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20 Books of Summer #2: Expiration Date by Duane Swierczynski – Take a walk on a wild timeline
Expiration Date by Duane Swierczynski (2010) French title: Date limite. Translated by Sophie Aslanides
Expiration Date by Duane Swierczynski was our Book Club choice for June. I’ve read enough Swierczynskis now to be –almost—able to write his name without mixing the letters up or putting too many Ys. I’ve read The Blonde and the Charlie Hardie series, Fun and Games, Hell and Gone and Point and Shoot.
All books mix Noir, thriller and SF with a huge dose of humor. Imagine the cocktail. I love it. For French readers, Swierczynski’s translator is Sophie Aslanides and it’s published by Rivages Noir. That’s enough for crime fiction lovers to pick the book, IMO.
So, what happens in Expiration Date?
We’re in Philadelphia. When the book opens, it’s present time. Journalist Mickey Wade has just been fired by his newspaper. Since he earned just enough to survive with his wages as a journalist, he’s now flat broke. He’s moving from his upscale neighborhood to a bad one, Frankford. That’s where he grew up and where he’s going to stay rent-free in his grandfather’s apartment while he’s at the hospital.
First night in the building, there’s a bodega downstairs but not a lot of neighbors. His friend Meghan helps him moving in and when she’s gone, Mickey feels tired, lonely, a bit desperate and headachy. He looks around Grand Pop Henry’s apartment and is intrigued by all the boxes he sees. But now is not the time to go through Pop’s stuff. He hunts down pills to fight his headache, finds what he thinks is Tylenol, pops two in his mouth, washes them out with some water and is thrown back to Frankford on February 22, 1972, his date of birth.
And I can’t tell you more about the plot without truly spoiling it. It sounds like Back to the Future but it’s by Swierczynski, so there must be murders, an investigation and bad guys. The plot is gripping and takes you for such a spin that sometimes you don’t know where you are or when. That’s the entertaining side of the book.
The more serious side is that, through these journeys into the past, Swierczynski takes us to Frankford street and shows us how it was a working-class neighborhood in the 1920s, moved to a middle-class one in the 1970s when Mickey was a kid to a run-down neighborhood. It’s now dangerous and the territory of gangs and drug dealers. The decline of industrial jobs in the US happened. It is the same implacable scenario that Roth describes for his hometown Newark. There is always some social commentary in good crime fiction.
A word about the American edition. Swierczynski writes for Marvel Comics and this one is published by Minautor Books. It includes black-and-white illustrations like in old fashioned books. It gives them a wonderful vintage feel.
Do I need to add that this is a great holiday read?
PS : A big thank you for this book to Guy, from His Futile Preoccupations.
Hell & Gone and Point & Shoot by Duane Swierczynski
Hell & Gone (2011) and Point & Shoot (2013) by Duane Swierczynski. Not available in French. (So far. So it goes in the Translation Tragedy category)
What was that old saying? It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye? Hardie supposed the fun and games were over. Now it was something else.
And something else it is.
I have read Hell & Gone and Point & Shoot by Duane Swierczynski almost one after the other. There are the two last books of the Charlie Hardie trilogy. The first one is Fun & Games and my billet about it is here.
In the first episode, poor Charlie Hardie happens to be at the wrong place at the wrong time and crosses path with a secret organization, The Accident People, who are specialized in killing people through what looks like an accident. Charlie Hardie is a tough guy. The Accident People are so impressed with his resilience and toughness that they decide they they want him to work for them. Hardie isn’t really on board with the idea so they don’t give him a choice. They kidnap him, drug him and ship him to in a high security prison somewhere. Soon, Hardie discovers he’s supposed to be the warden of highly dangerous criminals. And there’s a catch: if he tries to escape, it will trigger a death mechanism and everybody will die. And Charlie Hardie isn’t a killer. So a warden he becomes and he needs to manage a team of lethal guards. Hardie is a lone wolf. He used to work for the Philadelphia Police Department as a “consultant”, being a real cop wasn’t his thing. He worked closely with a police officer, Nate, and he was the one with the social skills in the duo. Hardie is not a leader, he’s a Pitbull who never gives up. Despite his desperate position, he still plans on escaping and doing whatever it takes to get out.
