RUMINATING IN MY PANTS #1: Director JOHN DAHL

(The RUMINATING IN MY PANTS series isn't really a review feature so much as it is just me rambling about shit. But hell, you'll figure that out toot-fucking-sweet 'cause you're so damned smart.)

John Dahl is still doing good work. He's directing episodes for major television shows like Battlestar Galactica, True Blood, Californication, and Dexter. Last year's You Kill Me was a thoroughly enjoyable rom-com/mob thriller with some great work by Tea Leoni and Ben Kingsley that was unjustly over-looked. And I really like his middle period work like horror thriller Joy Ride (arguably his best movie) and Rounders (it single-handedly made hold 'em cool, don't argue with me).

But that being said, I miss the days when he was America's noir auteur.

I caught his debut, Kill Me Again (1989), on one of the Encore channels the other night and it reminded me of my youth. No, not in the sense that as a boy I was involved in faking people's deaths and owed money to the mob - that didn't come about until I had a driver's license. When I was in middle school I recall reading a Roger Ebert review of The Last Seduction (1994) and then promptly going out and renting that and the other two Dahl noirs, the aforementioned Kill Me Again and 1992's Red Rock West and having an absolute nerdgasm in my parent's basement (Don't worry, I cleaned up afterwards).

These three movies were fine modern examples of the films I pored over in elementary school when I was forced, due to my parent's strict no R-rated movies policy, to watch nothing but old movies. Back then I figured that if I couldn't watch "adult" movies of the current generation, why not catch up with all those "adult" movies in the back of the video store with no ratings on them? And no, I am not talking about "the back of the video store" as in "behind the beaded curtain back of the video store." I'm talking about the "classics" section.

It was there that I discovered that the best movies were almost always film noirs, the edgiest offerings of the post-WWII era. These movies had cool stars like Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, John Garfield, Sterling Hayden, and Richard Widmark doing badass things that you could only get away with in B-movies. They had lots of violence and their stories were complicated and surprising. But the thing that most impressed me was that they almost always felt dangerous, like anything could happen, that there would be no simple moral at the end like most of the entertainment aimed at kids my age.

Okay, so I was a fucked up nerdy little kid. Not much has changed, I guess...

But back to Dahl, when I was finally able to get my parents' congress to pass my "R-rated movies are okay" amendment, I soon figured out that the early nineties had had a mini golden age of neo-noir filmmaking, and that John Dahl was leading the pack. Kill Me Again was like an even more twisted Double Indemnity with an added bonus of a crazy villain played by a young Michael Madsen. Red Rock West played like Dahl had put about ten old B-movies in a blender and hit "puree" then took the cap off and let the mess cover the room (translation: it was awesome). And The Last Seduction was basically the end-all-be-all of femme fatale films, taking the classic icon of B-movies as far as it could possibly go and never looking back.

None of them were necessarily going to edge out any other pictures and make my "Ultimate Noir Canon" list, but they were all super-solid and I was convinced that Dahl was going to develop into one of the great genre directors, that he was going to hack at it and hack at it until he had made the greatest neo-noir ever.

Then I saw Unforgettable with Ray Liotta and I lost all hope. Jesus, what a piece of shit.

As I said up top, dude still makes some damn fine movies that are nothing to balk at. The guy has proven himself at sports movies (Rounders), horror movies (Joy Ride), war movies (The Great Raid) and rom coms (You Kill Me), all of them with elements of film noir thrown in. I just wish that he could get his hands on motherfucker of a crime film script - or hell, that he'd start writing again. After all, he wrote Kill Me Again and Red Rock West all by his lonesome in the beginning.

According to imdb, Dahl has nothing in the works at the moment. Mr. Dahl, since you no doubt check this site every morning, I implore you: make another noir, even if it's just for your lonely fan the Nerd of Noir.

I can promise you my business. Shit, I might even go twice.

Catching Up #13: NINETEEN SEVENTY FOUR by DAVID PEACE

For all you paranoid noir lovers out there lemme just say this:

I, the Nerd of Noir, am not receiving any monetary or sexual favors from Serpent's Tail Independent Publishers. Not that I'm like, you know, above that sort of thing, but I swear I'm not. It is mere coinkydink that I've been reading so many of their books lately. I swear on the coke bottle lenses of my dorky glasses and my original copy of The Kill-Off. No money or bodily fluids have changed hands or orifices. Also of concern: I have not emigrated to the U.K., nor have I given up black coffee for tea.

