Microreviw [crime fiction]: By the Balls: The Complete Collection

By the Balls: The Complete Collection

Jim Pascoe and Tom Fassbender

Akashic Books

The Meat

By The Balls feels like a hoax. It’s not simply because the concept behind the stories of P.I. Ben Drake is in some sense fake—they are, after all, the work of Dashiell Loveless, who is a definitely fake author. There’s a touch of con artistry in the story behind the rise and fall UglyTown and the Jim Pascoe/Tom Fassbender partnership, at least in how its presented in this collection’s introduction. It just all seems a bit off...

By the Balls: The Complete Collection consists of ten short stories—five stand alones and the five that make up 1999’s Five Shots and a Funeral—and the novel By the Balls. The stories follow the career of Ben Drake, a firefighter turned PI, and his entanglements with the underworld of Testacy City, Nevada. As far as PIs go, Drake is mild-mannered. He has little of Marlowe’s coolness, Hammer’s brutality, or the Continental Op’s cunning. Ben Drake is in fact remarkably average—other than his alcoholism, of course. And he is also a broken man, haunted by the death of his wife. In fact, most women in Drake’s life seem to meet unfortunate ends. But maybe these things make him more average.

Drake’s average Joe persona stands in stark contrast to the comic otherworldliness of Testacy City. Otherworldly if you’ve never traveled through Nevada outside of Vegas, or at least been to Reno. Testacy City is Reno’s evil twin. For one thing, gambling hasn't taken a foothold here, mainly because the city’s thriving criminal community wants to keep it that way. Pascoe and Fassbender created a subtly odd cast of gangsters and crooks, noteworthy since they did it in the nineties when all fictional criminals were required to have some quirk or specific neuroses. The authors choose a more subdued approach compared to their contemporaries. A very large thug wearing an even larger suit. His diminutive yet deadly partner. Their boss, Small-Tooth Kelly. There’s nothing overtly odd about them: they don’t speak in outdated slang, or quote Chaucer prior to dispensing with a beating. If anything, they’re closer to the stock characters of classic hardboiled fiction than the hipster criminals of the nineties. The city too feels like a stock character of old school noir, replete with debonair mod bosses and drug-running Senate candidates.

All of this could have gone wrong. The very fact that the stories center on a private investigator should have doomed the whole Ben Drake venture from the start. But Pascoe and Fassbender, though obviously referencing the classics, do so in a carefully self-referential way. Their absurdist and counterintuitive treatment of genre themes—Drake’s almost pathologically platonic treatment of women, for example—lighten the stories. Though By the Balls is tongue-in-cheek, the stories never stray into parody. The authors' background in comics may also have influenced their skillfully subdued yet cartoonish take on the hardboiled genre.

The stories themselves are almost comedic in their setups. Though some of the stories felt unnecessary, particularly those providing background on central characters in the series (“Fireproof,” “Partners,” “Across the Line”), they were for the most part fun, often madcap narratives based on absorb premises. In this regard, “The Silent Ventriloquist” (case one from the generally good Five Shots and a Funeral) stands out. (I googled “Orpheus” and “Alexander Graham Bell" after reading it.) The centerpiece of this collection is By the Balls, wisely positioned in the last half of the collection. The novel is far superior to the short stories that make up the rest of the volume. It sticks with the basic absurdist and madcap nature of the shorter pieces, but as a short novel this approach is particularly effective. 

Finally, Akashic’s By the Balls: The Complete Collection gets bonus points for including Paul Pope’s artwork. Actually, I will give them two points on this. One bonus point because I am a fan of Paul Pope. And a second point for the mere inclusion of artwork. I have always found it odd that novels don’t include artwork more often. Who doesn't like pictures?

The Math

Objective Score: 7/10

Penalties: -1 the inclusion "over twenty short essays" praising the authors

Bonuses: +1 for artwork; +1 for Paul Pope's artwork

Nerd coefficient: 8/10

Microreview [crime fiction]: H.N.I.C.

