Edged in Blue

I’ve embarked on a project to read a biography of every president of the United States, including the obscure ones famous more for their facial hair than their accomplishments. So far, I’ve read Edmund Morris’s Theodore Rex and David McCullough’s John Adams. I’ve come away with new respect for Fox News. Their more outrageous assertions (those not spewed by Sean Hannity, anyway) are pretty tepid compared to some of the outright libel printed about Adams and Jefferson in the early days of the nation or perpetrated by Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst.

What I’ve also noticed is that it’s easy to pick out a relatively objective biography of a president up to about Nixon, and even then, some even-handed accounts are coming out about Tricky Dick. In fact, I would have to say Ronald Reagan is the most recent president you could find a biography about without a large amount of political ax grinding. Oh, sure, you have to hunt for one that doesn’t make him out to be either evil incarnate or a Conservative God to whom Rush Limbaugh sacrifices ex-wives.

You can’t read about a sitting president objectively. It’s not possible. While I wouldn’t put money on the current George Bush being the Second Coming of Harry Truman (for starters, too rich. Truman’s net worth in 2008 dollars was less than mine.), there is the cold, hard fact that history is going to need time to make its own judgment.

Similarly, I’ve yet to hear anything about Bill Clinton that doesn’t make him out to be either a treasonous serial rapist or the greatest president since Lincoln. No happy (or in George W. Bush’s case, unhappy) medium.

So why not George HW Bush, aka Bush 41, Bush the Elder, Bush the Wiser, or The Man Who Should Have Pulled Out? Considering the elder Bush’s presidency was largely finishing up Ronald Reagan’s paperwork and bringing in the Cold War for a soft landing, one might think it possible to give a thoughtful, objective overview of his time in office after 15 years.

Thanks to his son, everything Bush, Sr, did is going to be regarded in light of what Bush, Jr, did. Even if George W. Bush had the most successful presidency in history, his taking office a mere eight years after his father colors and shadows any accomplishments or mistakes made between 1989 and 1991. John Quincy Adams had the luxury of taking office 25 years after his father and with a different party. Benjamin Harrison, remembered largely for being Grover Cleveland’s seat warmer, was the grandson of a president, and one who promptly got sick and died after taking the oath. But W? He started out in his daddy’s shadow and ended up eclipsing him.

Granted, no account of a president’s life can be wholly objective. Historians have agendas like anyone else, and everyone - even me, who says he has no party or ideological loyalty - has an agenda. It’s human nature. But the farther a president fades into history, the more we have to rely on their papers, letters (and someday emails and texts), and records and less on the media’s usually questionable account of the day’s events.

So who’s the most recent president you think you can read about without feeling you’re being lectured by some pompous ass like Hannity or Michael Moore?

Heart-Shaped Box: A Novel by Joe Hill

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Joe Hill definitely is a chip off the old block in Bangor, Maine, but one thing he has over father Stephen King: He gets to the point much faster.

In Heart Shaped Box, Hill tells the story of an Alice Cooperish rock star gone to seed who’s duped into buying a ghost. In the worst way, Jude Coyne’s love-’em-and-leave-’em ways have literally come back to haunt him and anyone who helps him. Frightened, but undeterred, his Goth girlfriend Georgia sticks out the ordeal, nearly meeting her end several times. Over the course of the book, Georgia comes to identify, and eventually bond with, Coyne’s dead ex-girlfriend Anna. The ghost is angry for what Jude Coyne did to Anna. It may surprise you, though, that the late Anna is not.

Hill has clearly grown up on movies. His prose describes supernatural events in ways that suggest well-known movie and music video special effects. It’s a cinematic book, but not all that distracting.

Overall, great job and hard to believe this is a first novel.

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Amazon sent me some happy news yesterday.  The mad Dr. Gischler’s Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse, Neil Smith’s Yellow Medicine, and Reed Farrell Coleman’s Empty Ever After are all on their way.

And sitting on deck after I read those is Tom Nolan’s biography of Ross MacDonald.

Whoo hoo!  July will be Tom Waits, cold beer, and hot noir!

My wife and kid are going to go sooooooo sick of hearing Waits blaring from my office as I tear into these.  Maybe I’ll toss in Johnny Cash for Nita.

Severance Package by Duane Swierczynski

From Goodreads.com/Facebook

rating: 3 of 5 stars
The latest in a loose series that started with THE WHEEL MAN, Duane Swierczynski continues peeling off the layers of the secret organization known as “CI6.”

Jamie DeBroux reports to work at the end of paternity leave for a “management meeting.” There, his boss reveals that they are the front company for a super-secret intelligence agency. The company is being shut down, and to protect national security, everyone in the room is to be killed. They have two choices. If they try to escape, the elevators have been rigged to ignore their floor, and the fire towers have have rigged with sarin gas. Or they can mix themselves a mimosa that’s been laced with a painless poison.

And then sweet, corn-fed secretary Molly Lewis shoots her boss in the head.

What follows is sort of a combination of DIE HARD and THE TERMINATOR, done up as a strange hybrid of conventional novel and comic book. No surprise to the format. Swierczynski has been getting work with Marvel on the CABLE and PUNISHER series of late.

The book is laced with places Swierzy has been in real life: Madison, Wisconsin, Scotland, and, of course, his beloved Philadelphia. However, whereas THE WHEELMAN and THE BLONDE were very strong novels, SEVERANCE PACKAGE comes in as the weak sister of the series. Part of it is the format, using comic book illustrations every few pages and writing almost as though each page were a series of panels. On the downside, Swierczynski’s usual skillful plotting suffers as the story becomes a thin plot punctuated by violent scenes. On the upside, he gets points for trying this format out. It does make the story move faster, and eventually ramps up the suspense.