With that out the muthafuckin waaaayyy... David Peace's Nineteen Seventy Four just kicked my ass and then spit in my bloody, gaping eyesocket. This is my first Peace book and damn, dude can write. This is the darkness, the depths, the despair, the dire, the fucking low-goddamn-down, my dear nerds. In the words of Senator Clay Davis, "Sheee-it!"

Nineteen Seventy Four is the story of our most humble narrator Edward Dunford, crime reporter for the Yorkshire Post, a right prick of a man who has just landed the front page story of a missing ten-year-old girl, a case shockingly similar to two other little girl disappearances a few years back. Oh, by the way, the year of our story is, amazingly, the year of our lord nineteen and seventy-four, imagine that. Anyway, Dunford is trying to get the scoop on the latest disappearance from the corrupt police department while keeping his hot story out of the hands of ace reporter (and world-class douchebag) Jack Fucking Whitehead. It doesn't take long before sure enough, the little girl lost cases turn out to be related and the cover-ups go all the way to the higher-ups, the big boys of power!

Now, I know what you're thinking, "Nerd, I've glanced at your stupid little site before and it seems to me that you don't much cotton to mysteries and serial killer thrillers." Well, confoundingly southern-ish imaginary reader, you're right, I'm not big on mysteries or serial killer stuff, but this is more along the lines of the great exalted James Ellroy than to local boy John Sanford. Think The Black Dahlia (not De Palma's interesting misfire, Ellroy's first masterpiece of many) instead of Silent Prey or whatever book my Minnesota bro wrote last. Yeah, there are elements that qualify it as part of that not-my-thing serial killer mystery camp, but the most obvious comparisons are to Ellroy. Shit, look at the fucking book jacket and that's the first thing that'll catch your eye, the blurbs relating Peace's Yorkshire Quartet to Ellroy's L.A. Quartet. Well, I'm with the choir on this one.

And that is some damned high praise, not praise that even an over-caffeinated fanboy like myself tosses off lightly.

Peace does some crazy shit in this book, not as crazy as Ellroy but awfully damned close. You won't have any insane shocks like your protagonist getting killed half-way through the book or whatever but his stuff is hyper-dark just the same. It's ultraviolent, oversexed, and packed with cynicism and dread. The language is punchy and staccato, but moves faster than say, The Cold Six-Thousand where though the sentences are short, you have to over-think every little word in some passages. No, with 1974 the sentences just fly by like a Charlie Huston novel.

Another similarity is that your protagonist is also a fucker and a half who is generally a dick to almost every in the book, and not in a cool tough guy way either. He treats women ridiculously poorly and when he really starts getting in over his head he makes some terrible decisions. But he isn't totally irredeemable. Awfully damned close, mind you, but not totally.

Also like an Ellroy opus, this book has one labrynthine bitch of a plot. Shit gets complicated and I'm not sure it totally works itself out in the end. You get the big picture ending for sure, but certain little events and secrets are never fully explained to my liking when the dust clears. But you don't really notice such things until the book is over and the dust has settled since you're too busy racing alongside Eddie as he runs from one horrifying revelation to the next.

I'm already started on book two in the quartet, Nineteen Seventy Seven, and good lord is it awesome as well. The craziest thing so far is this: Jack Fucking Whitehead is one of the protagonists this time out! That guy's a douche! I guess I'll have to learn to like him this time out, though. One of your enemies is the hero? Doesn't get much Ellroy-ian than that right there.

Rock on, Peace, you sick, demented man.

Catching Up #12: FAGS AND LAGER by CHARLIE WILLIAMS

The second book in Charlie Williams' Royston Blake trilogy is a solid work, some would debate it's even more so than Deadfolk. Williams is even more sure in his storytelling, taking it out there even further than before. Thing is, Fags and Lager just didn't work for me the quite the way the first novel did.

We pick up with Blake a few months after the events that closed Deadfolk. Blake is in charge of Hopper's, though in reality Nathan the bar man is running the show from the shadows. Things couldn't be better in Blake's thick, delusional eyes. Well, his main squeeze Sal could stand to lose a few pounds, and yeah, maybe he's more fat than he is actually strong these days...and his clientele at Hopper's is mainly wanker kids who don't actually buy drinks, just come in stoned on something called Joey and fuck the place up - but that is neither here nor there.

