Sharpies and frauds

A couple of weeks ago I proclaimed that Richard Aleas's Songs of Innocence (2007) is the best novel that Hard Case Crime has published. The next day my friend Ed from the Dizzies sent me a note saying, essentially, "Really? Lawrence Block's Grifter's Game and The Girl with the Long Green Heart would be hard to top." Uh-oh. There were, after all, five Hard Case Crime books that my subscription hadn't brought me--the Block novels among them. And it wasn't too long ago that Hard Case published a third Block novel, one that reminded me just how much I like his work. Perhaps I should have hedged.

Properly challenged, I ordered the pair from my local bookstore. And Ed's right about at least one thing: they're really good. Both novels feature a grifter looking for a score and falling for a woman (need I note the ensuing disastrous consequences?). But despite their superficial similarities, they're distinctly different in tone, and reading them back-to-back is like watching a master play variations on a theme.

The Girl with the Long Green Heart (1965) tells the story of Johnny Hayden, a retired con artist who is lured back for a sharply designed long con. (You can guess what separates a long con from a short con, but if you want more detail, two great sources are David Mauer's The Big Con and J. R. "The Yellow Kid" Weil's Con Man.) A con novel exists largely so us outsiders can watch a con come together, and Block delivers the goods: there's worthless land in Canada, a mooch who can be induced to smell unearned (and possibly illicit) profit, and a lovely lady to pull it all together. There are deeds to be forged, dummy letters to be mailed from various cities throughout the country, a storefront land office to be furnished and staffed--wheels within wheels, and everything has to work perfectly for the con to succeed, which is what we're rooting for the whole time, morality be damned. Block doesn't excuse our choosing the side of the cheats, but he makes it easier both by making the mark a boor and by reminding us:

There's an old maxim that you cannot swindle a completely honest man. I'm not sure this is entirely true--it would be hard to test it empirically, because I don't think I have ever met an entirely honest man.

Yet even as we're watching the pieces fall into place, we know the plan will fail somehow. You can't write a crime novel about a con that goes off flawlessly--as much fun as these schemes are to read about, it's not the anticipated complications but the dangerous surprises that create the tension and provide the drama. In this case, despite Johnny Hayden's disbelief in pure honesty, too much trust is what opens the door to disaster. To run a con, you've got to trust your partners--and sins of omission, however minor in themselves, can bring the whole game crashing down. And as good as the set-up is in The Girl with the Long Green Heart, the crash is just as impressive.

Grifter's Game (1961) opens as a similar sort of grifter, Joe Marlin, is trying to stay a few steps ahead of unpaid bills:

The lobby was air-conditioned and the carpet was the kind you sink down into and disappear in without leaving a trace. The bellhops moved silently and instantly and efficiently. The elevators started silently and stopped as silently, and the pretty girls who jockeyed them up and down did not chew gum until they were finished working for the day. The ceilings were high and the chandeliers that drooped from them were ornate.

And the manager's voice was pitched very low, his tone apologetic. But this didn't change what he had to say. He wanted the same thing they want in every stinking dive from Hackensack to Hong Kong. He wanted money.

To dodge the bill, Marlin flees to Atlantic City, where he quickly and unexpectedly finds himself a in possession of a big block of heroin--and lovely lady who wants her drug dealing husband dead. From there, events proceed roughly as you might expect. Marlin concocts a satisfyingly multi-layered plan for knocking off the woman's husband, complications ensue, and, almost to the end, Grifter's Game follows through on our expectations: there's love, money, and double crosses, all adding up to a solid, if unspectacular, crime novel.

Then the last ten pages change everything, with an ending that might be the most stunning I've read in a crime novel. Rather than wrap the book up conventionally, Block takes a real chance, and the close of the novel left me gape-mouthed. In writing about Richard Aleas's Songs of Innocence, I mentioned how unflinching Aleas was about the consequences of his book's events, how by playing everything straight he built up to a shocking ending; Block handles Grifter's Game the same way, to similarly powerful effect. The ending is brutal, astonishing, and totally unexpected--yet at the same time it feels completely right.

After all that, have I answered Ed's question? Is Songs of Innocence better than Grifter's Game? Maybe? Probably?

All I know is that even being neck-and-neck with Lawrence Block is something to be proud of--and that if you like crime novels, you might as well read both and make your own decision. Regardless of which you prefer, I don't think you'll regret it.

Trollope goes digital, Borges goes ghostly, Donne goes on a peace mission

Not a lot of time tonight, so all I've got for you is a collection of odds and ends.

1 In all the writing about Trollope I've been doing this summer, I've neglected to mention Penguin's great new Trollope site, created with the help of the Trollope Society. It's everything such a site should be--especially for a writer as prolific as Trollope--giving a brief synopsis of each novel and major character, information about his Barset and Palliser sequences, and biographical information about Trollope. A particularly nice touch are the eye-catching (though slightly too contemporary?) cartoon renderings of Trollope's characters. But surely Phineas Finn didn't really look as horrid as this?

