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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.
Choke Hold by Christa Faust – sex, drugs and MMA.
Choke Hold by Christa Faust (2011) French title: L’ange gardien. Translated by Christophe Cuq
Do the things you’ve done in the past add up to the person you are now? Or are you endlessly reinvented by the choices you make for the future? I used to think I knew the answer to those questions. Now, I’m not so sure.
Angel Dare, former porn star is under witness protection. She’s a waitress at a diner in Arizona, hiding away from the men who want her dead. Her old life barrels into her new one when her ex-lover Vic Ventura comes to her diner with his son Cody. They don’t have to really catch up that Vic is shot dead right in front of her.
Angel doesn’t know if the killers are after Vic or her. No time to think, she just takes Cody under her wing and flees the scene as fast as she can.
Cody is 18 and recently reconnected with Vic. He is raised by his single mother who struggles with mental illness. His daily support system consists in Hank Hammer, former MMA champion and Cody’s MMA coach at a local gym.
Cody’s only goal is to become a MMA champion and he’s on the right track to achieve it. The kid is gifted and already participates to underground MMA fights in Mexico, all organized by the owner of the gym he trains at. That’s how Cody got involved in drug trafficking, thinking he was carrying steroids across the Mexican-American border.
Cody is young, idealistic and single-minded. He wants to be an MMA champion and go to Las Vegas to be casted in an MMA TV reality show. After Cody takes Angel to Hank’s trailer, the most sensible thing to do seems to leave Arizona and get Cody to Las Vegas on time for the show.
Our trio of misfits engages into a perilous road trip with a dangerous team of hitmen hot on their trail. Angel, Hank and Cody have all been thrown into the sea of life and have banged themselves on rocky shores. There’s a terrifying scene in My Absolute Darling where Turtle and Jacob are snatched by the rising tide of the Pacific Ocean and struggle for their life. That’s how I imagined Angel, Hank and Cody: taken away by events with no control over what happened to them and coming out of it bruised and battered.
Angel used to be a porn star, famous enough that people could recognize her on the street and that puts her in danger. She has to live with the memories of her former life and how it went to hell. Hank keeps Cody safe and straight and acts as his substitute father. He has a poor health, consequence of too many punches and concussions. Taking care of Cody gives him a purpose and it’s a win-win situation. Cody had a tough childhood with a mother unfit to raise him and forcing him to grow up and take responsibilities at a young age. Hank is his anchor.
And now, the three of them stick together for the better and the worse and despite Angel’s gut feeling that she’s better cut them loose.
Christa Faust’s style is punchy and catchy. (no pun intended) Choke Hold will appeal to readers who enjoyed Freedom’s Child by Jax Miller. Angel is the same kind of kickass heroin, full of sass, of resources and of courage. Faust spent a decade working in peep-shows and for the porn industry. She knows her stuff and her Angel sounds real. Choke Hold is the sequel to Money Shot and while I still enjoyed Choke Hold, I think it’s better to read them in the right order.
Recommended to crime fiction lovers and readers of Virginie Despentes. (In France, published by Gallmeister)
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? 🙂
Quais du polar 2014: welcome to crime fiction
In 2014, Quais du polar celebrates its 10th anniversary. It’s a festival set in Lyon and dedicated to crime fiction in books and films. (See the meaning of the name here) The whole city is about crime fiction during three days. There are conferences, exhibits, films, a great book fair and a walk turned into an investigation in the Vieux Lyon. James Ellroy was there for a conference and he was the star of the festival. I didn’t have time to participate in anything but go to the book fair. Compared to other salons, publishers don’t have stalls there, only independent book stores do. It is reserved to independent book stores from Lyon. If you look up book stores in Lyon in the yellow page, there are 95 results. They some are specialised in SF or comics, children lit, scientific books… Only a few of them participate to Quais du polar. Each stand corresponds to one book shop and the writers present at the festival are dispatched among them. I guess the book shops made good money during the weekend, there was a lot of people there. The atmosphere was like a swarm of crime fiction readers buzzing around stands, waiting to meet writers and chatting with book sellers. It’s always nice to be among book enthusiasts.
Time to introduce you to a new French word: libraire. A libraire is a bookseller, a person who works in a book shop. But when I see bookseller I see vendeur de livres and not libraire because I’m under the impression that the selling part of the word is more important than the book part. When I hear libraire, I think of someone who loves books, reading books, being around books, talking about books and recommending books to others. The cash part of the story is only the ending, not the purpose. Books are not cans of green peas. A libraire is not a book seller. Libraire is a noble word that implies that the person in front of you is knowledgeable about books and will be all lit up if you share your reading with them. One of those owns the book store Au Bonheur des Ogres. I was happy to chat with him again as last year he had recommended The Blonde and Nager sans se mouiller. I told him how the copy of Nager sans se mouiller I purchased from him in 2013 is now sitting on a shelf in Beirut thanks to the magic of book blogging and that I had LOVED The Blonde. He’s a true crime fiction aficionado, he oozes crime fiction enthusiasm, it’s incredible. You could spend hours talking to him about books. This year, he recommended The Midnight Examiner by William Kotzwinkle, La place du mort by Pascal Garnier and Le tri sélectif des ordures et autres cons by Sébastien Gendron. (Turns out I already had the last one). We’ll see how it goes this year.
