Tag Archives: News Views & Reviews

DIME THREE: He’s Back! (Nolan, That Is)

July 5, 2021Crime Fiction, Pulp FictionCrime Fiction, Donald Westlake, Dropping A Dime, Hard Boiled Fiction, Hard Case Crime, Max Allen Collins, News Views & Reviews, Nolan, Nolan Saga, Parker, Pulp Fiction, Richard Stark, Skim Deep, Two For The MoneyNuallain House, Publishers

I gotta come clean. Once again the gang at Hard Case Crime have crossed the transom with the requisite paper in the form of two novels in the Nolan series by Max Allen Collins. If Dime Pulp were a legit operation, we might expect more, but since it isn’t, we don’t. The latest from Hard Case Crime did keep these offices burning the midnight oeil. Not due to a guilty conscience, however, but in pursuit of guilty pleasure, i.e., reading crime fiction.

To make up for the gap in our limited knowledge of the Nolan saga, those Hard Case types bookended these offices with the original Collins foray into Nolan territory, and then an encore, as a wrap up to an epic crime career, written thirty three years later. Collins’ origin stories for the Nolan and Jon characters begin in a novella titled Bait Money, a boy meets thief story, in which the bond between apprentice and master is forged and sets the tone for all the Nolan-centric adventures to follow.

Hard Case Crime has reprinted four novellas from that late 80s period, Two For The Money and Double Down (reviewed in Dropping A Dime Two) each in the twofer format, which will be joining another two (four) titles slated for publication in 2022 and 2023. Skim Deep, the encore curtain call for Nolan and Jon, is novel length in its own right.

The incredibly prolific pulp polymath Max Allen Collins is a Hard Case Crime franchise author, it should be noted, Mickey Spillane’s heir apparent, and author of the Quarry assassin series (also well represented under the Hard Case Crime imprint). In the author’s note to Two For The Money, Collins reveals that the idea for the title and the plot of the first story, Bait Money, was inspired by his girlfriend who worked in a bank. The story starts off solid with a portrayal of Nolan, heist meister extraordinaire, trying to smooth things over with the mob over his killing of one of the bosses’ relatives. The mobster wants a blood price and Nolan has to find a way to pay it. Enter Jon, a comic book aficionado and amateur who has come up with a plan to take down a local bank. Needless to say it’s a bad plan, but the pro sees a way of fixing it and potentially clearing his debt. And naturally there are double crosses, unfaithful women, killing, and last minute glitches.

The Nolan character, Collins admits, is based on Richard Stark’s Parker. And to fix him in the reader’s mind, he is described as looking like Lee Van Cleef. If you were reading Bait Money when it was first published, you would know who Lee Van Cleef was and what he looked like. For the new generation of readers, Hard Case Crime has commissioned covers featuring the likeness of a Van Cleef-ish looking protagonist. And while Parker is a meticulously formulated character, Nolan, ostensibly just as tough, is humanized by taking on an heir apparent in Jon who also adds some comic (book) relief as it is his naivete that informs the narrative. There the resemblance ends, due primarily to a difference in styles.

Donald Westlake’s Richard Stark, author of the Parker novels, presents a casebook for the terse, uncompromisingly “stark,” stoic, “just the facts, ma’am,” Joe Friday deadpan voiceover narration. It is a style Stark is known for, and one admired by countless crime fiction buffs and aspiring writers. The economy of the prose finds it source in an older generation of writers who knew the value of counting words, as they were paid by the word, and well aware of the editorial constraints on length. The Parker novels may be formulaic but they have an edge that never gets dull. Combined with nearly imperceptible cinematic scene transitions and you have a style well worth emulating.

Max Allen Collins’ Nolan stories have what might be termed an improvisational discursive style, aka the kitchen sink approach, in which everything you need to know (cue Ed McMahon) about the characters’ looks, motivations, hopes, fears, hangnails, and warts are presumed open secrets from the discourse of the omniscient narrator who does not hesitate to tell the reader how it is. Collins is a good storyteller whose style is no style, just a recounting of the honest to goodness facts of a story that is too good to be true and bound to go south at any point, and of course that’s what the reader is looking for behind the feints and dodges, and seemingly untenable albeit predictable situations.

