Crime Fiction: Voluntary Madness by Vicki Hendricks

(Editor’s note: The following review comes from Steven Nester, the host of Poets of the Tabloid Murder, a weekly Internet radio show heard on the Public Radio Exchange [PRX]. Nester is also a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Rap Sheet, Mystery Scene and Firsts Magazine. He last wrote for January Magazine about Jonathan Ashley’s The Cost of Doing Business.)

Ask yourself this, you outlaw bohemians who view the suburban cul-de-sac at the end of the bourgeois rainbow as a fate worse than death: If you planned to chuck it all to avoid having to endure an undistinguished life; if you wished to live large and make a last-ditch statement of your existence, then check out with some Bonnie and Clyde panache (didn’t they die pretty -- at least in the 1967 film?), what would you do? You would live dangerously in order to acquire material for a novel, write it, party until your money ran out, then dress up as a skeleton and overdose on sleeping pills on a prominent float in Florida’s Key West Fantasy Fest parade, right?

Now that’s a bang worth hearing. It also happens to be the game plan for Punch, an older, half-Jamaican, half-Italian half-hearted desperado, and Juliette, a desultory 20-something waitress at a Tennessee Cracker Barrel, the main players in Vicki Hendricks’ much-missed and thankfully reissued, 2000 novel, Voluntary Madness (New Pulp Press). These star-crossed but well-suited lovers -- partners in crime and co-dependence -- stumble upon each other in a white-trash version of what Hollywood used to call a “meet cute.” Juliette wanders into the 7-Eleven that Punch was about to rob and is immediately smitten by “his hard muscles, with the smoothest Kahlua and cream skin, thick black hair past his shoulders, a view of the world evolved past our time -- I’m his, body and soul, no regrets, till I die …” This is a love story of two people who need unconditional love, without any kind of foreplay or background check. The dating scene was a lot more fun before the advent of Match.com, for sure.

Punch is a deadbeat with a sense of adventure, and in Juliette’s eyes he’s a man of the world. He’s played guitar in a band, troubadoured around Europe, knows how to order food at fancy restaurants, and possesses enough world-weary je regrette rien to make her swoon and substitute his beloved rum for a curative cup of hemlock. An affable opportunist who is also sincere, Punch tells her that she saved his life, and dedicates himself to her as much as her modest inheritance and his dissolute ways will allow. The only sin Punch acknowledges is the sin of being ordinary, and this borders on the nihilistic, giving weight to his suicidal endgame. “Nothing’s right or wrong, good or bad. Just more or less interesting,” he says.

In the “you complete me department,” Punch provides what Juliette lacks. “ … I always wanted to be a writer. We read about Hemingway in high school, and I’d be an adventure-novelist myself, if I had the brains -- which I don’t. I know my limitations. So being with Punch is the next best thing, the only thing for me.” Juliette possesses what Punch walked into the 7-Eleven for in the first place, money -- and lucky for him, also the instant compassion of a needy person. Juliette brings more to the relationship than complacency and care-giving; and if their first meeting doesn’t limn her as a chance-taker, one of her private pleasures is to wander Key West at odd hours and “flash” passersby. Punch, on the other hand, is a diabetic and a little less mobile, and seems weary of the day-to-day. He’d rather spend his time slouched on a bar stool than writing his much-vaunted but unseen novel, which he musters the courage to do when Juliette gently prods him. Aside from being Punch’s sweet-natured taskmaster, Juliette is also his muse. “I don’t interfere with his art,” she says, “I just set up interesting situations to stimulate it.” But what this pair are really doing is living their lives on their terms; and as Juliette’s inheritance dwindles the situations become more interesting.

They soon realize that armed robbery, another form of experience for the book, could also be a way to solve their cash-flow dilemma and spice things up a bit. First, they break into Key West’s Ernest Hemingway House & Museum, intent on theft. While there, Punch raises the ante to the house limit when he strikes and kills an elderly security guard. Free from compunction for lesser crimes, they then work their way up to robbing restaurants for food, and ultimately emptying the pockets of patrons at the fancier restaurants in town. The press covers their exploits and they gain some renown and a reputation to uphold.

Juliette is willing to follow her partner to the end, though she carries the hope that he can be rehabilitated. “But if Punch writes his great American Novel,” she muses, “I’m figuring he’ll want to live. He’ll be happy forever and won’t have to drink himself into a coma anymore.” Yet this outcome is not to be.

The titular “voluntary madness” in Hendricks’ tale is alcohol, something Punch submits to almost nonstop. As the two plan their path to oblivion, Juliette knows the best way to keep Punch sober is to keep him busy. (“I’m amazed at the way he can stay sober when he has mischief in mind.”) As much as she loves Punch when he’s sober, and as deep as her commitment is to his doomsday plan, the irony is that this busyness will lead to the completion of their misguided life’s work. ◊

Crime Fiction: The Cost of Doing Business by Jonathan Ashley

(Editor’s note: The following review comes from Steven Nester, the host of Poets of the Tabloid Murder, a weekly Internet radio show heard on the Public Radio Exchange [PRX]. Nester is also a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Rap Sheet, Mystery Scene and Firsts Magazine. He last wrote for January Magazine about Tod Goldberg’s latest novel, Gangsterland.)