Hardie needed to gain their trust somehow, put them at ease. He couldn’t escape if his own staff was keeping a closer eye on him than the actual prisoners.
God help him…
He needed to hold a staff meeting.
This gives you a taste of Swierczynski’s brand of prose. Punchy, straight to the point and laced with tons of humor. The whole book is a fast paced adventure as Hardie discovers the ins and outs of the prison and the personality of the prisoners. It’s hard to know who to trust. There are new developments all the time and it’s a highly enjoyable ride.
In Point & Shoot, Hardie has been sent in orbit around the Earth. The Accident People again. This time he’s keeping something precious in a satellite. He’s trapped there for a year at least and he can observe his wife Kendra and kid through a weekly live feed. He must stay on duty for twelve months otherwise his wife and kid will have “an accident”. He can’t say he’s comfy in his in-orbit shoe box.
Ordinary life up here in space was a Black & Decker funhouse of pain.
Things change when his avatar lands on the satellite and makes them fall into the Pacific Ocean. How will they survive? Is this man trustworthy? Are Kendra and Charlie Junior in danger?
You’ll know more if you read the book. We learn more about the criminal organization that holds Hardie prisoner, why he’s so resilient despite all the beatings, drugging and other awful things that happen to his body. His mind is unreachable. He’s stubborn as hell and never gives up. He’s got a one track mind and protecting his wife and son is his only goal.
He’s an engaging character because his moral compass remains stable. He’s tough physically but also mentally. He remains human, not a superhero. It is through little observations that the reader sympathizes with Hardie’s predicament.
Sometimes all Hardie wanted in the world was the opportunity to stretch. A real stretch, where you can reach your hands to heaven and you can feel the vertebrae pop. Such a stretch was impossible in this claustrophobic tin can. And taking a leak? Back on Earth, guys were blessed with the ability to find a semi-hidden spot, unzip, and let it fly. Up here Hardie had t contort as he were doing yoga in a closet. If the vacuum seal wasn’t tight, then he’s enjoy the sensation of his own gravity-free piss droplets smacking into his face.
He’s the good guy put in impossible situations and he fights against the monsters.
These books are off the charts action movies. I wonder why nobody turned them into films. There’s so much material here. I love Swierczynski’s sense of humor, his style and his crazy ideas. He even gave the surname of his French translator to the French character in Hell & Gone. It’s an unusual surname, Aslanides, I knew she was her translator for France and I asked him if it was an allusion to her and it is.
I’m so sorry to report to French readers that this trilogy isn’t translated into French. It’s available in ebook and in English. Unfortunately, it means you won’t have the paper books with their gorgeous covers.
Many thanks again to Guy for pointing Duane Swierczynski in my direction. I will definitely read other books by him. Here are his reviews of Hell & Gone and of Point & Shoot.
Fun and Games by Duane Swierczynski
Fun and Games by Duane Swierczynski 2011. Sadly, it’s not available in French, so it goes into the Translation Tragedy category.
Fun and Games opens with an amazing high-speed chase in the Hollywood Hills on Decker Canyon Road. It’s steep, full of hairpin turns and dangerous. The actress Lane Madden is driving like a maniac, trying to escape whomever is following her and trying to push her into a car accident. Her moonlight drive is a lot less romantic than Jim Morrison’s song.
At the same moment, Charlie Hardie is on a red-eye from Philadelphia to Los Angeles, where he’s expected to housesit the mansion of a famous composer. Hardie used to work for the cops in Philadelphia until a tragedy changed everything. He’s now living a wandering life, going from one house-sitting job to the other, trying to forget and go by. When he arrives on site, the house isn’t empty and Lane is inside, bruised and battered, hiding from Them, who attempted to kill her.
As it happens, Them are The Accident People, a secret society with connections in the right places and specialized in rewriting events or erasing unwanted witnesses from embarrassing scenes. They are discreet, efficient and provoke death that look accidental and fitting with the victim’s background. With Lane Madden, they aimed at a timely OD in her car. Only Lane fought back, using what she learned when she trained for stunts in the action movies she’d been doing.
For Hardie, this is a bad case of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. He should get away from this house and literally run to the hills. But he encounters the brain of this operation and realizes she knows about his past. And suddenly, things become very personal. Why do they want Lane dead? How did they manage to get info on him so quickly?
