First of all, by all accounts McDonald’s has never sold onion rings.
My favorite works by popular creators are the ones that are frequently what the multitudes rarely put on a greatest hits list. Like Philip K. Dick’s In Milton Lumky Territory or Stephen King’s Joyland. Now we have Donald E. Westlake′s last novel Call Me a Cab (available now here at Amazon) a heretofore unpublished novel from 1977 (unpublished except in a briefer version in a serialized magazine edition ages ago). It’s a novel ahead of its time full of 1970s attitude, with realistic, thoughtful characters, without cliché or canned, artificial controversy, and, although it’s from Hard Case Crime, there’s not a single crime in sight for 3,000 miles. And it’s as riveting as any of his previous brilliant works.
So what about the onion rings? Back to that in a moment.
Our borgBest of 2021 list continues today with the Best Books of 2021. If you missed them, check out our reviews of the Kick-Ass Heroines of 2021here, the Best Movies of 2021 here, and the Best in TV 2021here. And we wrap-up the year with our additions to the borg Hall of Fame tomorrow. We reviewed more than 100 books that we recommended to our readers this year, and some even made it onto our favorites shelf. We don’t publish reviews of books that we read and don’t recommend, so this shortlist reflects only this year’s cream of the crop. So let’s get going!
Best Sci-Fi, Best Tie-In Novel – Moments Asunder by Dayton Ward (Gallery Books). An engaging read and fun-filled start to a new trilogy, full of great throwbacks to all the Star Trek series, with several surprise characters and incorporated events, and a great update to Wesley Crusher. Runner-up: Star Trek: Picard–Rogue Elements(Gallery Books), by John Jackson Miller, provided a great story for a newer character, pulling into the mix the future of some familiar characters including the classic villain Kivas Fajo.
You’ll want to check out the end of the first issue of Titan Comics and Hard Case Crime’s new series Gun Honeyto learn how writer/creator Charles Ardai came up with the title. Gun Honey is a new comic book series about a woman who can get the weapons you want for the right price. The series is a mix of international locales a la James Bond, with the style movie audiences saw and heard in Guy Ritchie’s 2015 movie The Man from U.N.C.L.E.–you can almost hear the soundtrack. She’s the latest of a long line of anti-hero, badass femmes fatales in comics dating back to Miss Fury. And artist Ang Hor Kheng does the character and the genre justice, providing a sexy new character in a world of intrigue, duplicity, and the need for an alter ego.
Check out a preview of the first issue below, along with a preview of several of the series’ incredible cover variants from the likes of Bill Sienkiewicz, Robert McGinnis, Adam Hughes, Kendrick Lim, Jay Anacleto, Chris Wahl, Kendrick Lim, Ivan Tao, Warren Louw, Lesley Li, Fay Dalton, Andrea Camerini, and more.
Anyone who has ever been in journalism school has had one or more internships, maybe with a local newspaper or with a magazine, advertising agency, or public relations firm. Every intern is a target in one way or the other of the old-timers in the firm. The intern gets talked down to as a matter of rite. Usually at the end of the internship the intern gets sent along her merry way, and sometimes she gets an offer to stay on, usually at low pay. This is the world of Stephen King′s novelThe Colorado Kid, delivered in King’s trademark nor’easter style of dialogue. A young woman from Ohio named Stephanie McCann is winding down her internship with The Weekly Islander, working for the “news staff,” a pair of guys who can’t seem to decide how long they’ve worked at the paper named Dave Bowie (no relation, to either) and Vince Teague. Another reporter, from The Boston Globe, is asking the men about unexplained mysteries in the area for a features story, around the year 2004. After he leaves, The Weekly Islander men proceed to tell Stephanie about a story they didn’t share with the Globe reporter, the unsolved mystery of The Colorado Kid, a man found dead against a trash can situated along a nearby beach back in 1980. In a spin on Twenty Questions, Stephanie gets to ask all the questions–to learn the clues and what investigation transpired so far in the crime–and they answer in a very verbose and dragged out way that only local yokels would normally have the patience to listen to. After years out of print, The Colorado Kid has been re-released by Hard Case Crime for the first time since the book was first published in 2005. In fact it’s the book that kicked off the imprint, and lighted the spark to make it the popular publisher of crime fiction that it is today. The first edition fetches a princely sum in the aftermarket, so the new paperback edition is a welcome event for crime genre readers.