Louisville, Kentucky, is a tough old town. Wedged between the Ohio River and the outskirts of Appalachia, it’s a “city of enterprise, criminal and otherwise.” The side of the tracks where narrator Jon Catlett resides -- in Jonathan Ashley’s debut crime novel, The Cost of Doing Business (280 Steps) -- is a slim strip of bohemia; but beneath the restaurants and trendy shops there’s grit and a dog with plenty of fight. Catlett isn’t a bad type; he’s a bit of a cynic who owns a used book shop, so you know he’s a thinker; he has girlfriend problems and mounting bills, so he’s kind of a regular Joe; but what makes him different is the 800-pound gorilla of a heroin problem on his back.

His life is aimless and he’ll be the first to admit it. Yet he scrapes along, selling a few books, hosting hip concerts in his “posh, quasi-Gertrude Stein-esque salon disguised as a bookstore” for “the painfully predictable who stood for nothing,” doing small-time dope deals and getting high. Funny thing is, heroin is the biggest impediment in his life, but it also turns out to be the best thing that ever happened to him. When the “arbitrary nature of fate sideswiped me,” as Jon says in one of his many pithy and homespun, poetic observations worthy of Daniel Woodrell or Matthew McBride, his life’s work is revealed -- and all it took was a murder.

Even though it’s an accident, Jon’s killing of an annoying trust-fund junkie begins his elevation, along with sidekick Paul, from “part-time middle man to straight up dope kingpin.” Jon faces his change of life with equanimity, focus and a willingness to be mentored by corrupt cops and mobsters who’ve been to the rodeo many times. Best of all, he discovers he has a knack for the logistics of setting up and implementing drug deals. He’s making lots of money, too, so much that his addiction takes a back seat. The lessons Jon learns as he rises to the challenges of literally plotting and shooting his way to the top of the supply chain are laconic and wise. You don’t read Ashley’s work for the plotting or the action; it’s all been done before. You read it for the wry rural bard in Jon; and as a self-observant realist he pulls no punches, even from behind the veil of lies that is part of any addiction. “I acted like I’d only entered the dope game out of necessity,” he says. “Who am I kidding, though, I knew even then that the reason this recent detox had been so manageable was because a new addiction had begun to enter my life, power.” Things get better and better with every dead dope dealer he and his cohorts leave in their path as they make their way to Chicago and the Russian mob. Shooting people, a risk that invites unwanted scrutiny, is just part of the game that everyone involved accepts.

Calling the shots after getting rid of a blackmailing cop who discovered the trust-fund junkie’s murder is Louisville detective “Mad Dog” Mike Milligan. Milligan shows Jon that the first and foremost rule to surviving as a successful drug dealer, from the street corner to what passes as the corner office, is beating your newest business partner to the double cross. Jon and his motley crew of homeboys and misfits plot and eventually ally with Luther Longmire, a Kentucky gangster who happens to be carrying on a hot and heavy affair with his leggy first cousin Amara. Jon has been having an on-again, off-again affair with a wealthy and recovering addict whose presence is barely felt in the book, but when Amara enters, Jon is hooked. Amara is trouble and Jon knows it, but he can’t help himself. “It seemed that all Amara truly feared,” he thinks, “was boredom.” They bond over the poetry of William Butler Yeats, but Amara doesn’t let a libidinous fling get in the way of blood kin or business.

There’s an OK Corral in The Cost of Doing Business, and Luther and Amara and anyone else foolish enough to enter with Jon and Mad Dog are forced to pay the cost of doing business. ◊

Crime Fiction: Gangsterland by Tod Goldberg

(Editor’s note: The following review comes from Steven Nester, the host of Poets of the Tabloid Murder, a weekly Internet radio show heard on the Public Radio Exchange [PRX]. Nester is also a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Rap Sheet, Mystery Scene and Firsts Magazine. He last wrote for January Magazine about Frank Wheeler Jr.’s new novel, The Good Life.)

Longtime mafia hit man Sal Cupertine knows that once somebody “dictates the terms of your survival … you’re a dead man.” By that measure it would seem that Sal, the protagonist in Tod’s Goldberg’s wise and witty new novel, Gangsterland (Counterpoint), is as dead as them come.

After being set up by his mob-boss cousin to make a drug deal with three federal agents -- “Donnie Brascos,” as he calls them -- Sal murders those agents to avoid being captured, and is thereafter (for his own good) swept out of Chicago and sent to Las Vegas, the city that keeps “meth hours” and where a newspaper column reports on gangsters like “they’re members of a boy band.” Sal’s given a new face and a stack of texts on Judaism, and is told by his handlers (owners, really -- it seems cousin Ronnie sold him to the crooked Rabbi Kales and his even more crooked son-in-law, strip-club owner Bennie Savone) that if he wants to live he is now going to be “Rabbi David Cohen.” Resilient, and with a wife and son back in Chicago to whom he plans one day to return, Cupertine/Cohen gets the message. In the meantime, the FBI is calling him dead a bit too hastily, and a renegade ex-fed, whose poor planning was somewhat responsible for the massacre of those three other agents, sets about to “clear his name.” Cohen sits tight and tries to figure the angles as a new member of the “Kosher Nostra.”

