Hard Man

The best way to describe Allan Guthrie's new crime novel Hard Man (2006) is with one word: Ouch.

Guthrie fills his story with almost non-stop violence. Page after page and scene after scene, people are getting hurt. We see them punched, kicked, elbowed, kneed, and head-butted. They get their heads cracked against the floor, and they get their heads cracked against the wall. They get stabbed, with big knives and small, knives that are designed as weapons and knives that are designed for cooking. They get hit with hammers and shot with nails--and, of course, bullets.

That should, by all rights, make for a terrible book, troubling and wearing in equal parts. But it doesn't. Hard Man is a solid crime novel, dramatic and fun--even funny--because Guthrie creates distinctly odd and memorable characters, by turns grotesque and believable. And he has a flair for the short sentences and terse language of the crime novel; here's how the book opens, for example:

Another hot day in July. That was four in a row. Pretty good for Scotland.

Not so good for the corpse in the boot.

The orgy of violence Hard Man is set into motion by a father who decides that he and his two sons, bottom-feeding Edinburgh crooks, need to scare off his teenage daughter's estranged husband, who has been making vague but disturbing threats. Like many of the characters in Guthrie's three novels, they overestimate their own fighting skill--and, perhaps more important, their own toughness. See if you can find the flaws in the father's thinking here, as they wait for their young, strong, and violent prey to answer his door:

Jacob had glanced at his sons, nodded, then rang the doorbell. He slapped a wrench against his open palm while he waited for an answer. Oh, aye. They were all tooled up, they'd handle Wallace no problem, reputation or not. He was only one man against three, and those three were Baxters. Admittedly Jacob wasn't a huge threat by himself, cause, well, he was sixty-six years old and not as fleet of foot as he once was. Flash, to be fair, was even less of a threat: skinny, small--not to be cruel to his younger son, but the word Jacob was looking for was "weedy." Rog was a different story. Hard to believe those two boys had the same parents. Rog was a big lad, weighed over twenty stone, gripped that hammer proudly in his massive fist, and Jacob felt pretty safe standing next to him. Rog was a bouncer. He was used to this kind of thing. And the suit Rog insisted on wearing all the time worked in his favor. Aye, Rog meant business in more ways than one.

Jacob was sure Wallace would cower in front of their combined might.

You of course won't be surprised to learn that Wallace does no such thing; when you learn that Rog is actually a bartender rather than a bouncer, you won't be surprised that Wallace gives all three a solid beating.

So the men turn to Pearce, who was the main character in Guthrie's Two-Way Split (2004) and made a cameo in his Kiss Her Goodbye (2005) (both of which I've written about before. Pearce is the center of this book, too, the real reason, aside from the action, humor, and grotesquerie, to keep reading. Unlike the three Baxters, Pearce is the real thing, a true hard man--but he has reached a point in his life when he's pretty sure that's not what he wants to be. All his life, he's responded to problems with violence--a method that, in some ways, has worked for him. But in Two-Way Split we saw him, fiercely pressed physically and emotionally by circumstances, attempting to control his violence; his acts of kindness--even heroism--late in the book suggested that he might be able to find a way forward. As Hard Man opens, Pearce is living quietly by the seaside in Edinburgh, alone except for his newly adopted three-legged dog, and trying to figure out what he'll do once his small stash of money runs out.

So when the Baxters offer him the job of guarding the girl (with implied roughing-up-Wallace duties), he's not interested. Following their own bizarre logic, they decide to kidnap his dog, and the ploy works. Before long, Pearce has been sucked into the inimitably incompetent world of the Baxters, and he soon finds himself up against Wallace--who, it turns out, is a much scarier man than anyone thought, and possibly a much harder man than Pearce himself, because he seems to have little of the human left in him. Pearce fights Wallace, Wallace fights all the Baxters, and a lot of people get grievously wounded as the story rushes to a bloody climax.