Blake is approached by Doug the shopkeeper to rough up an outsider who is messing around with his teenage daughter. The bounty: four hundred fags and four hundred cans of lager. Sure, the beer is past sell-by and he could probably go through a carton of smokes in a week's time, but shit, Blake never claimed to be the brightest of bulbs. Well, okay, maybe he has made such a claim but whatever. He's just not that smart. His swede ain't what it should be, now ennit?

Turns out the dude he's supposed to rough up is his new boss, Nick Nopoly, who has purchased Hopper's from Nathan so that he can sell Joey to its underage patrons. So there's now a conflict of interest and then Blake kills some folks and fucks some shit up and things go this way and that and you have another fun, tough-as-nails novel like Deadfolk.

At least, that's what you'd think.

The first problem I had with this book are the little newspaper articles that precede every chapter. They're all from the local paper and they keep the reader informed of matters outside the limited knowledge of Royston Blake for the sake of storytelling. But the articles are so silly and cheeky that they just take you right out of it. With Deadfolk I was under the impression that I was in a fairly realistic world but the events were skewed because of the fact that a crazy person was telling the story. In Fags and Lager I quickly learned that everyone, even the press, is just as crazy as Royston Blake. It threw me for a loop, I tells ya.

Then there's the matter of the voice this go around: it's too funny. Now I know you're saying, 'The fuck's your deal, Nerd? Funny is good in my book.' Well, I generally agree with you, Imaginary Reader, I really do, but this time I feel like Williams takes it too far with the funny to the point that it dilutes the "noir" too much for my liking. Blake is constantly talking directly to the reader for comedic effect, telling the reader to fuck off and such and generally calling attention to the narration device itself. I'm not against post-modern tricks, no sir. I loves me some Bruen and God knows he fucks with stuff like that, especially in the Brixton precinct novels, but I really feel like the jokey-ness of the tone gets in the way of the darkness a bit too much.

But it is still a dark book, for sure. Blake does some more terrible things and the last few pages are surprisingly dire and depressing, a truly bleak ending for such a funny, satirical book. Still, though, there are a few too many cartoonish elements this go around. The whole "sweets" drug thing, a major part of the book, is a little too cute and reminded me of shitty action movies where the villains come up with their own super-lethal-addictive-green-glowing-drug ("Its streetname is BLOODBREEZE and it is a thousand times more potent than heroin!"), and certain other plot points were a little too out-sized for my tastes as well (Blake may be dumb, but no way he didn't know a certain character was in fetish gear instead of butcher gear. I mean, come on!).

But my complaints aren't meant to trash the book, merely show how miffed I was by the slightly more ridiculous elements in the book. I balls-out fucking adored Deadfolk and simply didn't LOVE the shit out of Fags and Lager. I liked it and it read fast as a motherfucker, but it just doesn't quite live up to its predecessor. I don't know if King of the Road is closer to Fags and Lager or Deadfolk, but either way I'm eager to read the shit out of it. It sure is harder to get a copy of than the other two in the U.S., though. The fuck's with that Serpent's Tail?

CATCHING UP #11: DEADFOLK by CHARLIE WILLIAMS

What is up with these nasty fuckers from the U-fucking-K? How did the Irish, Brits and Scots manage to wrestle the hard-boiled title away from the Americans, the folks who forged the belt out of U.S.-fucking-Steel all those years ago? Ken Bruen, Allan Guthrie, Ray Banks, Charlie Williams - seems these dandies with funny accents are out-noir-ing us like gangbusters with each new release. If you need proof of this shameful fact, look no further than Williams' Deadfolk, the first novel in his Royston Blake trilogy.

Deadfolk is narrated by Blake himself, a doorman at Hoppers, a posh bar (for Mangel, anyway) owned by a dreaded outsider. Blake has been down since his wife was burned up in a suspicious fire, so down that folks around town suspect he's lost his bottle. Truth is, he has lost it. His new girl doesn't respect him, any punter comes through the door could give a shit he's manning it, and the Munton clan - a nasty groups of thick brothers - are giving him shit big time. When he finally is pushed too far, Blake comes out of his depressed stupor to prove everyone wrong.

Then a spot of murder happens and Blake's life really goes to pot.

The first thing that strikes you about Deadfolk is the voice, Blake's voice, that is. He speaks in the voice of small-town Britain, with "summats, bottlers, knackers, fags, mongs, scran, slash," and other such words foreign to my ignorant American ears. No worries, though, you catch on quick then it never lets up. Deadfolk reads ridiculously fast.

