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Already Dead by Charlie Huston
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It’s a lot harder to do this than it looks. I know, all too well, because I’ve been working on something in the same vein. (And “vein�� isn’t a pun, though it could be.)

Huston’s basic plan here is to marry the hardboiled novel to the vampire story. His hero, Joe Pitt, is a vampire who, true to the Chandler/Hammett code, insists on working alone in a quasi-existential bid to figure out what it all means. In other words, his case(s) turn out to be as much about self-discovery as about their more proximate causes.

And it works. It works pretty well.

Being a vampire (vampyre) means that Pitt is changed from what he was when he was human. He isn’t sure what fulfillment might look like. He balances his girlfriend �� who, as someone HIV-positive, refuses to sleep with him �� with his uncertain place in the pecking order of the New York vampire world. He takes cases no one else can manage because, precarious and alone as he may be, no one else in this world is as self-possessed, as legitimately his own person.

The story itself is solid. Pitt comes up against the agendas of several different people, and it isn’t clear until the end who’s responsible for what. It’s professional work, entertaining and engaging, and, as I say, I’ve tried my hand at something similar.

Things fall down a little when too much of the story turns on the particulars of what it means to be a vampire, things like how the virus affects its host and how driven particular vampires are to the different clans and gangs, to the politics of the vampyre world. But, from what I can tell, Huston builds on all of that as part of the ongoing series. He’s planting the seeds of a more complex world where each decision here has implications for future novels. So, if it feels a touch too pat here, I can forgive it.

I also can’t help contrasting this with Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden books. Where those are clunky and cliché-ridden, with a protagonist in love with his idiosyncrasies, this is someone who approaches a real character �� at least as real as a vampire private detective can get.

In the end (or in the beginning if you prefer) it’s a stretch to make this work, but Huston does. I’m not quite in a hurry to read what’s next, but it’s on the list. This is quality pulp fiction, and I’m taking notes on how Huston pulls it off.


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The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I didn’t especially enjoy Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, and that, to my somewhat surprise, is the only Gaiman I have read so far. I’m not sure where to start with The Sandman stuff, and none of the other novels have struck me as particularly compelling. (But I am open to suggestions��) I’m just not that interested in fiction that seems poised to rewrite metaphysics. If Neverwhere was full of secret doors and an entire separate plane of existence, it suggested too large a canvas, one unsatisfactorily filled.

As it turns out, though, The Ocean at the End of the Lane isn’t a grand urban fantasy, nor is it an Allan-Moore style fantasy-politico invention. Instead, this is a smaller, more personal and more haunted story.

And it’s what I was hoping I’d find in Gaiman even if I didn’t know it until now.

The more I read this, the more it brought to mind the fabulous A Wrinkle in Time, down even to the presence of three mysterious women (one a girl here) who represent a glimpse of powers that we humans can never quite realize. But, as important as those characters are, the real story turns on a child who is only slowly learning that the universe is larger than himself. It’s a slow, difficult and sometimes terrifying business to learn that the adults who protect us are really just grown-up children themselves. That story may be as old as our species, but we have to find ways to tell it in every generation.

Gaiman manages very cleverly (and often movingly) to give a sense of the wonders of childhood �� the joy of having a kitten or the freedom of running through a field �� so the threats that emerge have something real at stake. I also enjoy the framing device of his returning to the scene of these events as an adult �� an adult who cannot entirely remember what it felt like to be a child in these circumstances �� since it punctuates the story as a whole.

There are moments here where a nostalgia creeps in, where (as he discusses in his afterword) Gaiman seems too much drawn to the lost world of his own childhood, and that feels like a flaw to me. Others may complain about the many unexplained elements of the magic, but that doesn’t bother me; the whole point of magic is for things to be left unexplained. But we do get hints at it, promises that some things will be revealed, and then those things aren’t. I like mystery, but I have less patience for teasing.

In any case, I did enjoy this. It feels like a small work, but that may be its biggest virtue: a clean shot at recovering a lost and focused innocence.


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The Chill by Jason Starr
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

To be honest, I haven’t read all that many “graphic novels.�� That’s not for lack of trying. I read trade paperback collections of monthly or quarterly series all the time �� like Eric Powells’s The Goon or Dave Sim’s Cerebus. And I enjoy any of them, or I wouldn’t keep reading them.