H.N.I.C.
Albert "Prodigy" Johnson and Steve Savile
Akashic Books


The Meat

Full disclosure: I began Albert “Prodigy” Johnson’s book with trepidation. It’s not that I have anything against a rapper writing a novel—or novella, in this case—it’s just that I’m wary of non-authors penning books. I felt much the same way when I began The Dewey Decimal System by Nathan Larson, guitarist for Shudder to Think. And as occurred upon reading Larson’s novel and its sequel, my wariness was thoroughly unwarranted.

HNIC delivered.

Prodigy is one half of the hip-hop duo Mobb Deep. While he’s still performing, he has taken a turn to the literary world, first with his 2011 autobiography, My Infamous Life, and now heading up the urban crime imprint Infamous Book through the always-on-point Brooklyn publishing house Akashic. HNIC is the first of Infamous’ offerings. And if you’ve got an afternoon to spend reading something that doesn’t suck, here you go.

HNIC is a pure crime tale: Pappy is a professional thief, albeit one with some non-criminal ambitions. Like countless fictional crooks before him, he’s planning one final job to finance his escape from the underworld. Of course when your best friend/partner in crime is a ruthless psychopath, any “one last job” plan is doomed to fail. And, as crime fans well know, when plans go sideways, people get killed and others need killing.

There’s really nothing terribly original about HNIC’s plot, which is by no means a bad thing. As a reader, I often enjoy such well-worn tropes. Otherwise, I wouldn't be a fan of crime fiction. There’s nothing inherently wrong with these heist-gone-wrong stories, provided they’re done well. To a considerable extent, the fact that HNIC resembles the plots of a thousand other books and films is a testament to the appeal of this story. After all, what fun would we have if the heist went off without a hitch? There’s only so many times you can watch Ocean’s Elevan. But we’ve watched the fuck out of Reservoir Dogs.

The strength of this novella, in addition to its straightforward prose and rapid pacing, rests on the universal theme at its center: loyalty. Loyalty and the bullshit our friends put us through. Granted, most of us don’t have buddies who force us to participate in a robbery and then try to put a bullet in our heads rather than split the loot squarely. But we all have buddies who get us to do things we would rather not—“Just one more drink”—and then who bail when things go badly. Like any good work of crime, HNIC is grounded in such common experiences and, like any good work of crime, it speaks to all of us, despite the fact that very few of us can bypass an alarm system through some computer trickery. 

As a sociologist a white sociologist in my real life, I would be remiss if I didn’t address the “urban” crime subgenre. We wouldn’t need such a subgenre if the world of crime fiction wasn’t so lilywhite. Perhaps by default, or perhaps because of the fact that I’ve been so thoroughly socialized into the American racial system, I read very few novels with non-white protagonists. Other than the Dewey Decibel novels, this is the only crime novel I have been sent for review featuring non-white characters. (And it’s no surprise that the Decibel novels are also published by Akashic.) So I get the need for “urban” crime fiction, and its cousin street lit. 

But as I read HNIC, I was struck by the fact that the race of the characters, heroes and villains alike, was very rarely apparent. Johnson and Savile in fact only brings it to the fore when the plot requires it. For example, Pappy mentions that white people’s apparent tendency to think all black men look alike is a bonus when conducting a robbery. Other than for a few specifics, Pappy could have been a Boston Irish or an East LA Latino. Crime fiction works when it speaks to us as humans. That’s part of our attraction to the genre: we find ourselves identifying with the characters despite the fact that our lives differ so incredibly. I may not be a backwoods hillbilly, but I get what drives Boyd Crowder. And I may not have grown up in a Brooklyn housing project, but I nevertheless sympathized with Pappy’s determination to escape his past, to rid himself of that which make him who he is. I’ve been running from Bakersfield for ten years now. And like Pappy, I can’t escape who I am—and who my friends are.

Perhaps one day we’ll finally become a society that doesn’t need racialized subgenres. But until we get there, Infamous books is a necessity. Either way, I’m reading.

The Math

Objective score: 8/10

Bonuses: 125 pages!