The other and most fascinating point that catches your eye is how absolutely thick and thuggish Blake is. I mean, he's our main character, our eyes and ears, and yet he's a nasty piece of work and actually pretty stupid most of the time. It's like if Lehane told the Kenzie/Gennaro books not through Patrick's eyes but through Bubba's. Actually, that might be a pretty good series...

But no, it is really messed up that Blake is a main character. He's sick, he's mean, he's delusional, he's a brute, etc., etc., but he's also hilarious and has a code. Okay, so he breaks his own code more often than not but still. He means well. Not all the time but...okay he's an asshole. It's quite a feat to have him at the center and do some absolutely horrible things (there's one murder by the riverside that almost lost me, a champion of evil characters everywhere), yet he's still our man. And it's not like with many Jason Starr novels where you're supposed to hate him, either. He's our hero, that Royston Blake.

But my favorite aspect of this novel is its simplicity. This is something I talked about way back when I reviewed Guthrie's Savage Night, the pleasure I get out of certain noir novels/movies where the author takes something simple and at human level and has events escalate into something much more complex and agonizing. Basically, the James M. Cain style of noir where there aren't major corruption plots to be uncovered or international spies to be exposed, just simple folk doing simple things for simple reasons...and then all the little things add up to something dizzyingly complicated.

So, my fellow Americans, read yourself some Charlie Williams and know thine enemy. We must not allow him and the rest of his monocle-wearing mates to beat us at our own game any longer.

BROTHERHOOD: SECOND SEASON by Blake Masters

The second season of any good television drama is about opening up the world a bit, changing the rules. The Sopranos introduced new characters (Furio, Richie Aprile) and allowed the storytelling to breathe a bit, the show took its time now that the whole "mother ordering a hit on her son" storyline had been defused. Deadwood had Swearengen practically become the good guy when Tolliver and Hearst's man upped the evil quotient. The Wire gave us an entire new cast of characters when they introduced the stevedores in season two. Mad Men took The Sopranos route after the whole "will Don Draper's identity be revealed?" storyline closed in season one - took its time, paid more attention to minor characters, etc.

Brotherhood sort of follows this mold and sort of doesn't with its second season.

We start out a few months after the last episode of the first season. Michael Caffee has been demoted somewhat in Freddie Cork's crew following the brain damage he suffered from his attempted murder. His right hand man Pete has been working in a garage ever since their falling out over Pete's falling off the wagon. Michael is also shacking up with Kath pretty regular too (Lucky man. That's one thing about this show: There are certainly some attractive "real-looking" women in the cast.)

Tommy Caffee is campaigning for reelection as state rep for the seventh district - arguably the only thing keeping his marriage to Eileen together. He is civil with her ever since she told him about her cheating and drug abuse, but cold. After some prodding by the smarmy speaker of the house, Tommy takes to fucking around on Eileen out of a misplaced sense of revenge.

Declan Giggs has started drinking on the job and spending most of his nights at one of Freddie Cork's whorehouses ever since Cassie left him. However, this behavior does not get him kicked off the force but instead made part of an undercover task force. His CO figures that if he keeps fucking up, Freddie Cork or Michael Caffee will approach him about helping out on a few things. If only the CO knew how much Declan owes Cork and Caffee already...

So there's some pretty good stuff going on in season two. Good mob stuff, good dirty politics stuff, good "in too deep" undercover cop stuff, good family drama stuff. Good show. But when you look at the main storylines I laid out up top, not a whole lot really changed or changes later on in season two from season one. You really might as well have called it season 1.5 or something. I mean, it's good - really good, actually - but it isn't GREAT like I thought it might be, like I thought it had the potential to be.

A perfect example is what happens to Pete McGonagle. After I watched the first episode I was like, "Where the fuck is Pete fucking McGonagle?" The guy is far and away the coolest character (the fan favorite - like Silvio Dante or Dan Dority or Omar Little or Roger Sterling) and he doesn't even show up till episode three and then only as a fucking corpse? Fuck that! But I rolled with it, thought about what that meant for Michael Caffee now that he didn't have a right hand man and confidante.

But then Colin shows up. Colin is a cousin of Michael and Tommy from Belfast who shows up and promptly proves himself violent and charming and - waddaya know - Michael Caffee's brand new right hand man. So fan favorite Pete had not so much been lost to us as he was merely recast by a dude with an Irish accent. And don't get me wrong: Colin is a cool character, a definite fan favorite kind of guy. It's just that, well, I was hoping for a new dynamic, a new direction.