Guthrie revels--I really think that's the only word that fits--in exploring what his characters do and think about once they've been injured: the Baxters, in particular, resemble characters in Kafka or silent cinema, always leaving one thing half-done as they rush off to try to do another that's suddenly occurred to them, racing around Edinburgh bloodied and broken and trying, with their pain-clouded brains, to figure out what to do next. He also clearly loves the slang of Edinburgh low-lifes, larding the conversations of his characters with unfamiliar terms. I didn't start making notes until midway through the book, but even so I picked up quite a few good ones: girning, cowped, fiky, plonker, horsetosser.

Hard Man would almost be worth reading just for the novelty of the slang; add in the odd characters and the still-compelling figure of Pearce, and you've got a strong crime novel. It can be excruciating, but it's also frequently so over-the-top as to be hilarious--I probably laughed guiltily about as often as I gasped in horror. That certainly doesn't make for a book you would lend to your mother-in-law--but what self-respecting crime novelist would want anything less?

Smack in the biscuit, or, We don't need no hanky-panky

Between the holidays and my computer problems, I've fallen behind in telling you about the crime novels I've been reading lately. So here's a quick roundup.

1) Wade Miller's Branded Woman (1952) and John Lange's Grave Descend (1971), a couple of Hard Case Crime novels that I read back-to-back, made a good pair. Branded Woman, set in Mazatlan, stars a tough woman, a jewelry smuggler who is searching for the mysterious man known as The Trader, who years ago branded her on the forehead as a warning to stay out of his way. Of course, the scar has the opposite effect, making Branded Woman a fine revenge tale as the woman wends her way through a fairly large cast of shady characters, double agents, and red herrings on the trail of The Trader. The rarity (for noir) of a tough female protagonist is enough to make Branded Woman worthwhile; that the mystery is sufficiently convoluted to keep me guessing was a bonus.

Grave Descend is also set on the water, this time Jamaica, and it stars McGregor, a diver and salvage man who gets hired—at a surprisingly high price—to investigate a sunken yacht. It won't surprise you that nearly everything about the set-up, from the guy hiring him to the story of the yacht's sinking, strikes McGregor as suspicious. But, like so many noir heroes . . .

"Hanky-panky," said [his co-diver] Yeoman solemnly. It was his word to indicate a wide variety of derangements and interesting activity.

"Looks that way," McGregor said.

"They setting you up for something?"

McGregor nodded.

"Better get out now," Yeoman said. "We don't need no hanky-panky."

"well, no," McGregor said, and ordered a beer. "But . . . "

"You're curious," Yeoman said.

"Something like that."

"The curious fish," Yeoman said, "gets the hook."

The set-up of Grave Descend is fantastic, an extremely complicated scenario involving insurance fraud and murder and art theft, but the payoff is a bit disappointing. The story devolves a bit into chases and fistfights—all very good in their place, but not quite as exciting as I'd hoped, considering how many balls Lange had tossed into the air earlier. But it was still a fun read, worth the time if for no other reason than McGregor's escape from the depths of a swamp, during which he has to fight a crocodile. He should have listened to Yeoman, but you already knew that.

[Bonus for those of you who don't click the links: Miller is a pseudonym for a pair of writers who, among other things, wrote the book on which Touch of Evil was based, and John Lange is the pseudonym of—wait for it—Michael Crichton, under which he wrote in medical school. The Wikipedia rules.]

2) I also checked in with Spenser and his entourage, reading Robert Parker's most recent account of his adventures, Cold Service (2006). It's been several years since a Spenser novel has done much for me, but they're worth the occasional Saturday afternoon. I think of them kind of like the soaps: you check in once in a while to see what the people you've been watching for years have been up to lately. Not much ever changes, but even that very continuity is somewhat soothing. Cold Service opens just after Spenser's best friend, Hawk the hit man, has been shot, near fatally. During his recovery, Spenser explains to Hawk's soon-to-be-ex girlfriend that the reason Hawk is almost never wrong is that he tries never to speak about anything he doesn't know. It was as succinct an explanation of Hawk as Parker has ever come up with, well worth the trouble of checking in.