But actual “novels�� in graphic form? Stories that sustain themselves over the course of a book and then end? Not so many. There are the legit literary ones �� Will Eisner, Art Spiegelman, and Gene Luen Yang �� but this is genre, a noir story boiled down to pictures and just a handful of words.

And this really works. It ties bloodied up Celtic myths with a police procedural and a generational love story. It reveals its background mystery quickly where others might make a gimmick out of it, but it keeps up its energy as the climax ramps up.

As much as any graphic novel I can think of, this feels like reading a movie. The illustrations are clean and sharp, and they carry the story in important ways. As just one example, a character has the capacity to appear differently to different people. The illustrations show that before we get the explanation, but not too much before.

I’ve heard good things about Starr, and I read an earlier book that he wrote with Ken Bruen. On the evidence of these two, he’s someone to keep reading. He gets what the genre is about, and he delivers it without nonsense.

Definitely worth checking out.


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Rilke on Black by Ken Bruen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’ve had a serious jones for Bruen’s work over the last few months. When he’s on, he just gets the hardboiled. He has his own voice and his own powerful sense of humor, and he has a knack for writing stories that favor the jab over the haymaker: quick narratives that take off and wrap up in skilled fashion.

This one, despite sounding great, is my least favorite of his so far. For one thing, I find the voice here more challenging that in other places. Nick talks in a strange fashion, some of it British-street vernacular (which can make it tough) and some of it just idiosyncratic in its rhythms. I expect him to go on about one thing, and he instead chooses another. It isn’t a matter of vocabulary, but of direction; I had too many instances of expecting he’d talk about one thing and finding, instead, that I was supposed to pick it up by innuendo or implication.

For another, Nick is very self-satisfied. He may have ambitions to be more than a tough bouncer, but he likes being a big plug-ugly. He likes the feeling of intimidating most people he sees. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not a perspective I can readily adopt. Unlike the extraordinary Jack Taylor in The Guards, who manages not quite to hate himself as he wrestles with his many failures, Nick risks patting himself on the back at every turn.

That tension undermines the strong premise of the book: Nick, his new young lover, and his sociopathic neighbor kidnap a local businessman. That might go in a lot of directions �� and it does bring some solid payoffs, especially in the way the businessman teases the not-too-bright Nick �� but it leads to Nick taking more and more responsibility for the crime as we see him less and less able. (I mean, forgetting to wear the mask that’s in his pocket?) In other words, Nick trusts (and even likes) himself despite increasing evidence that he shouldn’t.

The good news is that, like the other Bruen I’ve read, this is all over in a rush of adrenaline. This isn’t disappointing enough to put me off Bruen, but it’s certainly at the bottom of my list of his.


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Frank Nitti: The True Story of Chicago's Notorious "Enforcer" by Ronald D. Humble
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I generally know enough to avoid second-rate mob books. If you’ve ever been to my home and seen the floor-to-ceiling collection I have of books on Chicago and Jewish organized crime, you’d know I know the material pretty well, well enough to know what not to read at least.

Humble’s book threw me, though. He makes two big claims and a couple of smaller ones that, if he had evidence for, would really be game-changers.

For starters, he goes for the paradigm-shifting assertion that Frank Nitti was the key man in the Chicago Outfit. The “paradigm,�� even after all these years, is that Al Capone led the show in the important years. By the early 1960s, when Bobby Kennedy’s crusade against the mob brought the whole business fully mainstream, there were already claims that the credit (blame?) should have gone to Johnny Torrio. A few years later, when it became clear that the Outfit was still humming along, some people put forward the idea that Tony Accardo was a mover and shaker earlier than the public record suggested. A few years after that, there was a movement for Paul Ricca, with claims that he’d have been “the genuine godfather�� (as Bill Roemer called Accardo) but for the accident of getting arrested when he did.

So, Humble goes here for the one remaining big shot no one has really put forward for such honor (dishonor). (To be far, Mars Egheghian has looked hard at Nitti, but he’s made a more thoughtful and less dramatic claim for Nitti’s importance. He isn’t trying to claim that Nitti really overshadowed Capone; he’s trying to tell the history of a key figure who’s generally been overshadowed.)