Rabbi Kales attempts to inculcate Cohen into his faith in order to make this whole arrangement work. And at some levels Cohen connects, seeing his choice of obedience to a crime family that considers him an expendable commodity, always looking over his shoulder for a gun barrel, as farcical when compared to the existential plight of the Jews -- “pursued for being born,” as Kales tells Cohen. In the criminal world Cohen left behind, human relations is a “Ponzi scheme.” No one is trusted and all are eventually betrayed, killed by anyone who thinks they might be a threat or a potential witness.

Kales knows Cohen is a horrible man who’s made “terrible choices.” But Cohen is a jaded observer of human nature, and he knows that for Kales to have been given his own congregation by his criminal son-in-law, he had to make some pretty egregious choices himself; the means will always justify the ends, especially where criminals are involved. “If you did a little bad for a greater good and the only people who got hurt were people who decided to get involved with a bunch of gangsters, wasn’t that a net positive?” Cohen ponders. Of course it was. And some of the choices Kales has made allow Cupertine/Cohen to return to the game of being a criminal and making money, which is what he does best other than killing people. Much to Cohen’s surprise, Kales’ family-run funeral home also happens to be a crematorium for mafia murder victims and an illegal organ-harvesting operation. A professional killer could make himself of use there.

Bennie Savone gets the new Rabbi Cohen as “Jew’d up as possible” before presenting him to the congregation. For a stone-cold killer, Cohen doesn’t do a bad job at his unexpected new job, even when he’s counseling Bennie’s wife, who knows her husband is an outright crook and is ready to leave him. Cohen begins at times, in offhand ways, to see the world as a series of Talmudic parables, and his new learning “fill[s] his brain with whole new pathways of thought,” whether he likes it or not. Cohen hasn’t gone soft, just perhaps a bit more introspective; but as a hardened realist, he still views his new perspective as a bit “ludicrous.”

In Goldberg’s story, wisdom is tempered with humor and irony, as when Cohen makes up for his lack of book-learning and quotable, comforting tidbits from holy texts by drawing on popular-culture sources, finding “that if he paraphrased Neil Young or Bruce Springsteen it generally had the same effect.”

In Las Vegas it’s not difficult to see that many crimes are not immune from the ameliorating vicissitudes of time. “You didn’t need a gun to rob someone anymore, you just needed a spreadsheet,” says Cohen. Las Vegas to him is now a theme park, he thinks -- Gangsterland, where tourists put on gold chains and black silk shirts and ape Tony Soprano. Cohen isn’t going legit -- just maybe a bit more legit. And with cousin Ronnie in touch, and hopes of getting Bennie and Kales out of the way fast, he begins to plot the rest of his life. ◊

READ MORE: “The Best Place to Hide a Body? Just Ask Writer Tod Goldberg,” by Michael Shaub (Los Angeles Times).

Crime Fiction: The Good Life by Frank Wheeler Jr.

(Editor’s note: The following review comes from Steven Nester, the host of Poets of the Tabloid Murder, a weekly Internet radio show heard on the Public Radio Exchange [PRX]. Nester is also a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Rap Sheet, Mystery Scene and Firsts Magazine. He last wrote for January Magazine about Kevin Cook’s non-fiction work, Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime that Changed America.)

Sometimes to do the right thing, a lawman must cross the line and do dirty with the bad guys, and nobody knows that better than Sheriff Earl Haack Jr., of Linden, Nebraska. Plainspoken and direct, his daddy was a lawman who gave him the job and taught him to be a cop in the way that makes the most sense in a world that will never be tamed. “Remember, Junior,” Dad said. “Order comes first.” This means that to keep the right side of the law safe, a cop sometimes has to step over the line and bring the fight to the criminals -- and take some of their profits in the process.

Frank Wheeler Jr.’s The Good Life (New Pulp Press) is a modern-day Western in which the classic land-grab of ranchers and railroads routing dirt farmers and other decent folk has been updated. Now we’re given feuding drug dealers at war with each other over territory, while they go up against politicians looking for election-year publicity and underpaid police wanting a piece of the action. Junior does a good job keeping the animals in line and lining his pockets, but when it comes to women, he’s a bit fleeceable.

While serving as a detective in Denver, Colorado, he busts an Argentine college student named Camila for cocaine possession. It’s love at first offense, and Junior ends up marrying her. But she was in the deal for a green card only, and carries on an affair right under Junior’s nose. Camila eventually leaves Junior to return to South America, nearly wrecking him. Camila also knows how some cops can work with drug dealers, and that Junior is one of those people. She’s always thinking.

