Blood & Whiskey #5
Dear friends and readers…
The first real Seattle rain in months is falling as I wrap up this month's newsletter. We even briefly turned the heat on, which means fall rain-reading season is near. I've never been a "beach reads" person. If I'm at a beach, I'm swimming or paddling. But drizzle and gloom? Bring it on. Give me a fake-log, gas-powered fire, some jazz on the Sonos, and a beer within reach, and I'm good. Lots of good books coming this fall, the peak mystery-thriller release season: Michael Connelly, Val McDermid, Lisa Unger (see below), John Banville, and even one last le Carre. And there's always the unread stack of classics beckoning from my bookshelf: Ira Levin, Dorothy B. Hughes, Margaret Millar, her spouse Ross Macdonald, Georges Simenon.
This month's highlights include a few books (photo below) I picked up at a cool little bookshop in Victoria, BC, called Chronicles of Crime. Five were published by the fine folks at Soho Press and its Soho Crime imprint, a realization that reminded me to start adding publisher info to my reviews. (Starting.... now).
Also this month: Peter Heller's new literary thriller, The Guide (Knopf) is just out - see my Q&A with Heller below - as is a sharp crime caper, Harlem Shuffle (Doubleday) from versatile, shape-shifting Pulitzer-Prize winner (twice!) Colson Whitehead.
First up, though, my new author crush: James Sallis. He's been around for eighteen books, including Drive (which became that movie) and a bio of noir writer Chester Himes, which is on my TBR list. (I picked up Himes's If He Hollers Let Him Go in Victoria, too.) Originally published in 1992, Sallis's The Long-Legged Fly is the first in a series featuring haunted, Chekov-reading, hard-drinking (as in a pitcher of martinis for lunch) New Orleans private eye, Lew Griffin. He's a vivid, sad, angry, memorable character: a Black man in racist world; a poet of the streets, too friendly with the bottle; a cynic who wants to help, to right wrongs, but isn't sure any of it matters. "Things never get better... At the very best, they only get different." Sallis reminds me a bit of hard-to-categorize, slightly under-the-radar Percival Everett. Tight sentence gems. Wounded characters. Stories a bit slant. No easy resolutions. Soho republished the first four Lew Griffin novels, and the next three are on my list, as is the more recent Sarah Jane. (For more on Sallis, there's a good piece on LitHub: HERE.)
In Naomi Hirahara's historical thriller Clark and Division (Soho Crime), after the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, Aki Ito and her family are forced into the infamous Manzanar internment camp, ripped from their lives outside Los Angles where Aki's father ran a produce market. ("Our world shook and our friends began to disappear.") After three years they're allowed to relocate to Chicago, where Aki's sister Rose is waiting. But a day before they arrive, Rose is killed by a subway train in an apparent suicide. Set in the blocks surrounding the Clark and Division subway station, where Rose lived and died, Aki’s search for the truth behind Rose’s death exposes her to shady thugs, underground clubs, good-bad cops, and a slew of clues and coincidences. Despite a couple far-fetched plot twists, Hirahara kept me unsure and second-guessing until the end, with subtle feints and lots of historical details. It’s always a treat when a writer can sustain my interest and conceal the truth for 300+ pages.
My favorite this past month was Stuart Neville’s subtly masterful The House of Ashes (Soho Crime), a dark and fearless story of, well, really bad men and the women they seek to possess. Sara and Damien Keane have moved back to his native Northern Irish town to rehab an old house with a dark past. The narrative shifts between the present (with the IRA and “The Troubles” lurking offscreen) and sixty years earlier, when a woman named Mary lived in the house, which, no spoiler here (given the book’s title), was quite the house of horrors. Neville is a tightly-controlled and thrilling writer. He had me squirming with fear and anger, gasping at the remorseless violence, even ashamed at times of my gender and the cruelty that childish men are capable of. At the same time, I was awed by his restraint and pacing, the dialogue and action, and he had me cheering on the bold women striving to break free of their oppressors.
In Peter Heller’s books, the land, water, and sky (and sometimes fire) are more than settings, they become characters, sometimes comforting, sometimes deadly. In his new book, The Guide (Knopf), Jack — carried over from the last book, The River — is a guide at an exclusive fishing club that helps the wealthy and famous catch a few trout. Jack, of course, learns that not all is what it seems at Kingfisher Lodge, nor along the river that slices through the deep canyon. I’m still reading this one, but managed to reach Heller with a few quick Q&A questions…
Origins: So I always start with a first line whose music I love. In THE GUIDE it was “They gave him a bunk in a cabin by the river… Jack dropped his pack on the porch…” I was happy about it. I’m a sucker for a good porch and there was Jack. I was very glad to see him. I’d left him at the end of the last novel brokenhearted and alone and I’d been worried about him. And then I thought about something Lee Child had told me at a book festival breakfast a few years before: We were talking about method and I said that I started a novel with a first line and had no clue what was coming and let it rip. He said that he did, too. Me: “You’re kidding.” LC: “Nope. I throw everything against the wall in the first half — dead bodies, lurking figures, accidents — and don’t have a clue. In the second half I mirror all of that, tie up all the threads, and whatever doesn’t tie up is red herring and I’m good.” I thought I’d try it in THE GUIDE. Jack has just signed on as a fishing guide at a very fancy lodge and in the first few pages I piled on surveillance cameras, neighbors who shoot at fishers who stray across the line, mauling dogs downstream… anything that seemed fun and scary. The method takes a lot of faith that all of it will somehow work out.
