Angry Wisdom from Dangerous Dan

Every once in a while, I feel compelled to share some of the wisdom I've accumulated over the years.

1. Hallways are not good places to have conversations.
2. Doorways - Also not a good place to have a conversation.  Specifically the doorway in front of the men's room.
3. If you don't use your turn signal, you're a liar.
4. If your turn signal is on and you're not turning, you're a dangerous liar.
5. Blue tooth earpieces are not fashion accessories
6. No matter how cool you think you look when you bring your laptop into a restaurant or coffee shop, everyone else thinks you're a douche.
7. If you're having dinner with someone and ignore them to text someone else, you deserve to injest the spit in your food that mysteriously arrived there while you were neglecting your dinner companion.

This has been the first installment of Angry Wisdom with Dangerous Dan.  We'll now return to your regularly scheduled programming.

Ten from the Hip - The Hard Case Covers

The covers of the Hard Case titles are what attracted most of us to the line.  Here are ten of my favorites.


 

Six Fatal Shots - Six Notable Books in the Hard Case Crime series

There are a lot of good books in the Hard Case line.  Here are six.  I'm not including Grifter's Game or Girl with the Long Green Heart because I didn't review either of them as I was reading and they aren't fresh enough in my mind to write reviews for now.

House Dick by E. Howard Hunt

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Pete Novak is a hotel detective (or house dick) working for a Washington DC hotel. Novak takes a shine to a gorgeous guest, only to find the murdered body of her former sugar daddy in her room and the jewels he gave her missing. Can Novak find the jewels and keep the woman out of jail?



First off, I almost dismissed this one as one of Hard Case's more dubious picks, like the Robert Parker book that wasn't by the Parker everyone was thinkng of. E. Howard Hunt was involved in the Watergate break-in, after all. Well, I was wrong.



Hunt's writing is top notch and Novak is a great noir protagonist. He's a lonely hotel detective with a budding drinking problem. The web of sex, lies, and murder is very easy to get caught up in and hard to get to the center of without being devoured by it. I should know. I read the whole thing in one sitting. It's a little lighter on violence than some Hard Cases but heavy on twists. It took me forever to catch on to what actually happened regarding the jewels and Chalmer's murder. On the surface, the plot looks simple but once all the players are introduced, it becomes much more complicated.



If I could only recommend one Hard Case to someone, it would probably be this one. Who knows? It might become someone's favorite book with the word dick in the title*











*Yeah, it was an easy joke but I had to do it...



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The Vengeful Virgin by Gil Brewer

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Well, she was a virgin at some point...



The story is straight out of the James M. Cain playbook. Jack Ruxton, a broke TV repairman, hooks up with a teenage temptress, Shirley Angela. Shirley and Jack plot to rid Shirley of her invalid stepfather and get her vast inheritance. Almost immediately, things get shot to hell...



The Vengeful Virgin is a thrill ride of conspiracy, murder, sex, and insanity. Gil Brewer's prose is similar to Lawrence Block's and the suspense and desperation is very well done. Things start off wrong and just keep getting worse.



The characters are pretty reallistic. Even though officially I'm appalled by the idea of a thirty-ish guy and a teenage vixen, but as a red-blooded male... I can see how things went the way they did. In the beginning, Shirley's a sympathetic character. You feel for her, having her teenage years spent cooped up and caring for her dying stepfather.



The Vengeful Virgin is a gripping tale with a lot of twists and turns. If I wanted to get someone started on the Hard Case series, this is one of the ones I'd point them at first.



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Little Girl Lost by Richard Aleas

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


P.I. John Blake's childhood girlfriend, Miranda Sugarman, is found dead on top of a strip club. John follows her backtrail from her enrollment in medical school to a relationship with another woman, to a career touring the strip club circuit and a million dollar robbery. Only, things aren't as they seem at first glance.



I hate to admit it since I was prepared to write off Richard Aleas/Charles Ardai as a phony before I read his stuff but the man knows how to turn out a paperback original. The story had plenty of twists and turns and I only figured out what was really going on a few pages ahead of Blake. Great stuff.



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Songs of Innocence by Richard Aleas

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Three years after the events of Little Girl Lost, John Blake has quit the detective game and gone back to school. When his friend Dorrie turns up dead in her bathtub, John puts his detective hat back on and goes looking for why Dorrie ended up dead. The trail takes up through New York's seedy underbelly of "massage" parlors and up against the Hungarian mob. Can Blake piece together what happened before he ends up dead too?



Ho. Lee. Crap. Songs of Innocence is the most powerful of the Hard Case Crime series I've read so far. Blake's desperation is a tangible thing. The mystery of what happened to Dorrie gets worse and worse, as does John's situation. I didn't see the end coming until it hit me like a freight train. The characters are well done. Not only Blake, but the supporting cast as well. It would have been easy to make the other masseuses into stereotype sluts but Aleas didn't skimp.



Like I've said before, I was prepared to dismiss Richard Aleas (aka Charles Ardai, the founder of Hard Case) as a pretender but the man has made a believer out of me. You can definitely tell that the Hard Case Crime series is a labor of love for him.



If you're itching for a good crime story, Songs of Innocence fits the bill. You might want to pick up Little Girl Lost first, though, for a little more background on Blake and Susan.



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The Cutie by Donald E. Westlake

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Billy-Billy Cantell wakes up from an H bender in a strange apartment next to a blonde that's been stabbed to death with the police outside. He runs to the nearest person that can help him, Clay, a man whose part of the same criminal organization. Clay goes looking for the cutie that set Cantell up. Unfortunately, the same cutie is trying to set Clay up. All the while, Clay struggles with trying to make a life with the woman he's living with. Can she handle being married to someone in the business?