Junior’s in the middle of cleaning house when he’s tipped off that Nebraska’s attorney general needs a big bust he can show proudly to voters in advance of his upcoming re-election fight, and he intends that bust to take place in little Linden. The problem is that Junior already took out the AG’s fall guy. Junior’s plan was to quietly make the local drug establishment go away, then put his own people in to run the organization. Now he must steer the state police to a new target, a guy in Lincoln, Nebraska’s capital. Just as he has his head together, though, Camila shows up again, ostensibly because her wealthy father cut her off, but also packing plenty of the coochie-coochie that Junior can’t resist. Even so, Junior learned his lesson and he’s not buying it. When an assassin breaks into Camila’s apartment and uses her as a human shield, Junior sees it as a “gift from God,” and attempts to line up a shot that will kill them both. This story hinges on why she returned to Junior, and when she’ll play her hand.

What’s hindering Junior’s shady organization is a spy on the inside. The obvious suspect is Camila. A stranger comes to town and Junior takes notice, casting more doubt upon her. But when hog-tied and helpless, Camila comes clean. She tells Junior she represents a South American cartel that’s looking to move in and play ball with Junior -- Camila assured the cartel that she’d get her husband on the team. She owes El-Perro Negro, her boss in South America, for the death of his young cousin. But there is an insurance policy: a thug named Andres -- the stranger -- who’s in Linden to make sure Camila does the right thing, and he must be dealt with.

As far as Junior is concerned, feeding the state police the middle man in Lincoln, as well as his supplier in Chicago, in order to do business with the source in South America sounds like a good plan. In the meantime, there’s a mole to locate as Junior and his half-brother, Mikey, and second cousin Eddie continue to cull the weak, the unwary and the useless. The dealers Junior thinks he can use are asked to leave the country for a while. When they return they’ll have jobs.

The imagery in The Good Life is of Nebraska during harvest time, all corn stubble and chill, and like the best of Hemingway, death lingers in the background, built into the scenery. “Air smells like chaff,” and the reaper is on the prowl, hanging in the breeze. There’s some great good-ol’-boy repartee here, and the beauty of this genre, or at least of country boys cracking wise, is the brevity and pith of their observations and wit.

Junior Haack is a realist, and takes the course of action that makes the most cold-blooded sense, whether it’s beating the screw-up Mikey to knock some sense into him, allowing Camila -- the woman who hurt him so much -- to return to his life and (by his standards) change it for the better, or murdering and dismembering the competition. Despite everything, he’s still able to get a good night’s sleep.

Says Junior: “What I’ve come to understand about murder is its necessity. And if something is necessary, why regret it?” ◊

Non-Fiction: Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime that Changed America by Kevin Cook

(Editor’s note: This review comes from New York writer Steven Nester, the host of Poets of the Tabloid Murder, a weekly Internet radio show heard on the Public Radio Exchange [PRX]. Nester is also a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Rap Sheet, Mystery Scene and Firsts Magazine.)

For the last 50 years, the March 13, 1964, rape and murder of bar manager Kitty Genovese outside her Kew Gardens, Queens, apartment was as durable and persistent an urban legend as they come. The young woman’s grisly death -- witnessed by 38 of her neighbors, who turned a deaf ear to her screams as her killer took more than 30 minutes to dispatch her, as The New York Times belatedly averred -- resounded in the world of social science, and focused scrutiny on the perceived callousness of inner-city culture.

Kevin Cook’s new book, Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime that Changed America (Norton), reveals that while some of the facts of the case are indisputable, most of them aren’t. Much of the myth-building was the result of yellow journalism. Pundits blamed the lack of response to this woman’s brutal slaying on urban alienation, and called it a kind of irresponsible complacency on the part of a stressed and apathetic public that was becoming overwhelmed by political assassination, the Vietnam War, race relations and the threat of nuclear annihilation. Now, after half a century, Cook has come along as a myth-buster to set the record straight.

It could be said that the murder of 28-year-old Kitty Genovese was more the product of a typewriter than a knife. Barely mentioned at first in the New York dailies, Kitty Genovese was dead and buried for a fortnight by the time the Times’ newly promoted metropolitan editor, Abe Rosenthal, heard the story from his city’s recently appointed police commissioner, Michael Murphy. Murphy related some specious information about the tragedy, that it had been witnessed by 38 neighbors who had chosen to do nothing. The ambitious Rosenthal, who knew good copy when he saw it, sent a reporter to Kew Gardens to flesh out the story. The Times ran its piece on the front page; and while it was riddled with errors, it was accepted as the truth.

Cook reports differently.

As he explains, it took killer Winston Moseley, then a 29-year-old machine operator, a full half-hour to do away with Kitty Genovese. While many people heard her desperate cries for help, most of them thought some kind of domestic dispute was in progress, and ignored it. Moseley actually left the scene once to move his car in order to avoid detection, after a neighbor yelled for the attack to stop. He returned to find that Kitty had staggered to her apartment entrance. He then attempted to rape her. There were no 38 witnesses, as the Times reported. There was only one indisputable eyewitness, a craven alcoholic who opened his door and looked down to witness the rape in progress. This is a far cry from the Times’ assertion that it took a village to commit a murder.

