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Woody Haut’s Ten Favorite Crime Novels of 2013

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(In no particular order)

-Ask Not by Max Allan Collins (Forge):

The third in Collins’ excellent JFK trilogy featuring veteran “private eye to the stars,”

Nathan Heller. With the previous books covering the death of Marilyn Monroe (Bye

Bye, Baby) and the failed attempt on JFK’s life in Chicago involving the same

suspects only weeks before Dallas, this one concerns the plethora of post-

assassination deaths, including that of columnist and TV celebrity Dorothy Kilgallen.

Well-researched, Collins, whose fifteen historical novels featuring Heller form only a

fraction of his output, exploits the fact that, on the one hand, conspiracies and

paranoia are an essential ingredient in noir fiction and, on the other hand, that

present day paranoia owes much to that day in Dallas.

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-Under the Eye of God by Jerome Charyn (Mysterious Press):

Charyn’s latest Isaac Sidel novel reads like a cross between an eccentric Russian

novel and a comic book. Former Gotham cop, police commissioner and mayor,

Isaac is now vice president-elect, still dressed in his pajamas, carrying his heart on

his sleeve and a Glock in his waistband. Poetic, operatic, funny and heart-breaking,

Isaac, the Jewish cop-trickster, haunts old hotels, sees shadows behind shadows

and conspiracies behind conspiracies. Here children are political advisers, decrepit

hotels and eateries are holy places, prostitutes are goddesses, crime bosses and

their accountants have become the last remnants of civilization, and all profits end

up in the hands of misty-eyed oligarchs.

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-Black Wings Has My Angel by Elliot Chaze (Stark House):

First published in 1953 by Gold Medal, Chaze’s novel (reissued here in tandem with

Bruce Elliott’s excellent 1951 One Is a Lonely Number) has long been unavailable

in a readable format. Having broken out of prison, Ken gets a job on an oil rig, after

which he meets the evocative Virginia, who has a past of her own. Ken’s plan is to

dump her so he can commit that robbery he’s been planning since his days behind

bars. Unable to break free of one another, they travel from New Orleans to

Colorado, into a precipice from which they can’t escape. Unusually literary, this

mother of all pulp novels has achieved, for many noirists, near-legendary status.

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-Snitch World by Jim Nisbet (PM Press):

Considering Nisbet’s recent work, this is a relatively straight-forward narrative.

Though a throwback to author’s earlier work, it’s still within the realm of Nisbet’s

particular brand of absurdist noir. Filled with surprises, Snitch World revolves

around barroom conversations, taxi rides, a case of mistaken identity, a killer app,

and a heavy dose of psychogeography. Above all, it’s Nisbet’s homage to blue

collar San Francisco, the memory of which is fading fast. With its survival

techniques- drugs, drink, crime, wit or public disorder- this could be Nisbet’s most

painfully humorous book yet.

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-Others of My Kind by James Sallis (Bloomsbury):

This short novel is one of Sallis’s oddest and one of his best. Odd not because the

narrative belongs to Jenny, who, as a child, was abducted and kept for several
years under her abductor’s bed. But in the way the narrative moves, oblique and

unpredictable enough to border on the surreal. Having escaped to a shopping mall

where she lives off discarded food, Jenny’s discovered and placed in the system.

Eventually she gets a job at a TV station, where she meets a police detective who

introduces her to another young abductee. While Jenny’s life is hardly

straightforward, she proves to be as resilient as she is vulnerable. A long way from

the Sallis's Lew Griffin novels. On the other hand, it’s all part of the same story, just

told from another perspective.

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-The Maid's Version by Daniel Woodrell (Little Brown):

More akin to Faulkner or Sherwood Anderson than Hammett or Chandler, and

Woodrell’s most surprising turn yet. Through shifts in voice and time, Woodrell

depicts a small Ozark town during the Depression torn apart by a dance-hall fire

that kills some forty people. The narrator, Alek, seeks to discover those responsible,

whether big city mobsters, gypsies, a hellfire preacher, or someone else entirely.

Doing so, he discovers a town divided between those too powerful to fail and those

so powerless they cannot help but fail. And he learns about his family, in particular

his grandmother Alma, a maid to a woman whose alcoholic husband is one of the

town’s main power brokers.

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-Three Steps to Hell by Arnold Hano (Stark House):

Three novels: I’m a Heel, written under the name Mike Heller; Flint, written under

the name Gil Dodge; and The Big Out, written under Hano’s own name. But it’s the

western, Flint, originally published by Signet in 1957, that stands out. Saying its like
Jim Thompson on horseback isn’t hyperbola. Hano was Thompson’s editor at Lion,

and, with the latter’s permission, borrowed the plot of Thompson’s Savage Night for

the novel. While The Big Out, published in 1951, like a noir version of John R.

