Duane Swierczynski + Allan Guthrie: New Books
The point of a thriller is to be exciting enough to force you to read it in single sitting, which is what I did last week with Duane Swierczynski’s brand-new Severance Package.
A character with a familiar first name has to work on the weekend:
His name was Ethan Goines --
-- and his hangover wasn’t just a condition; it was a living creature, nestled with the meat of his brain, gnawing at the fat gray noodles, savoring them, and, as a cocktail, absorbing all available moisture from the rest of his body. The skin on his hands was so dry, you could fling him against a concrete wall and - if Ethan’s hands happened to be facing out - he’d stick. His eyes needed to be plucked out of his sockets, dropped into a glass pitcher of ice water. Might hurt some, but he’d enjoy the soothing hissssss of hot versus cold.
Oh, Ethan knew better. Knew he had to report to David Murphy’s Big Bad Saturday-Morning Manager’s Meeting.
It was why he’d stayed up way too late last night, drinking those orange martinis with Amy.
Rebel Ethan Goines.
Stickin’ it to the Man, one French Martini at a time.
They’d tasted like Tang...
Severance Package is the third of a gruesome and hilarious series of Philadelphia novels written by someone who loves take all kinds of genres and see how far they can go. The Wheelman was a heist caper, The Blonde was a techno-thriller, and Severance Package is an “Top secret spy team” novel.
After falling in love with The Wheelman, I began avidly reading Swierczynski’s superb blog which has been a fount of great recommendations: I have taken down my first Joe Lansdale, Ken Bruen, and Charlie Huston books because of Swierczynski.
But since I never read comics, I shrugged off the repeated plugs for Criminal written by Ed Brubaker and illustrated by Sean Phillips. However, recently the path between the hotel and theater in Toronto featured a comic book store. I finally went in and left clutching three issues of Criminal.
Being so new to the genre, I have nothing smart to say except “Yeah! This is really cool!” I think I am hooked.
A classy postmodern coda to each issue of Criminal are short but detailed celebrations of classic film noir by qualified authors. One of the issues I picked up has an appreciation 1957’s The Burglar by Swierczynski himself. This movie was the first-ever Hollywood film shot in Philadelphia and is based on a book by the first quintessential Philadelphia crime author, David Goodis. In his essay, Swierczynski praises the movie and books for being “time machines” of the post-WWII Philadelphia ethos. Surely future readers will think “Swierczynski” for 00’s Philadelphia just like we think “Goodis” for the 50’s now.
Scenes in Swierczynski’s books are often rendered with posed, “painterly” directness. Looking at Criminal makes me realize that this must have something to with the multi-dimensionality of comic books. This is particularly clear in Severance Package since it includes several cartoons inside the book by master illustrator Dennis Calero. (The cover is above is by the equally talented Tom Coker.) Swierczynski is now also writing for the Marvel comic Cable.
I have never met Swierczynski, but he is aware of my sympathy for his writing. When I wrote a bit about The Blonde on DTM, he responded with a post called “Ethan Iverson is Trying to Kill Me.” He didn’t stop there. I wish I could say that a bad hangover was the worst in store for Ethan Goines in Severance Package, but Goines’ day goes downhill from there.
There is also an explicit reference to The Bad Plus at a very tense moment. I can’t reveal too much without giving away the game, but I will say after reading it I got out of my seat and laughed out loud for at least a solid minute.
Another major noir/crime author who I learned about from Swierszynski’s blog is his friend Allan Guthrie. Just like understanding the comic-book style is relevant to decoding Swierczynski, understanding Goodis, Jim Thompson, and other down-and-out crime writers of the 1950’s is important to decoding Guthrie, especially how those older authors occasionally flirted with making some of their characters mentally ill.
It’s safe to say, though, that Guthrie goes further than any of his predecessors when allowing full-bore psychosis into what initially seems to be a conventional crime/revenge thriller. On each page of his newest, Savage Night, the reader thinks he can see what’s coming -- and knows it's going to be bad. Time and time again, what then happens is actually much worse than expected. This is because the characters are insane.
A typical moment: Andy Parks is going to extort money from Tommy Savage, but shows up to their first meeting at a restaurant “disguised” as “Smith.”
Smith arrived ten minutes late. He didn’t look at all like Tommy imagined. The man who gangled towards Tommy’s table, slight stagger to his walk, was as tall as Tommy, maybe had an inch on him, which made him well over six foot. Skinny, clothes hanging off him. But the thing that made him stand out was that he was wearing a black ski mask. He’d caused a visible tremor as he walked through the restaurant. Diners stopped eating to stare. A couple of waiters paused to look at him.
