The Last Kind Words by Tom Piccirilli

My review of Tom Piccirilli's The Last Kind Words is up at spinetingler.

Check that shit out HERE.

If dude's name isn't on your radar, your TBR pile is weak as shit, apparently.

To familiarize your ass, I suggest you hit up his name the labels at the bottom of this post.

Crime Factory Vol. 2 No. 9

My Crime Sleeper Double Feature on Paul Schrader's Blue Collar (1978) and American Gigolo (1980) entitled "In America, Establishment Fuck You!" is in the new issue of Crime Factory on pages 94-99.

Check that shit out HERE.

Really great issue this month, with shit from Ray Banks, Tom Piccirilli, Scott Phillips and a hell of a lot more folks in there as well.

Every Shallow Cut by Tom Piccirilli

My review of Tom Piccirilli's Every Shallow Cut is up at spinetingler.

Give that shit some of you precious time HERE.

It'll just take a second - scout's honor. Give it a look and then go back to doing what you were doing, which, if the Nerd had to guess from the looks of you, was looking at funny-faced kitties jump into boxes.

Tom Piccirilli's Shadow Season

My review of Shadow Season is up at bookspot.

It's by Tom Piccirilli, a rising star in the crime fiction world if ever there was one.

So yeah, you'd be well-fucking-advised to check that shit out.

The Coldest Mile by Tom Piccirilli

Even if Piccirilli never did another Cold novel (and with the way he ends The Coldest Mile, his sequel to last year’s The Cold Spot, you fucking well hope he’s got another one coming our way), I fucking pray he sets another book in this world that he has created. It is one of the most nerd-boner-inducing places a noir fan can go, where gangs of thieves are called “strings” and they’re always “grifting” and looking to set up another “score” and keeping tabs on other strings through “drops.” Yeah, the players in The Coldest Mile talk like that - no joke. But it’s not in a self-conscious sort of way like something Tarantino or Frank Miller would dream up. It actually feels kind of authentic in a crazy-ass sort of way.

In other words: Piccirilli has some fucking chops.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, letting shit get away from me. I’ve got to tell you just what the fuck you’re dealing with plot-wise if you smartly choose to pick up Pic’s brand-spanking new novel, The Coldest Mile.

The book picks up a few weeks after ending of The Cold Spot with top-notch wheelman Chase signing on with the Langan syndicate for what is apparently more of a chauffeur gig than his usual getaway driver stint. The Langans are a decidedly WASP-y crew in the NYC area that is on the decline. The boss is about to check out and his kids, Jackie and Sherry Langan, are scrambling for the top seat and organizing a move to Chicago where they hope they’ll gain some much-missed respect. Since there’s no score to be had and Chase is more of a string man than a syndicate soldier, he decides to rip off his new employers instead to raise some money before heading off to find his young aunt Kylie and wrest her away from his hard-ass grandfather Jonah.

But Jonah isn’t an easy man to find or, you know, wrest shit away from, and the mob, as all good readers know, doesn’t take betrayal lightly…

So if you don’t know who the fuck Jonah is and what that whole back story is about, fucking read The Cold Spot already. That shit rules and will make your enjoyment of The Coldest Mile increase ten-fucking-fold. The mythology that Piccirilli is creating with this series is what it’s all about anyway and yeah, like any good novel you don’t have to read the predecessor but shit, once you read this one you’re just gonna go back and read the first anyway so fucking do it up right from the start - read The Cold Spot first.

But as good as Spot was, Mile truly ups the ante. In Spot Pic had to get some heavy exposition out of the way for the first half of the novel so that we could really see how much Chase loved Lila and how far he fell once she was murdered, seeing what it would take to actually him to go back to the life. With The Coldest Mile Chase is in the life the whole fucking time, beating ass or racing down the freeway on ever other page. I’m not fucking around when I say that The Coldest Mile runs on equal parts dread and adrenaline for three-hundred some pages.

And this book really brings it with the action, showing that Piccirilli is one of the new masters of the action sequence, on par with the likes of Huston and Swierczynski - no fucking lie, dear reader. His violence hits hard and hits often, making you feel every busted molar and desperate eye gouge. Also, as with the terms and organizations that I mentioned admiring above, even the rules of combat in Piccirilli’s world seem both grittily authentic and classic-film-noir-bat-shit crazy at the same time.


I haven’t ventured much beyond Piccirilli’s very recent foray (ha! I’m a douche!) into straight-up crime/noir, but the guy writes the genre like he’s been doing it since the Gold Medal days. Here’s hoping he keeps running with it for a long-ass time. And if there’s not another Cold book sometime in ’10, the Nerd is gonna be hunting down some motherfuckers, Chase-style. Bank on that.

Piccirilli's THE FEVER KILL

After reading The Cold Spot I broke down and bought a snazzy-looking copy of The Fever Kill, another book in the noir vein from Tom Piccirilli. The introduction to the book by Ken Bruen informed me that Piccirilli had been writing westerns and horror novels up until now and this book is a mean hybrid of western and noir, a personal favorite type of hybrid for me.

Elmore Leonard wrote westerns before he took to crime books which are essentially contemporary urban westerns in his hands. George Pelecanos often writes books that play out like great westerns set in the gritty streets of D.C. (my favorite series of his books, the Karras and Clay trilogy of King Suckerman, The Sweet Forever, and Shame the Devil were VERY much in line with classic westerns). No Country for Old Men was western, noir and neither all at the same time. In other words, I was pumped to see a writer I'm less familiar with take a swing at a meshing of two favorites.