Cook goes to great pains and uses much detail to describe a nation undergoing change, and not for the better. He’s equally meticulous in setting the scene of Kew Gardens, which -- though only minutes away from Times Square and the center of the universe -- is at heart a small American town with neighbors who know each other, leave their doors unlocked and enjoy the simple pleasures of life. It was the type of place where people looked out for each other. But then the snake entered the garden and, in a way, the homicide became a teachable moment for the nation, one that persists to this day.

The tale of 38 witnesses persisted, too, even among responsible scientists. Using this false premise, socials scientists devised the “Genovese syndrome,” also known as the “bystander syndrome,” a condition wherein the larger the number of witnesses present at a crime, the fewer the chances that anyone will intervene. Personal culpability, in effect, is diluted in a crowd.

Everyone knows how Kitty Genovese was slain, but few know how she died. The implication of all accounts is that Winston Moseley left her to bleed to death and that she perished alone. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The police were called and responded, and Kitty died in the arms of a neighbor who attempted to keep her alive until help could arrive. Kitty Genovese, who suffered horribly in the hands of Winston Moseley, was not handled very gently by The New York Times, either. ◊

Crime Fiction: Rake by Scott Phillips

(Editor’s note: The following review comes from Steven Nester, the host of Poets of the Tabloid Murder, a weekly Internet radio show heard on the Public Radio Exchange [PRX]. Nester is also a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Rap Sheet, Mystery Scene and Firsts Magazine. He last wrote for January Magazine about Jerry Stahl’s Happy Mutant Baby Pills.)

Rake is a gem of a noir tucked into a snug coffin with the lid firmly secured by a tidy little noose. Scott Phillips’ latest novel (released by Counterpoint and following 2011’s The Adjustment) is set in Paris. It features a famous yet nameless narrator who is so unctuous that you might feel the need to wash your hands after putting the book down; and that might only be once, because you’ll most likely read this work straight through. Known here only by his TV character’s name, narrator Dr. Crandall Taylor is the star of a cancelled American soap opera that’s a hit in Europe. Taylor is so smooth he makes ground glass feel like silk; and he’ll draw blood just as easily when backed into a corner. Even so, he’s a very likeable sociopath.

Ostensibly in Paris to raise money for a film project (that doesn’t exist), Taylor is living off what fame brings other than money: adulation, dinner invitations and prodigious sex. Outwardly affable, he comes across as cheerful and harmless. But beneath that veneer is an obliging opponent who can be brutal when challenged. He’s as likely to pull out a knife as he is his penis, depending on whether one is coming at him or coming onto him. Taylor is a thrill-seeker of a highly evolved kind. Says he of his acute and refined tastes: “If you ever get the chance to fuck someone with whom you’re complicit in a recent murder, I highly recommend it.”

By degrees we see just how brutal (and empathetic) a man he can be; and while his violence is thorough it’s never too gratuitous, only well-deserved. Random trouble seems to seek him out when cuckolded husbands aren’t doing so. When trouble does find him on a deserted quai along the Seine late one night, he’s forced to defend himself from five assailants. After dispatching four, the fifth turns out to be a young woman. Taylor beats her as well, and when he discovers she’s pregnant, he calls for an ambulance -- but he wishes another fate upon her unborn child.

Mostly I hoped I terminated that pregnancy, though inadvertently, if only for the sake of the kid himself. I grew up with a mother like that and buddy, that’s not any way you want to grow up.

After anger-management classes, a discharge from the Green Berets for beating a fellow Corpsman, and an assault-and-battery conviction that followed his beating the irate husband of a cast member who caught them in flagrante delicto, Taylor’s lucky to have discovered acting and its therapeutic qualities. In that art he finds that “all that anger gets wrapped up in the preparation and chucked out in the performance.”

Also, the part of Dr. Crandall Taylor provides a respectable role model and enables Phillips’ protagonist to form an identity other than that of a vicious drifter who can’t find his place in the world. He never confuses himself with a real doctor, but his fans do, and he is nothing but gracious with them. His proudest moment as an actor came when a doctor told him she modeled her mannerisms on his character. Taylor keeps his violence hidden from fans and never intentionally bites the hand that feeds him; and as an unrepentant satyr, he usually has something else to do with it.

When Taylor begins an affair with Esmee, the wife of an investor in his bogus film project, he discovers her husband, Claude, is a violent and amoral arms dealer. While Taylor doesn’t seek out danger as a matter of course, he does welcome it. “I was fucking the wife of an arms dealer, the kind of guy for whom killing really meant nothing at all. Cool.”

Claude discovers the trysts, and then attempts to kill Taylor, but fails. In the aftermath, Taylor takes Claude captive until he can figure out what to do with Esmee’s vengeful husband. Once Taylor understands that setting Claude free will only result in his own death and those of others does his choice become clear. Claude is killed and the imaginary film suddenly materializes and goes into production with the late arms dealer’s money. The crime is solved, too, but venality wins in the end.

