A Negro and an Ofay, By Danny Gardner, reviewed by Tim Hennessy

A Negro and an Ofay
Danny Gardner
Down & Out Books
2017
261 pages
reviewed by Tim Hennessy

With the volume of detective fiction published today, emerging from a crowded pack has never been more difficult. Protagonists piecing together answers to convoluted mysteries is such a familiar path to head down, I swear off as much detective fiction as I pick up, always vowing I’m done, that I’ve read enough.Whether a seasoned, hard-boiled investigator or an amateur doing a favor for a friend, the PI novel is a genre weighed down by its history and popularity. With an overabundance of white male detectives running through the fictional mean streets and dark alleys, looking to right wrongs while busy self-consciously narrating, and maintaining their buzz, what has kept the detective novel appealing for over 150 years?

You can find one answer in the exciting narratives coming from the points of view of underrepresented authors and their protagonists, who are revitalizing the genre and making it more relevant. One of the bright spots in recent years, Danny Gardner’s A Negro and an Ofay, explores the complicated racial politics and code-switching necessary to navigating the 1952 Midwest.

When life had him by the short hairs, [Elliot] often fantasized about being a good student who graduated on the Dean’s list. Then he could have traded on his near-whiteness to land a job in the front office of some industrial farm in Illinois. Could’ve had a name tag. Maybe a desk. Dated some chippie from the secretarial pool. Perhaps that would have kept him from enlisting in Patton’s Third Army. He would have never followed every other discharged colored to the big city. He wouldn’t have taken the police academy test while drunk, just to show much smarter he was.

Elliot Caprice is the embodiment of otherness, abandoned by his white mother after his black father dies in a race riot. He is “a city boy trapped in farm country” raised by his father’s brother in Southland, a small rural Illinois community where as a young man, he collected vigs for Izzy, a Jewish loan maker and additional father figure. Elliot is also a war veteran who became a South Side Chicago police officer upon his return. Working amongst rampant corruption, Elliot was blackmailed into snitching on dirty cops once his past relationship with Izzy came to light. Elliot complicates matters for himself further when he involves himself with a former police lieutenant turned beat crime reporter William Drury, who investigated organized crime and its ties to the policing community.

Great characters have always been the engine that’s driven and sustained detective novels beyond any given books’ mystery. In the short span of his life, Elliot has done a lot of living, and Gardner’s loaded his first novel with an abundant supporting cast in which there’s hardly a character that comes in contact with Elliot that doesn’t have a complicated history with him or an uneasy rapport.

In the first third of the novel, Gardner layers Elliot’s conflicts with his past as well as his community on thick, with multiple subplots that would make any number of great novels. Much of the first act gives quick glimpses into Elliot’s past to establish the character. Elliot’s time serving in the war changed everything for him.

For the average Negro, the existence of concentration camps was an abstraction. Just another example of how ofays do each other when there were no niggers around. Once Patton took colored regiments deep within German territory, they witnessed atrocities that eclipsed the tortures of Jim Crow. …the next concentration camps to be liberated would hold colored bodies. This was his motivation for joining the Chicago Police Department. …He desired to legitimize himself. Perhaps legitimize colored folk overall.

One is still left wanting more of a sense of Elliot’s time as a younger man trying to navigate the dismaying effects of returning home from war. Also, further exploring the conflicts Elliot’s time collecting for Izzy presented as he began his career as a police officer would make an excellent time period we can hope Gardner explores later in the series.

So where does the detective story come in? That plot thread picks up much later when Elliot learns that his Uncle Buster lost his farm after taking out a bad loan to help pay labor for the planting season. Matters complicate quickly when Buster falls ill, and loses his workers to a competitor, failing to keep up with payments.

To help pay off his uncle’s debt, Elliot takes on work as a process server hoping he can figure out a way to save the farm. He’s dispatched to get a signature from a wealthy widow in the midst of an estate battle with her husband’s adult children. Their sudden marriage after his first wife died in a boating accident raised suspicions and when he later drowns in a bathtub after changing his will to benefit her, foul play was suspected. Seizing an opportunity to make some side cash, Elliot’s hired to examine the complexities of her legal situation so she can retain the assets her husband left her.

