Thursday Reviews: A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

A Farewell to Arms

Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway is often criticized for romanticizing war and glamorizing it as a test of manhood. There is nothing romantic about Hemingway’s tale of an American serving in the Italian army during World War I. Except maybe said American’s relationship with a Scottish nurse.

Lt. Frederic Henry is an ambulance driver for the Italian army in the north of Italy, where fighting, as it is on the better known Western Front in France, is a brutal stalemate. Henry is popular with his native cohorts, and it is Rinaldi, an Italian driver, who introduces him to Catherine Barkley. It’s not bad. He’s liked by his fellow soldiers. He has some authority, being a lieutenant, and Catherine promises to be a nice fling to break up the monotony of an endless war.

When Henry is wounded by shell fire, however, Catherine follows him to Milan while he spends the summer recovering. There, she becomes pregnant, and the two decide that they are already married. They just need a priest to make it official. They also decide to wait until after the war. Upon his return to the front, however, Henry is caught up in a retreat when the Austrians break through. During the retreat, he kills a sergeant for desertion, but then himself is rounded up by the “battle police,” little more than commissioned vigilantes, looking to kill any officer guilty of causing Italy’s defeat. He escapes in a river and flees to Milan where he and Catherine escape to Switzerland. They live an idyllic life in Montreux, long before some stupid with a flare gun burned the place to the ground, until Cat begins to give birth. How does it end? With Henry walking back to his hotel alone in the rain. You figure out the rest if you haven’t read it.

This is not The Sun Also Rises, a roman a clef of the Lost Generation’s trip to Spain. It does, like a lot of Hemingway’s best work, make copious use of autobiographical material. But Hemingway never saw the battles depicted, and his nurse lover, who never became pregnant by him, did not want to marry him. Hemingway is not telling his own life story. This is a man who, like so many in Europe in the 1910′s and 1920′s, was angry about World War I, seeing it as a pointless conflict designed to prop up a bunch of archaic regimes. He is particularly harsh towards Italy’s leadership and thinks little of America’s eventual entry into the war. All Frederic Henry gets out of the war is a ruined leg and a lost family.

Not very romantic at all, but then war is Zero Dark Thirty, not Hogan’s Heroes, isn’t it?

Thursday Reviews: Worst Enemies by Dana King

WORST ENEMIES

Dana King

It starts with a couple of scenes reminiscent of Strangers on a Train. Stock broker Tom Widmer is asked by another broker, Marty Croupcho, to kill his wife. They discussed killing each other’s spouses for months, but Widmer always thought it was a joke. Croupcho says he’s not kidding. His wife is filing for divorce that day. So Widmer does it, trying to make it look like a burglary gone bad. Too bad he’s no killer. He even leaves DNA evidence in the toilet when he throws up from nerves. Open and shut case. Right?

Well, no. Widmer is a slam dunk for Detective Ben Dougherty, “Doc” to his friends, of the Penns River Police Department. Penns River is suburb of Pittsburgh struggling to find its identity in a post-industrial world. Widmer himself is feeling age creeping up on him. He’s young enough to still have options but old enough to notice he’s alone. His partner is a retired Pittsburgh cop named Grabek, who’s good but does the least amount of work possible to get the job done. What makes this case odd is a second murder in an abandoned row house. The man is a known operator for what’s left of Pittsburgh’s mafia, but he also turns out to be “Marty Croupcho,” and not the Marty Croupcho who turned up at Widmer’s arraignment.

Worst Enemies is a very working class novel. There are no real power brokers in this one, except maybe a local mob boss who spends as much time running his car dealership as he does the remains of his criminal empire. Penns River is populated by a motley collection of Irish, Slavic, Italian, and black characters who used to make the steel and the cars and the appliances America buys. It’s not the depressed wasteland of the 1980′s and 90′s, but the town needs an identity it can’t seem to find.

There’s a certain small town vibe to King’s writing. Worst Enemies takes place closer to an urban center than Stephen King’s fictional Maine towns, but there’s a sense of history there, both personal and shared, that builds the connection with the reader. When a writer has you seeing the places where you yourself grew up as the story unfolds, often without realizing it, he’s done his job.

And done it well.