Fans of King’s TV and film adaptations and Shawn Piller television series will recognize the novel as the impetus for the Syfy Channel series Haven (now streaming on Netflix) a show that also included Hard Case Crime’s Charles Ardai as a producer. Here’s what they have in common: The Colorado Kid is set in the Northeast, it featured newspapermen Dave and Vince, one of the local policemen was named Wuornos, and there’s a restaurant in town called The Grey Gull. I noted nothing else in common with the TV series, except a different story of the Kid (the series’ handling probably less satisfying than in the book). Ardai, in a 2019 foreword to the new edition, surmises that King may have chosen to wait this long to reprint the book to provide some distance from the series, so fans wouldn’t confuse the two. If you choose to take on The Colorado Kid–the novel–just don’t search for any supernatural twist or horror. There isn’t any and there isn’t supposed to be. It also doesn’t follow a mystery formula, but is more a folktale, a storyteller’s legend, something like the lost people of Roanoke (one of the mysteries that surfaces in the series).
If it sounds like I’m holding back some elements, it’s because some of the surprise worth holding back is in the bones of the tale (surprises like we found in the films Midnight Special, 10 Cloverfield Lane, and Split). With this story “the journey is the thing.” First, the possibilities raised in the story are probably better than the story. The Colorado Kid is a different type of tale, kicking aside all reader expectations–no matter what expectation you have coming into the story. It’s full of Stephen King’s Maine, the local oddballs are few here, but we get plenty of their anachronisms, their dialects, and colloquialisms from storytellers Dave and Vince. And as with the next Hard Case Crime book King would write, Joyland, it’s chock full of local charm (a more satisfying read, I reviewed Joyland as part of the official blog tour for the initial release here at borg in 2013). The Colorado Kid is another example of why King is a bestselling author–his newspapermen keep you immersed in their little office along with Stephanie for the entire ride. By book’s end you’ll more likely be ready to kill Dave and Vince for their quirks than the author for his… unorthodox… ending. Continue reading →
The downside to discovering an author that’s new to you but who passed away decades ago is that no more novels will be coming your way from that author. But that’s not necessarily the case if that author is Erle Stanley Gardner, and you’re reading something newly published from Charles Ardai’s Hard Case Crime imprint. Ardai continues to locate lost, never before published novels, and reprints some of the best forgotten works from decades of great pulp crime novels. Hard Case Crime released the never-before published Gardner novel The Knife Slipped last year. Back in 1940 The Knife Slipped was rejected by Gardner’s publisher because of his lead character, a brash and brilliant private investigator named Bertha Cool, who Gardner describes as “profane, massive, belligerent, and bulldog,” and in her first case her tendency to “talk tough, swear, smoke cigarettes, and try to gyp people” was enough to reject the story. Gardner promptly replaced the novel withTurn on the Heat, the second in his Cool and Lam series, a series that would expand to 30 novels. And if Gardner’s name is familiar it may be because he also created the popular mystery genre icon Perry Mason (Gardner would write 86 cases featuring his famous lawyer). At his death in 1970, Gardner was the #1 bestselling author of all time, with hundreds of millions of books in print. Turn on the Heat was published in 1940 under Gardner’s pseudonym, A.A. Fair. A reader of both Gardner and Fair, master crime novelist Raymond Chandler once accused Fair of stealing a plot point from a Gardner novel.