Same thing with the whole part about Tommy being the cheating spouse this time out instead of Eileen. Yeah, that's different for his character and we learn some new things about him through the journey, but it kind of feels cheap in that it is just a reversal of the roles instead of a fresh direction, a new story. Now Tommy gets to be a bastard and Eileen has call to complain instead of the other way around. I mean, it's solid but it ain't blowing your fucking hair back, is it (Though, like I said earlier, there are some very pretty women in this show and adultery is another excuse to see them naked and fucking. I must be pretty spoiled to be bitching about it.)

There are still plenty of reasons to watch Brotherhood even if it is not an astounding show like those mentioned up top. My favorite episode of season one was the hyper-eventful wedding reception finale episode where tons and tons of shit goes down in the span of just a few hours. This season has not one but two similar mini-movie episodes (read: episodes you submit for Peabody Awards) just like it.

The first and better episode is the one where Michael and a demented contract killer wait for their mark to come home so they can off him while we also follow Tommy's moral dilemmas on election day. The other Peabody contender takes place on Thanksgiving where we get to see numerous characters prepare and enjoy/fuck up their family dinners while major gangster shit/undercover cop shit goes down. These episodes, despite their gimmicky-ness, stand out for me the way the "College" episode in The Sopranos does: They hold up strongly on their own, rest of the show be damned.

In the end, Brotherhood remains a hell of a good show with many of the things I liked about the first season still holding true. Thing is, it just doesn't blow your mind or become a better, different show the way many of the modern TV canon has managed to do so as of late. Basically, my complaint is that the bridge was reinforced and painted pretty instead of blown up and reconstructed.

DENNIS LEHANE'S THE GIVEN DAY

I'll grant you that The Given Day is a different for Lehane. It is twice as long as his other books and painstakingly researched, packed with historical events and figures. But The Given Day is still a "Dennis Lehane" novel, no doubt about it. This isn't the boring historical fiction that crowds the shelves of the "Barnes & Noble Recommends" section, no sir. This is historical fiction more along the lines of James Ellroy's The Cold Six-Thousand or Elmore Leonard's The Hot Kid. Shit, there's the blurb right there:

"Dennis Lehane's The Given Day reads like a frenzied mix of James Ellroy's The Cold Six-Thousand and Elmore Leonard's The Hot Kid."

Man, I'm fucking awesome. Anyway, that is how The Given Day goes down: it has the down-and-dirty skinny on history that Ellroy relishes only it's delivered in a fluid prose sure to please any Leonard fan. Do not be put off by the length and cover of this book, it is a shit ton (that's metric, mind) of fucking fun. And on the plus side, you can fool your NPR tote-bag friends into thinking you're reading the next Memoirs of a Geisha while you're really having a pulpy good time, just with a "literary" cover.

The Given Day follows Danny Coughlin, the son of a prominent police captain, as he goes undercover to infiltrate the "Bolsheviki" unions in post-WWI Boston with the hope that his investigation will earn him a promotion to detective. Eventually, our other protagonist, Luther Laurence, crosses his path when he comes to Boston in hopes of hiding out from some vicious Tulsa gangsters he has recently run afoul of. The two become caught up in history as the turbulent times blah-blah-fucking-blah.

A summary only makes this book sound dry as fuck, something it definitely is NOT. The violence hits hard, the language is profane and funny, the characters are sharp, the pace is lightning fast, and the story is the stuff of high classic melodrama (that is a compliment, snobs). The Given Day is an epic written in blood and guts. It's like the best of American movies: lofty themes delivered via an entertaining genre story (Chinatown, Godfather, Wild Bunch).

So do not be put off by the sheer weight of the book or its pretentious cover or the historical setting. This book will kick your ass and make the pages fly just as fast as they did when you read Darkness, Take My Hand or Mystic River. Lehane may have branched out some, but he certainly did not alienate his devotees.

CATCHING UP #10: PSYCHOSOMATIC by ANTHONY NEIL SMITH

Psychosomatic is a nasty piece of work. It's one of those books where after you put it down, you feel both disturbed and assured by the knowledge that yes, there is someone out there who likes their escapism just as sick and wrong as you yourself do. This book is demented, gross, disturbing, and funny as all hell. In other words, it's only for members of the hardcore club. We're talking like Allan Guthrie hardcore, here, folks. Fucked up shit.

The books starts with a hot chick whose lost her arms and legs named Lydia. Her drug dealing ex-husband Ronnie has been a douche to her ever since she lost all her limbs in a car accident, going so far as to stop by her place with another woman and fuck her brains out while Lydia has to sit there helplessly and watch.