Thursday Reviews: Out Of Sight by Elmore Leonard

Federal Marshal Karen Sisco ends up in the trunk of a car with fugitive Jack Foley, who has just escaped prison in the Florida Everglades. It’s a strange encounter for Sisco. It’s her job to arrest Foley. On the other hand, when Foley gets away, she wonders how things might have been different if they met under different circumstances.

She soon finds out when one of Foley’s accomplices heads north to Detroit for a heist. For Sisco, it results in a difficult assignment for the Florida-based marshal. It’s Superbowl weekend in Detroit, which, for the Rust Belt, means cold and snow. Sisco’s fugitives have trouble adjusting, and so does she. She also finds herself crossing paths again with Foley. What happens?

It gets messy as Foley’s cohort goes north thinking of an easy heist against a bragging former convict and ends up in a home invasion. And Foley? What happens when the fugitive and his pursuer take a time-out?

The Compleat Kepler: What Next?

And so we have reached the end, 13 tales of crime from America’s North Coast. In them, Nick Kepler has taken down an unstable cop threatening two of his fellow officers, made a couple of domestic abusers disappear, solved a decade old murder, nabbed a sexual predator, watched the events of 9/11 while chasing a fugitive in an airport, and even disarmed a gun-wielding maniac in the nude. To say Nick Kepler leads an interesting life is an understatement.

The events in this collection start in 1999 and end a month after those in Northcoast Shakedown, set in the summer of 2002. So what’s next?

Well, Second Hand Goods, the follow-up to Northcoast, takes place about eleven months afterward. So you have that to read until the next Keplers appear. What are those?

For starters, there is a short story called “Gypsy’s Kiss,” a sort of sequel to “Roofies.” In it Gypsy informs Nick that she is finally getting out of the sex trade. And she wants Nick to be her final client.

Then there is Bad Religion. Nick is hired by a mega-church to find out where all the money’s going. One of the people getting ripped off is a known Russian mobster. And he’s not even one of the crooks involved.

Beyond that, I haven’t decided. I have a story outlined call Suicide Solution, wherein a friend of Nick’s commits suicide after betting his and his wife’s retirement money on a shady deal to redevelop an abandoned amusement park. But will it be a Kepler story? I originally started on this in 2005, when it looked like Second Hand Goods would hit bookstores the following spring. I had the entire Kepler series mapped out, and I figured Nick would be only a couple years behind the calendar when each book debuted. Oh, if I only knew!

One of the reasons I’m rethinking this is that Nick is fixed to the calendar. That might not be important to you, but the author needs to be able to undo something like that before he or she writes. So Suicide Solution would have to take place in May of 2005 if I kept up Nick’s established timeline. I really never liked the “ageless” character. I can’t see Nick being 35 in 2003 and 36 in 2013.

I can, however, see another character taking over. And the setting for this one offers new story ideas as well. We’ll see. For now, know that there are two Keplers in the pipeline. Coming soon.

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Thursday Reviews: Charlie Opera by Charlie Stella

CHARLIE OPERA

Charlie Stella

Charlie Pellechia takes his wife to Vegas in a last ditch effort to save his marriage. Unfortunately, she’s had enough of him and his love of opera. So what was supposed to be a second honeymoon is the end of their marriage.

Only Nicky Cuccia has other ideas. Nicky is a wise guy and thinks there should have been no consequences to grabbing Charlie’s wife’s ass. There were, however, as Charlie broke his jaw defending his wife’s honor. Cuccia follows Charlie to Vegas and proceeds to beat both of them up separately, through hired muscle, then tries to kill Charlie. But he can’t get that right. An aging mobster, dying of cancer, decides to turn before the job is done. Cuccia’s other hired hands are a vapid body builder and a would-be wise guy who loses his nerve easily. There very presence brings them into the sites of a nervous organized crime cop, a DEA agent out to save his own hide, and the psycho ex of a waitress whose roommate Charlie ends up with.

This is a little bit of a departure for Stella. The cops play a bigger role in this, and the main protag, the titular Charlie, is not a mobster. He’s a civilian caught up in Cuccia’s macho vendetta. Plus the story takes place almost entirely in Las Vegas, new territory for Stella, who usually sets his stories in New York. Stella is juggling a lot of balls here, including a subplot about a Vegas cop whose wife is cheating on him. It’s more complex than Jimmy Bench Press and Eddie’s World, and unlike the follow-up, Cheapskates, is only very loosely tied to the world of those books.

