→ January 25, 2023
→ By

Blacktop Wasteland.

S.A. Cosby’s 2020 novel Blacktop Wasteland takes the one-last-job gimmick into the back woods of North Carolina, where Beauregard “Bug” Montage, a getaway driver of exceptional skill who has since retired from the larceny game, finds his legitimate business threatened with bankruptcy if he can’t come up with $20,000. Coincidentally, a thief who cost him a huge payout the last time they worked together shows up with the promise of a six-figure score if Bug will drive him and a buddy to knock over a jewelry store in Virginia. Needless to say, the job does not go as planned, leading to a high body count and a mostly predictable ride down the highways and back roads as Bug tries to save himself, his family, and maybe his business too.

Bug’s life is not conducive to being a getaway driver, as he’s now living with his wife and two kids, while he has at least one daughter from a previous relationship, and takes some care of her because her mother is an addict. This, of course, leads to some fairly obvious complications, where anyone involved in the heist gone wrong can threaten not just Bug but any members of his family. His garage is failing because one of his many nemeses in their small town has opened up another, new garage and siphoned off a large portion of his customers – but that garage conveniently burns down, and its racist white owners decide to pay Bug (who is Black) a visit. And the planning of the heist itself turns out to be less than ironclad, as what Bug’s confederates are stealing belongs to someone else who will be very unhappy to see it lost, while the two men he’s working with turn out to be less than worthy of his trust.

It’s a lot, and I don’t mean that in a good way; it feels like Cosby is artificially ratcheting up the stakes as much as he can to produce a specific level of high tension and a dire situation for Bug to escape. While the plot itself isn’t predictable, the plot’s destination is. There’s only one way this can all end, really, and you can paint in broad strokes how Cosby is going to get us there, and who’s likely to be left standing when the story ends.

That’s not to say Blacktop Wasteland is boring – it is tense, and sometimes exciting, and never slow. There’s one particular car chase that is about as well-written as I’ve seen, where Cosby translates the speed of the chase and Bug’s dexterity behind the wheel into prose without breaking the spell of the scene with extraneous descriptions. I’m not a car guy, but Cosby seems well-versed in engines and what cars might be capable of doing in the hands of someone like Bug, who is both expert driver and mechanic. I’m also not immune to the type of narrative greed created by a plot where one man is targeted by just about everyone else in the story except for his own family; Cosby pulls the rubber band as far as it can possibly go without breaking, and when he lets it go, it’s effective, even if you can guess the general outline of things to come.

In the end, however, Blacktop Wasteland felt too familiar, and in some ways too derivative of other heist novels, such as the Parker novels from Richard Stark (a pen name of Donald Westlake). Cosby may have been trying to touch on some larger themes here, especially of race, but if so, it doesn’t achieve that goal – there’s only the story itself, which is enough to sustain the read but not enough to recommend it.

Next up: P. Djèlí Clark’s A Master of Djinn, winner of last year’s Nebula Award for Best Novel.

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→ October 7, 2021
→ By

Harlem Shuffle.

Colson Whitehead’s last two novels, The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, both won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making him the first Black author to win that prize twice. Both were serious novels, the first with fantastical elements to try to tell a familiar story in a new way, the latter more straightforward, but neither presaged what he’s done in his latest novel, Harlem Shuffle, which is funnier, more action-packed, and just generally more entertaining.

Harlem Shuffle is the story of two men in that part of Manhattan in the early 1960s. Raymond, the son of a crook who has become an entrepreneur, owns a furniture store in Harlem that caters to the customers the white-owned stores downtown won’t serve. Freddie, his ne’er-do-well cousin, has been getting Ray in trouble since they were kids, and this time, he lands Ray smack in the middle of a heist that has half of Harlem looking for them, and involves Ray with the kind of people he never wanted to be involved with – the people with whom his father did jobs, that is. When a mobster’s goons show up at the store, and a crooked cop does too, things go pear-shaped for the cousins, leaving Raymond to try to find a way to clean up the mess and protect his family. Meanwhile, Ray’s situation at home is always tenuous. He needs a bigger house for his growing family, while his in-laws continue to look down on him as the son of a crook, which makes him not good enough for their daughter. He’s already conflicted about taking any money from Freddie’s shenanigans, but now anything he gets from the big score would help him move to a better place … while also risking further scorn from his in-laws and even the trust of his wife.

My experience with Whitehead is limited to the two novels that won him the Pulitzer, both of which were weighted down with heavy themes and only lightened by Whitehead’s remarkable prose and rich characterization. Here, Whitehead gets to have some fun, even though there are undercurrents of violence, internecine warfare in Harlem’s Black community, white cops assaulting Black citizens (including the real Harlem riots of 1964, which occur right around Ray’s store and shut down much of the commerce on which he depends), and more. There’s also a subtle theme of the growing divide within the Black community between the upwardly mobile and those still held down by the extensive obstacles of the time and the history of oppression that still limits Black Americans’ economic opportunities today.