3) It took my local bookstore a month or so to get it, but I finally got to read Allan Guthrie's first novel, Two-Way Split (2004). It's set in the same seedy Edinburgh milieu as his second novel, Kiss Her Goodbye (2005), and it even peripherally features Kiss Her Goodbye's two most important characters, leg-breaker Joe Hope and his boss, Cooper. This novel, however, is about a set of novice criminals who disastrously botch a bank job. Along the way, a couple of outsiders, find out about the job, and, for very different reasons, close in on the thieves. Disaster and violence—painfully well-described—ensue.

Guthrie loads Two-Way Split with effective details, carefully drawing the grubbiness that pervades his characters' lives. Take this passage, for example, wherein Pearce, a recent ex-con who has reluctantly taken some enforcement work to pay off a debt, enters a block of council flats looking for a man named Cant:

Cant's handwritten name was taped on top of the garish pink paintwork of his front door. The letter a had been scored out and replaced with a u. Pearce felt the corners of his mouth twitch. He slipped a fingernail under a burst paint blister, which peeled off like boiled skin.

Pearce's greatest asset is his formidable strength, and from the moment he's introduced he carries the threat of violence:

Winter in Scotland was far too cold to walk around bare-chested. That's why Pearce wore a t-shirt. His fists clenched, relaxed, and clenched again. His forearm muscles writhed under his goose-pimpled skin. He smacked his hands together.

His challenge throughout the book is to overcome violence, get past those urges despite extreme provocation—and to accept an unexpected offer of what, against all odds, appears to be some sort of real future.

All the characters in Two-Way Split are damaged, one of them far, far more than is immediately clear (though as I look back through the book, I find that Guthrie drops hints from the very start); his fragility leads the novel into completely unexpected territory. But Guthrie pulls it off; right to the end he kept me guessing as to what decisions his characters would make—and, more importantly, caring about those choices.

When I read Kiss Her Goodbye this summer, I thought it wasn't entirely successful, the violence seeming disproportionate to the story and the characters. I think that if I'd read Two-Way Split first, I would have been more receptive to Kiss Her Goodbye—Two-Way Split seems a clearer exposition of Guthrie's themes. Or it's possible that it's just a matter of settling into his world, and either novel, read first, would have been tougher. Regardless, I'm now definitely ready for his next novel, Hard Man, which comes out next spring.

4) And, finally, over the holiday I read another Hard Case Crime novel, Richard S. Prather's The Peddler (1952), which tells the story of the meteoric rise of a small-time San Francisco hood named Tony to the high reaches of the syndicate that runs the city's brothels. It's a dark book, almost an inverse morality tale, where the protagonist becomes more and more successful while getting less and less human. Because Tony is the focus of the book, I kept ignoring the warnings his friends and associates—and his behavior—gave as to his utter amorality and self-centeredness, thinking that he'd eventually redeem himself. But as the book goes on, it becomes clear that Prather isn't pushing Tony to an epiphany. Tony is nowhere near trusting enough to learn any lessons; the only one on offer, therefore, is for us, and it's the old lesson that working in a dirty business will make you dirty.

I don't mean to make The Peddler sound like a drag—it's a completely gripping read. Early on, I found myself rooting for Tony despite myself; later I kept wondering, tensely, how his come-uppance would be delivered. And, oh, Prather has a way with slang:

Then Frame was saying, "He just went off his nut, see? We were plain' poker and the guy was drinkin' heavy. All of a sudden he goes off his rocker and yells at Sharkey, 'Get away from me—don't let him get me.' Then he yanks out the barker and bangs him. Smack in the biscuit. Then Romero flopped down on the floor, cold. I guess the sight of poor Sharkey's think-pot flying through the air like that put him under a strain." Frame grinned wolfishly, his stained, pitted teeth jutting under his pulled back lip.

I like a lot of different people for a lot of different reasons. I can get along with just about anybody. But if you don't appreciate that crazy run of slang, I don't know if I can be your friend.