I won’t say more about the plot to avoid spoilers. This is a fast-paced pulp novel, one you don’t want to put down and it would make a fantastic movie. The characters are well drawn and their past is revealed slowly through the book. Don’t read the summary on Goodreads, it gives away too much of Hardie’s background. The man is a survivor and his survival instinct is out of the ordinary.
Swierczynski has a punchy style that highlights the twists and turns of the plot. See a sample here:
When life finally stops kicking you in the teeth, you don’t whine and count the gaps. You see the fucking dentist and move on.
There aren’t any breathing time as we follow Hardie from one attack to the other. Swierczynski seems to have an bottomless well of creativity in ways to eliminate people. And it works.
Fun & Games is the first volume of the Hardie trilogy that continues with Hell & Gone and Point & Shoot, reviewed by Guy. You can find his review of Fun and Games here and I recommend it, he’s a lot better than me at writing about pulp fiction.
For French readers who’d be interested in Swierczynski, try The Blonde, it’s excellent.
This is another read from my #TBR20 project. Now I want to read the two other volumes. So, after the #TBR20 is over, I already plan to buy the two other books of the Markaris trilogy and the two other Swierczynskis. Hmm. I’m afraid the #TBR20 gig will be followed by a book buying spree, followed by another #TBR20. When will that stop? 🙂
It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window. Raymond Chandler
The Blonde by Duane Swierczynski 2006 French title: The Blonde
Just thinking about The Blonde brings a smile on my face. Funny, gripping, crazy, daring, witty are the adjectives that come to mind. It’s full of references to classic noir films and fiction and I’m sure I missed most of the references. The title of the post is the opening quote of the book, putting your reading journey under the protection of the master of literary Noir crime fiction.
Jack Eisley is sitting at a bar in the Philadelphia Airport. Tomorrow, he has a meeting with his soon-to-be-ex-wife and her lawyer and soon-to-be-next-husband. Jack dreads the meeting and he’s happy to chat innocently with a pretty blonde at the bar. Everything seems alright until she tells him that she put something in his drink and that he’ll die in a few hours. Meanwhile, Mike Kowalski, profession: secret agent for a weird agency, is doing a side job for himself. He’s currently slowly and methodically eliminating all the people responsible for the death of his beloved Katie. He’s about to pull the trigger and score one more enemy when his special phone rings and his contact asks him to go and get the head of a Pr Manchette (*nudge, nudge*) who died in the morning. Kowalski’s employers want to analyse Pr Manchette’s head. In addition, he needs to get a woman called Kelly White who was last seen at the Philadelphia Airport. Back to Jack, who’s now at his hotel room, sick as a dog at the exact time the blonde had predicted he would be as a result of the poisining. He starts believing she did spice his drink with a lethal weapon. He rushes back to the airport to find her and put his hand on the antidote.
As it is, both Kowalski and Jack are after the same woman, Kelly White. They embark in a fast paced trip across Philadelphia at night and the reader takes a seat aboard an UFO of a book. Jack soon finds out that Kelly White has a virus which doesn’t bear privacy, loneliness or solitude. If she’s farther than three meters from another human, she dies within 3 minutes. Isn’t that idea fantastic? It provides countless possibilities of comical scenes in a novel. Imagine living a daily life with this when the others around you don’t know it. You’re constantly invading other people’s space, you can’t pee on your own and you act suspiciously promiscuous. The horror.
The intrigue is made of this incredible scenario of futurist science whipped with international terrorism. This icing on the cake is the personal Vengeance carried on by Kowalski. All this works extremely well. Duane Swierczynski manages to write a coherent and yet totally wacked story. Mike could have a penguin as a teammate and the reader would accept is a fact. He’s that good! The ending is surrealist and yet totally logical. The style is full of catchy dialogues, urgent descriptions and striking imagery. Here are Jack and the blonde during their first encounter:
You’re looking for something unwinding and well-written? A book to take you away during a journey on a train? The Blonde is for you. What about me? I loved this book and I already have Fun and Games waiting for me. As often, I owe the discovery of this writer to Guy’s impeccable tastes in literature. Thanks again, Guy.
PS: For readers who can read Spanish or French, I recommend Carlos Salem. He’s Swierczynski’s European evil brother.
Book Around the Corner 