The Compleat Kepler: Lady Luck

Lady Luck

The last completed story from the Deep Purple Project takes its inspiration from the last album of Deep Purple’s original run, Come Taste the Band. One of that album’s signature songs was “Lady Luck.” All I needed was the title. It would involve casinos.

But casinos did not exist in Ohio at the time. Here in Cincinnati, that was irrelevant. Drive west out US 50 or I-275, and you arrive in Indiana. There are three riverboat casinos within fifty miles of downtown Cincinnati. Not good for Cleveland. My septuagenarian aunt informed me that she had to go to West Virginia, Michigan, or even Canada to play her slots when this was written. (Ohio now has four casinos.)

So Nick was going to have to hit the road. He would have to go look for a husband who absconded with the kids’ college fund to count cards. At the time, I had just read books by Steve Hamilton and Laura Lippman that inspired a couple of story elements. Steve writes about the area around Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, which has several Indian casinos. That made the perfect place for Kepler to go on a wild goose chase. Frustrated, Nick consults the element I got from Laura’s By a Spider’s Thread. In that novel, Tess is part of an Internet group where female private investigators share information. It wasn’t much of a stretch to think there were other such groups for PI’s or that Nick would use it. So on the group Nick consults, a colleague from Cincinnati complains about a guy at Louisville’s casino (really in Indiana as Kentucky has yet to legalize non-track gambling) It sounds like his errant husband, and we pick up the story at Lawrenceburg, Indiana’s Argosy Casino (now Hollywood Casino).

I’d actually never been in the old Argosy, but I knew the area well enough, including the extended parking. I actually used Belterra Casino (about forty miles west of Lawrenceburg) as a model. I also decided to make this more interesting than just a missing husband story. I had just seen the movie Rounders, where Ed Norton and Matt Damon play two hustling poker players who get into hock with a Russian nicknamed KGB. A lot of illegal poker games are played in every city, including Cleveland. If our missing husband upset the apple cart by not being the mark some seedy thug wanted him to be, he would likely also have someone looking for him.

The story starts out in the Cincinnati area, where I’ve lived since 1991, and follows the normal route to Cleveland. Even the truckstop where Nick finally phones his client after dealing with the muscle and the husband once and for all, is a standard pit stop for anyone heading north.

It’s also the only story in this collection that takes place after Northcoast Shakedown. I tried to work in Elaine, but the story required some judicious trimming. Still, it brings Nick into the period between Northcoast and Second Hand Goods.

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The Compleat Kepler: Love Don’t Mean A Thing

Love Don’t Mean a Thing

This story was originally written for an anthology called Sex, Lies, and Private Eyes, edited by Michael Bracken. Unfortunately for Michael and the rest of us who contributed, the publisher pulled the plug in a fit of reorganization. So after two years of waiting, the story reverted back to yours truly. I turned around and submitted it to Thrilling Detective. Needless to say, editors Gerald So and Kevin Burton Smith were happy to have a story that was already largely edited by the time it came over the transom.

When it was accepted, one of the first things Kevin told me was that Kepler does a damn fine Humphrey Bogart in this one. And with the last line in the story, I have to agree.

The original impetus for this story was sex. Now, Nick has no problem hooking up, as evidenced by Northcoast Shakedown and Second Hand Goods. In the latter, he not only is seduced by his client, but he and Elaine…  Well, maybe I’ll wait until Bad Religion is released to tell you more about that.

But sex was never central to the story, except maybe in “Roofies” (which was about sexual assault). The anthology had “sex” right in the title, so this story was going to be about sex. Since I was doing these shorts chronologically, this story ended up occurring about a month before Northcoast Shakedown. In that one, Nick is meeting with Tanya, a witness to one of his cases, at his favorite watering hole. A red-headed waitress named Audrey gives Nick a dirty look for bringing this glamorous blonde into “her” bar. I decided to build on that dirty look.

I’d attempted to do a couple of stories about Nick and Audrey before, never successfully. When this story came about, with sex as its reason for being, I decided that Audrey had always had a crush on Nick. But this being a crime story, there needed to be a crime. But did the crime need to happen before the story began? This was not a mystery. It was noir, and there is nothing more noir than a divorced man who doesn’t understand that his marriage is not only over, but it’s over by court decree. So Audrey marches into the bar, divorce papers in hand, very hungry to devour a man. It just so happens Nick is game and agrees to be Audrey’s dessert.