In some sense Parker doesn’t seem to have a future, going from one heist to another, scrabbling to stay even. Nolan, on the other hand, is trying to get just enough ahead so he can open up a snazzy club while staying out of the clutches of the mob. He wants to retire from the heist biz and lead a normal and happy life without a .32 Colt breathing down his neck. It would be difficult to make Nolan into a petty bourgeois but he has the dreams of one, a quintessential American dream, though with more than a little tang of cynicism. Parker is an untamed animal, a force of nature, with which nature will deal.

The second novella in Two For The Money is titled Blood Money in which the bonding between Nolan and Jon solidifies in their quest for revenge against the men who killed Jon’s guardian uncle, the “Planner” (shades of Dortmunder). The “eye for an eye” theme is big in the Bible Belt Midwest where most of the action takes place: Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Wisconsin, anywhere the mob and fundamentalism might have its tentacles. There are no shortages of derring-do, shootouts, kidnappings, and miraculous rescues. Enough twists and turns to keep the pages turning, a few slapstick moments to offset the more compelling business of getting the money and getting revenge, and the hedging justifications for that chosen lifestyle of outlier/outlaw. Yet there are consequences: that butterfly whose butt you kicked is going to come back around in the form of a homicidal maniac looking to get even. And take all the money.

Can an author go back to a character thirty three years later and pick up where he left off? What will have changed in experience and maturity of style? These are question the curious reader might ask as they dip into Skim Deep, the epilogue to the Nolan saga, the last ride into the Acapulco sunset.

Nolan is retired from the heist biz with that snazzy club he always wanted and the soft life is making him sentimental so he pops the question to his longtime live-in gf. Enter Vegas, where Jon now resides trying to make a living as a comic book artist keyboardist for a casino cover band and where Nolan and his bride-to-be are heading to get hitched. Enter, also, revenge, in the form of “Maw” Comfort, matriarch of a clan of crooks from (where else?) Missouri, three of whose members Nolan has had to eliminate for stepping on the toes of his thief’s integrity and going for the double cross. And, of course, money, the root of all robbery, in the form of a casino skim. This one time, the coming together of the retired robber and his now journeyman partner is not with the object to plan a job but to celebrate and “legalize” a relationship about which Jon’s feelings are ambivalent (incidentally). Not to spoil all the machinations of the plot, but like a Jacques Tati movie, everything that goes around, comes around and meets at the intersection in a head-on collision. The pitch might be spun as: they fall in shit and come out smelling like roses.

As for the difference in style, Collins has not abandoned his fussy omniscient narrator nor the breezy improvisational writing style. The sex scenes have improved in detail if not in sensitivity. In the portrayal of Jon, Collins allows more of the autobiographical nature of the character emerge (which has always been there on one level of emphasis or another). That the main action does not take place in the Quad Cities area somehow ups the ante on the techniques of graphic violence. In Skim Deep, the pulp adventure returns to its roots as a Western, and Collins’ long expertise in the pulp genre skillfully brings about the denouement to everyone’s (characters included) satisfaction.

To read in this crime fiction genre is to discover something about the American psyche, the deep rooted divide of oblivious well-off swells and the continual rebellion of the have-nots who want theirs. The symbolic outlaw then becomes valorized to justify contravening societal norms as a leveling of the playing field, a kind of grass roots communism, a Utopic equitable community. Yet the myth of egalitarianism posits a level playing field in which universal values are applied equally when obviously this is never the case—the “nature” of humans intervenes—hierarchies or boundaries are created depending on the circumstances. Idealized individuals (such as Nolan and Parker) stand symbolically for the masses, and differences are glossed over to align with the symbolic outlier outlaws who are too unruly to fit into the narrow category of convention and reside at the periphery where dogs howl to be let in, but flee the multitude once the gates are opened (thus their tantalizing mystery). Fiction can only deal these issues a glancing blow in the hazy nostalgia for a way it has never been.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it,
Perry O’Dickle
for Dime Pulp

Dropping A Dime—One

May 5, 2021Crime Fiction, Pulp FictionBasil's War, Blue Rider Press, Catalina Eddy, Crime Fiction, Daniel Pyne, Dave's Pulp and Mystery Reads, Dropping A Dime, Kevin Burton Smith, Mysterious Press, News Views & Reviews, novella, Paperback Warrior, Pulp Fiction, Stephen Hunter, The Thrilling DetectiveNuallain House, Publishers

by Perry “The Professor” O’Dickle

Catalina Eddy, A Novel in Three Decades, Daniel Pyne, Blue Rider Press, 2017
Basil’s War, Stephen Hunter, Mysterious Press, 2021