Following in the footsteps of his golden-aged predecessors, Gardner sends Elliot down a familiar path filled with duplicitous wealthy relations, and broader entanglements that involve organized crime, and familiar federal law enforcement officers that complicate his life yet again. Gardner’s novel is too action heavy to balance the elements of race and class that are also on its mind. The book has a lot of plot threads to connect and resolve, which it does with the aid of a massive shootout. While fun and well executed, the action sequence served as an opportunity to bring disparate plot threads together rather than build tension.

Even though not all of the story elements work in equal measure, Danny Gardner is laying the foundation for a fascinating and complex character. The more opportunities we have to view the detective genre through different experiences like those in the works of Attica Locke, Adi Tantimedh, Steph Cha, and Alex Segura the more it vital it will continue to be. Each of these writers’ like Gardner uses their sleuths to look at social issues intersecting cultural conflicts of the past and present all while bringing a fresh perspective to a familiar genre.

Switchblade III, a review by Rusty Barnes

Switchblade Issue III boasts a number of contributors familiar to anyone who follows the small press crime scene, writers like Eric Beetner, Morgan Boyd and Preston Lang. As well, there are a number of writers I know mostly from their Twitter feeds and the occasional scuttlebutt. I realize it's still early on in Switchblade's career, but it's safe to say they've become prominent in a short time. All told, editor Scotch Rutherford has put together a well-done and entertaining issue here.

Some highlights include the aforementioned Preston Lang, who gives us "Press it Down," a story about a former musician turned mayhem artist, a granny who turns out to be skilled in the use of a golf club. I've found his stories always deserve more love than they receive: he's well-published, but merits further recognition, and kudos to Rutherford for recognizing that and giving him a spot in multiple issues.

In "Burning Snow," Morgan Boyd writes about how even a simple job like shoveling snow can become a criminal web of intrigue and violence. Told by our narrator Max, who's got a secret or two himself, the story ranges across the snowy landscape, artfully and simply revealed, to an unforgettable description of a fat man in flagrante delicto. The ending is a punch in the gut that  tells us what some of us could still stand to learn: some people never have the luck.

Eric Beetner's piece, "Family Secrets," about a child who witnesses a gruesome crime and is forced into a criminal act himself, is something I've found typical of Beetner, in novel or short story mode. His work is well-paced and  deftly written, always in service to the narrative, not flashy. It's solid prose exemplified by lines like "I didn't buy the fake sincerity in Mom's voice when she told me Dad would be okay. But beyond wondering if my Dad would live or die, I tried to figure out how in the world he ever come to be shot."

Other stories are largely successful but not necessarily my bag.  I recognize the effort each of the writers here, though, and I appreciate too the effort it takes to put out a quality journal several times a year. It's an often Herculean effort sustained only by the love you get from writers and occasionally from readers, and certainly not in monetary rewards. The kinks in the production process notwithstanding, I expect Switchblade to have a long successful career highlighting the best the small press crime scene has to offer for as long as Rutherford can keep the magic going on the back end.

The stories are out there waiting, and I see the job of small press crime journals like Switchblade, Pulp Modern and Tough to bring them to the forefront and provide an alternative--however the individual journals define that-- to the larger venue/larger payday every writer generally shoots for. Our job is to get large in vision, but stay small in practice, to highlight writers before they reach mainstream success, and to bring attention to those mainstream writers who still need the boost. Their success is our success. Every Switchblade issue, every Pulp Modern issue, every story, every time we get our names out there in the small press crime scene, is a success for all of us.

Review of Nolan Knight’s The Neon Lights Are Veins by James Pate

Nolan Knight
The Neon Lights are Veins

Publisher: 280 Steps

Review by James Pate

I’ve always been drawn to stories about misfits and rebels, individuals existing on the outer fringe who radically take their lives into their own hands, for good or ill. Struggling artists, street-level visionaries, punks, insomniacs, wanderers, the obsessed and the damned.