That shit will not play with Lydia.

She hires an idiot ex-prizefighter named Cap to beat the shit out of Ronnie for three grand, only to later learn that Cap is an old associate of Ronnie's. Cap tells Ronnie about his wife's scheme which gives Ronnie an idea. He gives fat loser Alan Crabtree forty bucks to film the fight, has him pose as an innocent Zapruder who just happened to have his camcorder with him at the right time. Crabtree agrees and films it, only to get footage of the idiot Cap accidentally killing Ronnie. Thinking fast, Crabtree kills Cap and makes it look like the two men did each other in. Afterwards he stops by Lydia's place to tell her what went down, only to get laid by the stumpy seductress.

Soon enough, Crabtree is Lydia's bitch, the femme fatale using her sexuality to turn Crabtree into her puppet, a puppet who will help her climb to the top of the drug trade. Throw in a pair of frat boys car-jackers turned cop-killers, a crazy goth girl in an old-fashioned nurse's uniform, a redneck X dealer, a few rapes, and a ton of murders and you have Psychosomatic, one of the craziest books I've read in a good goddamned while.

Now, as you can tell from the plot summary, this book boasts some bizarre low-lifes and a crazy plot, but what makes it really sing is its sharp prose, the hilarious dialogue, and the very original use of Gulf Coast locations. This is a world we've never seen before and Smith reveals it slyly and carefully despite the briskness of Psychosomatic's pace. Also, though the characters might sound like a bunch of wacky cartoons, somehow Smith makes them feel real, their motivations human.

I mean, hell, who wouldn't want to sleep with a hot amputee? Wait...did I just develop a new personal fetish? DAMN YOU SMITH!!!

So, if you like your fiction to completely cross the line, you can't go wrong with Psychosomatic.

MARCUS SAKEY'S GOOD PEOPLE

I surely hope someone makes a movie out of Sakey's latest novel, Good People. It has a strong story and characters, is loaded with tension, and chugs along at an extremely brisk pace to a satisfying, action-packed conclusion. In other words, it's just like Sakey's other two novels, The Blade Itself and At The City's Edge.

Except here Sakey really fucking brings it.

Good People begins with a quartet of professional thieves ripping off a movie star who is making a drug deal in a flashy downtown Chicago nightclub. Naturally, the heist goes bad and one thief ends up dead and another takes off with the whole score to himself.

Flash to a few weeks later to Tom and Anna Reed, a yuppie Chicago couple who are trying their damnedest to have a baby, and while the work certainly shows on their bank account, it isn't registering on their home pregnancy tests. The debt from the fertilization treatments is tearing apart their marriage until they find their tenant, a grumpy asshole with no family or friends, dead in his bed from a heart condition. What's more, they also find his stash of four-hundred grand...

After convincing themselves that taking the money won't hurt anybody, Tom and Anna soon find themselves hunted by the two thieves the dead man betrayed. And the drug dealer the four thieves ripped off originally. And the cops.

In other words, our J. Crew-wearing heroes are in way over their square little heads.

It's a great story that I read in no time (same as the other two Sakey novels) but this time I think he really has a handle on things. The bad guys are oh-so-fucking-bad, the good guys really get the screws put to them, and the balance between the Reeds' yuppie normalcy and the criminal underworld of the thieves is struck perfectly.

But I should say, that as with the last two Sakey novels, I still don't feel the true on-the-ledge danger, the sense that anything can happen. I never get the impression that either Tom or Anna will die or get mangled or have some other tragedy befall them (as could very well happen in a Jason Starr yuppie noir, something I kept thinking about throughout the novel). Sakey has established himself as a rock-solid crime writer, but certainly not one of the modern bad boys that have popped up in the last few years. No, he's more in line with someone like Michael Koryta, an author who no doubt brings some dark goods, but who you can also reccomend to your mom.

But then again, that's more a matter of personal taste than an actual complaint about the book. This is Marcus Sakey's story, after all. Can't blame him for not being Jason Starr (though the last half of Starr's The Follower felt pretty safe to me, making me mildly nervous about his next solo effort...). That being said, Good People proves that Sakey keeps growing with each book, and - from the rate he's been pumping these fuckers out - it probably won't be long before he tops himself yet again.

