Others of My Kind by James Sallis

This could be James Sallis's oddest novel. At the same time, it could also be one of his best. Odd, not  because the narrative voice belongs to Jenny Rowan, a woman who, as a child, was abducted and kept prisoner for a several years. Finally, she escapes only to spend several years in a shopping mall some twenty miles from Harpers Ferry, living off whatever food and clothing punters discard. No, the novel's oddness has less to do with  those who inhabit it than with the manner in which the narrative moves, which at times is oblique enough to border on the surreal. Normally one thinks of the surreal in terms of imagery- here the image of Jenny as a young girl being kept in a box under her captor's bed- comes close. But Sallis's short novel approaches that category through its structure, coming across like the literary equivalent of a game of exquisite corpse, in which one body part is overlaid onto another; though, in this case, with characters and plot bouncing off one another,  it's more a matter of placing narratives next to each other, to see if and how they fit.  Like a narrative equivalent to poet Robert Duncan's concept of tone-leading.

As we've come to expect from Sallis, Others of My Kind is inhabited by vulnerable yet resilient people, capable of doing surprising things. Indeed, what matters is how Jenny responds to the twists and turns of the plot that has become her life. Found by a kind security guard, she's placed in the  child-care system until, at age sixteen, she gains her autonomy.  Not surprisingly, her life is anything but  straightforward. Likewise, her feelings regarding her abductor. Employed as a news and documentary editor at a TV station, she's contacted by a detective who asks if  she'd  assist him in a case regarding another young girl who'd been  abducted and sexually abused. Jenny visits and befriends the young woman. Though Jenny has carved out a life for herself, she can't help but be a victim of circumstances. In this near-future world- familiar yet skewered-  there's an even greater degree of political turmoil than now. Everything is in flux, no more so for someone with Jenny's history. About survival and how one plays the cards one's been dealt, Others of My Kind is a long way from the Sallis's Lew Griffin novels. But, on the other hand, maybe not. After all, they're part of the same world. Not a crime novel as such, except in the largest sense of the term.  Going from the ordinary to the extraordinary, from darkness to light, Others of My Kind is as moving a novel as anything Sallis has written. And however odd the structure, the parts  have a surprising coherence, equal to the whole; in fact, are crucial to its existence.

Sounds Like London- 100 Years of Black Music in the Capital by Lloyd Bradley

As the opening pages of Lloyd Bradley's book attest, black music has long been a mainstay of British culture, no more so than in the capital itself. West Indians, Africans and exiled black Americans, have for many years been making what has become the soundtrack to the city, often in cross-cultural circumstances. When I arrived in the early 1970s, ska, American soul, South African jazz  (the Blue Notes, Brotherhood of Sound), then reggae and West African-based music  were the sounds I heard.  But black music, as Bradley points out, is constantly evolving, with some forms falling out of fashion, often caused by the dictates of the market, for instance the creation and perpetuation of  the term "world music," or political factors, such as the demise of the Greater London Council, which promoted black music as part of their inclusive policies.

As the author of Bass Culture, Bradley is well-positioned to explore this vast  subject. It's not a bad attempt, though it has some drawbacks. For one thing, to do justice to the subject would take a book twice as long. I suppose that's part of the problem. Bradley, who attempts to cover the music from sometime around 1919 to the present, breezes through the early years, name-checking the likes of  jazzers and calypsonians like "Snakehips" Johnson, Rudolph Dunbar, Freddy Grant, Sam Manning, all of whom were heard in the capital long before the great Lord Kitchener arrived on the SS Windrush. Moreover, I would maintain that  the first couple chapters, like the rest of the book, alongside recordings of the music under discussion, in this case  CD anthologies like Topic Records' Black British Jazz, or Honest Jon's various volumes of London Is the Place For Me. For a more detailed account of the African diaspora's contribution to early British jazz, one could do worse than have a look at  Andy Simon's lengthy on-line account, Black British Swing, published in 2012.