And the evidence is thin. There are dozens of pages of references, which is good, but few of those references are full or even to substantial sources. There’s a lot of cherry-picking here: a selection of evidence that affirms Nitti’s far-sighted criminal planning, and then a range of unsubstantiated claims. Nitti was the guy behind the Hymie Weiss. Nitti was the real brains behind the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Nitti was the one who saw how to lead the mob out of its Prohibition dependence on illegal booze.

Each of those elements is questionable. Dozens of better-informed historians have tried to solve the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, and few have ever put Nitti at the heart of it. But even so, that pillar of evidence would be what deserves attention, not the conclusion Humble tries to draw from it.

Humble’s second big claim is, taking the widely discussed but generally dismissed claim that Giuseppe Zangara deliberately shot Anton Cermak when he seemed to be aiming at FDR, he asserts that future Outfit triggerman Davey Yaras was the brains behind the assassination.

I’m not sure where to start with all that. I’ve been working on a book project involving Yaras (who, weirdly, is buried 20 yards from my grandmother) for several years, so I know what’s out there on him. How Humble can claim that a 21 year old kid, who was, apparently, still working as a boxer, could have been involved in a vast and successful conspiracy, is beyond me. And how, given the thin-ness of that claim, he could then go on to quibble with the Warren Commission’s findings and insist that Yaras was central to the JFK assassination is simply mind-boggling.

It’s conspiracy-theory work of the kind that gives this whole genre a bad name.

Early on, when I suspected problems, I started noting some of the factual errors here. For the sake of posterity, here are some of them:

+ New York’s Paul Kelly, of Five Points Gang fame, was not Irish but rather very much Italian.

+ Tony Accardo was not locked up in the Cook County Prison, as Humble tells on page 11. Rather, as Humble tells us on page 50, Accardo famously never spent a night in jail.

+ North Side gang leaders Bugs Moran (French-Canadian) and Teddy Newberry (Jewish) were not Irish.

+ There is no evidence that policeman Harry Miller (yeah, one of my relatives) was linked to narcotics trafficking. To be sure, I followed Humble’s one reference on the subject to George Murray’s old book. Murray says nothing about narcotics, and Humble gives no other source.

So, yeah, skip this one. With any luck, I’ll have one of my own out in the next four or five years. Without that luck, you can still find a great many much better takes on Chicago and Prohibition. It’s a long list.


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Ubik by Philip K. Dick
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I wanted to like this one more than I did. Philip K. Dick’s work seems intriguing at a distance. I gather he had a sense of some of what it would feel like to live in virtual reality before virtual reality existed, and I gather he had a critical eye toward it. Who would we be in a future where we could invent so much of the world we experienced?

And this book really is a virtual reality experience. I don’t want to give away too much, but most of it takes place within a construct that one of the characters discovers himself inside. There is an inside and an outside to the experience, and it’s tantalizingly confusing to tell one from the other. And the very end suggests a wrinkle that serves as a potentially fascinating coda to the whole.

Knowing all that, I’d have been psyched to read this. I like what it’s asking, and I like the way it refuses to take the easy path and explain everything we go through. Much weaker authors could turn this material into something three times as long, and they’d weaken the strangeness at its core.

That said, though, this just didn’t quite grab me. Too many of the rules of the universe get demonstrated and then undermined. Details that matter early end up not mattering at all. There is a showdown in place, but it’s not the one we’ve been led to believe for most of the book. Dick shows his cleverness throughout this, and that cleverness acts as an antidote to the antiseptic sci-fi concepts that undergird it, but I found myself playing catch-up so often that I never quite caught the joy of it.

To be fair, I read this as an audiobook, and I think the narrator was likely ill-suited to the material. There’s an air of cynicism here; if it isn’t quite a noir experience, it certainly isn’t the bright, suburban-toned reader I had.

So, I’ll look for another PKD one of these years, holding out hope that Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep or some other of his best-known work will get through to me. For now, though, I don’t quite get the program, and I’m willing to accept that it may be more my shortcomings than Dick himself.


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