBJ:Someone once mentioned that orange is the new black, but I didn’t believe them, or rather I chose to ignore it……
As with the other novels, I forwarded a brief synopsis to my designer Kyle Fletcher. He designed the cover art with very little additional input from me, so I really didn’t agonize over the design at all. I completely trust his discerning eye, and in my opinion he has perfected the link between the cover and the content in all three books.

JDK: What is next for Lars Boye Jerlach the writer? When can we expect a new book from you, and what type of book will it be?

I have a lot of other irons in the fire at the moment, and I honestly haven’t had the time to sit down and think about my next steps. I will obviously continue to write, but at this stage I can’t really tell you what is next for me. Perhaps I’ll try my hand at something completely different, but I have a strange feeling that when I start writing again, it’s going to be in the same vein as the other novels. I somehow seem unable to resist the temptation of pursuing scenarios of enforced loneliness, so who knows? The next book could quite possibly involve an astronaut…

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