In any case, Bradley, emphasising the relationship between history and the music, relies on some fairly solid informants. In the first two chapters, it's the legendary pianist Russell Henderson and his 1950s cohort, the steel pan virtuoso Sterling Betancourt. It's the informants that allow Bradley to delve into the music, the record labels and distributors active during the 1950s. The third chapter centres on South African jazz and is built around interviews with drummer Louis Moholo, Hazel Miller (wife of  bassist Harry Miller) and formidable musician and composer Mike Westbrook. Here Bradley outlines the impact that  the Blue Notes/Brotherhood of Breath had on the London music scene in the mid-1960s. The fourth chapter covers West African music in the capital, from Ambrose Campbell to Osibisa, from the viewpoint of Osibisa leader Teddy Osei, highlighting th importance of Sterns from its origins as an electrical supply shop to major record store and label, as well as the African Centre  in Covent Garden, which became a popular venue for West African music. The fifth chapter, entitled Bass Lines, Brass Sections and All Things Equals, includes interviews with the visionary Eddy Grant, who, amongst other things, fronted the 1970s group, The Equals, and maintained a recording studio in Stamford Hill, as well as the  the veteran singer from Carriacou, Root Jackson, who achieved cult status in the 1970s with the funk/soul outfit FBI, and who still can be heard gigging around London. But it's the following chapter on the creation and success of  Lover's Rock- The Whole World Loves a Lovers- that I found the most interesting. Lovers Rock was never a genre that appealed to me when it appeared in the 1970s. However, it was not only  a London phenomenon but, according to Bradley,  a reaction to hardcore roots reggae, which tended to marginalise young West Indian women. What began in London soon became popular in Jamaica. In examining the cultural importance of Lovers Rock, Bradley touches on the roots of London reggae, the record labels, distributors, producers, sound systems and DJs. For this he relies on the renown bassist, producer and mix master Dennis Bovell, who recalls that competitions would be held, with the winner recording a single (without pay). It served the purpose getting young women back onto the dance floor and created enough product for Bovell's company to be taken seriously.

Unfortunately, for me, Bradley's book becomes less interesting from this point on, with chapters on BritFunk, recent sound systems, pirate stations and music in the digital age. Yet I still  learned a lot  from these chapters. Call me naive, but I had no idea that during the 1980s clubs had a quota for blacks at the door, even when black bands were playing. In the end, the book points out  that black music has been a music of migrants, one that mixes countries of origin and musical styles with relative abandon. For instance, someone like Ambrose Campbell could move from jazz to calypso to West African music. Likewise, Teddy Osei. To this day London black music, though no longer the province of migrants as such, remains cross-racial, rebellious, and often  cutting-edge.

However, there are problems with the book. For instance, someone should have told the author that most readers don't really care what football club he supports, that it has nothing to do with the book's subject matter. He also has an annoying habit of referring to interviewees by their first name even though it's sometimes been pages since he's last quoted them. Then there are self-conscious asides (no point in mentioning you are not related to someone simply you share a surname) and a deadline journalism  style that does the subject no favours. Minor criticisms, but a good editor should have been on top of that kind of thing. Though the most humorous, if not ludicrous, example of editorial slackness crops up when  Bradley attempts to name-check Airto Moreira, whose name comes out in the text as Ayrton Moreira- clearly a spellcheck chapeau to Peter Ayrton, the senior editor and  founder of the book's publisher, Serpent's Tail.

And maybe my memory is faulty, but I'm sure Bradley gets it slightly wrong when talking about record shops in the 1970s and early 1980s. Dobells on Charing Cross Road closed in 1980, but Bradley seems to be saying that it existed concurrently with Ray's on Shaftsbury Avenue, which wasn't the case. Though he could have been referring to an earlier period  when Ray's was Collet's on New Oxford Street, then Charing Cross Road. And why no  mention of Honest Jon's, whose Soho shop specialised in reggae, or the shop in Camden Town where could always flip through a rack of very cheap African records. And what about Daddy Cool in Soho?  Also, the book could have been improved by including a list of recordings, if only to make it easier for the reader to track down and listen to the music mentioned in the text. And what about a map so those unfamiliar with London could get a sense of how the music scene over the years shifted around the capital? In the end, with a little more research, more attention to detail- the opening chapter deserves a book on its own- and a more attentive editor, this could have been a much better book. While the definitive book on black music in London has yet to be written, Sounds Like London will do for starters.

Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon

Just like everyone seems to know where they were when JFK was killed or when the Twin Towers went down,  Pynchonites can usually recall  their first encounter with the man's writing.  For me, it was sitting in my Yellow Cab at the San Francisco airport at three a.m, reading The Crying of Lot 49,  hoping no one would ask for a ride back to the city. Reading Pynchon at an airport in the middle of the night seemed, at the time, more than fitting. Ironically, Bleeding Edge, an incendiary recollection rather than a prescient bombshell, turns  "where were you when..." on its head, portraying New Yorkers- from the manic, obsessive and greedy to the politically radical or absurd- in the days leading to and just after 9-11.