Westlake can craft a tale with more twists than an octopus's tentacles. I only figured out who the killer was about a page before Clay did. Mavis St. Paul really got around.



I'd say this is the best of the Westlake's Hard Case Crime has put out.



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Quarry in the Middle by Max Allan Collins

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Using information contained in the deceased Broker's database, Quarry goes to the rathole port town of Haydee's Port, Illinois to prevent a hit and earn some cash in the process. As a result,Quarry puts himself in the middle of two casino owners, both of whom would like to see the other put out of business. Permanently...



I'd say Quarry in the Middle is my favorite Hard Case Quarry novel so far. There is a lot of sex, a lot of violence, and the standard Quarry orgy of violence ending. Quarry proves to be a well-rounded character, a scumbag with some redeeming qualities, even if he does have trouble keeping his pants on. There are a couple twists and I saw the big one coming, but neither are obvious.



If you like Quarry, you'll like this. If you've never read a Quarry before, you can pick this one up without getting lost. Quarry in the Middle is easily in my Hard Case top ten.





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It All Started with the Colorado Kid - The Hard Case Crime Series

There I was, my reading life languishing in the aftermath of the Dark Tower, when I saw Stephen King was releasing a book called The Colorado Kid, part of something called the Hard Case Crime Series. At that point in my life, the only crime books I'd read were The Maltese Falcon and Red Harvest, both by Dashielle Hammett. Entranced by the 50's style cover, I took the plunge. I haven't looked back since except to make sure someone wasn't standing behind me holding a gun.


The Colorado Kid isn't my favorite Hard Case novel by any means but it kicked the door open and sprayed the room with bullets. From there, I discovered a new world of crime novels, like the Quarry series by Max Allan Collins, and discovered two guys who'd wind up being two of my favorite writers, Lawrence Block and Donald Westlake. I've read books I never would have discovered on my own, like House Dick by E. Howard Hunt, the two books by Richard Aleas, and Losers Live Longer by Russell Atwood. I've read posthumous works by the masters, like Dead Street by Mickey Spillane, The Dead Man's Brother by Roger Zelazny, and Memory by Donald Westlake. I've visited seedy used bookstores to track down books by writers I've discovered through Hard Case. My odyssey to find old Matthew Scudder, Parker, and Dortmunder books would be enough for a couple blog entries apiece.

As of this writing, I'm very nearly caught up. The Hard Case line includes 66 titles until they resume publication in September and I'm 100 pages away from finishing Memory, the last of the books I have left to read. It's been a long road full of dames and double crosses but it's a road I'm glad I've traveled.

For more info on the Hard Case Crime series, click here.

Ice and Snow: Take it slow

The title of today's blog post was on one of those highway department roadwork signs this morning.  It has been resonating in my head ever since.

Remember the other day when I turned off my heater and was contemplating wearing shorts?  Well, the temperature dropped the past two days and this morning's commute was made even more enjoyable by a deluge of wintery mix.  Cars were off the road, people were driving like even bigger assholes than usual, it was great.

April 1st fast approaches, as does the beginning of the Dark Tower re-read.  I dreamed about the Dark Tower last night.  I was in a run-down office park with a lot of unsavory characters around.  Some tall guy came out of the shadows and handed me a set of clothes: dark brown pants, black boots, a tan shirt, a brown and white poncho, and a cowboy hat.  "It's that time again," he said.  Instead of handing me a set of guns, he handed me a book.  I didn't recognize it but I knew it was a Dark Tower book.

Is this too weird to use?

Picture a network of one-way wormholes of one-way wormholes that allow nigh-instantaneous travel across thousands of miles, possibly even to other worlds. Now picture a monorail that travels through all of them. A simple train trip could take someone to other cities or other worlds in mere minutes. It would take longer to load and unload the train than it would to travel across galaxies.


Still with me? Now, what if the train was torus shaped. The locomotion would be provided be each car and instead of functioning like a train, it would be more like an enormous turnstyle. It wouldn't have to be all that large, either. Just the length between each wormhole at each stop. Let's say there are twelve stops on the route and twelve cars on the train. One car would always be at each stop. Every fifteen minutes, the train changes position by one car.

What's that, you ask? What's to prevent someone from getting one at one stop, walking to the different cars, and getting off at a different stop without the train actually moving? They check your ticket at every door. Since I concocted the Megarail (patent-pending) for a humorous SF mystery set in a pseudo-Edwardian period, I think the ticket-checker having sole authority on the train works rather well.

Joining the Army

One of the perks of Goodreads is the opportunity to win free books through their FirstReads program. I have done so on four occasions. I've won Lick Your Neighbor by Chris Genoa, The Sentry by Robert Crais, A Very Simple Crime by Grant Jerkins, and, most recently, Embedded by Dan Abnett.


Embedded arrived at my house on Monday and I started it last night. I'm not very far into it but I'm digging what I've read so far. In the package with Embedded was an invitation to join the Angry Robot Army and the opportunity to receive free books for review purposes from Angry Robot.

Did I dare enlist and commit myself to any conflict the Angry Robot Army chose to subject me to? I did. Have I mentioned what a whore I am for free books?  It wasn't the first time I've been a member of an army. The firs time was way back in 1997. I was a fresh-faced boy of 20 when the ska band The Toasters informed me I was part of the Two-Tone Army.  Apparently I signed on for a life-long stretch without realizing it.
 
In other news, I finally finished The Rise of Endymion last night.  While it wasn't as urination-inducingly good as the first two books in the Hyperion Cantos, it was a great way to end the saga.  Other than some parts of the the last two books feeling a little padded, I have no complaints.