The New "New Grub Street"

I read mostly crime books -- by choice or occupation. But once a week or so I make time for something with no crime at all in it. "Grub" is my current flame, an updating of George Gissing's classic about Victorian era publishing that is beautifully written (a large number of scenes beg to be read aloud, even if you're alone) and brilliantly faithful to the original.

Here's what my edition of New Grub Street says on its back cover: "The once despised commercial hacks of Grub Street are now in the ascendant, and there is little call for writing of artistic merit. Sensitive novelist Edwin Reardon thought his reputation was safe, but poverty undermines his temperament and he finds it increasingly difficult to produce anything marketable. As his fortunes dwindle his marriage founders, and the future belongs to such as Jasper Milvain, a self-seeking writer of facile reviews who has no real interest in literature as an art form but thrives by manipulating public opinion..."

Elise Blackwell, who acknowledges her large debt to Gissing, moves the scene to present-day New York, where Reardon becomes Eddie Renfros, Milvain turns into Jackson Miller, Eddie's wife Amanda is not only increasingly disillusioned by his failure but driven (very hard and very fast) to become the most original character in the novel. Writers will recognize themselves in every character -- even the obsessive Henry Baffler who jumps from a burning building to save his only copy of an unreadable novel.

In Praise of Smaller Houses

Pulp is the hottest thing in mysteries these days: everyone from Jeff Pierce at The Rap Sheet to John Banville (justifying his late plunge into mystery writing) and Ed Gorman have used the recent publication of Otto Penzler’s massive anthology to wax enthusiastic about the form which shaped – like an ethnic or regional diet – our daily lives.

But the best news for me about the Penzler tome (which now sits on my bedside table and, at 1150 pages of words and pictures, will be there for a long time) is that it marks the return of Black Lizard, one of those smaller houses that has kept the non-blockbuster mystery form alive. Kevin Burton Smith mentioned at the housewarming (thankfully spared the full extent of that term during the recent Malibu/Topanga fires) of John Shannon and his swell dame of a partner, Charlotte Riley, that he’d heard that Black Lizard was planning to make a comeback five years ago.

You can’t mention “pulp” or “smaller houses” and not lead off with Charles Ardai’s Hard Case Crime, which recreates the world of the two-bit paperbacks (although the Fawcett and Gold Medal lines were up to thirty-five cents when I began buying them), including many of the original artists (Robert McGinnis’s erotic painting for Richard S. Prather’s The Peddler is better than Viagra.) Ardai’s choices are razor-sharp, and if you haven’t read Prather or David Dodge or Donald Hamilton in a while, give your senses a feast.

The list of imaginative, courageous small houses which specialize in crime is long. I've mentioned many of them on this page. There's my own publisher, Poisoned Pen, with another wonderful book about an opera castrato in 18th Century Venice just out...

Europa, who publish the best of foreign mysteries and have just made a splash with Steve Erickson's latest...

Stark House, a literal labor of love whose newest title is
and Kate's Mystery Books of Boston, where Richard Marinick's latest is stirring up sales.


Not to forget Soho Crime, Serpent's Tail, Felony & Mayhem, Mugshot and of course Crippen & Landru. They all know that small houses have an important role in the crime fiction world, and together they play it with grace and taste.

In for A Penny...

Don't be put off by the labels "fantasy" or "alternative history": Walton knows how to use the classic mystery form to create a frightening trilogy about what might have happened if Hitler had conquered England. In "Farthing," a determined daughter of one of the leaders of the Farthing Set -- named after their ancestral home -- which negotiated the peace in 1941 lets her diary entries tell the story, alternating with the voice of a top London detective who comes from a harder school and maintains a dangerous private life.

In "Ha'Penny," it's eight years later, in 1949, and the female narrator shifts to a leading young actress. The British theater is thriving, despite Nazi propaganda films by the dozens offered free to a working class weakened by poverty.

Meanwhile, the rampant Black Market and corruption at the highest levels have split the country. America, run by President Charles Lindbergh and his isolationist government, refuses to help its former Allies. It's a bleak picture, but Walton is such a strong and hopeful writer that next year's "Half A Crown" (the third book in her beautifully-titled "Small Change" series) might show us all a way out. Many thanks to Tor, for giving its full publishing push to this terrific project.