Centering almost entirely on Maxine, a discredited fraud investigator and Jewish flaneur,  Bleeding Edge depicts  America at a tipping point. The dot com bubble has burst, Bush and Cheney have only recently begun their onslaught, and the culture as a whole is rapidly moving off the edge. In that sense, it's a snapshot of a particular time and place, and of a condition from which we've yet to fully emerge. It's also an homage to the Jewish New York novel- perhaps the last of its kind. Even if Bleeding Edge isn't  as prescient as V, Gravity's Rainbow and the Crying of Lot 49, a line could still be drawn from Crying of Lot 49  to Bleeding Edge and it would make perfect sense, but only if  Pynchon hadn't written those other, later novels, which range from the mediocre  (Vineland, Inherent Vices) to the ingenious (Mason & Dixon) to the  impressive but unreadable (Against the Day). Something of a throwback, yet  a thoroughly welcome one, replete with the author's early trademarks: that smart and biting humour, a plethora of warning signs, riffs, and pop culture references, and an emphasis on  social control, synchronicity, and paranoia ("the garlic in life's kitchen, right, you can never have too much of it."), all chaotically wrapped in Marx brothers urban hipsterisms which tend to highlight that which separates Freedonia with the Land of the Free.

As Gramsci once said, with the old world dying, and new yet to be born, a variety of morbid symptoms appear in the interregnum. Whether boom and bust, crash and burn or shock and awe. And, as Bleeding Edge illustrates, perhaps  cyberspace is the most morbid of them all. Yet as that symptom expands so do the fissures and possibilities, though not all necessarily for the better. For the power of capital to adapt or reinvent itself remains.

"DeepArcher also has developers after it. Whatever migratory visitors are still down there trusting in its inviolability will some morning all too soon be rudely surprised by the whispering descent of corporate Web crawlers itching to index and corrupt another patch of sanctuary for their own far-from-selfless ends."

Reading Bleeding Edge in conjunction with Edward Snowden's revelations only gives that quote, and the book, added meaning. And those various Gramscian mutations could have otherwise gone undetected, at least to those old-school enough to appreciate literature and linearity. Not surprisingly, Bleeding Edge is as much a black hole as a narrative- characters come and go, some are lost and others found, while linearity, though it exists, is given a typically rough work-out. Still, despite the cartoon cut-outs, the circumlocutions and great American shit-storm, the novel manages to hang together, as does its critique. Moving through generations, Pynchon's novel  really does end up bleeding at its edges. With an array of characters navigating  the city, the emphasis, from pre-9-11 to post-9-11, gradually shifts from the street to the computer screen. Yet Pynchon's characters, whether on the street or screen, remain recognisable, whether by the reader or by Maxine. After all, what is fiction other than a form of virtual reality. Significantly, the novel ends with the next turn of the wheel and what remains after the wreckage.

As far as I'm concerned, Pynchon's latest is essential reading and maybe the first real novel of the post-9/11 era, one in which you might might meet yourself or some doppelganger from Pynchon's past.  Noir?  Could be.  Or simply a dystopia in which  that light at the end of the tunnel grows dimmer as wealth becomes more concentrated and technological advances become more enticing. After all, Bleeding Edge takes place is a city that never sleeps, played by a character actor familiar but beyond identification. Which is why Pynchon opens his novel with a quote from the great Donald Westlake: "New York as a character in a mystery would not be the detective, would not be the murderer. It would be the enigmatic suspect who knows the real story but isn't going to tell." Which is the point.  Who will tell?  Indeed, who is capable of telling? Bleeding Edge might as close to that telling as we're going to get.

Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives- Stories From the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense, edited by Sarah Weinman

For me, one of the cornerstones of noir, and perhaps its most subversive element, has always been its investigation and critique of the nuclear family and middle-class suburban life. What goes on behind those closed doors and lace curtains is, as far as I'm concerned,  far scarier than any number of serial killers or psychopathic cops. Just think of McGivern's The Big Heat, Dorothy B. Hughes'  In a Lonely Place and  Leigh Brackett's A Tiger Amongt Us. Given their emphasis on domestic angst, it's no coincidence that film noir during its classic period was referred to as crime melodrama, and sometimes categorised as films for women. Naturally, a number of those films were based on stories written by women; after all, who better to describe the politics and paranoia of domestic life.