I also learned from the site that Trollope thought that the ending of Phineas Finn was a bit abrupt and unsatisfying, as did I. In his Autobiography, Trollope admitted:

It is all fairly good except the ending,--as to which till I got to it I had made no provision. As I fully intended to bring my hero again into the world, I was wrong to marry him to a simple pretty Irish girl, who could only be felt as an encumbrance on such return.

If I may be allowed to absurdly mix eras and forms: the ending reminded me of the end of Don Knotts's great comedy The Love God?, wherein Knotts's character ends up not with the vivacious career woman (and bombshell) he's been seeing, but with the lovely young lady from his hometown who has been patiently waiting--and who is as dull as paste. It makes sense for the ethical arc of the story, but it's impossible to believe and makes no damn sense on any other level.

2 I learned about the Trollope site through the ReadySteadyBook blog, where I was involved in the following exchange after blogger Mark Thwaite ended his post by asking if he should give Trollope a try:

Stephen Mitchelmore: No!

Mark Thwaite: Sage, succinct advice as ever, sir!

Levi Stahl: I totally disagree with Stephen Mitchelmore: Yes!

The Palliser novels provide insight into politics, strongly drawn characters--including several fully realized, sympathetic portrayals of strong-willed women--and a drawn-out, sensitive depiction of a marriage of two very different partners who despite their differences (and the strictures placed on them by society) are essentially equals.

Trollope doesn't have the humor of Dickens, the godlike sympathy and understanding of Tolstoy, the fire of Dostoevsky, or the piercing aphoristic insight of George Eliot, but his attention to his characters and the realities of their world make him well worth reading.

Stephen Mitchelmore: But Levi, we do share the same reasons!

3 In With Borges, which I wrote about the other day, Alberto Manguel mentions that he's just one of many people who, over the years, served as readers for the blind master. I imagine them reuniting once a year in a secret library, an invisible college of readers conjuring the Borges who is not in the library, the lost Borges, the one who, in "Borges and I," writes:

It's Borges, the other one, that things happen to. I walk through Buenos Aires and I pause--mechanically now, perhaps--to gaze at the arch of an entryway and its inner door; news of Borges reaches me by mail, or I see his name on a list of academics or in some biographical dictionary. My taste runs to hourglasses, maps, seventeenth-century typefaces, etymologies, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Robert Louis Stevenson; Borges shares those preferences, but in a vain sort of way that turns them into the accoutrements of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that our relationship is hostile--I live, I allow myself to live, so that Borges can spin out his literature, and that literature is my justification.

At the end of a long evening of wine and talk, during which they've tricked him into lowering his guard, the Borges they conjure is swiftly trapped between two covers and filed away in an obscure, rarely visited section of this already obscure library.

As the years mount, and death slowly winnows the circle of readers, the Borges they conjure becomes less solid; what was at their first meeting a gargantuan reference book becomes, by their last, perhaps a single line of poetry.

4 After writing about Borges's admonition to his nephew ("If you behave, I'll give you permission to think of a bear."), I thought that Borges might have enjoyed my favorite Victor Borge joke, which I heard him deliver to a young whippersnapper on the Jack Benny Show:

Borge: How old are you?

Whippersnapper: I'm six!

Borge: Shame on you! When I was your age, I was twice that old!

5 Having written recently about the Thirty Years War, I was surprised to learn yesterday from John Stubbs's John Donne: The Reformed Soul (2007) that Donne served as chaplain to the delegation that King James sent to Frederick and Ferdinand, the chief warring parties, in 1619. The mission, however, was doomed from the start, as it had been

entirely seeded and nurtured by a Spanish subterfuge. Spain's great aim in the Bohemian crisis was to keep England from sending military and financial aid to the Protestant rebels: the neutrality desired by the Spanish was assured by massaging King James's diplomatic ego. The great Machiavellian Spanish ambassador, the Count of Gondomar, reassured his masters that "the vanity of the present King of England is so great that he will always think it of great importance that peace should be obtained by his means, so that his authority may be increased."

Actually that's the sense I get of the whole war: if you were involved, you were probably being double-crossed.

For his part, Donne in the years to come would be a strong voice against English involvement in the war, despite anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish public sentiment. Donne surely took up that position at least in part because it was the position of the King, in whose good graces Donne needed to stay--but it's also not hard to trace that preference to Donne's youthful memories of the horrors of war and his seeming general distaste for sectarianism and the violence it often entailed.

6 Finally, it seems fitting to follow Donne, the poet of love in secular and religious guises, to a couple of fun throwaway lines from Lawrence Block's Grifter's Game (1961):

I lighted her cigarette. She was poised and cool but not at all subtle. She leaned forward to take the light and to give me a look at large breasts harnessed by a lacy black bra. Eve learned that one the day they got dressed and moved out of Eden. It has been just as effective ever since.