It’s not unknown that ex-husbands (and ex-wives and ex-lovers) often stalk those who dumped them. Audrey’s ex is one such unbalanced person and sneaks into his old house, gun in hand, ready to teach a lesson to his “unfaithful” wife and the man encroaching on his “property.” Oh, friends and neighbors, this is not something Nick Kepler tolerates, not even when he’s caught in the nude at gunpoint. He manages to subdue the wayward ex and proceeds, with considerably less guilt than before, to repeat some of the events of “A Walk in the Rain.” Yes, our wayward ex-husband goes into the trunk, but he’s alive for the trip to a remote beach out near Cedar Point, the coaster mecca 60 miles west of Cleveland. There, Nick releases him from the trunk, but, at gunpoint, tells him to walk to Canada. It’s night. It’s freezing. It’s Lake Erie.  Our boy will drown before he even reaches the breakwall. Nick relents and strands him out in the middle of nowhere, then dumps his car on the freeway.

But was Audrey just after a good time? Or did she know her ex would come after her if she brought a man home? Was there a reason she decided to sleep with a man with a reputation for bringing the abuse back to abusers?

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Thursday Reviews: Needful Things by Stephen King

Needful Things

By Stephen King

A new store is opening in Castle Rock, Maine, a “wide place in the road” near Portland. It is called Needful Things, and the owner, Leland Gaunt, is ready to make deals. He will sell you your heart’s desire for an unbelievably low price, but only if you agree to do him a little favor. “Just a harmless pranks,” he always assures his customers.

Only the pranks aren’t so harmless. Like any small town, Castle Rock is seething with petty squabbles, long-smoldering grudges, and self-centered persecution complexes. The “harmless pranks” often set one person against another. Eventually, it turns violent.

Even without these sudden eruptions in violence, Sheriff Alan Pangborn (The Sun Dog, The Dark Half) is suspicious. Who is this Mr. Gaunt? Why didn’t he know about him before the shop opened? By the time Pangborn turns his sites on Gaunt, his “cross wiring” of the town’s people starts to bear homicidal fruit.

Needful Things is almost a retelling of Salem’s Lot, King intending it to be the final story set in the fictional Castle Rock. This, of course, does not pan out as several later King novels mention or even take place in Castle Rock. Gaunt is Barlow from Salem’s Lot. The townspeople don’t become vampires. They become barbarians. But where Gaunt differs from Barlow is that Barlow is reproducing. Barlow is Dracula settling down in small town America. Gaunt is a supernatural version of Batman’s nemesis, The Joker, sewing bloody chaos and enjoying every brutal second of it.

My one complaint is that Needful Things is wordy. King does weave an intricate plot, and no one can make a fictional town, especially one prone to supernatural doings like Castle Rock, seem real the way he does. However, the book does drag on and on, as though the epics It and the Dark Tower books (which are actually shorter up to this point) have become his template. It might not be so bad, but King already told this story once.

Jennette Marie Powell

Full disclosure: Jennette became my li’l sis around 1984. I’d call her my “sister from another mother,” but that doesn’t work as well as “brother.” But you get the idea. Anyway, I’m interviewing Jen here about Hangar 18, her latest offering.

Hangar 18 is a departure for you, leaving the Saturn Society behind for now. Tell us about it.

Hangar 18: Legacy is about a psychic Air Force officer and researcher, Adam Keller. Adam’s used to sensing the thoughts and emotions of others, so he keeps people at a distance. But when a desperate, telepathic voice demands rescue, dark thoughts of death threaten to overwhelm him. Then he meets a woman whose attraction to him—and his to her—quiets, if not silences, the voice. All he has to do is risk his heart and experience the emotions he’s long denied himself.

Skeptical programmer Lisa Stark wants nothing more than to finish the subliminal messaging software she’s worked on for over a year, a project someone wants badly enough to kill for. Then Adam discovers the voice plaguing him is an imprisoned extraterrestrial thought dead for decades. Lisa’s software is key to freeing the being and silencing the voice… if she lives to finish it.

This book has a long history. How did it start out?