I’ve seen media coverage of Harlem Shuffle that makes it sound like a heist novel – possibly pushed by the publisher – but it’s more heist-adjacent, since Ray doesn’t participate in the heist itself, just in the misadventures that follow when you steal something that a very powerful and violent person would not want to have stolen. Whitehead adapts one of the best aspects of the heist genre, or just the hard-boiled crime genre in general – the array of eccentric and often funny side characters that populate many of those novels. A thief named Pepper who worked with Ray’s dad turns out to be a pivotal character as the novel progresses. Miami Joe is one of the main antagonists in the first part of the novel. Chet the Vet is so-called because he went to vet school for all of a month before turning to crime. Between these fun, if only morally compromised, side characters and Whitehead’s ability to shift between the highbrow prose of his award-winning novels and the vernacular of his 1960s setting, Harlem Shuffle was a blast to read, perhaps an entrée into his work for folks who want to start with some lighter fare before reading his two more serious books.

Next up: David Ewalt’s Of Dice and Men, recommended to me by Foxing lead singer/songwriter (and longtime D&D player) Connor Murphy.

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→ September 3, 2020
→ By

The Burnt Orange Heresy.

The Burnt Orange Heresy adapts the best-reviewed book by pulp author Charles Ray Willeford, a short 1971 novel where Willeford took aim at the worlds of art and art criticism inside the framework of a thriller. For about 80 minutes, it’s a great ride, a long con with a handful of actors at the tops of their games … and then it flubs the ending as severely as any film in recent memory, comparable to First Reformed but with so much less to redeem it before the missteps.

James Figueras (Claes Bang) is an art critic giving a talk to American tourists about how important art criticism is when Berenice (Elizabeth Debicki) wanders in towards the end of the talk; the two strike up a flirtatious conversation and quickly end up in bed. She says they’ll never see each other again, but he seems to have other ideas and invites her along for a weekend at the country house of the wealthy art dealer Joseph Cassidy (Mick Jagger, his first film role in two decades). It turns out that Cassidy wants to involve Figueras, who has some shady dealings in his past, in a scheme to steal one of the last paintings by the reclusive artist Debney (Donald Sutherland), who lives in the guest house on Cassidy’s estate and hasn’t released any paintings in a half century. This plot has unforeseen complications, of course, leading to tragic consequences.

While the film sets up the plot, this film is as tight as any heist movie from recent years – tighter, say, than Widows, a superior film overall that also featured Debicki – and largely gets you on the wavelength of the characters. I’m not totally sold on the chemistry between Bang and Debicki, but the dialogue works and when they disagree, the tension builds slowly from within. (It helps that they are both giants; Bang is 6’4″, Debicki 6’3″, so they’re eye to eye – and it’s funny how they tower over Jagger and Sutherland.) Bang is a very convincing con man; the entire opening sequence, where he delivers his seminar to the happy tourists, is a clinic in grabbing an audience’s attention and holding them rapt. He’s weirdly charming, although I’d say his charm works more when he’s playing the art critic than when he’s wooing Berenice. Jagger, meanwhile, is clearly having the time of his life as Cassidy, hamming it up in a way that might not work for a veteran actor but here, where you can’t exactly forget who he actually is, it works to his advantage.

When this movie hits the final stretch, though, it breaks a leg so gruesomely it should be taken off the track and shot. While it may adhere to the plot of the book, it hinges here on a character doing something so incredibly stupid that it destroys any suspension of disbelief, and then robs us of a fairly critical resolution to a particular arc. That forced decision does get a series of double entendres in an I-know-what-you-did ending, but by that point, I’d thrown in the towel on the plot.

If the novel’s intent was to parody the art world, it comes through in pieces in the film – and, although I’ve seen several reviews that say that aspect of the film is pretentious, I never found it so. It doesn’t expect you to know anything about fine art, and the wry humor of its satirical elements will work even if you don’t follow that world. But for the heist arc, and the way various hints and implications don’t actually pan out in the end, turned this movie from a B+ to a failing grade.

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→ February 5, 2013
→ By

Parker (a.k.a. Flashfire).

The top 100 prospects ranking is out now – you can view the entire list of names or jump right into the top 25 capsules, as well as the ten prospects who just missed the cut. My ranking of all 30 farm systems went up on Monday. I also did a Klawchat today. Wednesday will bring the AL top tens, with the NL on Thursday along with a fresh chat and the finale of the Baseball Today podcast.

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I’ve mentioned Donald Westlake’s Parker series, written under the pseudonym Richard Stark, twice before, thanks to the series of reissues by the University of Chicago Press and the fact that they keep sending me copies of these books. The latest one to show up in my mailbox was Flashfire, which has been reissued under the title Parker because it’s the loose basis for the movie currently in theaters, starring Jason Statham as the title character and Jennifer Lopez as his romantic foil of sorts.