Nolan Knight’s The Neon Lights Are Veins (280 Steps) is a Californian crime novel teeming with misfits. There’s the protagonist, Alvi Drake, whose legendary days as a skateboarder are behind him, and who is tormented by a painful family history involving a conniving, crazed mother and a recently deceased wife. There’s Mongo, a transvestite dreaming of fame and adoration in a city where she knows the odds are against her. And there’s Faye, a recent arrival to Los Angeles who is struggling against the myriad social forces pushing her toward a life of prostitution. There are others too, in this social orbit – most of the them living in a crumbling apartment building called the Hotel Lafayette -- and taken together, they made me think of Andy Warhol’s Superstars of the late 60s and early 70s, whose drug and sex fueled lives created a micro counterculture. Knight clearly has sympathy for these characters. Neon is one of those noir novels where the so-called deviants are actually the good guys. Even the fetishists are treated with good humor, presented not as sickos but as people with unusual sexual appetites. Knight has a Rabelaisian interest in the diversity of human nature.

The bad guys are the ones after money and power and control. Ray Satin is the ringleader of a group of very violent men who make small fortunes through drugs and pimping. Satin is vicious – his weapon of choice is the screwdriver, which he uses on both men and women, strangers and relatives – and he views other people as rungs on the ladder toward greater wealth. He is a dangerous combination of psychopath and narcissist. As he tells his men early in the book, “Money, power and monopoly—that’s the goal, gentleman—in that order.” When we meet him, he has started to make inroads with the police and City Hall, a move he hopes will pay off with a near total control of the Los Angeles underworld.

There are two factors at work against his grand designs, however: his nephew Rocco, and Alvi Drake. The nephew is sickened by the cruelty of his uncle’s world, even though he participates in that world by helping his uncle literally bury the bodies. He dreams of a more everyday life. While on the campus of UCLA, he imagines himself as just another student. Knight writes, “He reclined the seat and shut his eyes, envisioning dorm room summer nights, intellectualism sandwiched by beer pong and togas. All those great things the movies had promised.” Rocco is trapped in a Tarantino movie but wants to be in a Linklater one. As the story progresses, Rocco’s desire for escape starts to run counter his uncle’s desire for underworld dominance. Alvi Drake, in contrast, is an outsider to Satin’s world. He is looking for a missing ex-girlfriend named Gabby. His quest takes him into a grim, treacherous network where no one but his most immediate friends can be trusted.

Part three of the novel is titled “The Underground Web,” and, like the best of Californian noir, the novel reveals the shadows and back room deals that dwell beneath the sunshine, beaches, and mellow vibes. Knight’s Los Angeles is a double-sided coin: a haven for rebels like Alvi and Mongo, but also a Gothic terrain of nihilistic power grabs.

The last third of the novel is a fragmented, explosive showdown between these two spheres. It’s not giving too much away to say that things do not always go well for the more sympathetic characters. Knight’s novel is strikingly bleak in places, and the more familiar plotline of the good guys handily winning certainly does not apply here. But this pessimism is one of the best elements of the novel, giving it an unexpectedly tragic dimension.

For all of the book’s fatalism, though, Neon is not a depressing work. The narrative has an amphetamine-like intensity. And Knight’s language sings with a streetwise poeticism reminiscent of Hurbert Selby Jr., Lou Reed, and Richard Price. When Alvi walks into a barbershop, he heads “past the candy cane spiral, into the lair of man. Ricky Nelson crooned. Smut rags and nickel pulps cluttered the magazine rack; Lawrence Tierney and Killer Kowalski sneered from mint green walls.” Rocco strolls the through the grounds of UCLA and thinks it is “the Monica Vitti of college campuses: lean, tan, Romanesque—hypnotic to the human eyes.” In The Neon Lights Are Veins, the language is constantly surprising, bouncing around on the balls of its feet.

The publishing history of Knight’s book is an odd one, to say the least. 280 Steps, a Norwegian crime press founded in 2013, published Neon this past winter. A few months later, 280 Steps suddenly ceased to exist. The last time I checked, there were only seven copies of Knight’s novel left to buy online. I hope the book gets re-issued shortly by another press. It’s a fierce, bold work, and deserves a wide readership.

