Coal Black, by Chris McGinley, reviewed by Tim Hennessy

Coal Black: Stories
Chris McGinley
Shotgun Honey
(180p) 978-1-64396-058-6

In a country growing more homogenous with every generation, nowhere in America holds greater mystique and misunderstanding than Appalachia. For decades, fictional and cultural studies sought to analyze a region in crisis, struggling to reinvent itself amongst decline. Chris McGinley’s thoughtful story collection Coal Black is a journey beyond the pop-culture stereotypes into the hard realities of life in a part of the country most don’t consider until it becomes politically advantageous.

The affects and grip of opioid addiction and its impact on communities run throughout many of the stories, notably in “Hellbenders” where Sheriff Shelby Hines spends his days in pursuit of suspects under the chemical influence, futilely stemming the tide of desperate actions. When the Sheriff takes his wife to the emergency room to be treated for the early stages of heart failure, the harried hospital staff’s attention is consumed by the multitude of issues relating from drugs, specifically efforts to treat an overdose, which irritates the Sheriff.

         

“They seem more interested in saving a junkie than anybody else around here.”

“Well don’t let it get to you.”

“But I do let it get to me. And why shouldn’t I? I deal with these people every goddamn day.”

           Tragedy befalls Sheriff Shelby; his grief simmers as he endures a naloxone seminar with colleagues, testing his patience as former addicts in recovery lead workshops only reminding him of the cycle of dependency without hope. They’re lectured by “people whose only achievement thus far was their commitment to drugs. At least that’s the way he saw it.” Shelby’s pain clouds his judgment and leads him to embark on a quest for justice; it’s a fatalistic neo-western that opens the collection with a bang.

           “Kin to Me,” an inventive inversion of a buried treasure tale, Ephraim trespasses on coal company land, harvesting moss, when he unearths a shallow grave – in it a small man preserved in an ancient burial plot. Ephraim anonymously calls in the discovery, hoping the archaeological find would unfold differently, shedding national attention onto the forgotten area and its history.

         

“Ephraim got $2.00 a pound for the moss from his connection, almost a hundred bucks all told. But it was the coal company who really planned to cash in on the discovery. They launched a media campaign to celebrate the find of “Brunson Corporation Man” but the name didn’t go over as big as they had hoped.”

           What starts out as an inadvertent story of grave robbery morphs into an unforgettable genealogical heist.

           McGinley distinguishes his foray into Appalachian narratives with an infusion of folklore in several stories. Most notably, “With Hair Blacker Than Coal” which melds a tale of an abandoned baby raised by bobcats who grows to be a feral mountain woman perfectly blended along with a sheriff in pursuit of two brothers who poached a black bear. Sherriff Curley Knotts is called upon to track the Clatter brothers, a lawless, profane duo who savagely killed a black bear, taking only its paws, leaving the carcass to fester and rot. The Sheriff known for his tracking skills as much his relentless nature, heads deep into a holler that never ends, reminding him of a similar remote search and destroy mission when he served in the Mekong Delta that still haunts him. The perfectly paced story is the crown jewel of the collections (sure, we’re biased-- we originally published it). McGinley weaves a pursuit story so filled with hair-raising, breathless chills he gives the reader the sensation of being hopelessly lost deep in thick woods, an unseen rustling adding to the growing unease separating the prey from the preyed upon.

McGinley effectively uses the undefinable sense of dread giving it multiple forms, often that of an angry spirit, as in “Coal Black Haint”. Bertie Clemmons, protected early in her life when her mamaw helps defend and kill her abusive husband:

“Her mamaw nodded knowingly a week later when Bertie learned that she was pregnant. “It’s mountain instinct,” the old woman had said. “It’s the females that protects the young in these hills, not the males.” Bertie didn’t know whether she meant animals or humans.”

Years later, Bertie has become the state’s first female sheriff investigating the disappearance of Charlotte, a young girl believed to have run away, a situation reminiscent of her daughter, who ran off years earlier after they fought. A friend of Charlotte’s believes a haint got her, a theory Bertie quickly rejects as a ridiculous mountain ghost tale. The further she digs, the traumatic echoes and shame of Bertie’s past haunt her, which made her an angry ghost of her former self, as she patrols the same community trying to get it right this time.

Even though not every story fires on all cylinders--in plot mechanics, similar themes and repetitive characters--McGinley shows a progression of elements honed carefully in the multiple narratives capturing the rugged beauty of the region. He creates a sinister landscape of uncomfortably recognizable characters struggling to come to terms with their past as they forge ahead, trying to find a place for themselves in an ever-shifting country. Those unfamiliar with Appalachia would do well to spend time with McGinley’s gripping, homespun yarns.

