Nightmare Town : Stories by Dashiell Hammett

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

This is a collection of 20 short crime stories that Hammett published in magazines like Black Mask and Saucy Stories from the early 1920s to the early 1930s. I usually expect uneven quality in collections. But not so here.

Readers of noir detective tales will enjoy the prose. This is from the title story, which features a kungfu-type hero who wields an ebony cane:

Behind his stick that had become a living part of him, Steve Threefall knew happiness – that rare happiness which only the expert ever finds – the joy in doing a thing that he can do supremely well. Blows he took – blows that shook him, staggered him – but he scarcely noticed them. His whole consciousness was in his right arm and the stick it spun. A revolver, tossed from a smashed hand, exploded ten feet over his head, a knife tinkled like a bell on the brick sidewalk, a man screamed as a stricken horse screams.

As if the role of blind chance and accident didn’t loom large enough in the course of life, it’s a corrupt world too in these stories. Cops and judges are on the take. Gangsters run whole towns. National crime syndicates design and operate elaborate scams. And ordinary people are ground down, going along to get along.

Low-lives are cunning and effective at the felonies they commit and scams they pull off. Experience makes them good at their jobs, but their criminality is also a manifestation of personality kinks. This reminds me of John Bingham’s heartless malefactors – neither the basic rules of decency nor the damage they do to the lives of other people means anything to them. This doesn’t mean they are not empathetic – their ability to see things from others’ point of view is keen enough to enable them to manipulate other people like tools. In these stories when they fess up to crimes, they do so with relish over their accomplishments.

Readers of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald will enjoy these stories

Come Sunday by Isla Morley

Review by Mirah W. (mwelday)

I was drawn to Come Sunday because it is partially set in one of my favorite places, Hawaii.  Come Sunday is about the trials of deep emotional loss and the toll it takes on people.

Abbe grew up in a tumultuous home in apartheid South Africa.  As soon as she was able, she escaped to the United States where she eventually meets Greg.  Greg becomes a minister and takes a position in Honolulu.  Abbe and Greg settle into Honolulu and have a daughter, Cleo.  Cleo is a strong-willed child who routinely frustrates her parents.  Slowly a happy life is replaced with religious doubts and resentment over a perceived imbalance of responsibilities in the family.

When tragedy strikes and Greg and Abbe lose Cleo they are forced to face the fractures in their marriage.  They each face their grief in a different way and the fracture between them grows deeper.   In her attempts to move forward, Abbe goes back to South Africa and comes face to face with her family history and tries to make sense of all she’s thought was true and how all of that affects her experiences and life choices.

I was torn at times while listening to this audiobook.  I had a hard time empathizing with Abbe; she came across as judgmental and hardhearted even before experiencing Cleo’s death and those characteristics were intensified after that tragedy.  Hawaii wasn’t featured as prominently has I would have hoped;   however, the narration was very good and the various characters’ personalities came through with the different voices used by the reader.

Night Swimming by Robin Schwarz

Review by Vicky T. (VickyJo)

What if, heaven forbid, you were told you only had one year left to live?  After the shock subsided, what would you do?  How would you spend the rest of the time left to you?  This is the premise of an interesting novel by Robin Schwarz called “Night Swimming”.

Our heroine is 34-year-old Charlotte Clapp.  After a routine physical, she is called back to her doctor’s office and given the devastating news:  she has cancer, the same type of cancer that took her own mother a few years back, and by the doctor’s reckoning, she has just about one year left to live.

Charlotte is in shock.  The unfairness of it all overwhelms her.  She has lived in the same small town in New Hampshire all her life.  She is single, having lost her boyfriend to her former best friend while nursing her dying mother.  She works in the bank in town, sees all the same people every day, knows every one of them, and basically feels that life is passing her by, all 253 pounds of her.  And now this.  One year left.

Charlotte remembers the last conversation she had with her mother, who confessed to Charlotte that, while she had loved her husband and was thrilled to have Charlotte as a daughter, she had some regrets.  She had always wanted to travel…to see Paris, Italy, the pyramids.  Her suitcases were purchased but never used, except as storage cases in the basement.  She pleaded with her daughter to live her life, and not have any regrets at the end.  Little did Charlotte know how soon that end was going to arrive.

And so, as Charlotte leaves her doctor’s office, a plan is brewing in the back of her mind.  She doesn’t have all the details worked out, but she does have something in mind.  She swings by the bank where she has worked for 15 years..and quits.  Then she goes home and between sobs, eats every bit of junk food in the house, drinks a bottle of wine or two, and passes out on the couch. When she awakens, she has another plan.

She spends her last day at work clearing out her work area of all the accumulated junk that piles up after 15 years.  A hastily-planned going-away luncheon is held for her, where she tells people she will head for Florida and Disney World, and then perhaps to New Orleans.  She offers to lock up the bank—one last time—and after everyone leaves, loads up two million dollars in small bills.  She hurries home, packs the money in her mother’s dusty, unused suitcases, dumps her car in the river, picks up a used Jaguar and heads off for Hollywood.  The thing is, she left in such a hurry (probably due to having robbed the bank of two million dollars) that she has missed the phone call from her doctor’s office, explaining that there was a mix-up between her chart, and the chart of a Charlotte Clapp from Durham.

The author has created a likeable character in Charlotte, someone quite a few readers will be able to recognize and relate to.  And of course, the premise of “What would you do?” is a fascinating one.  Schwarz gives Charlotte an earnest, yet amusing voice.  She finds herself in comic yet believable situations, and what could have been just a “chick lit” book is something much more satisfying.  This is Robin Schwarz’s first novel, and I look forward to reading more of her work!

The Dead Secret by Wilkie Collins

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

Friend and rival to Charles Dickens, Collins wrote this mystery between the readable Hide & Seek and his best novel The Woman in White. The Dead Secret is well-written enough but padding with irrelevant scenes hinders the pace of the story. Another problem is the plot. It’s absurd.

Just when the reader is wondering whether to bail, however, Collins will introduce a bit player or set piece that is too appealing to turn one’s back on. Mr. Phippin, wonderful comic relief, plays the martyr to dyspepsia. The housekeeper Mrs. Pentreath and steward Mr. Munder of the creepy mansion are very well drawn indeed. Their interview with Uncle Joseph gives Collins a chance to skewer pomposity and respectability (too bad Uncle Joe fails to be consistently fun). Finally, Andrew Treverton and his rotten companion Shrowl call to mind sleazy characters in Oliver Twist. In Hide & Seek, Collins puts a woman who is deaf at center-stage, but the use of a blind character in this one is not nearly as inventive or convincing.

So, loyal readers, read it for the characters, if plot is not so important to you. Another reason to read it is to sharpen the critical sense. Just where does Collins’ handling of the secret go awry? We’re able to guess the secret fairly early on so the element of surprise rather fades away.