Love’s Lovely Counterfeit by James M. Cain

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

James M. Cain started his novel-writing career with three bangs: The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), Serenade (1937) and Mildred Pierce (1941). A falling off was Love’s Lovely Counterfeit (1942) mainly because some characters have all the life of cardboard cutouts and the ending is pure melodrama. Even the background of chiseling weasels doing corruption as business as usual in city politics seems half-baked. Still, as a hard-guy mystery, it might be worth reading for its surprises and lurid moments, if you’re trapped on a trans-Pacific flight and have run out of other goodies to read.

But back to lurid. After not getting it on with Big Sister, the anti-hero gets close to Man-Crazy Little Sister by getting her to realize that they are both bad to the bone. They fall for each other, boy do they:

Obviously, they had got to a point where the word love, if either of them had uttered it, would have been somewhat inadequate. Insanity would have been better, and there was some suggestion of it as she raised her face to his.

The period touches and slang are cool.  Cain must have liked describing people because he’s damn skillful at it. This about some bank robbers: “four wild kids, anywhere from eighteen to twenty, scared so bad the slobber is running out of their mouths, couple of them coked to the ears, their suspenders stretched double from the gats they got in their pants.”

After LLC, in 1943, the uneven Cain wrote the immortal Double Indemnity. In 1956 Hollywood based Slightly Scarlet on LLC, with Arlene Dahl and Rhonda Fleming playing the sisters.

Readers that like David Goodis and Jim Thompson would probably like Cain. But novices should start with the three big bangs mentioned at the start of this review.

Vampires Need Not…Apply? by Mimi Jean Pamfiloff

Review by Cynthia F. (frazerc)

I’m not sure how the author manages to produce consistently funny stories while dealing with serious issues like mass murder, torture, the end of the world and correct spelling of Mayan names but she does. I love the multiple viewpoints and frequently snarky dialogue!

This is book 4 of the series and I really can’t suggest starting here. Well, you could – the author does a fairly good job of giving you the basics of the backstory – but I can’t recommend it. There is WAY too much backstory to absorb; including the ins and outs of the various characters and how the plot has developed to the opening of this book. So back up to Accidentally in Love with…a God? and hop on the rollercoaster…

This series deals with the Mayan pantheon which is both a plus and a minus. The plus is it’s not peopled with the same Greco-Roman gods/goddesses/myths you learned about in seventh grade; the minus is the names are mentally tongue-twisting and the ‘specialties’ of the various gods are probably not familiar to the reader and frequently seem weird. For example: a major player in the story is Ixtab who we find out is the goddess of suicide. My contemporary, western sensibilities immediately kicked in with ‘Say what? Suicide needs its own goddess?’ And then there’s the whole who is related to whom issue in a ‘family’ group that puts the ‘dys’ in dysfunctional.

Like the other books in the series the immediate storyline is nicely tied up but the last page contains the requisite ‘oh my god’ teaser…

Needless to say I will be continuing this series.

The Woman In White by Wilkie Collins

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

Victorian era novelist Wilkie Collins is known for two long novels that were originally published in installments in a weekly magazine.  The Woman in White, say some critics, was one of the first mysteries, published in 1859, and The Moonstone, published in 1868, is considered – by no less than the likes of T.S. Eliot – the first detective novel or police procedural.

In The Woman in White, a young drawing master is unfortunate enough to fall in love with a young woman who has been promised by her father to a milord. After the marriage, the milord turns out to be neither rich nor a gentleman in any sense. Mystery revolves around the milord’s secret, known to a furtive lady dressed in white, who roams, forlornly but conveniently for the plot, nearby our main characters. I cannot give away in a review an inexplicable death, which adds to the whydunnit aspect of the story.

True, there are some slow spots, since we are, after all, in the world of the Victorian novel whose audiences liked drawn-out scenes and situations. Also true, in a couple of places Collins over-uses indirect speech, in which one character merely reports to another character what was said in a conversation with a third character. Overall, however, the narrative technique holds interest. The story unfolds from different points of view, thus forming a chain of evidence that is at once plausible and engrossing. A contemporary critic said Collins’ special merit is “that he treats a labyrinthine story in an apparently simple manner, and that the language in which he writes is plain English.”

