All Due Respect Issue #1 (16 page)

Now, I haven’t read every hardboiled book out there, so I’m ready to be proven wrong, I guess. But I do believe that Angel Dare is a unique character, truly hardboiled in her frank and unflinching way of looking at sex and at herself. Oh and did I mention that she doesn’t drink?

Grifter’s Game,
by Lawrence Block

A Hard Case Crime novel
reviewed by Chris Rhatigan

In terms of reading for pleasure, there’s no one higher on my list than Lawrence Block. I find his books terribly addictive. They’re dark, yet light and fluffy, like a delicious chocolate cake…or a really good book.

Grifter’s Game
is a bit different than the other Block books I’ve read. For one thing, it’s much earlier in his career—it was originally published by Gold Medal as
Mona
in 1961, then reissued in 2004 by Hard Case Crime. (The original name fits nicely the cover, which features Mona’s eyes hovering in the sky,
Great Gatsby
-style.)

Con man Joe Marlin has had an easy life swindling rich, bored wives out of their not-so-hard-earned money. But then on a “business” trip to Atlantic City, he finds two things he’s never encountered before: a packet of raw heroin and Mona Brassard.

Of course, Mona just happens to have a husband that she needs murdered, and she thinks Joe’s just the man for the job. Unlike some of Block’s other characters (like John Keller) or a typical con man, Joe actually has a bit of conscious when it comes to killing other humans, which is an interesting twist. Also, unlike his later work, there isn’t as much of Block’s trademark humor.

Nevertheless,
Grifter’s Game
is a blast. Joe enters a tight spiral into darkness, leading to a shocking ending. (I don’t think I’ve ever called an ending “shocking,” but I didn’t see this one coming at all.) This is classic noir—the foolish ambitions of men and women launching them from the curb to the gutter. And all told in Block’s written-in-stone prose.

It’s fitting that this was the first book Hard Case published. This is a 205-page paperback that’s as tight and suspenseful as anything else out there.

The Cocktail Waitress,
by James M. Cain

A Hard Case Crime novel
reviewed by Chris Rhatigan

How do you review a James M. Cain book? Do you compare his books to those of mere mortals, or do you compare them to his best work, like
The Postman Always Rings Twice
or
Double Indemnity
?

I don’t know about all that, but what I do know is that
The Cocktail Waitress
is worthy of your time and money. It’s the vintage Cain love-death triangle—the stuff that we all know and love him for.

Joan Medford’s worthless drunk of a husband has died in a suspicious car crash. To provide for her son, she takes a job serving drinks and flirting with customers. Two of them pursue her: a rich, but repulsive, old man, and a moronic, but terribly attractive, young man.

The story is told from Joan’s perspective. She claims that she’s recording her tale to “clear my name of the slanders against me, in connection with the job and the marriage it led to and all that came after—always the same charge, the one Ethel flung at me of being a
femme fatale
who knew ways of killing a husband so slick they couldn’t be proved.”

I found myself teetering back and forth between trusting her and then deciding it was all a pack of lies—then trusting her again. Which is perhaps the genius of the thing: of course it’s a bunch of lies—it’s fiction, but Cain puts you in this spot where you actually care about whether such and such happened or didn’t.

Joan is quite the manipulative storyteller. Always claiming that everything she’s doing is for her son, or, alternately, playing the victim (or both at the same time). Yet I found her likeable—especially when she beat the holy hell out of a customer who thought it would be fun to grope her.

The Cocktail Waitress
is a lost novel. Cain wrote it in 1975 at the age of 83, and it’s clear, as the baseball expression goes, that he hadn’t lost anything off the fastball. This is a brisk, gripping story—and why it wasn’t published at the time is a bit of a mystery.

Thankfully, Hard Case Crime Publisher Charles Ardai took the time and effort to unearth all the various manifestations of this manuscript and bring it to the masses. And Ardai’s afterword on the project and Cain’s work in general is worth the price of admission on its own.

Fortunately, it comes after a great novel.