Review by C.J. Bunce
What happens when the grimy world of Elmore Leonard small-time criminals collides with the kind of criminals you’d find in a Coen Brothers movie? The end result may look a lot like Ken Bruen and Jason Starr’s unlikely lovers Max Fisher and Angela Petrakos. Their early 2000s trilogy of crime novels has arrived in a collected paperback titled Supermax: The Max and Angela Trilogy, now available in bookstores and here at Amazon. A twenty-year anniversary of the first Hard Case Crime novel in the trilogy, 2006’s Bust, the book collects that novel plus 2007’s Slide and 2008’s The Max. If you like stories of criminals stumbling over their decisions and making only one worse call after another to somehow still come out on top, this series is for you.
In an introduction to Supermax written by Jason Starr, he explains how he and Bruen came together to write these novels, with both writers on opposite sides of the Atlantic, before Zoom, just sharing drafts back and forth each day. It sounds like each writer was trying to come up with the best way to make the other writer laugh most of the time–at least that’s what breaks through in the dialogue. Although Starr says neither writer wrote any character exclusively, the spark readers will find in these stories comes from the way Galway, Ireland, writer Bruen digs into Irish thuggery and brogue (especially when it can’t be understood by those listening) and Jason Starr lays out the setting with the low and lower elements of New York City.
Max heads up his own technology company. He’s getting older and his health is poor, and we catch up with him laying into his doctor for not getting him the right drug cocktail. He and another guy argue over HDL and LDL scores, but his problem may just be that he’s mixing it with Viagra. The latter may explain why he’s obsessed with women’s breasts, one of the reasons he hires Angela Petrakos as his assistant, which precipitates his detachment from his wife.
Angela has her own good features, most of them from her looks, but it’s her Irish accent that seems to really bring in all the men. She’s also tough, and knows how to make men fear her. But it’s clear Max and Angela were never going to be any kind of good match. At least Bonnie and Clyde really liked each other.
Each novel is its own play on its title, with Bust the most obvious, the two writers dancing back and forth on the many meanings of the word. Ultimately it’s Angela’s idea to bring in a guy her cousin knows who Max can hire to kill his wife. That guy goes by the name Popeye, but his key feature is his mouth, the result of a guy who smashed a bottle into it years ago. After the job is done and paid for, Popeye makes a big mistake and a sketch of his face is circulated around the city. As a criminal who claims IRA ties, he’s not all that smart or effective. But he is ruthless. Fortunately for Max and Angela, the cops on the scene aren’t all that sharp either. When an ex-con in a wheelchair enters the picture, trying to get back into the crime world, everyone’s plans blow up in their faces.
The bumbling criminal antics of Fargo (only Irish swapped for that Dakota/Minnesota/Wisconsin accent) and a similar variety of interesting characters in varying (bad) places in their life as that in Jackie Brown, blends with some very funny writing to make Bust a fun read from beginning to end. In the second book, Slide, fugitive Angela hooks up with a serial killer back in Ireland, while Max stumbles into becoming a crack dealer. The third book, The Max, finally finds Max and Angela in the slammer–Max in Attica, Angela in a jail in Greece. You can read them all in the new combined volume Supermax.
The fourth book in the series, Bruen and Starr’s 2016 novel Pimp is also still in print, available here at Amazon. Starr also wrote the fun sci-fi/noir genre-bender, The Next Time I Die, reviewed here at borg.
Count Supermax: The Max and Angela Trilogy as one of Hard Case Crime’s best volumes of contemporary crime stories. Order it now here at Amazon.