Tommy wondered what the protocol was for dealing with a patron in a ski mask. Especially one who wasn’t armed, or causing any trouble. At least no trouble as yet.
Wasn’t against the law to wear a ski mask, was it?
Smith shoved his tongue out through the mouthhole, let it stay there as he stared down at Tommy. He wasn’t being rude, just seemed to be his habit to stick his tongue out while he was thinking. Couple of seconds later, he held out his hand, uncovering a bracelet of barbed wire tattooed on his wrist. Looked like a prison job.
I have enjoyed all of Guthrie’s books, but in Savage Night his gaze into the abyss seems even deeper. There is something strangely untroubled and unforced about the unfolding of events. I hope I am not the only reviewer brave enough to declare this Savage Night better than Jim Thompson’s.
I have met Guthire and even talked noir with him here on DTM. Since that interview, I have been working my way slowly though Guthrie's many excellent suggestions. I recently found Soft Touch (1963) by John D. MacDonald. I thought I didn’t really admire this author, but this is a really, really good book. (Unusually for MacDonald, Soft Touch also touches on the “psycho” area, which is probably one reason why Guthrie likes it so much.) One passage is stunning as a stand-alone. This is when two old war-buddies have completed a successful heist and have just opened the spoils, a briefcase containing $3,650,000:
A one-dollar bill has a humble and homely look. A five-dollar bill has a few meek pretensions. A ten is vigorous and forthright and honest, like a scout leader. A twenty, held to the ear like a seashell, emits the far-off sound of nightclub music. A fifty wears the faint sneer of race track. It has a portly look, needs a shave, wears a yellow diamond on the little finger. And a hundred is very haughty indeed.
Then there is quantity. A wad of ones in the bottom of a grubby pocket, or fanned between the fingers in an alley game. Or three frayed fives in a flat cheap billfold. Then there is the flashy billfold, padded fat with ones and fives and tens and twenties. Next step is the platinum bill clip, with its dainty burden of twenties and fifties, crisp and folded but once. After that is the unmarked envelope with its cool sheaf of hundreds, slipped from hand to hand in the corridor of a government building.
Or there are banks. And when you get up to the window there is a stack at the teller’s elbow that can stop your heart.
When cute little girls visit the mint the kind man sometimes lets them hold a million dollars. In ten-thousand-dollars bills, the sort of bills that circulate inside the mysterious and cabalistic recesses of the Federal Exchange System. One hundred of them. A little packet only so thick for a whole million dollars. And if the little girl should cut and run with it, it wouldn’t do her a damn bit of good.
But there was nothing like what I looked at when I whipped that piece of cloth aside. Nothing. I was one man when I pried the locks loose. And I was somebody else after I looked at the money. And I knew in some crazy way I couldn’t ever go back to being the man who pried the locks, no matter how desperately I might want to.
Guthrie’s formidable website/noir magazine has been recently updated with lots of great stuff. I devoured the first decent overview of the mysterious Ted Lewis that I have ever seen, and the reprint of an 1984 piece on William Campbell Gault is just fantastic, especially this part about cult favorite Fredric Brown:
In 1949, Gault moved to Pacific Palisades. In California he joined the Fictioneers, a fraternal group to pulp writers that had been formed in the ‘30s and included W. T. Ballard, Henry Kuttner, Day Keene, Bill Cox and Ray Bradbury. Gault’s closest friend was Fredric Brown, a frail intellectual who had also started out in Milwaukee. "Fred was the great, innovative one," Gault said. "He had a mind like Einstein and he peddled it for two cents a word."
Their pulp work was quick and playful. Brown wrote a story called "Whistler’s Murder" and Gault wrote one about a racehorse called "Whistler’s Mudder". On another occasion, they each wrote a story with the same last scene: five footsteps in the snow.
"Maybe the pulps will come back someday, but I don’t think so," Gault said. "They’re better than TV but they’re not enough better. No one’s going to turn off their tube for a chance to read."
The pulps dying, Gault began working for the Post Office and worked on a novel at night. Fredric Brown, already an author with Dutton, sat in the firm’s office until editors read and agreed to publish Gault’s first book. Don’t Cry For Me, written in 28 days, won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America.
The pulps didn’t really die, they just kept growing up. Both Duane Swierczynski’s and Allan Guthrie’s latest give any other kind of mass entertainment - including television - serious competition. The next time you feel like escaping reality for an evening, keep off the internet, don’t turn on the tube, hide the DVD’s, and crack open one of their books.