Lauren Beukes was also there, she’s very friendly. I now have a signed copy of her Zoo City. It was on my wish list after reading Max’s review. I managed to snatch a signed copy of The Cold Dish by Craig Johnson for my in-law. I haven’t read him –yet— but in France, he’s published by Gallmeister. So I suppose he’s good. Even without his cowboy hat and plaid shirt, you’d know he’s American. He’s very friendly too.
I said earlier that publishers don’t have stalls at the book fair. They are involved in the festival, though. I really liked the ads for the publisher Points. Tu ne tueras Points… mais tu liras des polars. Literally Thou shall not kill but thou shall read crime fiction. There’s a pun on Points / point which is an old version of the negative form pas.
I had a lot of fun that afternoon and I hope I’ll have more time to go to conferences and exhibits next year.
Quais du polar: Lyon celebrates crime fiction
This weekend Lyon hosted a festival dedicated to crime fiction named Quais du polar. Let me explain the name. In French, polar is a crime fiction category that covers Noir, thriller, hardboiled and pulp. Cozy crimes and whodunnits aren’t called polars. I have a category Polar on the blog since I never know exactly how to tag the crime fiction book I’m reading. So more precisely, a Raymond Chandler is a polar and an Agatha Christie isn’t. That was for polar. Now, what about Quais? In Lyon, we have two rivers, the Saône and the Rhône. This means lots of banks and piers (Quais) in the city. In addition to this geographical consideration about Lyon, 36 Quai des Orfèvres is the address of the police department in Paris. So a festival named Quais du polar makes sense when it deals with crime fiction.
This event is a firework of crime fiction feasts. There are conferences with writers and publishers, a literary fair (more about that later), an investigation organized in the city, theatre plays, touristic tours, operas and films in the Institut Lumière, the place where the cinema was born.
We did the investigation with the children and I went to the literary fair. It was held in the Palais du Commerce, the beautiful buildings owned by the Chamber of Commerce, located Place de la Bourse. (Stock-exchange plaza). I mused about the irony to have a book fair in the premises of the corporate world. There, independent book stores had stands and each stand had writers present to meet readers and sign copies of their books. I’m not usually looking for signed copies of books, except for particular writers. I was really happy to discuss with Nancy Huston once, more to talk about our common love of Romain Gary than about her own books. This time I was on a mission; my mother is a huge crime fiction reader and with Mother’s Day coming soon, I had the perfect idea for a gift! So I got the signed books I wanted.
To me, the most interesting part was to meet with enthusiastic booksellers. (Sorry, sorry, writers… I never know what to say to you). The nicest one was the crime fiction aficionado from Au Bonheur des Ogres. The name of the book shop itself is attractive since it’s the first title of the Malaussene series by Daniel Pennac. (You can read a review of Fairy Gunmother another volume of this series here) This bookseller uses “tu” at first sight because we’re members of the great brotherhood of compulsive readers. He recommended a Spanish writer, Carlos Salem, and you’ll read about him soon. This bookseller helped Salem’s career in France, along with two other independent bookstores in Toulouse and Paris. I know because they are all mentioned in the acknowledgments of Matar y guardar la ropa, the book I purchased. Yes, as far as I know, the only murder that occurred during the festival is that of my book buying ban. I came home with:
- Matar y guardar la ropa by Carlos Salem (Nager sans se mouiller). I’m loving it so far.
- Le petit bleu de la côte Ouest by Jean-Patrick Manchette (Three to kill, review here) I’ve never read Manchette and I’ve been willing to try him for a while.
- The Blonde by Duane Swierczynski. Also recommended by the friendly bookseller. I knew the name though, thanks to Guy. (See his review of Severance Package)
I love crime fiction, I’ve always read this genre and I wondered why I hardly read any lately. I came to the conclusion that it stemmed from a language Chinese puzzle. I don’t know much about French crime fiction writers and I’d rather read English-speaking ones in English. And here come the difficulties: I enjoy reading crime fiction to unwind and reading crime fiction in English requires more concentration than in French. Plus, I came to question old translations of crime fiction classics, so reading them in French isn’t an option anymore. With hindsight, it seems quite stupid not to pick crime fiction on the shelf because of a bad concentration-fun equation. So I’ve decided to read recent polars in French; you’ll have to make do with billets without quotes (terribly frustrating at times) and probably poor ones too because I’m not very skilled at reviewing crime fiction.
I think the festival was a success, the place was full of people engrossed in conversations with booksellers, avidly reading their recent purchase on one of the side benches and writers seemed happy to be there. There were lines in front of the conference rooms, we crossed a lot of families and couples also doing the fake Chinese investigation in town. The Palais du Commerce is gorgeous, it gives a classy touch to the event and I hope these independent book stores gained new readers. I can tell you Au Bonheur des Ogres has me now, especially since they also deliver books.
PS: The book buying ban is a phoenix, it can be born again from its cinders.
Book Around the Corner 