Kiss Her Goodbye, one more time

As I’ve mentioned before, one of the things I like about this medium is that it enables me to revisit my opinions about books if I feel like I haven’t quite conveyed what I meant, or if I’ve changed my mind about a book through further thinking about it or through conversations with friends or commentators. And that’s what I’m doing today.

A week ago, I wrote a post comparing the leg-breaker protagonist of Allan Guthrie’s Kiss Her Goodbye (2005) and the hit-man protagonist of Max Allan Collins’s The Last Quarry (2006). As part of that comparison, I wrote,

I want to know why Allan Guthrie chose to make Joe a leg-breaker; Kiss Her Goodbye could have been written, with essentially the same plot, with Joe as a burglar, or a safecracker, or any sort of petty criminal. So what does the leg-breaking add other than another level of seaminess and violence to a story that could have had plenty of both without it? I finished the book still a little unsure.

Well, this being the Internet, sometimes you get an answer. This morning, Allan Guthrie himself commented:

In answer to your question, I decided to make Joe a 'legbreaker' because the entire book is about a violent man trying not to be violent in the face of extreme provocation. If he was a safecracker, the whole point of the book would have been missed. It wouldn't have interested me. Violence interests me. The psychology of the hard man is what I wanted to explore here. As for Joe's lack of qualms: he has qualms aplenty--he holds Cooper back in that opening scene you mention, he's terrified of Park, he's sexually dysfunctional, he's a borderline alcoholic (as you mentioned)--maybe I didn't state it overtly enough, but it's all connected to the job.

Nothing like a word straight from the source to send you back to the book. He’s right about the opening scene—I described Joe as having few qualms as he and his friend/boss Cooper beat a guy with a baseball bat. What had stayed with me from that scene was the visceral impact of the violence, but I’d forgotten that Joe does at least attempt to restrain Cooper:

“We’re going to kill you now, you little tosser.”

“That isn’t necessary.” Joe put his hand on Cooper’s elbow.

Billy was sobbing. He started screaming again.

Cooper said, “Two minutes at most.”

“He’s got the message.”

Cooper shook Joe’s hand off and took a swing. Something crunched when the bat hit Billy’s face and Billy stopped screaming. Cooper said, “Now he’s got the message.”

Joe’s restraint is subtle, in comparison to the violence surrounding it, but it’s definitely there. And Guthrie will get no argument from me about Joe’s overall dysfunction. I traced his alcoholism and sexual problems to his desperately unhappy marriage, but I can accept that the wrecked marriage itself is just another component (and result of) of his overall self-destructive impulses, fueled by frustration and anger about the violence of his job—and his nature.

That violent nature, Allan Guthrie argues, is what he was interested in all along in writing this book. Because I was looking at Kiss Her Goodbye in conjunction with The Last Quarry, I was thinking about both protagonists in terms of plot first—did they need to have the jobs they had order for the plot to function? Guthrie’s saying that instead I should look at it in terms of character: sure, you could have a book with similar plot mechanics whose central character was a safe-cracker, but it would be an essentially different book, and one that he wouldn’t be interested in writing. He’s interested in Joe himself and how the person he is drives the events of the book; if they’re to have any meaning, the man and the plot are inseparable.

When I look at Kiss Her Goodbye from that angle, I see what he’s getting at: the essence of Joe (and his problems) is the violence inherent in him and his job, and that’s what drives both the action and his relations with the other characters. I still think the book isn’t entirely successful, but, as I said in my original post, Guthrie’s aiming high. He’s written a book more emotionally and psychologically complex than Collins’s The Last Quarry; the fact that I prefer the Collins says at least as much about me and my taste in crime novels as about the books themselves.

This revisiting also serves as a reminder that I frequently latch onto one way of thinking about a book and have to be jarred or pushed into looking at it from another angle. It’s one reason I like talking with people about books—and writing this blog, which in itself forces me to think and rethink, if only to achieve a coherent explanation of my opinions.