There are several accomplices in Claude’s murder, and each of them is involved in the movie project. After Inspector Bonnot of the Paris police shows Taylor that the evidence points to him, Taylor hires one more cast member for his movie, Bonnot’s young and beautiful daughter. The unsolved murder of a globally reviled arms merchant will hardly be mourned, and because of Dr. Crandall Taylor the world is a safer place. He looks forward to bedding the inspector’s daughter and, with his usual aplomb, opines that “It’s good to be the star.” ◊

Fiction: Happy Mutant Baby Pills by Jerry Stahl

(Editor’s note: This review comes from Steven Nester, a resident of Austerlitz, New York, and the host of Poets of the Tabloid Murder, a weekly Internet radio show heard on the Public Radio Exchange [PRX]. Nester is also a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Rap Sheet, Mystery Scene and Firsts Magazine. He last wrote for January Magazine about Robert Stone’s Death of the Black-Haired Girl.)

Jerry Stahl throws a bucket of acid in the face of corporate America with Happy Mutant Baby Pills (Harper Perennial), his rant-raving eighth novel. Stahl’s message is simple but horrifying: today’s corporations are poisoning the users of their products, yet the victims don’t seem to care. For instance: As long as jet planes can get us around the country quickly (as they spew contrails of deadly poisons into the friendly skies), and chemical companies can keep our lawns weed-free (while poisoning us), have no fear. Dow and Monsanto might be filling our body with carcinogens, Stahl tells us, but Big Pharma will gladly sell us the cure. And if there’s nothing wrong with you? Well, then, Big Pharma will happily invent a syndrome for you. Happy Mutant Baby Pills is Silent Spring on hard drugs and attitude, only instead of birds dropping from the sky it’s the human race that’s going to take the hit.

The plot and characters here are as edgy and disturbing as one could expect from Stahl (the author of Permanent Midnight, I, Fatty, etc.). Lloyd is a neurotic and self-loathing heroin addict who writes the fine print for pharmaceutical companies, stating that the wonder drug you might be taking could also produce birth defects, make you cranky, turn you into a werewolf, you name it. As a junkie, Lloyd will do whatever and go wherever is necessary to keep the drugs coming, which makes him the perfect follower; and fortunately for the reader, drugs don’t dull his intelligence or his outrage.

Lloyd meets a woman named Nora at an Occupy L.A. event. She tells him that she writes sarcastic greeting-card messages. Lloyd falls for her. He ends up murdering an innocent man in a bathroom stall at her behest, and the pair then take it on the lam. Lloyd is the inebriated yet cerebral tour guide in this picaresque road trip of a novel, which gives Stahl plenty of opportunities to ridicule everything he observes.

Nora is the one driving Happy Mutant Baby Pill’s plot, and when she reveals her agenda to Lloyd, readers will watch in morbid fascination as the train jumps the track in slow motion. Readers are also likely to thank God that Nora is nothing but a fictional character. For it turns out that Nora is pregnant. She tells Lloyd she plans to call attention to the danger of consumer chemicals on humans by ingesting everything she can get her hands on to create a mutated baby, “one hundred percent USDA approved.” As hideous as it sounds, the humor prevails. “If this were NASCAR, I could have a sponsor name on every deformity, one per tumor,” says Nora.

The anger in these pages is righteous, and the scolding and bile are tempered by absurdity. Stahl, whose style is hallucinatory and searing, belongs in company with other American satirists, his work comparing nicely with the yucks of Sinclair Lewis, the anger of Lenny Bruce and the surreal schtick of William S. Burroughs. He understands the same thing those giants did: If you’re not going to entertain, no one’s going to stick around for the tongue-lashing. The same thing applies to honesty. Stahl’s self-deprecation is legendary and he never sacrifices artistic merit for speaking the truth.

When Stahl riffs on dope addiction he’s unbeatable, even though its ground already covered. The genius of Stahl is that he never repeats himself. Like William Faulkner’s well-trodden Yoknapatawpha County, Stahl’s riffs seem new with every book.

Fact and fiction are continuously conflated within the plot turns of Happy Mutant Baby Pills, including a torturous encounter with a real California sheriff’s deputy who allegedly fired a tear-gas canister at an Occupy Berkeley protester, nearly killing him. The book’s title reminds one of Mad Man actress January Jones, whose strange-but-true homemade vitamin pills -- concocted from her newborn baby’s placenta -- sound kookily innocuous when compared with how Big Pharma plays the game. The seeming insanity of the multibillion-dollar prescription-drug business is pointed out by Stahl’s sounding off on antidepressants that can cause users to turn suicidal: “I have the condition, I want to get rid of it, so I take the medication to make it go away and -- Pfizer meet Job! -- inflict upon myself the exact thing I want to eradicate.” Take Lyrica, for instance, the treatment for restless knee syndrome. One of the side-effects is “feeling high.” Who in these casually scrupulous times, Stahl muses, wouldn’t admit to restless knees just to catch a buzz?