Turn on the Heat plays out from the viewpoint of Cool’s employee, ex-lawyer and full-time private eye Donald Lam. Lam tells his story in that sweeping, pull-us-all-along-for-the-ride manner that Archie Goodwin embraced in Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe series. It helps that Lam is a fan of Cool, but his tolerance for her domineering style brings him to his limits more than once in the story. But the feeling is purely mutual. Lam seems to forget he’s an employee and spends too much from the expense account. Like Stout’s Prisoner’s Base case where Goodwin lied to Wolfe to keep him out of trouble, Lam must lie to Cool to protect her, and as with Wolfe, Cool doesn’t like it one bit. Cool has the business acumen and savvy, but Lam also knows the score and is able to stay ahead of all the players almost all the time, as he attempts to solve the case for the client, protect the agency, protect Cool, protect himself from a murder rap, protect a girl from a murder rap, keep the D.A. off his case, and somehow serve a little revenge to the thug who keeps roughing him up.
Cool has taken on a new client and sets Lam about tracking down the client’s estranged wife, missing for twenty years. Lam is a feet-on-the-street detective, but his leads dry up quickly. When the wife shows up at a local hotel, Lam finds the case leading in an unpredictable direction, and he soon becomes bent on thwarting efforts of the police, the D.A., and even his client to keep him from the truth. Not convoluted or contrived as many other crime novels of the day (and today), Gardner’s mystery is well-paced and doesn’t employ any far-flung solution to wrap-up the whodunnit. Gardner’s prose was far ahead of its day in many ways–three times I turned to the copyright page to verify this book was actually written in 1940 because of sentences and word-usage I would have wagered had not come into the American lexicon until decades later.
Readers will expect plenty from the author of such notable noir novels as Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Mildred Pierce. James M. Cain wrote several works after these classics, both in and outside the genre. But his last novel, The Cocktail Waitress, was never published–Cain instead found himself re-writing it and never giving the final handoff to the agent and publisher in a form he was happy with. That is, until Hard Case Crime tracked it down, and writer/editor Charles Ardai took all the sometimes competing bits and pieces and edited into a final novel, first published in 2012.
The fun of The Cocktail Waitress is Cain’s writing choices, and the unknown quantity is wondering how much was truly Cain’s preferred words and sections, and how close Ardai’s edit is to Cain’s original vision. Cain, who many consider one of the greats of the crime genre along with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler (who co-scripted the screenplay to the film adaptation of Cain’s Double Indemnity), presents a slow-simmering story of a femme fatale told from the first-person perspective of that femme fatale. Unfortunately the story never quite catches fire until the final four chapters, and really sets ablaze in a bombshell in the final paragraph of the final page. The cocktail waitress of the title is Joan Medford, a 21-year-old housewife we meet upon learning of her husband’s death. Her husband was an alcoholic and abusive to her and her son, and he died in a car wreck after storming out of the house drunk. Or was he? Police repeatedly return to question her. Cain’s struggling heroine is easy to empathize with, but the circumstances in which she finds herself prompt the reader to question whether she is lying to us, lying to herself, or maybe she is just one of Cain’s hapless victims of the multiple blows that life deals out.
Joan leaves her son with a relative and lands a job as a cocktail waitress. Her goal is to be able to afford to take care of her son again. She befriends two men who are customers at work, a wealthy older man named Mr. White, and a young, attractive bad boy named Tom who is reckless and doesn’t understand his own stupidity. As she describes herself and her actions, Joan does not seem the architect of her own trajectory, but she also is conscious of not letting any man determine her fate. The men seem to pursue paths with her that she seemingly is also considering, and she goes along, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Her character lacks some consistency, which may be a fault more of the nature of a final, pieced together novel. She seems sensible and wise, as most people tell themselves about their own actions. Yet she physically attacks a man at work for acting inappropriately, with little preparation for the reader. She makes a business deal that risks her nest egg. She takes actions that risk her job. So there is an impulsive side to her, but is she the kind of person that would murder someone, and not just one husband, but other men, too? What will she do, and how far will she go, for her son? Can we trust her? Can we trust Cain?