Penalties: 125 pages...Granted, I usually complain about the page count of crime fiction (over 250 and I'm bored), but in this case I could have kept reading for another 125 pages

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Microreview [crime fiction]: The Nervous System

The Meat

Sometimes, I don't trust my own tastes. Take Nathan Larson's second installment in his Dewey Decibel series, The Nervous System. A while back, I reviewed Larson's debut, The Dewey Decibel System. Though in retrospect my school was probably lower than it should have been, I found the novel to be a flawed debut. But I liked a lot about the novel, particularly Larson's reimagining of noir/hardboiled tropes and the starkly realistic dystopian setting he created.

So when I received my copy of The Nervous System I was fairly excited. OK, that's not true. I received the second book before buying the first. And I received it nearly six months ago. A little thing called a dissertation got in the way.

But I finally got around to reading Larson's second installment in the Decibel series. And I liked it. Or at least I think I liked. I liked it.

Much of what I enjoyed about the first novel I enjoyed about the second. Larson sets his story in a near-future New York City, which is largely a ghost town following a series of devastating terrorist attacks, subsequent financial collapse, and a superflu epidemic. Asian and Eastern European mobs, shady construction firms, and security contractors populate the rotting city, taking advantage of misery and catastrophe as vultures tend to do. This dystopian setting isn't a precautionary allegory à la 1984, but rather a frighteningly spot-on assessment of where we'll probably end up in a few years. Granted, Larson can be criticized for drawing too much from contemporary hysteria, taking a bit of every ballyhooed threat-of-the-week to craft a really shitty future for us. But, as a news junkie and committed pessamist, I didn't mind it so much.

Quick plot summary: Senators Herman Cain and Sarah Palin got married and led the Tea Partyers to power. Or at least their future power-couple facsimiles of them did. Dewey, cleaning up the mess he made in The Dewey Decibel System, stumbles upon some nasty informationrelating to husband. Next thing he knows, our hero has to deal with Korean-Chinese mobsters and a nasty private security corporation as he generally stumbles through it all, killing and kidnapping along the way.

What I did mind is the voice of the novel's narrator. Dewey Decibel has, undoubtedly, a unique voice, mixing '90s hip hop slang and militaryspeak within an erudite, vaguely Southern cadence. For the most part, Dewey's peculiar way of speaking isn't intolerable, not entirely. Maybe too cute, maybe too unrealistic, but generally tolerable. However, numerous phrases and phrasings caused me to stop reading to take a moment to roll my eyes, sometimes cringe. Larson's style is particularly troublesome at the outset of the novel, slowing down the reading. At about page 20, I was a bit worried, worried because I wanted so dearly to love this novel. But I settled in, I got used to Dewey's voice, and I enjoyed the book.

Part of the reason I liked The Nervous System is that Larson pays due respect to the noir/hardboiled tradition without trying to recreate The Killer Inside Me or The Big Sleep. Like The Dewey Decibel System, the plot of The Nervous System is straightforward, to some extent even simple. Just like a good crime novel. I don't need a complex conspiracy unfolding over 600 tedious pages, just the barest justification for murder and mayhem in 250. In a nod to the hardboiled heroics, Dewey Decimal is a violent man with an intransigent and abiding sense of justice. Larson, quite smartly, did not write his hero as a PI. (I'm not sure that PIs still exist in the real world, but I certainly can't see how they'd find employment in Dewey's New York.) Nevertheless, his war is private. And there's a well-placed twist of sorts, as any good crime story need. (Just one, maybe two. Don't get too smart on us.)

Even Dewey's lingo -- or rather his incessant usage of lingo -- is a nod to hardboiled fiction. Again, Larson gets kudos for not simply reproducing the style of old. For whatever reason (a lack of critical insight or originality?), contemporary authors feel compelled to mimic Spillane and Thompson stark and often trite dialog, resulting in their characters sounding ridiculously out of date, if not simply ridiculous. Larson doesn't always manage to avoid ridiculousness, but at least he's trying to do something new with a well-worn form.

And thus far, he's been pretty successful. Now up the ante for number three.


The Math

Objective Score: 6/10

Bonuses: +1 for dystopia; +1 for respect without mimicry; +1 for having Sarah Palin and Herman Cain marry

Penalties: -1 for Dewey's voice; -1 for a fairly flat female lead

Nerd coefficient: 7/10