CHICAGO IN NOIR AND BLUE

I've written expansively about the blog called The Outfit, where Chicago-based crime writers Sean Chercover, Barbara D'Amato, Michael Allen Dymmoch, Kevin Guilfoile, Libby Fischer Hellmann, Sara Paretsky and Marcus Sakey gather to swap ideas, thoughts and bitches. Now Hellman has put together an extraordinary volume called "Chicago Blues" featuring all of her Outfit colleagues and many other Chicago writers. It contains 21 stories, 17 written especially for this collection, at least half of which are topnotch: an amazing batting average in a field where .250 is normal.

Other cities have their noir collections: a house called Akashic (dedicated to "reverse-gentrification of the literary world," as their catalogue says) has published volumes including Neil Pollack's neighborhood-specific Chicago Noir. But, as Hellman's collection proves on every page, crime and blues are inextricably connected in Chicago

In his introduction, Rick Kogan says about Theresa Needham, who ran Theresa's, one of Chicago's most famous blues clubs: "She would die in 1992, by which time the blues was big business in Chicago, and some people had a hard time remembering that the music was not born in a Grant Park Festival. Its roots are ever in the smoky, ramshackle South and West Side Bars and, further back, in Memphis and the Mississippi Delta."

The best thing about "Chicago Blues" is the way it catches both the spirit of the blues and the excitement of a well-crafted mystery story. Editor Hellman, who writes the Ellie Foreman mystery series, tells in "Your Sweet Man" (from a Muddy Waters song) a gripping chronicle of a boy's tangled relationships with his blues singer mother, Inez, his dying father, and the slick operator who steals Inez away.

In "The Non Compos Mentis Blues," Sean Chercover – whose debut novel Big City, Bad Blood earned some glowing reviews and who owns, according to his bio, "more blues albums than can reasonably be justified" – drops his private eye Ray Dudgeon into a case where avoidable murder is played out over just a hint of sad music.

Michael Allen Dymoch puts her Chicago Police Detective John Thinnes into a shapely, scary story called "A Shade of Blue," about a man who collapses as he's recalling the 1960's murder of a blues singer "so good it gave me goose bumps."

Kevin Guilfoile, whose first thriller was Cast of Shadows offers a spooky story called "O Death Where is Thy Sting?" in which an avid blues record collector comes across the only existing copy of a vinyl made by an unknown three-fingered guitar player on the day Robert Johnson (of "Sweet Home Chicago" fame) died, and which is rumored to feature ghostly shrieking. Guilfoile's story is full of fascinating expert details of the record collecting and selling business ("Any record somebody else wants you to have isn't worth having…")

In her first short story to feature her tough and compassionate series hero, private detective Smokey Dalton, Kris Nelscott shifts Smokey to one side and lets the young boy Jim, whose life Dalton saved in Memphis (after Jim witnessed the assassination of a Black leader and the arrest of the wrong man in her first novel about him), serve as narrator. It's a fine addition to Nelscott's ongoing portrait of Smokey as a living library of recent Chicago history

Jack Fredrickson, whose first mystery was the well-received A Safe Place For Dying, explains in "Good Evenin', Blues" why the narrator calls his blues club The Crossroads: "Chi-Town's a blues town; lots of folks know the old Delta legend about Robert Johnson meeting the Devil at a crossroads in Mississippi, to bargain away his soul in exchange for becoming the greatest bluesman that ever lived." The only problem is that the club is incredibly noisy from the trains which run above it. Then a man named Pearly Hester ("He was dressed like an old-time bluesman in baggy pin-striped suit, white shirt loose in the collar, and a floral necktie. He set a gray felt fedora on the bar") offers a solution that literally turns out to be a deal with the Devil.

But the best quote (a lovely inside joke) in the book is from Sara Paretsky's "Publicity Stunts" – which has no blues at all in it. V.I. Warshawski asks a successful novelist who wants to hire her as a bodyguard what the woman does for a living. "I write crime novels. Don't you read?" she says sarcastically. To which Vic replies, "Not crime fiction. I get enough of the real stuff walking out my door in the morning."

"Chicago Blues" is a splendid bedside book, to be enjoyed for a long time. Slip some Muddy Waters or Robert Johnson into your CD player and delight in the best of both worlds.