Tunis’s Keystone Kids, is about two baseball playing brothers, and I'm a Heel,

published by Gold Medal in 1957, concerns an sadistic cripple who, out of revenge

for the hand he’s been dealt, resorts to extortion. Proof enough that being an editor

and being a writer are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

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-Dead Lions by Mick Herron (Soho Press):

Taking up the baton from Le Carré, Herron is more of a spy writer than a crime

writer, though he uses the language, wit, dark humor and perceptions associated

with the latter to great effect. A follow-up to his excellent Slow Horses. Slough

House (hence slow horse) is where MI5 sends screw-ups, of which there are no

shortage, some with borderline personality disorders. Here one finds cold war hold-

overs, sleeper cells, straw men, sleazy characters, London street scenes, acts of

violence, high-pomp buildings with their grimy underside, Stop the City chaos, and

an incendiary English village where things are not what they seem.

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-Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives, ed. Sarah Weinman (Penguin):

As welcome as it is timely, this anthology of female crime writers spans some

seventy years and includes the relatively well-known- Highsmith, Hughes, Shirley

Jackson, Margaret Millar- alongside the lesser known- Helen Nielsen, Vera

Caspary, Charlotte Armstrong and Elizabeth Sanxay Holding- as well as those-

Nedra Tyre, Barbara Callahan, Joyce Harrington, and Ceila Fremlin- who, up to

now, have disappeared from the unwritten male-dominated history of noir fiction. As

well as highlighting some excellent writing, it’s Weinman’s contention that, in their

day, these noiristas, pretty much ignored by critics, dissected society in much the

same way as contemporaries Gillian Flynn, Megan Abbott, Attica Lock, and Sarah

Gran. And, of course, she’s right.

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-Laidlaw by William McIlvanney (Cannongate):

A novel that helped expand the parameters of crime fiction when it first appeared in

1977, establishing both the literary merit of the genre and showing that noir could

exist outside the confines of the US. Reissued and every bit as good in 2013. Jack

Laidlaw is Glasgow’s answer to Philip Marlowe, and as wrecked and melancholy as

any James Crumley character. Written long before such protagonists threatened to

become a cliche. Moreover, McIlvanney portrays Glasgow, with its sectarianism and

drunken sentimentality, as never before in crime fiction, paving the way for Rankin’s

Rebus and various other tartan dicks.

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Bubbling Under:

-Grind Joint by Dana King (Stark House):

It’s the midst of the Great Recession in small-town Pennsylvania. The mills have

closed, and a soon-to-be-opened casino is the town’s only sign of life. When a

drug dealer is found dead on its doorstep, two detectives try to discover who might

have dumped the body there. And who’s putting up the money for the casino. The
detectives have to deal with their own department, local mobsters and an ex-spook

in charge of casino security. With crisp dialogue and sparse exposition reminiscent

of Elmore Leonard and Geroge V. Higgins, it’s an investigation of a town on the

edge of a precipice.

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-Hammett Unwritten by Owen Fitzstephen/Gordon McAlpine (Seventh Street):

What if the Maltese Falcon were real, and perhaps cursed? With a handful of

individuals Hammett supposedly based his characters on, this is arguably the best

and most thoughtful revision of Hammett since Gores’ novel of that name. True, the

author- supposedlyFitzstephen- over-reaches somewhat, but my attention never

wavered. With truth eliding into fiction, the reader is left to speculate just where the

dividing might be.

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-Dark Times In the City by Gene Kerrigan (Europa):

Along with Ken Bruen and Andrew Glynn, Kerrigan represents the best in present-

day Irish noir. More in the Elmore Leonard school, Kerrigan, with his edgy dialogue

and unrelenting narrative, portrays present-day Dublin as well as anyone. Just out

of prison, Danny intervenes in a barroom altercation, and, in doing so, accidentally

insults the head of the city’s most notorious criminal outfit. He ends up caught

between the gang and the cops. An over-used template, but thanks to Kerrigan’s

sharp writing and incisiveness, it works like a dream, or, in this case, a nightmare of

no small proportion.

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-The Red Road by Denise Mina (Orion):
Another excellent novel from my favorite contemporary Scottish crime writer. With

her fearless yet vulnerable heroine, DI Alex Morrow, Mina never shies away from

contemporary issues. On the night Princess Diana’s death, Rose Wilson, having

been pimped by her boyfriend, kills two people. Fifteen years later, the fingerprints

of a vicious arms dealer are found at the scene of a murder, while a Scottish lawyer

on Mull who has shopped his father, waits to be murdered by someone with

important connections. A complex, sometimes humorous and compassion-filled

book which shows that Mina, always a good writer, improves with every book.

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-Strange Loyalties by William McIlvanney and Papers of Tony Veitch

(Cannongate):

Two more Laidlaw reissues from the king of Tartan noir. Papers of Tony Veitch was

originally published in 1983 and Strange Loyalties in 1991. Both are intense tours

through Glasgow’s underworld, focusing on its gangs and political corruption, and

are well worth reading. Of course, both involve Laidlaw coming to terms with his

past. Taken as trilogy, the Laidlaw novels represent a moving and honest rendering

Glasgow working class culture. The question is: will there ever be a fourth Laidlaw

novel? Don’t bet against it.