“What are we now,” Stahl proposes, “but our symptoms?” Throughout Happy Mutant Baby Pills Nora and Lloyd ingest vast quantities of illegal drugs. What they are trying to medicate is the effects of the human condition -- the pain, uncertainty, personal demons -- and it’s a long and varied list, as everyone knows. So, I guess, they’re just human, and they need really strong medicine in order to cope. Lloyd puts it all in perspective: “Heroin. Because once you shed your dignity, everything’s a little easier.”

One last thing: If you’ve been pacing at the maternity room door for the last several paragraphs, I’m not going to open it for you. But I will say that, like many satirists, Stahl is an optimist at heart. After Nora’s baby girl is born, Lloyd opines that “if ten years from now, it turns out she can repel fleas, is that so bad?” ◊

Fiction: Death of the Black-Haired Girl by Robert Stone

(Editor’s note: This review comes from Steven Nester, now a resident of Austerlitz, New York, and the host of Poets of the Tabloid Murder, a weekly Internet radio show heard on the Public Radio Exchange [PRX]. Nester is also a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Rap Sheet, Mystery Scene and Firsts Magazine.)

Robert Stone might be one of the best and last of the postwar literary adventure writers. Taking over from Ernest Hemingway, whose lion-shooting calm and whiskey-muscled brawn are larger-than-life qualities that once held a character's mettle to the fire, Stone has updated morality in crisis, pitting corrupt cops against drug dealers racing in a cross-country shoot out (Dog Soldiers); single-handedly sailing the circumference of the globe (Outerbridge Reach), and maneuvering through political and religious turmoils (A Flag for Sunrise and Damascus Gate). These are the scenarios wherein characters’ moral guidance systems are tested, while the world falls apart around them.

Death of the Black-Haired Girl (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), which reads more like a police procedural with a bit of Graham Greene’s lapse of faith tossed in, is Stone’s new, eighth novel, and takes place on the campus of an elite eastern liberal arts college, the very seat of higher standards. University is supposed to offer the perfect world -- safe from the horrors of reality, while allowing students to interact with it amid a modicum of safety. Yet the violence of the real world is not far away and the boundaries blur. “It was never certain whether tags were left by street kids or art students,” Stone observes of graffiti. And once you invite the vampire into your house he’s free to come and go as he pleases.

Steven Brookman is a brilliant and careless professor who abruptly ends a romantic relationship with Maud Stack, his equally brainy but tragically naïve student. She’s just let the vampire in by publishing a vitriolic attack on abortion protesters in a local paper and by allowing herself to fall in love with Brookman.

A rebel against her own upbringing, Maud had the type of “antique Catholicism Brookman thought had disappeared from literate circles a generation ago, thin-lipped and bitter, to every man his cross. Now she dealt the same card reversed. Armed with the childish energy of a parochial school minx, reciting every dirty word that’s ever occurred to her.” Maud hasn’t made the connection between cause and effect, and that she might have to bear personal responsibility for her actions. “Maud wanted fulfilling experiences,” Stone explains. “She wanted them for free.”

The anti-abortion demonstrators are angered to the point of violence, and Maud’s life may very well be in danger as a result. Finally, in a drunken confrontation with Brookman in front of his home on a busy sidewalk, Maud dies under the wheels of a carelessly driven car. Her death stands for nothing; it’s the random hand grenade that’s tossed into the lives of those who knew her, leaving them to sort out their culpability, real and imagined, along with the need to make sense of the event, while the reader views morality and ethics from the different angles of each character’s perspective.

John Clammer, the bible-thumping schizophrenic who is the ex-husband of Maud’s roommate, soon acknowledges having committed the murder to his pastor, the ironically named Reverend Fumes. Fumes sees an opportunity for glorification by taking Clammer under his wing and guiding him through the process of confession and redemption. Meanwhile, Jo Carr, a lapsed nun and now a student advisor at the college, sees her past returning to haunt her after she thinks she’s spotted a rebel priest she had known from her radical past in South America stalking the campus.

Viewing Maud’s corpse in the morgue, her old partner Lou Salmone mordantly observes that “the mixture of mortified humanity and disinfectant somehow conveyed a judgement.” Everyone is guilty of something, the line conjectures, and the police most want to pin the young woman’s death on Brookman. Might he deliberately have pushed her in front of an oncoming vehicle? Ellie, Brookman’s pregnant wife and a devout Mennonite (who “believed, however humbly, that her course in life was directed by God”), proves to be the calm in this mounting storm, perhaps because she’d moored herself to a higher power, and has therefore been spared the searching self-reflection of those who have only themselves as guides.

Maud’s father, Eddie Stack, is an old-school New York cop. Crime-solving to him is simply a matter of finding the most likely culprit and running him down; and if that fails, revenge is a pretty good Plan B. Indeed, he plans to avenge his daughter by taking Brookman’s life. But when the two meet, Brookman is armed, anticipating “some kind of blood debt, something to be endured as a result of what happened.” He also viewed such a confrontation as a challenge to his thrill-seeking side, which is the essence of his irresponsible character.

