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.

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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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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The Compleat Kepler: Roofies

ROOFIES

So which Deep Purple song inspired this one? There’s a song they did on their 1973 album Who Do We Think We Are? called “Mary Long,” a dig at British moral crusader Mary Whitehouse. There are a number of other titles I could have pulled from that album for story fodder: “Woman From Tokyo,” “Smooth Dancer,” “Super Trooper,” and “Rat Bat Blue,” the last of which could have been slapped on anything and made a cool title for a PI story.

But “Mary Long” starts with the lines “Mary Long was a hypocrite/She does all the things she tells us not to do.” That stuck with me. I changed it to “Harry Long” to make him a man. Obviously, his nationality went from English to American, so the change in gender and location immediately began generating ideas. So who was Harry Long, and why was he a hypocrite?

Maybe Harry’s a fine, upstanding citizen. I made him a middle-aged man who does all that white, middle-class suburban stuff: Joins the Rotary, active in his church, etc. There was one of those silly Freemason conspiracy shows on History at the time, so I decided, “What the hell. Let’s make him a Freemason.” Why?

They tend to frown on their members cheating on their spouses and indulging in various vices that might draw unwanted attention. I may not buy into the whole dark fantasy of the Freemasons scripting all of history, but even I know they are a secret society. And Harry is not the kind of secret they want to keep. Why?

Because Harry likes to go to the strip club. And it’s not the Masons or the Rotary Club or his pastor who’s worried. It’s his wife, who hires Nick to tail him. As the story begins, Nick is about to write this case off as a paranoid wife with a very busy husband. It happens. Then Harry goes into Silky’s, and we are introduced to one of Nick’s favorite informants.

Gypsy is a stripper and a call girl whose history with Nick dates back to his early days as a PI. She was his informant way back when and took a bullet for him when he tried to save her from some unsavory characters. In gratitude, he got her off heroin. She is slowly working her way out of the sex trade, but will do anything for Nick. And Nick would do anything for her.

When Gypsy realizes that Harry has been slipping some of the girls rohypnol, aka “roofies” or “the date rape drug,” she demands Nick do something about it. Nick tries to get his pal Rick Reese involved, but the police can’t really do anything without hard evidence or a girl to submit to a drug test right after the fact. Furious, Gypsy sets a trap for Harry, using herself as bait.

The real story here is in the backstory between Nick and Gypsy. She is loosely based on Elaine from the Matt Scudder series, Scudder’s hooker girlfriend who is saving up and investing to get out of the trade. But Gypsy is a rougher character, having to claw her way up further than Elaine to escape the life she’s leading. And that bullet she took?

That pretty much tells you everything you need to know about Gypsy and Nick.

The Votes Are In

Over the last couple of weeks, I asked for input on what book I should release next. To recap, those choices were…

• Bad Religion – the next Kepler novel that still needs a little work
• The Compleat Winter – the collection of non-Kepler short stories
• Winter of Discontent – the blog in book form
• An ebook of me writing about rock n’ roll

To the three of you that voted, thank you.

Seriously, though, the overwhelming opinion is that I should do Bad Religion next.

The Compleat Winter and the rock and roll book tied for second.

Nobody wants to read this blog as an ebook. But then, you already get the blog for free, don’t you?

Bad Religion will appear some time this summer.

The Compleat Kepler: Cold Cocked

Cold Cocked

The Deep Purple song that inspired this one was an obscure one off Machine Head called “Pictures from Home.” Some would ask, “Why not ‘Highway Star’ or ‘Lazy’ or ‘Space Truckin”?” Or, for that matter, why not “Smoke on the Water?” Well, actually, I did come up with a story inspired by “Smoke on the Water,” but it’s a lengthy one involving a fictionalized version of the abandoned Chippewa Lake Amusement Park near where I grew up. I outlined that one, and it may or may not become the fourth Kepler novel. I have not decided yet.

I took all the titles from the album and tried to come up with an image. “Smoke on the Water” was pretty obvious. The old park was, until the land was finally cleared in 2010 for development, prone to arson fires. “Pictures from Home,” though, didn’t go the way I expected it. Those who know the song tend to fixate on the lines “I’m alone here/With emptiness, eagles, and snow,” which doesn’t work for a private detective prowling the mean streets of Cleveland. There’s nothing empty about Cleveland. Eagles there are a band featuring Don Henley, Glenn Frey, and former Clevelander Joe Walsh. And snow? You’re not alone in the snow in Cleveland. There are two million people in that whole corner of Ohio who want butcher Punxetawney Phil and Buckeye Chuck for lying to them about snow.

But the title… Now that’s different. Pictures from home? The story starts with a picture. And Nick’s taking the picture. I decided to make that a shocking picture. He’s photographing a carefully staged murder scene. The idea is to show the woman who tried to pay him to kill someone the photo. When she hands over the money, in swoops Nick’s pal, Homicide Sergeant Frank Windsor, to slap the cuffs on her, and the “deceased” shows up at the police station, they have a slam dunk for prosecution. Only someone cold cocks (hence the title) Kepler and the “deceased” dies for real in this one. Now, both Kepler and Windsor are suspects. And it’s up to Windsor’s partner Bertkowski (who first appeared in “Just Like Suicide”) to straighten things out.

Megan Powell, the editor of the old Shred of Evidence zine, snatched this one up, having published “Full Moon Boogie.”

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