Like the previous novel I'd read, this one opens with a prologue that kicks you right in the balls. I brought it along fishing with my dad over the weekend and he picked it up and gave the first page a look and couldn't stop reading until he'd read the whole chapter. To take a phrase out of Karl's word-a-day calendar, I "concur." We start out with a disgraced cop being carried home drunk on the back of his put-upon son Crease. The cop had fucked up a ransom hand-off years previous that resulted in the shooting of the kidnapped little girl. The image of the son dragging his dad while the local deputy slowly follows him in his patrol car through town is burned in my brain. The whole sequence is just so perfectly mean and quietly sadistic that it brought a nasty little smile to my face.

Crease is run out of Hangtree following his father's death only to return a decade later to settle old scores along with some new ones. He's been working undercover trying to bring down the brutal druglord Tucco (nod to Eli Wallach, perhaps?) while finding some time to bone the big man's wife on the side. He has a son who hates him, a wife who doesn't understand him, and another kind coming soon by way of Tucco's girl. Before coming up to Hangtree to finally figure out what happened all those years ago in regards to botched kidnapping that ruined his father, he tells Tucco the truth about his identity. Tucco tracks him down to Hangtree and taunts Crease via disposable thugs and minor confrontations, allowing Crease the luxury of putting his father's old case to rest before the final showdown goes down (that's either an awesome way to end the sentence or super lame).

So you have the classic Chandler-style mystery thing going on where Crease interviews all the players with varied success to finally find out what happened while the classic ticking clock High Noon situation with Tucco looms overhead to keep things tight and the danger close. There is much discussion of how quick Tucco is "on the draw" with his butterfly knife instead of a gun, as well. Apparently Tucco's favorite way to kill people is to pop them in the temple in one quick flash with the blade. Cold. There are also many minor stand-offs throughout the book, usually involving Crease's favorite tough guy phrase "Do you want me to ____." (Naturally, this makes more sense if you read the book.)

As with The Cold Spot, my favorite aspect of the book was in the little details. Piccirilli has a knack for little criminal scams and insights that he peppers throughout, bringing a certain authenticity and originality to the prose seldom seen in many noirs. My favorite details involved Crease's knowledge of human nature, how he seems to be able to read what everyone is thinking around him, from his shify ex-girlfriend Reb to the old jock who used to throw bottles at him when they were kids. These small insights are what make the story hum, make it come alive.

Again, as with The Cold Spot, I felt there were a few too many cute moments in the story. The relationship between mute gravedigger and his bright son became tiresome as did certain attempts to humanize Crease like his relationship with his sister-in-law, a woman whose kids are legally adopted as Crease's so they can get health coverage. Since, compared to many noirs, Crease is a pretty "good" guy I felt that the story didn't need these cuter moments to help me root for him. But then I want even the assholes that populate your average Jason Starr novel to succeed.

But through it all Piccirilli keeps it tight and moving forward. The mystery aspect of the novel is kept to a minimum (a plus in my book, whodunnits aren't my bag) and pays off believably, no crazy-stupid twists here. The western stuff is nicely translated to the present and the small-town noir details make it feel like something Jim Thompson might have written. With The Fever Kill and The Cold Spot Piccirilli is fast becoming one of the noir writers to watch.

Who is this guy Piccirilli?

Tom Piccirilli recently showed up on my radar. I was killing time (it was giving me dirty looks so I fucked time up) at Barnes & Noble in the mystery section when Ken Bruen's name popped out at me while I was in the P's. It turned out that Bruen did an intro to Piccirlli's THE FEVER KILL. In said intro I found out that Piccirilli is an extremely prolific writer of horror and western novels who has recently forayed into noir. Cool.

Problem was, The Fever Kill was untested, 184 pages and $16.95 in paperback. That is too much of a gamble for me, thanks. Call me cheap but...yeah I'm cheap. Fuck you. I did however manage to find another new Piccirilli in mass market paperback form over in the Fiction/Literature section called The Cold Spot for the winning price of $6.99 that had even more praises covering it by authors I love (Bruen, Starr, Gischler, Swierczynski).

The Cold Spot started out really solid. A crew is playing cards after a successful heist when one of the members, an old hard-ass named Jonah, whips out a gun and plugs some dude in the temple. Jonah's grandson Chase didn't know about the hit and is both pissed and afraid, so much so that he ditches the crew and takes up with a string (a mercenary form or a crew). From here the book sucks for about a hundred pages as Chase builds a life with the sheriff's daughter and they do cute shit together and blah, blah, blah until she's murdered and Chase must take revenge with the help of his estranged crazy grandfather.

Now, we need that build up of the relationship of Chase and his wife. It has to be there and it probably has to be as long as it is. But if I hadn't had the ringing endorsements of authors I love I would have tossed this book aside around the time Chase wrassles with his lady love's cantankerous hick father to prove he'll do right by her. But I'm glad I stuck it out.

Piccirilli has created his own cool little world of crime that I'd like to hang around in a lot more. His scams and heists are fascinating and fresh with little details that make them pop. His action scenes hit hard and deep to make you sick and his characters are crazy enough and tough enough for any true noir fan. AND it looks like we have a sequel on the way. Count me in. I'll buy it for sure.

Maybe Piccirilli will even have a trilogy rocking for us and that first boring part will have provided enough exposition for us to chug through two more books of awesome shit similar to THE COLD SPOT's second half. Either way, I have 6.99 and tax with your name on it, THE COLDEST MILE.