Favorite line: “The canyon brimmed with pines and spruce and scattered aspen, and broken sandstone up high, and there was nothing above the bands of rimrock but higher mountains, the Beckwiths and Raggeds. And above those a felted blackness, limitless, and dense with stars. What could be better? It was his mantra, what he told himself again and again as he went through his day and tried to keep his eyes clear and his heart open. If not open, at least strong—his spirit. What could be better?”
Also… “Don’t fuck with a cowboy.”
Fuel: I wrote the book during Covid. I absolutely had to get out. So I paddled whitewater with friends twice a week and drank a lot of coffee. Come to think of it, I always drink a lot of coffee.
Also read or reading…
Clever and catchy, Lisa Unger’s Last Girl Ghosted (Park Row Books / Harper Collins) comes out Oct. 5, and I’ll have a full review next month. I’m more than halfway through and this baby’s got it all: dating apps, digital privacy, missing girls, secret identities, doomsday preppers, the dark web. This one could be big.
Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle (Doubleday) is billed as his first crime novel. As he did with his zombie novel, Zone One, Whitehead brings his own quirky-sharp sensibilities to the crime genre, as Harlem furniture salesman Ray Carney gets pulled deeper into the shady world of gangsters, lowlifes and wannabes. It’s also a riveting portrait of Harlem in the 1960s, a story of race, corruption, family, greed, and power. His last two, both brilliant — The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys — each won the Pulitzer Prize.
The Postman Always Rings Twice, by James M. Cain. Spending time with Cain’s classic, with sweaty, doomed Frank and Cora, was a single-session treat — “a good, swift, violent story,” as Dashiell Hammett described it. I also watched the 1981 Bob Rafelson remake with Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange, but… What a mess! Occasionally sexy, sure, but the tone was so goofy and off. So was Jack.
See below* for info on buying books mentioned in Blood & Whiskey.
Cocktail of the Month…
My wife’s mom stayed with us for a few weeks this summer, and one thing I love about my mother-in-law (in addition to great cook and a great reader) is her appreciation for the occasional well-made cocktail. We experimented with a bunch of them this summer, and here’s a favorite — a play on a Boulevardier or Old Pal (sans vermouth).
The Pauline
1 oz bourbon (i.e. Bulleit)
1 oz Campari (an amaro works, too)
bitters (I used tasty plum tree bitters from Girl Meets Dirt on Orcas Island)
slice of orange, slice of ginger
Muddle a slice of orange and a slice of ginger with a few dashes of bitters. Add ice, bourbon, Campari, and top with club soda, stir…
Playlist of the Month…
This one is for the writers out there…
During the darker days of the Covid shutdown, at the suggestion of writer Jami Attenberg (who has a great newsletter called Craft Talk), I subscribed to the Flow State newsletter, which sent me daily music recommendations — instrumental, trancy, droney, ambient, dancey — tunes for getting into a work flow. Over the years, I’d tried various sounds to disappear into my writing — Brian Eno, Radiohead, Steve Reich, Arthur Russell, two Beastie Boys chill albums (The In Sound from Way Out and The Mix Up). I’ve listened to days’ worth of jazz, and my second book, Driving with the Devil, was fueled by the Drive-By Truckers (and Evan Williams whiskey). But lately this “flow” stuff has been doing the trick, so here’s a collection of favorites:
Giveaway…
Last month’s winner: our pal (and realtor) from Asheville, NC, Dana H. Congrats!
Next giveaway: I’ll send both of the books pictured below to one winner (picked from a hat). To enter, just share/post this newsletter somewhere on the world wide web…
And in October I’ll do a giveaway for my forthcoming book, The First Kennedys.
Thanks for reading again this month! Feel free to send feedback or suggestions. And please spread the word a little, on the socials, or forward this to friends and family.
Till next month….
-Neal
You can find me on Instagram; occasionally Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Goodreads
And it's a battered old suitcase
To a hotel someplace
And a wound that will never heal
No prima donna, the perfume is on
An old shirt that is stained with blood and whiskey…
-Tom Waits, “Tom Traubert’s Blues”
*Books mentioned in Blood & Whiskey can be found on my online list at Bookshop.org (which supports independent bookstores, sharing a cut of each sale), or at Amazon.com. I encourage you to shop local. You can find a store near you with Bookshop’s store locator tool (HERE), or the store finder at IndieBound (HERE).
p.s. — Oh, and here’s a Wall of Simenon from the amazing Russell Books in Victora, BC (a few doors down from the equally amazing Munro’s Books)…
