Author Archives: mattS
Reading Donald Westlake’s ‘361’
361 / “Look up 361 in any Thesaurus and you’ll find this: ‘Destruction of life; violent death; killing.’ “
I picked up a handful of Hard Case Crime books on clearance, a couple of the authors being ones I recognized, but they sat on the shelf for a couple years before I got around to reading one of them. I started Donald Westlake’s “361” mainly because it was the one sitting closest to me while I was having some computer issues. A few bugs had caused serious delays in my computer’s ability to even idle without freezing, so while I tried to troubleshoot that, I needed something to do.
Being in a significant reading slump the last few months, I didn’t have much faith in Westlake’s ability to keep me engaged. Nothing I picked up interested me, and nothing I was reading already seemed worth grabbing. This would do, I thought, for a momentary distraction while my computer struggled to open a single web page. But I was wrong. This was perfect. This was just what I needed.
The jacket gave away the setup, but that only heightened the suspense as Westlake’s narrator, Ray Kelly, walked you through the first chapter. I’ve missed this style of writing, the rough and to the point pulp narration. Kelly himself has no patience for people throughout the book, and it comes across in everything he does and relays to the reader.
As the history of the plot unfolds you can feel the tension and mystery of all the directions it could go, the uncertainty of the Ray Kelly as he pushes forward through what he’s being told, struggling to sort out the lies, the misdirection, the motives that led to his blinding, his father’s death and destruction of the family he thought was his.
What sets this apart from the other pulp novels I’ve read is that Ray didn’t choose this course for himself in the sense that he isn’t a professional detective or criminal. He was just a guy who was discharged from the Air Force, happy to be reunited with his father and heading home.
In a way, that makes Ray just like Ed Johnson, the private detective who tries to help him but is (as perhaps as the most realistically written private detective in the history of pulps novels) terrifyingly out of his league when he learns his client is getting involved with violent criminals; and Eddie Kapp, the gangster who holds the secret to the death of Ray’s father, and who until Ray came along was content to retire to Florida and leave the underworld behind.
But where Johnson refuses to push on and leaves Ray on his own, and Kapp throws himself gleefully back into the New York mob scene, Ray is simply a scared, hurt man, who has had everything taken from him. He wants justice and is willing to do whatever is necessary to achieve it.
Unlike the characters in similar books who suddenly find themselves at home in the darkness where their vengeance lies hidden, Ray has no interest in that life. He’s simply a man who wants to go home, but is willing to kill any man who tries to stop him.
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Thanks to the Violent World of Parker for explaining the title and sharing the original cover art.
Trying to Read “Hex and the City”
It’s been a couple years since my last visit to the Nightside, and that is the only factor I can think of to explain how disconnected I felt from Simon Green’s supernatural noir series when I jumped back into it with the fourth book, “Hex and the City”
I cannot imagine that the first three books were as poorly written as this one. They couldn’t have been. I wouldn’t have continued reading them. Would I? Ok, ‘poorly written’ may be unfair, but at the very least, this book was awkwardly written.
Was I struggling to get back into the world of John Taylor and the ‘Nightside’, or was Green struggling to remember how to write these characters himself?
Paragraph long stretches of John Taylor speaking should have been adapted into descriptive expositional paragraphs. Perhaps they originally had been internal monologues in earlier drafts as multiple times Taylor would repeat something he had said half a chapter before to the complete surprise of the very characters he had spoken it to initially.
Too often, Taylor was supposed to be speaking to characters around him and interacting with them, but instead was stiff and spoke at them (or at the reader or just at anyone who had wandered by and might be listening). He wasn’t a part of the scene and he wasn’t moving it forward. This wasn’t descriptive, this wasn’t storytelling. It was bullet points dressed up to look like a novel.
Detective fiction thrives on the smug, smartass private dick, but here, Taylor takes it to a level that brought to mind the fanboy writing style that turned me off the ‘Dresden Files’ after just one book.
The story picked up a bit towards the end and gave us a great answer to the question that’s been building since the first book. But ultimately, I found myself turning the page, not to find out what would happen next, but just to finish the thing and move on to another book.
“Hex and the City” is the fourth book in this series, so I won’t give up on the whole thing just because this one disappointed. There is an end to the ‘Nightside’ series, as Green finished it off with the 12th book, “The Bride Wore Black Leather”
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Reading “Darkness, Take My Hand”
Had “Darkness, Take My Hand”
Of course, had the plot of the second book not picked up significantly about halfway through, I don’t know when book three would have hit my reading list.
It’s ok to have a case without rooting it deep within your character’s personal histories. As readers and viewers of any story, we want to experience the world these characters inhabit but you should insult your audience with stories contrived to make us believe the entire universe revolves around those characters.
But… Ok, if you’re going to do it, I suppose, this time, at least, it was done pretty well.
I figured out who the mystery guy was before the big reveal, but I think, as readers, we were meant to figure it out ahead of the characters. Once the story got to that point it was obvious because deep down, that wasn’t the mystery.
Between books one and two, Patrick started up a new relationship, and it was the few pages of his frantic sprint over the icy streets of Boston when she was in danger that had me more on the edge of my seat then the ultimate conclusion to the case itself.
With that in mind, maybe I was wrong about this book. Maybe I was wrong about what the real story was? The reason I picked up the ‘Kenzie & Gennaro’ series in the first place was to experience Lehane’s Boston through his characters. The real story in “Darkness, Take My Hand” was the fallout of those decisions that Patrick and Angie had made in the previous book and how it affected both differently. Perhaps the story wasn’t about hunting a killer, but learning to accept and move past those choices Patrick and Angie made and must continue to make to survive in their line of work. Otherwise, they would allow themselves to be consumed entirely by it, as many of the characters ultimately were.
It’s actually a quote from “A Drink Before the War”
“It never works that way. Once that ugliness has been forced into you, it becomes part of your blood, dilutes it, races through your heart and back out again, staining everything as it goes. The ugliness never goes away, never comes out, no matter what you do. Anyone who thinks otherwise is naive. All you can do is hope to control it.”
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Gas Station Burrito 