HONEY IN HIS MOUTH by Lester Dent
Book Quote:
“Mr. Harsh, the only way I will deal with you is to buy you. I do not care to work with you on any other basis. I buy you or nothing. You are a cheap man, so buying you will not be expensive. Get it straight—I buy you, or I have nothing to do with you.”
Book Review:
Review by Guy Savage (NOV 7, 2009)
In Honey In His Mouth from pulp author Lester Dent, Walter Harsh is a nomadic, small-time grifter who makes a tenuous living selling photographs. Partnering with whichever woman he happens to be involved with, and working under the guise of National Studios of Hollywood, Harsh moves from town-to-town hustling customers to buy more photographs than they’d planned to when they “won” the free 8×10 portraits. It’s a low rent, sleazy operation, but it’s a living. Unfortunately, Harsh ripped off a supplier to the tune of $720 for photographic supplies. So when the supplier spots Harsh in a gas station, he’s out–not just for his money–but revenge too on the “thieving bastard” who took him for an idiot.
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November 7, 2009
Tags: Caper, HCC, Thriller Posted in: Con or Caper, Thriller/Spy/Caper 
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THE BROKEN TEAGLASS by Emily Arsenault
Book Quote:
“Language…is supposed to be one of the things that separates us from grunting primates. If you turn it into something you beat your chest over, something that only serves to make you better than someone else, or make you insensitive to other human beings—then you may as well be a grunting primate.”
Book Review:
Review by Eleanor Bukowsky (NOV 6, 2009)
In Emily Arsenault’s The Broken Teaglass, two young employees of a dictionary publishing company become obsessed with an unsolved murder. Billy Webb, who is twenty-four, joins the ranks of editorial assistants at the Samuelson Company, and soon befriends Mona Minot, a bright, aggressive, and forthright colleague. Together, they relieve the tedium of their jobs by digging out citations written by Dolores Beekmim, author of a non-existent book called “The Broken Teaglass.” Dolores’ mysterious citations appear to be some sort of confession, but what crime did she commit and why would she place incriminating information in old card files? It takes quite a while for the persistent Billy and Mona to put all of the pieces together, but they are a determined and single-minded pair with a great deal of time on their hands.
November 6, 2009
Tags: Contemporary, Mystery Posted in: Contemporary, Debut Novel, Job, Mystery/Suspense, Writing Life One Comment
BOSTON NOIR edited by Dennis Lehane
Book Quote:
“One of the recurrent themes of noir has always been the search for home. Not home in the physical sense – though that does happen – but in the irrational, emotional sense. The heroes and heroines of noir are usually chasing something they couldn’t hold even if they caught up to it. Some part of them understands the futility of the chase even as another part clings to the need for it. This is probably why, if only to alleviate the pain of waiting, they chase something else in the meantime – a lover, a bank job, the murder of an inconvenient spouse. Yet the home being searched for in these pages might be Boston, and the journey to find it – however fruitless that goal may turn out to be – is as rich and varied, as hilarious and sad, and ultimately as engaging as the city itself.”
From Dennis Lehane’s Introduction
Book Review:
Review by Chris C.T. Terry (NOV 5, 2009)
Boston Noir is one of the latest releases in Akashic Books’ mighty Noir Series. Each collection offers around a dozen new short stories from a city’s literary luminaries. The stories are all tough, bleak and crime-related and they have specific neighborhood settings in the featured city.
Boston Noir is edited by Dennis Lehane, a masterful crime writer whose work transcends the shackles of genre fiction to become plain ol’ great literature. Two of his novels, Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone, have been made into movies and he has written for the HBO television series The Wire. He also contributes a piece to this collection, “Animal Rescue,” a story about a Dorchester tough guy who finds an abused dog. Read the rest of this post »
November 5, 2009
Tags: Boston, Noir, Short Stories Posted in: NE & New York, Noir, Short Stories No Comments
MANY AND MANY A YEAR AGO by Selcuk Altun
Book Quote:
“A man who has never had an unforgettable woman in his life has not lived, but merely existed on this earth.”
Book Review:
Review by Guy Savage (NOV 4, 2009)
In the delightful, genre defying novel, Many and Many a Year Ago, from Turkish author, Selcuk Altun, Kemal Kuray is the son of the Assistant Cemetery Director–a former sergeant-major who played the tuba in the local air force band. Kemal’s father’s unfulfilled ambitions spill onto his son, and Kemal grows up with the indoctrination that there is “no calling more noble than that of a fighter pilot.” In time, Kemal, forbidden to play with the other children in the neighbourhood, grows up “studious and disciplined,” winning a scholarship to boarding school and eventually accepted into the Turkish Air Force Academy. Graduating with the rank of Lieutenant, Kemal begins flying an F-16 and as a hotshot pilot he is slated to become the “future commander of the Air Force.” A plane crash leaves Kemal injured, depressed and grounded, and his promising career is over before it really began.
November 4, 2009
Posted in: Literary, Mystery/Suspense, Top Picks, Translated, Turkey, World Literature No Comments
HAIKU by Andrew Vachss
Book Quote:
“I live among the dispossessed and disenfranchised. But, unlike others of my tribe, I have not descended as a result of damage done to me. The wounds that drove me to these depths were all self-inflicted.”
Book Review:
Review by Bonnie Brody (NOV 3, 2009)
Andrew Vachss has done it again. He has captured life on the streets – - the homeless, the addicted, the dispossessed, the mentally ill – and has made these disenfranchised people the true heroes of the world. Vachss’s vision is a unique one, with a theme that is pervasive throughout his books. He reframes miscreants into heros and shows real evil where one least expects to find it – - in the ordinary citizen parading as Mr. Good or Mr. Show-off. It is those that we turn away from or that we find invisible or repulsive that Mr. Vachss turns into the super-heroes or saviors of the day. He writes about a cultural underground that many of us have never been privy to, an underground that has its own codes of morality and rule of law, where cities exist in tunnels underneath slums and cultures form based on an unspoken law belonging only to the dispossessed. Read the rest of this post »
November 3, 2009
Tags: Contemporary, Street Life Posted in: Contemporary, New York City No Comments
THE MOST BEAUTIFUL BOOK IN THE WORLD by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt
Book Quote:
“But as soon as she was on the bus, she forgot all about the incident and began to levitate. For from the very first sentence, Balthazar Balsan’s new book drenched her in light and carried her away into his world, blotting out all her troubles, her shame, her neighbors’ conversations, the sound of machines, and the dreary, industrial landscape of Charleroi. Thanks to Balthazar Balsan, she had her head in the clouds.”
Book Review:
Review by Kirstin Merrihew (NOV 02, 2009)
The Most Beautiful Book in the World is a collection of eight modern fairy tales. In each of the novellas, a sense of the fantastic intertwines with the mundane, sometimes enchantingly, sometimes crudely but still beguilingly.
The title story, for instance, transports the reader into the midst of a women’s gulag during Soviet rule where the inmates suspiciously eye the newcomer, Olga. She might, after all, be an informer. But the talk of the day is about her hair which is either “horrible” or “magnificent” depending upon the prisoner opining. Read the rest of this post »
November 2, 2009
Tags: Fairy Tales, Short Stories Posted in: Allegory, France, Short Stories, Translated No Comments