Some of those authors are included in Weinman's excellent and welcome anthology, while others  in Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives simply wrote novels and contributed stories to the likes of Ellery Queen between the 1940s and the 1980s. Weinman seeks to revive this cross-section of banished noiristas. Her anthology is interesting not only because it highlights such "lost" writing, but, as Weinman points out, these writers dissected society from a female perspective more often than not with a  female protagonist, making them  precursors to  the likes of  Gillian Flynn, Megan Abbott, Attica Lock, and Sarah Gran, whose work is amongst the most interesting crime fiction being produced today.  Of course, that might be down to the fact that  a certain type of  male crime writing, burdened by the cult of masculinity, the myth of the lone hero and its lopsided libertarian ethos, has arrived at a dead end. Likewise, the Chandleresque private eye. These days it's  become harder than ever to make those  tropes work. That's not to say that there aren't exceptions to that rule. But, as I suggested years ago in Neon Noir, a great deal of the crime fiction, particularly during the 1980s, could be said to have been a male response to feminism as well as an extension of Vietnam war literature, both of which carried a limited sell-by date. Clearly times have changed.

What one gets treated to in Troubled Daughters... are not only stories by the better known- Patricia Highsmith, Dorothy B. Hughes, Shirley Jackson and Margaret Millar  (her husband, Ross Macdonald, also wrote about domestic situations, but from a more distant perspective)- but by the less well known but equally formidable Helen Nielsen, Vera Caspary, Charlotte Armstrong and Elizabeth Sanxay Holding (a Chandler favourite). However, for me, the great joy was discovering the likes of Nedra Tyre, Barbara Callahan, Joyce Harrington, and Ceila Fremlin. Many of these writers, regardless of the quality or importance of their work, have been ignored by critics, Anthony Boucher not withstanding. But then the quality of criticism when it comes to crime and noir fiction has always been somewhat strained. As for the stories themselves, they are uniformly excellent, dealing not only with the paranoia of suburban life, but poverty, escape, identity, trauma and loss. And, of course, there's no shortage of crimes. My one quibble would be where are the likes of Mary Holland, Craig Rice, Delores Hitchens and Leigh Brackett? But, who knows, maybe there's a second volume  in the pipeline. I hope so, this even though I generally abhor anthologies. In the meantime, we owe Sarah a debt for "rediscovering" these writers and putting them in the context of their, and our, time and place.

The Maid's Version by Daniel Woodrell

Daniel Woodrell, about whom I've written several times (for example, here and here), never ceases to surprise me. My first surprise came when, after his series of excellent Bayou crime novels, he produced, seemingly from nowhere, the incredible Civil War novel, Woe to Live On. Then he switched gears again, with  modern-day Ozark narratives like Tomato Red, Give Us a Kiss, and The Death of Sweet Mister, which seemed to reach a fruition in  the evocative Winter's Bone.

But, for me, The Maid's Version is Woodrell most surprising turn to date. It too is set in the Ozarks, and is every bit as noir-infested as his previous books. For me, the real surprise here is the writing itself, which at times seems to approach the lyricism of Faulkner. Then there's the book's scope, which, like a noir version of Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, takes in an entire community. With its subtle shifts in voice and time, Woodrell is able to depict the rifts of a small entire town torn apart by a dance-hall fire that kills some forty people.

"The explosion happened within a shout and surely those in the house must have heard everything on that bright evening, the couples arriving, strolling arm in arm or as foursomes, the excited laughter, the cooed words, the stolen kisses..., all carrying loudly on that blossom-scented night between the wars, here in the town this was then of lulled hearts and distracted spirits."

 And how's this for timeless writing:

"Trains have haunted the nights in West Table since 1883 and disrupt sleep and taunt those awakened. The trains beating pass toward the fabled beyond, the sound of each wheel-thump singing. You're going nowhere, you're going nowhere, and these wheels are, they are, they are going far from where you lie listening in your smallness and will still lie small at dawn after they are gone from hearing, rolling on, singing along twin rails over the next hill and down and up over the next onward to those milk-and-honey environs where motion pictures happen for real and history is made and large dashing lives you won't lead or even witness are lived."

Essentially, The Maid's Version is a simple story. It's narrator, situated in the present, sets out to discover who might have been  responsible for the fire.  In doing so, he uncovers the usual, as well as some unusual, suspects- big city mobsters,  gypsies, a hellfire preacher, or someone else altogether.  As a by-product of his investigation he also discovers a great deal about the community in general and his family in particular. With the main action taking place in the midst of the Depression, this is a town divided between those  too important to fail, and those so unimportant that they must struggle not to fail, which are represented by two families- Alma's and the family for whom  she initially works. And it's Alma, the maid and the narrator's grandmother, on whom the story rests. As though Woodrell is saying that such workers are, in the end, the keepers of the culture, burdened with essential information, both useful and inflammatory. Yet Alma has to be discrete, something that's not easy or, given her circumstances and her more reckless sister, possible without suffering the consequences. Interestingly, I can't recall any mention  that Alma is anything but a poor farm girl, leaving readers to question their own assumptions regarding race, class and domestic servitude.  