Brookman’s adventures are mostly manufactured. He rock-climbs, hunts, and seems to leap from bed to bed in a single bound. In the aftermath of Maud’s tragedy he goes unpunished, and leaves his professorship to research and write a book about Siberia. There he has the one true adventure in this novel, and it takes place mostly in his imagination. Disoriented in the blackness of a frozen Siberian night, his shoulder injured during a fall, Brookman believes he’s close to death. His lack of spine and his cowardice border on vanity. He drops the pretense of risk-taking man of action and screams into the empty Siberian tundra, hoping that his needle of a life in an enormous haystack of humanity will be found, equaling the miracle of someone hearing him in the first place. ◊

Fiction: Me and the Devil by Nick Tosches

(Editor’s note: This review comes from Steven Nester, a resident of McKinney, Texas, and the host of Poets of the Tabloid Murder, a weekly Internet radio show heard on the Public Radio Exchange [PRX]. Nester is also a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Rap Sheet, Mystery Scene and Firsts Magazine.)

You’ll be relieved to learn that rumors you may have heard concerning Nick Tosches writing a vampire novel aren’t quite true, not that Tosches couldn’t have set that genre straight. With his own brand of historical fiction, his tenacity and fastidiousness for getting to the ur-moment of culture and thought, Tosches is James Michener in a sharkskin suit. A tireless autodidact, he could’ve followed the roots of vampirism all the way back to the cuneiform tablet on which it was first recorded. But in Me and the Devil (Little, Brown), his fourth novel, no one skulks through the fog-shrouded streets of Manhattan to bite the necks of hip urban noctambules and turn them into vampires; that would be too banal. There is, though, some drinking of blood.

What Me and the Devil does is portray the spiritual demise and moribund career of a writer named Nick Tosches, with human-blood-drinking as the symbol for rejuvenation and rebirth. Along the way Tosches delineates the parasitic ways of humans, human vanity, self-delusion, the creative process and the gods men through the ages have created, among many, many other things.

In plenty of respects this book reads like a memoir. Both Nicks live in Tribeca; are writers; have struggles with alcohol; have plenty of gripes with the publishing world; live large with food and drink; and count among their friends many heavyweights in the music and publishing businesses. The candor with which author Tosches has his character express thoughts and pursue pleasure is remarkably brutal and brings the book into the realm of transgressive fiction. This honesty is often so vile and astringent, it could remove the enamel from Amy Vanderbilt’s cool, calm and mortified smile; but it has a purpose.

The sadomasochistic sex, misogyny, misanthropy and rants are so pervasive and jaw-dropping that the reader begins to believe Tosches has something to get off the chest of not only the Nick the character, but probably his own chest as well -- and the reader would be right. Tosches isn’t attempting in these pages to cater to an audience that appreciates base characters, crude situations and vulgar observations; he’s attempting to portray a lost soul who complicates what should be the simple pleasures of life -- wine, women and song -- to the point where they become perversions. But as the twilight hour approaches, he begins to have thoughts and now wants some answers.

Worn out by excess, his writing career inert, and in need of a spiritual second wind, Nick the character finally discovers the power of human blood.

Incorporated into the sex act, the several women he comes to know don’t mind getting cut in order that Nick can feed on them; they like it. Swilling blood immediately becomes Nick’s remedy for everything that ails him; makes him feel alive again and engages him in the world once more. Nick believes that blood can bring him closer to “the fresh-blossoming life force.” But the salubrious effects of sipping from the arteries of women young enough to be his daughters lasts only a short time before he enters a period where he’s no longer in control of his mind or actions.

Nick hits rock bottom when the devil himself appears in his apartment as a hallucination. Say what you want about the devil: he’s one of the few characters in this book who talks with any kind of sense, and he sets about straightening out Nick. The real implication here of course is that Nick is only talking to himself, and it is he who saves himself. As he makes his way back to reality and sanity, Nick realizes that nothing is more important or fulfilling than the simplicity of merely existing. Not books or writing or wisdom, not the fanciest food, wine or clothing, or the most beautiful and compliant woman can make anyone closer to the divine than they already are, if only they have the patience to realize it.

While the prose in this novel is often bombastic and flowery (“a dandelion fondled by a sigh of soft summer air”), Tosches attains pithy perfection when he keeps it simple and pierces to the core (writing, for instance, about “greed, the lowest of monotheisms”). Tosches is at his best when, as in his first novel, Cut Numbers (1988), he keeps his characters focused on the baser things in life. But since this new book is about a living person, Nick Tosches the writer, it’s going to be a little rough, a little opinionated, sometimes beautiful, and with off-the-cuff observations and the quirks of a searching mind.

As was true of Tosches’ previous novels, Me and the Devil is about something. Although it contains opinions on many topics, it’s really an unscrambling of the existential predicament as Tosches sees it: there are too many complications for what ought to be a simple explanation of where we come from and where are we going. It sounds corny to consider, but the truth is that he’s speaking the minds of many who reach a certain age. When there’s a veritable supermarket aisle of available faiths, and consumers are urged to pick a brand and take it for granted, perhaps the wisest action is for one to chart his or her own course to eternity -- just as Tosches has his character, Nick, do.

READ MORE: “Nick Tosches: The ESQ&A,” by Scott Raab (Esquire).