LOL long history is so true! However, I don’t think you’re referring to the legends that say the wreckage from the Roswell incident were brought to Wright Field in 1947. As you know (but others probably don’t), Hangar 18 began its life in 1999, as Nothing to Hide, my first completed novel. There were no aliens, just a psychic, a skeptical programmer, and someone who wanted to kill her. And lots of first-book problems, like boring scenes with nothing more than a character thinking. Yet it sold to an epublisher, and was released as an ebook in 2002. However, this was five years before Amazon’s Kindle came out, and before ebooks were really viable—the only ebooks that were selling well were erotica, which my book was far from! After its contract ended, I let it sit, but when I decided to publish through Mythical Press, I knew I had to resurrect it. At its core, it was still a good story. So I completely rewrote it, without even looking at the original. This time, I added aliens, and put the mind-control software where one would expect to find it being developed—in the military. And no more boring scenes with people just thinking!

You work at Wright-Patterson AFB (where the real Hangar 18 is located). How prevalent are the rumors of aliens on the base? Or is it more the realm of Internet denizens in search of a good conspiracy?

LOL no one admits to believing this stuff—it’s all just for fun! There’s not even a Hangar 18 there, nor was there ever. The generally-accepted explanation for the Roswell incident was that the “spacecraft” was actually cold war surveillance equipment. Captured Soviet technology would have certainly been shipped off to the military’s Foreign Technology Division, which was indeed located at Wright Field. That I believe!

Do you think you might return to the Saturn Society after two books and a short story?

Yes! I’m working on another short story right now, and letting ideas ferment for a third novel. No ETA for that one, however.

The RWA features prominently in your blogs and your marketing. Why not tell us a little about that group?

RWA is Romance Writers of America, a professional organization for romance writers. RWA is different than other professional writers’ organizations in that writers at any point in their career are welcome, including unpublished writers. IMO, it’s hands-down one of the best places to learn craft and business, especially if you’re fortunate to have a good local chapter. This is true even if you’re not writing romance, but perhaps another genre, with some romance in it. I’m certain I would not be as far along as I am now without my friends from the Ohio Valley RWA.

I listen to a lot of music when I write. What have you been listening to lately?

I find a lot of inspiration in music! Pink Floyd has been drawing out the muse for working on my short story this past week. And I can almost always dig into something while listening to my favorite, Front Line Assembly. This may explain why I come up with so much weird stuff.

What are you working on now?

At the moment, I’m working on another Saturn Society short story, which may be included in an anthology with work from some of my OVRWA friends. I’ve also started planning and outlining a futuristic romance I’ve wanted to write for years. And I’m still getting ideas for the third Saturn Society novel, so that may be coming up within the next year!

Who are you reading?

Right now, I’m reading a contemporary young adult novel—Come Back to Me by Coleen Patrick, and on the treadmill is crime fiction—Dirty Martini by J.A. Konrath. I have a collection of short stories about some Kepler guy queued up on my Kindle for after those are done.

Thanks so much for having me, Jim!

The Compleat Kepler: Might Just Take Your Life

Might Just Take Your Life

This title immediately suggested a sequel to “A Walk in the Rain,” where the consequences of Nick’s actions come back to haunt him. In the original, Nick’s friend Angie kills Joe Kopinsky, her abusive ex, after getting his gun away from him. Rather than face a grilling by the prosecutor, she convinces Nick to make Joe disappear. Nick does so and admits that, had Angie not killed him, he would have.

But did Joe have family? Wouldn’t someone miss him? Someone does, and he decides to avenge his brother’s death. There’s a whole section of Medina County where Nick (as well as yours truly) grew up that, at least in the early 2000′s, was still mostly farmland. And this was the perfect place for Joe Kopinsky’s brother to employ some painful persuasion techniques on Nick. He wants Angie. He’s convinced Angie killed Joe, but Angie’s good at keeping a low profile. She only emerges in public places when she’s in Cleveland and stays out of sight the rest of the time.

I had to walk a fine line with this one, which was written for the old Hardluck Stories ezine. I didn’t want it to become torture porn. Fortunately, Andy Kopinsky had many of the same problems his late brother Joe had. It gave Nick the leverage to manipulate him into getting careless.

Originally, when I had the entire series mapped out, I planned for the final Kepler novel to bring Nick full circle. His final case would be a direct result of “A Walk in the Rain,” complete with an ambiguous ending of a wounded Nick cradled by Jackie Bouchaine (Northcoast Shakedown, Second Hand Goods) and saying, “I got him.” Fade to black. Did he die?

Did Jimmy in Quadrophenia? Only the reader would know for sure.

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