Primarily utilized in YA fiction, the novella is perhaps underrated as a form ideally suited for the terse, largely cinematic, action focused prose that characterizes much of crime fiction. Ranging from approximately 120 to 200 pages, the novella shares qualities with the screenplay in that its length is more or less analogues to a 90 or 120 minute feature as well as with its emphasis on dialogue in developing the story. Pulp fiction’s breezy, sly, ironic, idiomatic, sardonic, satirical, prone to hyperbole style of storytelling, couched largely in the American vernacular, constitutes much of its entertainment value. Pulp fiction has always been about the reading experience as entertainment. Driven by the action needed to keep the reader’s attention and the constraints of its length, the novella doesn’t have time to waste with aimless ruminations, flabby Freudian conjecture, or Clancy Bloat, aka geek bait (really just footnotes inserted into the narrative), that invariably activates the “cut-to-the-chase” mode to scan the page looking for something germane to jump out. The crisp concision of the novella is its charm, a quick easygoing read demanding no more than a suspension of belief in the turning of a page.

As per example, the successful utilization of the novella as a medium for pulp fiction is well illustrated in the two books under review, Catalina Eddy, A Novel in Three Decades by Daniel Pyne (Blue Rider Press, 2017), and Basil’s War by Stephen Hunter (Mysterious Press, 2021).

Catalina Eddy is in effect three novellas under one cover: 1. The Big Empty, taking place in 1954, 132pp; 2. Losertown, in 1987, 170pp; 3. Portuguese Bend, 2016, 168pp. All the action in each time frame begins in the June gloom following the May gray of the Southern California coastal climate. The Catalina eddy is a weather pattern feature (as one of the characters explains), and weather is the ground against which these stories are set, how it influences moods as a gripe about something you can’t do anything about, a SoCal regional trope much as was Raymond Chandler’s Santa Ana winds.

Heavy in irony, pulp references and allusions, Catalina Eddy might be classified as meta-pulp. The tough guy narration of The Big Empty, a play on The Big Sleep, has a Chandleresque sense of place (LA) although the prose style is more reminiscent of a later generation lean and mean PI pulps. If there is any doubt as to its ironic undercurrent, the PI’s name is Lovely. TV reportage of the atomic bomb tests on Bikini Atoll that open the first novella serves as a political time stamp, as does Reagan’s war on drugs and California politics in Losertown aka San Diego, and the new century’s dysfunction of obscene wealth contrasted with the corruption, greed, and poverty that it is built upon, set in the contemporaneous Portuguese Bend.

The Big Empty, also a nod to Ellroy’s The Big Nowhere, employs many PI tropes: the PI gets his phone messages at an Asian grocers, his office is a counter in a coffee shop, hangs out in a jazz club, in love with the chanteuse, and so on—he may be a tough guy but he’s a soft touch. Pulp fiction aficionados will likely get all the PI nods and nudges. The ironic twist is that the de rigueur body the PI stumbles upon also happens to be that of his ex-wife. In the process of investigating her murder, he encounters a religious cult and a government protected scientist who is a serial killer. The Big Empty offers a cleanly delineated, no frills narrative, all straight lines and right angles as if it were a kind of pulp Cubism.

Losertown opens on a Deputy US Attorney briefing his new boss, an evil Nixon appointed female US Attorney ideologue, as well as the affair he’s having with a married FBI agent. Of the three novellas, this is the most subtly nuanced. A drug bust of a wealthy former surfer and smuggler is used to pressure the mayor of Losertown. The twist is that the man they bust is innocent of the charges and has to endure the inept politically framed machinations of the government that lead to the death of his partner and the destruction of everything he has. Throw in a firefight with a rightwing nut job and a subtle resolution revelation at the end to tie things up and you have a nicely framed story. Pyne’s screenwriter chops serve him well here. He doesn’t miss a beat.