Book Review: Shank, by Roy Harper

Shank

Roy Harper

Crime Wave Press

$13.95

reviewed by David Nemeth

An outlaw’s prime motivator is not wanting to go back to prison. Readers take this at face value, but not wanting to go back to prison is a strong incentive, because prison is shit. Roy Harper’s Shank (Crime Wave Press) takes aim at Hollywood’s myth of the sanitized prison system and obliterates it. Prison is no game, it’s death, it’s boredom, it’s soulless.

In Shank, Harper’s narrator David “Tool” Roney is serving a life sentence at Parchman Farm, the oldest and only maximum security prison in Mississippi. Though Shank details the daily life inside a prison walls, Harper shines when writes about a convict’s existence and their fight for dignity:

Prison was about much more than just not being allowed to come and go. It was about sensory deprivation. Deprivation of life’s normalcy. You were deprived of all kinds of stimulation – colors, aromas, sounds, movement, family and love – all variety of life was replaced by something bland, offensive, and negative. Everyone wore the same clothes and the same hairstyle. Everything was painted the same bland, uninteresting color. Everyone was a potential enemy. Your life became permeated with the odors of unwashed bodies, urine, feces, and insanity. Steel doors slammed and people were always screaming; angry, stupid or insane screaming. Everything moved slowly and any sudden move caught your eye; was it an act of violence? Or was it just a rat?

Stuck in the Maximum Security Unit, Roney is always on alert against the daily humiliations forced upon him by both guards and inmates. These indignities drive his one ambition — to escape. Roney finds himself a partner in making his escape plans, a man who Roney knows to be “loudmouthed and rude, with an overbearing personality, abrasive to most people’s nerves, Mad Man was a man who was hard to like.” But what attracted Roney to him most was that Mad Man was an outlaw.

I didn’t particularly like Mad Man, myself, and would never even have talked to the man if it hadn’t been for the one thing that drew me to him: Most inmates who spoke of escape fantasize about living in the woods or blending into a large city somewhere and maybe getting a job. Not Mad Man. He wanted to escape so he could rob more banks, do drugs, sell drugs, enjoy party girls, and live like a biker till someone killed him. Yep, Mad Man Rigsby was a one-hundred percent true, no excuses made, no apologies offered, outlaw.

Unlike heist novels where the plan goes haywire and usually fails, Shank is prison escape novels, the plan always falters, but somehow the escape always succeeds. Harper clean and crisp writing excels at building the tension throughout the escape and does not falter as Roney continues to evade the dogs and police tracking him down.

Usually we don’t assume that a crime writer is a pick-pocket, robber, murderer or, say, prisoner, but in this case, assume away. Harper is currently a prisoner at Parchman Farm where is his serving 88 years for robbery as a repeat offender. Left with the knowledge that his only way out of prison is escape or death, Harper has escaped from prison three times. One escape was featured on an episode from National Geographic’s Breakout series, “Escape from Supermax”. Even though there is an authenticity to the bleak dreams and bitter realities of Shank, the book succeeds on Harper’s direct and no-nonsense writing.

Occult Detective Quarterly Review by Alison McBain

I love brand new magazines. They are the lifeblood of any short story reader. New magazines often have fewer conventions and allow their authors to push the boundaries further, so I feel you get a more eclectic group of writing than you might in already well-established publications. I also love the feeling of discovery, and often first issues don't disappoint.

It was with this in mind that I opened up Issue # 1 of Occult Detective Quarterly, edited by Sam Gafford and John Linwood Grant. I always judge a publication by its cover--it's the first impression a reader gets. For the most part, I thought the graphics complemented the content really well, conveying a polished retro style that screamed "hard-boiled" from the color cover to the black and white interiors.

This first issue had seven short stories, the first chapter of a serial, an article about Doctor Spektor and interview with its creator, a tongue-in-cheek how-to about ghost hunting, and reviews of three works featuring the supernatural. Most, if not all, of the fiction found within its pages had the feel of old-school adventure stories, containing tortured and sometimes oddball antiheros, mysterious murders, and inexplicable and magical happenings.