CATCHING UP #9: CITIZEN VINCE by JESS WALTER

With the election just days away, now is the perfect time to pick up Jess Walter's Citizen Vince, a crime novel about the importance of the right to vote. I know what you're thinking my friends (election humor), "A crime novel about hopeful shit like voting? The fuck?" Well my friends (I'll stop now), if you skip this one you'll be missing out on some of the best dialogue not penned by Elmore Leonard or Charlie Huston, and a plot that unravels with the organic ease of a Pelecanos novel.

We meet donut baker Vince Camden a week before the 1980 election in Spokane, Washington as he bakes donuts, deals pot, makes fake IDs and runs a credit card scam. He's also juggling two women, a neurotic prostitute and a book smart donut shop customer that he pines for. It's a quiet life but Vince makes it work.

But then Ray Sticks had to arrive in town and fuck it all up.

You see, Vince Camden's name is in witness protection after some bad debts left him in deep with the New York mob, forcing him to cut a deal with the FBI. Well, it seems the FBI didn't do a good enough job because if Ray Sticks after you, that means the mob is sending out their very best to do you in. After he narrowly escapes from Sticks, Vince catches a plane to New York in an effort to figure out who sent Sticks after him.

It's a good old-fashioned crime story, a lot like something Leonard might write, but what really makes Citizen Vince hum is it's sense of place and connection to the presidential election. Some surprising historical characters pop up in this book (I won't spoil it) and it's not just a stunt - no, it actually makes perfect sense that they would be involved in this story at this time in our history. And then there's the on-going election campaigns that keep getting mention in this novel. Again, this is not just a device, "the vote" is essentially what Citizen Vince is all about.

You see, before he went in the program, Vince was a felon and therefore not allowed to vote. Now, despite all the crazy violent shit going on around him, the need to vote, to be normal, to count, is the most important thing on his agenda. How Walter pulls these scenes off without making you gag from sentimentality, how he makes you feel a glimmer of hope for the process - it's just something to fucking awe.

Boils down to this, my friends (sorry, I can't get over how lame that is): Read Citizen Vince and you might just believe in what you write on the ballot this November.

SCALPED VOL 03: DEAD MOTHERS comes out!

Jason Aaron and R.M. Guera have just put out the third trade of Scalped. their kick-ass series about a shady-as-shit Indian Reservation. I cannot stress this enough, folks: If you like noir, you should be reading Scalped. That's all I should have to say. Hands down, the comic you should be reading.

But, I'll continue because I've got nothing better to do.

This series is what I always dreamt of when I first discovered comics, an event that wasn't that long ago (I know: for a nerd I am late to the party). Scalped is a large cast crime story with a fresh environment where there are no good guys and bad guys. The violence hits hard and the dialogue is foul and funny. Basically, it is The Sopranos on a Rez. In fact, if David Chase ever adapted the series for HBO, I would give up beer.

Well, for at least a week.

So I implore you, dear nerd, to pick up the first three trades (Indian Country, Casino Boogie and Dead Mothers) then quickly get caught up on the issues. That should tide you over until the lazy bastards who put out Criminal finally pick up their current run. I swear, what is the fucking hold up over at ICON? Criminal is on possibly the most staggered and fucked up schedule of all time.

But I digress: Scalped fever. Catch it.

EVERY LAST DROP by CHARLIE HUSTON

If you haven't been reading the Joe Pitt vampyre novels, then don't read beyond this paragraph. Instead you should go get Already Dead and prepare to burn through the rest of the Joe Pitt books (No Dominion, Half the Blood of Brooklyn, Every Last Drop) toot-fucking-sweet. And don't be fooled into thinking Charlie Huston's vampyre (sorry, it's how it's spelled in the book, probably the ONLY thing lame about the whole series) universe is similar to the other shit floating around in the toilet bowl that is current vampire media (looking at you True Blood and Twilight). Huston's books are hard-fucking-boiled noir before they are anything else, and with the latest - the penultimate in the series - Huston out does himself in the depravity department. This is rough stuff delivered smoothly via his stream-lined no-bullshit prose style.

Okay, so for those of you left, let me give you a quick rundown of where Pitt's at since we last left him in Half the Blood of Brooklyn. In the year since the previous novel, Pitt's been laying low in the wasteland that is the Bronx, a burrough where there is damn near no organization whatsoever to be had. In other words, Pitt's had to resort to more desperate ways to acquire blood. But not that desperate. He's still looking out for psychos to kill, crazed vampyres who risk exposing them all with their reckless bloody feedings. In fact, chasing just such a gang of vampyres is what brings him in contact with Lament, a sadistic child-abusing vampyre who gives his charges ridiculously sad monikers like "Low" and "Pathetic." Lament is apparently in the employ of Dexter Predo of Manhattan's Coalition and Predo makes a trip across town upon Pitt's capture. He's got a proposition for our hero.