Portuguese Bend is probably the most lyrical of the three novellas, thanks in part to Susan Sontag’s writing on photography, as its protagonist is a freelance crime photographer working for the Long Beach Police Department, a nod to Arthur Fellig aka Weegee, who has an intuitive feel for framing his crime scene shots verging on artistic genius. A doctored photo leads the photographer to suspect the cover up of a shootout that left a female undercover cop paralyzed from the waist down. Enter the wheelchair and shades of Ironsides, the cop and the photographer team up to get to the bottom of a murder that involves crooked cops and a homicide detective by the name of Terry Lennox (!). The title, Portuguese Bend, refers to a geographical feature on the southern coast of the Palos Verde peninsula, incidentally the wealthiest zip code in the US, located west of the urban sprawl of the greater Los Angeles area, and where the Catalina eddy wind pattern is often centered. There’s a pop feel to the last story in this masterful triptych of crime fiction, a certain ineffable casualness in the pacing and attention to the characters who, despite the flying bullets and impossible situations, get to ride off into the sunset, a Southern California sunset once the coastal fog clears.

Each novella evokes a style consistent to the era in which they are set: classic first person voiceover, law & order procedural, and HD Widescreen pilot. Additionally, the device of having a peripheral character in one novella become a central figure in a subsequent story works as a subtle linkage connecting a sequence of well told tales.

Daniel Pyne is the author of five novels, including Catalina Eddy, and a raft of TV and screen writing credits, among them Miami Vice and the remake of The Manchurian Candidate.

Stephen Hunter’s Basil’s War from Mysterious Press hit the stands yesterday (5/4/21). Its 288 printed pages doesn’t qualify it as a novella, but the wide margins, line spacing and font size would argue for fewer pages in manuscript (perhaps by 88?). But no matter, Basil’s War is a gem, a scrumptious hors d’ oeuvre from the author of the Bob Lee Swagger sniper franchise, and a perfect example of the succinctness and directness a novella demands.

Basil St. Florian, a British playboy and wealthy ne’er-do-well, a kind of ginger David Niven now serving in British Army Intelligence, possesses just the right mix of duplicity and audacity to make him, in the later years of World War II, a perfect spy. His mission is to track down a handwritten manuscript from the 17^th century which holds a clue to the identity of a mole in the British cryptography section at Bletchley Hall, and for which he must parachute behind enemy lines, get to Paris, photograph the manuscript, which he does (of course), all the while staying one step of the SS and German intelligence, and somehow getting back to HQ in London with the goods. The novel follows a fairly straightforward story arc, replicating the tone of popular fiction of that day as is found in the G8 & His Flying Aces adventures, except that it is British, very British, and very droll (a French loan word).

One of the tells of a potentially good story is an E. B. White opening (“Where’s Papa going with that ax?”), usually the first sentence, but at least within in the space of the first few paragraphs. Basil’s War opens tantalizingly with tantalizing dialogue. The reader is transported to a boudoir and the arch repartee of its two occupants, male and female, one of whom but not both could be David Niven or Maureen O’Hara. The depiction is that of a Hollywood war movie in grainy black and white. But it is wit and sparkling language that powers Basil’s War as the action slaloms between the mission briefing and the actuality of getting to Paris, paced cinematically so that there is always new information or new action. The technical and period details are authoritative but not overwhelmingly so and key to the clever denouement. The witty ironic dialogue with a touch of Wildean bite could have been lifted from a Noel Coward play. All of it is amusing, quite accurate, and very well done.

The reader must wonder at one point whether the author had as much enjoyment in writing it as the reader has in reading it. The added bonus is that Basil’s War is a master’s class on how to write succinctly with the spare deftness of a journalist’s touch. As a former film critic for The Washington Post, Hunter is knowledgeable in the art of storytelling employed by the cinema, how the action unfolds with each revelation, building to the surprise resolution in perfectly timed steps. Besides the writing, which is terrific, the plot lines are tied together with cunning plot turns appropriate for all those who wish to experience their guilty pleasures. A number of famous names from that period are provided with cameo appearances, among them Winston Churchill and Alan Turing, and a well-known film couple that dropping a dime on would spoil the clincher. If there is such a thing as proof to the pudding, i.e., the novella, it is found in these pages.

Stephen Hunter, former film critic for The Washington Post, is the chief honcho of the successful Bob Lee Swagger franchise, and a Pulitzer Prize recipient for Criticism in 2003.

Word Out:

A shout out to Dave of Dave’s Pulp And Mystery Reads for his amazing pulp bibliographic blog which has done wonders for my reading list.

Also to The Thrilling Detective’s Kevin Burton Smith for a really terrific site focused on the permutations of the iconic private eye.

And last but not least, the guys at the Paperback Warrior blog and podcast for their expert commentary on various and sundry aspects of paperback novels.