So thanks for the comment, Allan; I appreciate you taking the time to explain. And this gives me a chance to mention something that I left out of my original post, because it didn’t really fit anywhere: for all my questions about Kiss Her Goodbye, I did like it enough to go looking for Allan Guthrie’s other novel, Two-Way Split. It’s coming out in paperback in the United States in October (with a really sharp cover design), so I’m sure you’ll all hear more about it then.

Two jobs

Quarry, the protagonist of Max Allan Collins’s The Last Quarry (2006) is a retired contract killer. The protagonist of Allan Guthrie’s Kiss Her Goodbye (2005), Joe Hope, is a leg-breaker for a loan shark. Neither job is one you’d want to tell your mom about. And if you were, say, Saint Peter, you’d probably put the contract killer at least a few places in line behind the leg-breaker, right? Yet while I enjoyed The Last Quarry despite Quarry’s profession, while reading Kiss Her Goodbye I couldn’t get around the problem of Hope’s job. I’m not sure there’s a defensible explanation; hell, I’m not entirely sure of the explanation at all. Maybe I’ll figure it out by the end of this post.

Kiss Her Goodbye is by no means a bad novel: in telling the story of the suicide of Joe’s daughter and the death of his wife it paints a detailed picture of the seamy side of Edinburgh, and Guthrie’s created some memorable characters (particularly good is a young lawyer who is drawn to the dangers of Joe’s life). But then there’s the leg-breaking. Joe explains how he got into being an enforcer, recruited by his best friend when he was about to become a father and his job prospects were poor. Now he’s a borderline alcoholic in a deeply troubled marriage, desperately unhappy with life—but I didn’t get the sense that his relationship to his job itself was as complicated as I’d have liked. The opening scene features him and his friend messing a guy up with baseball bats, and he seems to have few qualms as they inflict tremendous pain on the man.

Given that Joe’s job is to seriously hurt people, I’d like a little more complexity, and at least as much inner turmoil related to his job as to his marriage. I want to know why Allan Guthrie chose to make Joe a leg-breaker; Kiss Her Goodbye could have been written, with essentially the same plot, with Joe as a burglar, or a safecracker, or any sort of petty criminal. So what does the leg-breaking add other than another level of seaminess and violence to a story that could have had plenty of both without it? I finished the book still a little unsure.

I probably wouldn’t have thought about this at all had I not soon after read and enjoyed The Last Quarry. Collins has written before about Quarry, though this is the first I’ve read, and this novel finds him recently retired and managing a small resort somewhere in Minnesota. A chance encounter in a deserted convenience store leads him to a contract to kill a young woman in Colorado, a job that quickly begins to get under Quarry’s skin—via, of course, his heart.

This all ought to be at least as unacceptable as Joe Hope’s leg-breaking. But Quarry operates with a degree of open introspection that in Joe Hope is submerged by anger and self-pity, and while Quarry’s potted defense of his occupation (essentially, the “if I get hired to kill you, you’ve probably done something to deserve it” defense) is unconvincing, he clearly operates according to a code. It’s a code that would, I think, hold leg-breakers like Joe in low esteem. In addition, his role as a hit man is essential to the book; it’s what drives the entire plot.

Is all that sufficient to make the difference, to justify my enjoying Quarry while judging Joe? Well, no. Not if I’m making a strict argument about ethics, and not even if I’m limiting the discussion to fiction, where one of our most important jobs as readers is to make judgments about the characters we’re being shown, their decisions and actions.

But Quarry is a convincing character and good company—funny, self-effacing, and cynical, with a skilled barroom raconteur’s narrative style—and that carried the day. It enabled me to concentrate not on what he did for a living, but on what he was attempting to do now that emotion had made his job more complex.

That’s where these books’ role as entertainment takes over: an affable hit man is flat-out more fun than a dour leg-breaker. Allan Guthrie may be aiming higher—trying to show us some real darkness—but Collins’s touch is more sure, and The Last Quarry ends up a better read.

But I do have one request for Collins: please, please, please never describe a man’s penis as a “blade of flesh” ever again. Please. I have to go cleanse my mind now.