Based on the Wikipedia description of the film’s plot, it seems like the screenwriters made a number of changes for the worse, attempting to ratchet up both the drama and the romantic tension in ways that violate the spirit of the novel and of the Parker series in general. Westlake’s writing here is sparse, as stark as his pen name implies, a stripped-down version of the more literary noir novels of the Chandler/Hammett cohort, and the plot is straightforward although not exactly simple. The novel begins with a bank heist where Parker is betrayed by his three partners, who keep his share as an “investment” in their next job, a massive jewelry theft planned for Palm Beach. Parker has no choice but to let them leave with his money, instead plotting a slow, thorough revenge on his former mates. The plan ends up intertwining him with a local realtor, Leslie, who starts to figure out that he’s up to something other than just shopping for real estate, which turns out to be critical when Parker is shot by hit men sent after him for reasons not entirely Parker’s fault.

The novel’s main separator for me was the interaction between Parker and Leslie, where Leslie’s interest in him goes from purely opportunistic – he’s her ticket to a better life – to something resembling romantic, while Parker remains all business at all times, and views Leslie as a useful asset but nothing more, even contemplating killing her if she becomes too problematic. The imbalance replaces the generic romantic tension of mass-market detective/mystery novels with a different kind of tension, as two people who need each other try to use each other within the parameters they’ve each set for themselves, one trying not to get too close, the other trying to get just close enough. I’m disappointed to see that the film alters this formula a little bit to try to appeal to a broader audience, which doesn’t seem to have worked anyway; sticking to the book more faithfully might have garnered stronger reviews, bringing in a different but at least more substantial crowd.

The one flaw in the book is Parker surviving the attempt on his life by the hit men due to a highly amusing deus ex machina, a white supremacist militia that might as well have been organized by Joe Arpaio and that happens to be patrolling the area of the Everglades where Parker is shot. For a character who survives and succeeds on his wits in most of the books to live to see another day thanks to a band of idiots happening to be in the right place at the right time is a copout unworthy of the character or of Westlake. Even his decision to get into the car, under duress, with two people likely to try to kill him was questionable; I expected him to make some kind of move rather than submit to near-certain death. I won’t pretend that the Parker novels are great literature, but the plots are always interesting and tightly crafted, so this one plot point was all the more irritating for its relative cheapness. Outside of that, Parker fits the bill for me for plane reading – quick, engrossing, serpentine, yet never pandering or insulting.

Next up: Joe Posnanski’s book on the 1975 Reds, The Machine.

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→ September 9, 2011
→ By

The Score.

Littlefield leaned closer to him. “You’re a young man, you can still learn. Pay attention to this. You can steal in this country, you can rape and murder, you can bribe public officials, you can pollute the morals of the young, you can burn your place of business down for the insurance money, you can do almost anything you want, and if you act with just a little caution and common sense you’ll never even be indicted. But if you don’t pay your income tax, Grofield, you will go to jail.”

Donald Westlake, writing under the pseudonym Richard Stark, produced a series of hard-boiled crime novels starring the thief known as Parker, a series that began with the book The Hunter (later adapted for the screen as Point Blank and Payback). The University of Chicago Press has reprinted the first twenty Parker novels (out of 24), including The Score, which is currently available as a free eBook through amazon and is also free on BN.com, with the promotion running through the end of September.

The crime at the heart of The Score is certainly ambitious – Parker finds himself drafted to join a group that intends to knock over an entire town in North Dakota, led by the unreliable Edgars, who devised the plan because he knows the town’s layout and when they could maximize their payout. Stark spends about two thirds of the novel on the setup, with Parker leading the effort to assemble the ideal team and handling some of the logistics, including an interesting scene where he goes to purchase weapons from a blind arms dealer who stores the goods in boxes for children’s toys. The bickering starts from the moment Parker, who has little to no tolerance for bullshit, meets Edgars, and while it never explodes into a complete meltdown, the undercurrent is always there and threatens to undermine the solidarity of the team in an effort where one screw-up will sink the entire operation.

The real appeal of the novel is in the interplay between the characters, mostly between Parker and the others. Parker’s experience and limited tolerance for frivolity makes him the ideal field general for the operation, but he’s also forced to delegate as the group takes over the town almost building by building. Three group members eventually deviate from the plan in one way or another, forcing Parker to adapt on the fly, and his reaction to one of those three was one of the few big surprises in the book. But Westlake’s knack for clipped, quick dialogue keeps everything moving even through that first two-thirds of the novel where nothing actually happens beyond the planning; even the masters in the hard-boiled field, Hammett and Chandler, would typically drop a body or two and have their protagonist get a blackjack to the dome before the halfway point, although both had the brighter, more literary prose that they could have dispensed with those plot devices and still kept me riveted.

I am enough of a fan of heist stories that I knocked out The Score inside of forty-eight hours, and appreciated reading one that’s the antithesis of the overly stylized heist motif popularized by Ocean’s Eleven. I could have done with a little more explanation of the big twist from the mouth of the character responsible, although Stark does provide the basic back story, and Parker’s sudden decision to go soft on one of his partners in the heist, although not terribly consequential, felt oddly out of character. Parker’s simple, direct, no-nonsense approach is the real appeal of the novel for me, even with those quirks, a rare example of a likeable protagonist who’s actually the bad guy.

Next up: Michael Ruhlman’s The Soul of a Chef: The Journey Toward Perfection. Ruhlman’s Ratio remains an essential, often-used item on my cookbook shelf. (Shelves, really. Three so far.)

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