Nick Kolakowski's Main Bad Guy, reviewed by Tim Hennessy

Main Bad Guy
Nick Kolakowski
Shotgun Honey Presents
152pgs
978-1-948235-70-9 $11.95/2.99 reviewed by Tim Hennessy


Bill and Fiona, the con-man and assassin couple at the wild heart of Nick Kolakowski’s Main Bad Guy (the frantic third book of his Love & Bullets Hookup series) have their backs against the proverbial cliff. If the Rockway Mob they double-crossed doesn’t kill them, all that stands in the way of financial liberation is eluding everyone trying to capture the heroes and their escape fund.

In the first book of the series, A Brutal Bunch of Heartbroken Saps, Bill puts these events into motion when he runs off with a large sum of the mob’s money, and the Dean, their boss, puts a bounty on his head. The Dean dispatches multiple assassins to track him down, among them, Fiona, jilted by his disappearance and prepared to bring his head back to New York: the box, dry ice, and hacksaw ready. Bill, an expert in manipulating people and computer systems before his involvement with the mob, sticks to mostly small-time insurance scams, info hacks, and a little bookmaking on the side but a chance encounter with an older, suicidal con-man makes him reevaluate his life’s pursuits and act on his one-time fantasy escape plan. What makes him easy for Fiona to locate, other than the tracker placed in his favorite pair of boots, is recalling Bill’s extensive answer to a rhetorical question. She comes to his rescue; then things veer into a finale echoing the Wild Bunch and True Romance complete with a hitman channeling his inner Elvis.

Book two, Slaughterhouse Blues, finds our protagonists licking their wounds south of the border and beginning life in hiding. It doesn’t take long for the Dean to locate them, send two hitmen, and again Bill and Fiona go on the run, this time with one of their betrayers in tow, to help them dig up Nazi gold hidden in an old New York bar. It’s quick fun, that channels The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

Installment three, Main Bad Guy, begins with Fiona and Bill en route to the airport, without a moment to catch their breaths, when an unknown attacker blindsides their cab. Kolakowski doesn’t shy away from showing the physical toll life on the lam takes on our heroes.

“Bill’s cheekbones had swollen so much, he feared looking at himself in the mirror. He felt an absurd jealousy for action-movie heroes who could emerge from a pummeling with only a photogenic cut or two on their brow. In real life, skin behaved like ripe fruit when you hit it.”

After tending to their more urgent wounds, Bill and Fiona stumble upon luxury condos in mid-construction and decide to lay low and rest in one of the completed units. This innocuous decision proves fortuitous for the Rockway mob because it turns out they own the building.

The only hitch in the mob’s luck: Fiona and Bill access the penthouse panic room before their mercenary security team can corner them. With nowhere left to run, the Dean and his goons lay siege to their plans of escape, setting the stage for a long-brewing showdown.

Of all the heightened cinematic influences that bleed into Kolakowski’s Love & Bullets trilogy, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid regularly come to mind. Desperadoes, fugitives perpetually on the run, and smartasses, Fiona and Bill likewise find themselves surrounded by people who want them dead at every turn while the good life calls to them from a distant land. Fiona and Bill’s relationship is the one element of the book where doubts linger. If love were measured in bruises and blood loss alone, it would be a tale for the ages. Early on it’s hard to see what draws them together. Fiona watches him hustle bar patrons until he tries his smooth charms on her and she offers him a job.

For someone who vouched to mobsters on the behalf of her thief boyfriend, Fiona’s flippant acceptance of Bill's dishonesty, even while predictable, is unclear why they want to go through all these obstacles to get a fresh start together. Maybe, like Fiona’s father Walker, who emerges from tough guy retirement to lend a hand, my skepticism is rooted in my affection for Fiona: she can do better than this doughy sweet talker. It’s difficult to imagine her and Bill in a less externally conflicted life together, without adrenalin and anxiety fueling their every move. At least Butch had a simpatico partner in Sundance, even when pinned down on the narrow face of a cliff with only water below, he was willing to risk the uncertainty of Butch’s escape plan. Even if he couldn’t swim. It’s hard to know if Bill and Fiona are as equipped to deal with the downtime of a straight life. The risks of settling down in a stable relationship together could be what finally kills them.

On the precipice of change, most of us barely notice as we straddle familiarity and the unrealized potential ahead of us. Change is fertile ground for cliché ridden aphorisms. From its opening scene to fiery final confrontation, Main Bad Guy is an inevitable conclusion to a madcap trilogy. As much as Kolakowski owes a debt to his cinematic influences, he crafts a high-action thriller, with a flair for the absurd.

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.