Pulp literature, in general, is a literature of vices. The pillars of these include smoking, drinking and gambling--the latter not in dollars, but with lives. In the pages of ODQ, there are the classic flea-bitten PIs, the ex-cops and journalists, and the apprentices who must follow their masters into uncertain undertakings. Even in "When Soft Voices Die" by Amanda DeWees, a story set in the 1800s, the female protagonist is not a demure and virginal little miss, but rather has a scandalous background (for the time in which it is set) of a former actress and a widow to boot. Most of the characters in these stories are free-wheeling adventurers who might have powerful magic on their side, but it's seldom magic they completely control or entirely understand. There comes a point in each story where the character has no idea what they're getting into, but they persevere anyway in the face of great odds.

Pulp is also a literature of voice. From the feature story of a wise-cracking gorilla detective in "Got My Mojo Working" by David T. Wilbanks and William Meikle, to a been-there-done-that odd job man in "MonoChrome" by T.E. Grau, the tone is often jaded, with strong touches of sarcasm--and a wink and a nudge towards the reader. The fourth wall is usually cast aside, and the characters tend to speak directly to the reader throughout the pages of each story. As such, fully half of the eight stories are told in first person, with many of them in a quick-to-read, conversational style.

While I enjoyed a number of stories in the issue, I must say that the real star of the collection for me was "MonoChrome" by T.E. Grau. From vivid scene-setting to superb pacing, this story is told in a slow, literary reveal that incorporates a somewhat surrealistic narrative and elements reminiscent of the best horror movies. To give you a small taste of Grau's style, here is a stark picture of the home of the main character, Henry Ganz, an alcoholic and former cop whose best days are behind him.

Pico Union was left to rot by inches through the gutting of post-war factory jobs that drove out the blue collars, filling the gaps with style-blind investors and immigrants from Guatemala and El Salvador, on the run from brutal civil wars and therefore unconcerned with such bourgeois notions as curb appeal. Los Angeles was full of neighborhoods like this, mixed-race middle class bastions gone to shit, with a preponderance of them circling downtown like a rusted halo. (37)

I enjoyed the mystery of Grau's piece, the description and dialogue, the small hints and motifs throughout the story, and the building of tension that leads to a spectacular and satisfying ending.

I feel that the magazine will certainly appeal to fans of the genre, but there were a few things that stuck out to me as a reader. In terms of background, all the pieces are set in the U.S. or the United Kingdom, and I would have liked to see a little bit more diversity of the characters and variety of locations--maybe a murder mystery in the Congo or a ghost story in Japan. While the overarching theme of the magazine hearkens back to the days of pulp, I feel that there are elements that can be modernized, since we live and read in a global society.

And while I enjoyed reading the reviews and learning a bit more about the history of the occult detective genre, I was disappointed that a page had been accidentally left out of the article, "How to be a Fictional Victorian Ghost Hunter (In Five Easy Steps)" by Tim Prasil. I'm sad to say I'll probably never be a good ghost hunter, since two out of the three steps were on the missing page. Perhaps they'll do a reprint of the missing page in the next issue or on their website--I thought it was fun to learn about ghost hunting trends in literature, and I'm sure I'm not alone in wanting to see the remainder of the article.

But a first issue also includes getting your editorial legs under you as you work out the kinks, so I don't think that there were any grievous errors that would make me not pick up the next issue. This was a very beautiful and well-put-together publication. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did--and look forward to Issue # 2.

Occult Detective Quarterly

edited by Sam Gafford and John Linwood Grant

Issue # 1, Fall 2016

96 pages

Electric Pentacle Press

http://electricpentaclepress.bigcartel.com/

http://greydogtales.com/blog/occult-detective-quarterly/odq/

$6.00 PDF / $13.00 print

Alison McBain is an award-winning author with more than forty short stories and poems published, including work in Flash Fiction Online, FLAPPERHOUSE and The Gunpowder Review. When not writing fiction, she is the Book Reviews Editor for the magazine Bewildering Stories. Alison lives in Connecticut with her husband and three children.