Remember pretty little rich girl Amanda Horde and her pre-op tranny vampyre girlfriend Sela? Well, Amanda has started up her own clan called Cure and she's taking in any and all vampyres. Predo wants Pitt to be his mole within Cure and give him a heads up on how close Horde is to discovering a cure for the Vyrus, if she's going public anytime soon - stuff like that. In exchange for his service he gets his hall pass back for Manhattan. Thus Joe Pitt comes back to "civilization."

From there Pitt gets in way over his head and plays all sides against each other and generally fucks up everybody's shit. He also takes a horrifying trip up to Queens to visit the wild Mungiki gang (for those keeping score at home, Staten Island is the only borough Pitt has yet to cross into by my count).

Basically, Huston is setting everything up for the out-and-out war that we'll no doubt encounter in the final novel. There is a lot of expositional dialogue in this entry but it is generally okay because nobody does dialogue better than Huston (bold, I know, but true). There is plenty of violence and gore in Every Last Drop (an obscene amount once you get to Queens) and some fucking HUGE secrets are revealed, but it really feels like he's setting you up for the big pay-off that promises to come down upon us in the upcoming last book. More so than any of the previous three books, Every Last Drop doesn't really work without having read what came before, hence why I told you, uninformed-readers-still-reading, to stop reading after the first paragraph otherwise none of this will make any sense to you.

But I guess in another way, if you HAVE read the first three, you don't need a review to tell you to read the living shit out of this one. Thing is, because the release dates of Charlie's books got switched around, it's most likely going to be at least a year and a half before the final Pitt book comes out.

Shit.

CATCHING UP #8: DIRTY SWEET by JOHN McFETRIDGE

I am not a fan of reading series books out of order. Thankfully, there was only one book in the Toronto series prior to Everybody Know this is Nowhere so I wasn't ridiculously behind, but if I'd read them in order Everybody Knows probably would have read a little smoother, certain events wouldn't have seemed so out-of-the-blue. In other words, don't make my mistake: read Dirty Sweet then Everybody Knows.

And I'm not advising this simply simply because it makes the characters easier to distinguish. No, it's because Dirty Sweet is an easier way to enter McFetridge's vast world simply from a storytelling perspective. Dirty Sweet is more like classic Elmore Leonard while Everybody Knows plays out more like Clockers (okay, so despite the last few pages of Everybody Knows which were jarringly cute and tidy in a Get Shorty sort of way). But this is not to suggest that Dirty Sweet isn't as smart or exciting as Everybody Knows, not by a longshot.

Down-on-her-luck real-estate agent Roxanne Keyes saw a man shot in the head right in the middle of downtown traffic. Guy just gets out of the passenger seat of a car and pops a fellow motorist three times in the fucking face. Cops Price and Loewen question her and it's clear that she knows more than she's fessing up to. They're right: She knows who the driver of the murderer's car was, a Russian strip club owner named Boris Suliemanov. Roxanne figures she can use this knowledge to her advantage, coerce Boris into taking some real estate off her hands.

But then she meets internet porn entrepeneur Vince Fournier, a charmer with a secretive past and a bright idea for how to launder money for Boris through his web operation. There would be percentages handed out, naturally...

From here the cops and the Mounties breath down all of their necks and the motorcycle club boys try to edge in on Boris's small-time operation and, of course, murder and mayhem ensue.

As with Everybody Knows, Dirty Sweet has a massive cast of characters and doles out seemingly authentic lore left and right about Toronto, police work, porn, money-laundering, organized crime and many other topics that have rarely been covered in crime fiction so intelligently. The scam at the center of Dirty Sweet is much more complex and realistic than any I've read in quite some time.

But the real kicker here is how complex McFetridge's characters and their respective arcs are. There are no good guys and bad guys, in a sense you're rooting for just about everybody on all sides. Even the "romance" in the novel is touching and quite achingly sad. Roxanne and Vince seem to hit it off in the manner that they would in a Leonard novel, but then takes a realistically melancholy turn later in the book as their dark secrets are slowly revealed to the reader.

I hope that McFetridge keeps writing in this police precinct/Toronto underworld series. It has such a rich cast that I could see McFetridge's Toronto growing and growing to become something as wonderful as Pelecanos's D.C.