Woodrell's novel might have the reach of an epic, but it has the compression of a short story. Of course, it's self-conscious, necessarily so; after all, the narrative voice is that of a young man fighting to find a way to tell the story. And by the time of its final telling, he has become relatively well-versed in the ways of the world, aware of what has been lost, whether through war, fire, technology or historical amnesia. All of which makes The Maid's Version light years from those early Bayou novels and a major step beyond the likes of  Tomato Red and even Winter's Bone. At the same time, The Maid's Version manages to retain the humanity of the latter and the toughness of the former. The Maid's Version is not only unlike anything Woodrell has previously written, it's unlike anything you are likely to read this year.

Killer Apps, Westerns, Pinkertons, Hammett's Missing Years, and Bodies In Your Bed

Snitch World by Jim Nisbet (PM Press). Another example of absurdist noir from one its foremost practitioners. This is, in some ways, a throwback to Nisbet's earlier work, with an added dose of San Francisco psychogeography thrown in for good measure. But Snitch World is also an homage to blue collar San Francisco, or at least those  on the margins who can still remember it. A kind of  last stand against killer apps, with survival techniques, be they drugs, drink, crime, wit or public disorder. With its barroom scenes and taxi cab rides, this is Nisbet at his most painfully humorous. Could there be, as SW's Klinger might wonder, an app for this kind of writing? I doubt it.

Hollywood Westerns by Robert B. Pippin (Yale University). After reading his book on film noir, my review of which can be found here, I was expecting great things from Hollywood Westerns and American Myth. The book concentrates on Howard Hawkes' Red River, and John Ford's The Searchers and Who Shot Liberty Valance. So it's somewhat limited in scope and perhaps slightly disappointing. Nevertheless, Pippin draws a great deal from the myths those films represent, relating it to the trajectory of the US. In fact, there's as much, if not more, packed in these 155 pages then in a book like  Slotkin's mammoth Gunfighter Nation. Anyone who loves westerns will certainly want to have a look at this one.   

Western Crime Fiction Goes East: The Russian Pinkerton Craze 1907-1934 by Boris Dralyuk (Brill). A fascinating subject: the popularity and social meaning of Pinkerton, Holmes, and Nick Carter stories in Russia prior to and just after the revolution. Published in pulp formats, they represented a Manichean universe that, even though they came from the West, fit into both the old order, already in turmoil, and into the new command society overseen by Bukharin and, citing Marx's love of crime fiction, his demand for "red Pinkerton" stories. It turns out that a number of Russia's top writers- Esenin, Blok, etc.- dabbled in the Pinkerton genre. Dralyuk compares the publications to dime pulp novels and comic books in the U.S.. Likewise, the role of such fiction was similarly ambiguous: was it subverting the culture, upholding its values, or doing both at the same time. The book is fascinating when it comes to Russian reading habits, the  role of parody, wrestling, and the kinoroman- not dissimilar from the original Serie Noire ethos. Overpriced, so, unless you're part of the 1%, order it at your local library.

Hammett Unwritten by Owen Fitzstephen, with Notes and Afterword by Gordon McAlpine (Seventh Street Books). An ingenious little book. Fitzstephen is both the name of the author and the name of  the mastermind writer and Hammett doppelganger in Dain Curse. It's a novel that purports, tongue only half in cheek, to explain Hammett's two decade long writer's block.  Reminiscent of Dominic Stansberry's Manifesto For the Dead and Ariel S. Winter's Police at the Funeral, but even more reliant on biographical detail and used to a greater effect. In doing so, Fitzstephen/McAlpine  highlights crucial moments- based on fact as well as fiction- in Hammett's life, all of them revolving around something close to the Maltese Falcon. Incredibly, those disparate moments are pulled together to make a compelling narrative. But why no mention of Hammett's unfinished Tulip?



Stiffed by Rob Kitchin (Snubnose Press). From another small press churning out novels that are often more interesting than those produced by the majors with their conglomerate concerns. Kitchin's book is a hilarious and frightening Westlakesque tale about keeping one's friends,  getting rid of unwanted corpses and how to deal with the subsequent fall-out. Because waking at 5 a.m with a hard-on and a corpse in your bed might not be the best way to start the day. Uneven at times, with occasional repetitions, implausibilities, and mid-Atlantic perplexities, but, in all, thoroughly entertaining and not without a smidgen of social value.