And what characters! Sir Percival Glyde is an exasperated and desperate villain. His henchman Count Fosco is oily, cold, cautious, and ruthless. Hollywood well cast Sydney Greenstreet – the heavy in The Maltese Falcon – in the worthless 1948 movie version of the novel. The drawing master writes of the startling and ingenious Fosco, “Sincerely as I loathed the man, the prodigious strength of his character, even in most trivial aspects, impressed me in spite of myself”  Lady Fosco remains a malign presence.  Laura, the love interest of the artist, is ineffectual, inept, weepy, and subject to the vapors. But her weaknesses are balanced by the brave and reliable Marian Halcombe. As it was published as a serial, Collins reports that single male readers wrote to him, asking who was the living model on which Marian’s character was based, so that the writers could propose to ask her for her hand.

For its riveting plot, memorable characters, enthralling narrative technique, and ominous and weird atmosphere, this novel has never been out of print since its first publication 150 years ago. Collins wrote about 30 novels, but he considered this novel to be his best. So much so that he had inscribed on his tombstone the epitaph “Wilkie Collins, author of The Woman in White and other works of fiction.”

Darkness Rises by Dianne Duvall

Review by Cynthia F. (frazerc)

Darkness Rises – Immortal Guardians 04

This is the fourth book in the Immortal Guardians series and I have enjoyed them all.  This one is no exception. First a word about the series: there is a network of good guys – including humans, gifted ones, and Guardians.  The guardians are fang-bearing, blood-sucking good guys with assorted powers, the gifted ones are individuals with special powers, and the humans are just regular guys with skills and dedication. The bad guys are vampires – fang-bearing, blood-sucking ex-humans on a fast track to crazy. There is a vamp virus – if the person who contracts it is a gifted one they become an Immortal Guardian – if the person is a regular human they end of a vampire, a so far incurable transformation. Enough said.

The hero of this story is Étienne, one of the Immortal Guardians. While out looking for vampires one night he finds Krysta who is out trolling for vampires by pretending to be easy prey. To his astonishment she is apparently human and an extremely skilled fighter.  Since she intrigued him and was vastly outnumbered, he steps in and helps finish off the group of vamps she had lured. She is startled and assumes he’s a vamp also (it’s the whole fang thing) and escapes him with the help of her brother.

Étienne goes from intrigued to obsessed, following her on her nightly vamp-killing tours while trying to decide what to do. Then a paramilitary group starts hunting the Immortal Guardians (again) and they don’t care how much mayhem is caused to bystanders in the process. Étienne is hit with enough tranquilizer darts to bring him down while ensuring she has the time to get away. She doesn’t, of course, and he ends up at her home with her brother healing him. Now there are two humans with knowledge they shouldn’t have. And then there’s the paramilitary guys who might have followed them home…

The rest of the book proceeds with the developing relationship between Krysta and Étienne, the pursuit of the human mercenary threat, and, of course, killing vampires. Lots of action, I really enjoyed it. I look forward to more in this series…

There’s a series thread continuing from earlier books concerning Ami who is now pregnant. And then there’s Zach, and enigmatic character with wings who drifts in and out of the storyline – also introduced earlier. Their threads are unresolved and will undoubtedly form the basis for other books. Other characters from previous books continue to be major players in the storylines so it is better to read this series in order…

Immortal Guardians series

Darkness Dawns #1

Night Reigns #2

Phantom Shadows #3

In Still Darkness in Predatory #3.5

Darkness Rises #4

Murder by Matchlight by E.C.R. Lorac

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

Readers that like novels set in wartime London – Like Ministry of Fear (Greene) or The Untouchable (Banville) will like Murder by Matchlight, a 1944 mystery by now neglected E.C.R. Lorac (the pen-name of Edith Caroline Rivett). The danger of air raids is described:

He was soon driving westwards along the empty darkness of Marylebone Road – a darkness slashed by the incredible brightness of the traffic lights shining out at the road junctions ahead. Belfort Grove had the same quality as every other London street during the blackout: it seemed completely blank and dead, as though it were impossible that cheerful normal human beings could live and move behind the dead facade of blackened houses.

But that’s not all. When one character complains why go after the killer of a lazy thug who needed killin’ given that civilization is endangered by the war, series hero CID Inspector Robert MacDonald mildly observes that if private justice through murder prevails, it’d really be a nazified world then.

The climax also involves an incendiary bomb crash through the roof of a rooming house of the vic and the colorful characters who lived there with him. The characters are fun if thin, the plot strong, the solution surprising, the writing top-notch, as the quote above shows. I recommend this without reservation.  Dover Publications reprinted it in the 1980s so it pops up at PBS every now and then. Sadly, though Lorac was a prolific author, her mysteries are hard to come by.