While I was a little disappointed with this one, it did do the one thing a series novel should do.

Made me ask what happens next.

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My review of Libby Hellman’s Easy Innocence is now live at January.

Gerald So tagged me last week for Patti Abbott’s Friday Forgotten Books. So for my pick, I choose Jeremiah Healy’s Blunt Darts. It’s Healy’s debut work and the debut of his John Francis Cuddy. Cuddy, we learn, is a former MP who had it all. He could have been a top executive at an insurance company, except he had this thing called… um… What’s the word I’m looking for?

Oh, yeah. Ethics. They fired him for having ethics.

The story itself is one you’ve heard before. Wealthy family, lots of secrets, corrupt small town police force. But all that serves to introduce us to one of the PI genre’s best characters. We meet Cuddy in the unemployment office, BSing the entrenched bureaucrat about his employment prospects. At first, it seems he’s given up and is milking the system. As it turns out, he’s just become a private investigator, and revealing that might cost him his unemployment check before he can build a client base.

It was that initial scene that endeared me to Cuddy. His MP past serves more as background fodder than a means to make him a tough guy. (Lee Child successfully takes the opposite tact with Jack Reacher, but then we want Reacher to be a tough guy, don’t we?) Cuddy also has an unusual conscience in his late wife, whom he regularly converses with at her graveside.

Cuddy is very much a work in progress in this one. We don’t hear his wife’s side of the conversation, a surprisingly believable plot device in later books. Cuddy’s new lover, Nancy Meagher, does not appear. And Healy spends more time differentiating his creation from fellow Boston PI Spenser.

I always thought the Cuddy series, and its Detroit counterpart, the Ben Perkins series, were grossly underrated and underappreciated. Alas, both series are out of print. Too bad, because I think it’s time to revisit Cuddy’s Reagan-era Boston.

My review of Jennifer Jordan’s anthology, Expletive Deleted, is now live at January Magazine.

I just finished reading Homicide: A Year of Killing on the Streets.  Definitely the best book about crime I’ve read in a long time.  It’s also responsible for one of those moments of serendipity that catch you by surprise from time to time.

This morning, I bussed it to work, driving from one cushy suburb to another to catch an express bus downtown.  The express busses from Eastgate and Anderson follow the 275 Loop into Kentucky, then shoot into downtown Cincinnati via I-471.  I see nothing but franchise food, shopping malls, and 4-8 lanes of  asphalt all the way in most mornings.

There are no express runs during the day, however.  Cincinnati’s idea of streamlining public transit is to gut it.  I took the 24, an interminable route that takes one from downtown through Pill Hill (where no fewer than five hospitals are located) over to Hyde Park, and eventually to Anderson.  Yeah, making what used to be a 45 minute run into almost an hour and a half really streamlines it.  No wonder Ohio is in the toilet.

The 24, however, also cuts through Over-the-Rhine on its way up to the University of Cincinnati and Pill Hill.  It crosses Court Street out of Downtown into OTR and stays there until it finds its way to Short Vine and the university campus.

As we turned onto Liberty, one of the city’s most troubled streets, and then onto the northern leg of Sycamore, I found myself reading David Simon’s account of a ghetto shooting in Baltimore and Sgt. Terry McLarney’s cynical take on the scene with a suspect almost too stupid to appear in a Victor Gischler novel. (Almost.  Gisch can work magic with even the most willfully stupid people as characters.  Man’s a genius.)

Stopping for a moment to give my eyes a break, I peaked up over the edge of my reading glasses* and noticed…

Jesus, I’m going through that same exact neighborhood.  The buildings looked tired.  The residents looked tired.  And just as I witnessed years before delivering pizza in Madisonville and East End, the locals didn’t jump out at me with a gun or a knife or yelling boo.  But the street names and intersections all figure prominently more often than not on the morning news on WLW.

Cincinnati’s worst homicide rate in recent years was under 95.  Most years, it’s below 90.  So people who get killed “where it doesn’t count,” as the most recent episode of The Wire puts it, tend to make the news more often here than they do in other cities.

But something else happened.  It occurred to me, as I write the current novel, that some of the places I write about are places I never see anymore.  Since I quit delivering pizza as a second job almost six years ago, I don’t see the Madisonvilles and East Ends anymore.  I don’t find myself dropping coworkers off in Avondale or Evanston, delivering pies to unemployed former workers from Cincinnati Milacron.

No one ever pulled a gun on me in those eight years I delivered pizza, but that world was close and very real.  You couldn’t miss it.  Not long after I quit that job, more than a few writers criticized George Pelecanos for not portraying some of the more rundown neighborhoods of DC very accurately, that somehow, his dialog and descriptions were dead wrong.

It infuriated me because, first off, to a person, every one of those people criticizing GP was white.  I was angry because they seemed to have a distorted vision of how people in poor black neighborhoods behave (and why, something that gets overlooked a lot) that had nothing to do with the reality I’d seen over eight years.  (I found the Appalachian-based East End to be a bit scarier than Madisonville, probably because there’s nothing scarier than a drunk hillbilly on a Friday night.)  It angered me because GP was pitch perfect, writing dialog I’d heard every night from customers, from people I met on runs, and even from some of my coworkers.  Mind you, some of the people I got angry with I still call my friends.  They hadn’t seen what I’d seen.  It still pissed me off.

That was then, when my forays into that world were still fresh in my mind.  Today, while riding a bus through OTR and reading a book by a friend and coworker of George Pelecanos, I got a sharp reminder of how long I’ve been away from it.

I hope when I finish my own book, I’ve done it justice.

*Yes, I wear reading glasses now for smaller print.  God, when did I get old?