Mystery

Charlie Huston, Guest Blogger: Another Bloody Mess

Mystic_arts [Ed.: Charlie Huston's latest book, The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death (Amazon's pick as Best Book of the Month for January), descends into the grisly underworld of crime scene clean-up, appropriately inscribed with his indelible signatures: hilarious, inappropriate dialogue; outrageous supporting characters; and another bloody wreck at the intersection of Money and Violence. Honoring the theme of the novel, Charlie is posting on Omnivoracious all week, sharing "true stories about messes I've seen, helped clean up, and made." See more posts, and get more at his blog, pulpnoir.com.]


FLUIDS 101


Bartending often serves as a introductory course in bodily fluids.

Call it Blood, Spit, Urine and Vomit 101: A general survey of liquids and fluids, viscous and non, generated and/or expectorated by the human body under alcoholic duress.

Most people audit it in college.  Sit in a few times, get a feel for the material, and decide it's not for them.  Others sign up as soon as they see it in the catalogue.  The take advanced topics and specialities.  A few attend seminars, endure orals, become masters.  The select, willing to invest the time and effort required to compose a thesis, are eventually granted the status of doctors in the art.  Whether you advance from there into the professional ranks depends greatly on your ability to translate the theoretical into the concrete. 

It's one thing to talk about the puke you just saw sprayed all over the inside of the can at the local off-campus, it's another thing entirely to be the guy with the sponge and the mop.

I was the guy with the sponge and the mop.  Not that I employed them very often.  Not as long as the effluvia was restricted to the confines of a single bathroom in any establishment with two conveniences.  

Brother, that's what out-of-order signs are for. 

Anything on the open floor, anything in great enough quantity to puddle, that was another matter.  A little pride of position, please.  Let's get the regurgitate off the floor before someone slips and falls in it.

Not everyone was so well schooled in their calling.  I've walked into bars that reeked of excrement.  Human excrement.  Unmistakably human excrement, floating in a thick strata all its own in the dead air of the place, while the reeling drunk bartender did a back bend over two stools to allow slobbering customers to take body shots of Don Pedro out of her belly button.

As you move up the bartending ladder, away from frat bars (that's the gutter, well below the bottom rung that is generally occupied by transient-junkie bars located withing two blocks of bus stations) and up toward fine dining establishments (same booze and behavior, more veneer), the fluids become more rarefied. 

Less puke, more blood.

Odd, but true.

Not the kind spilled by violence, but quite a bit of accidental blood.  Chalk it up to a higher proportion of inexperienced heavy drinkers, a greater likelihood that customers sufficiently monied to pony up for an $18 martini may be of an advanced age and more prone to the stumbles, or the chances that any drinking taking place is in the context of a special occasion or a business account (both incite an overestimation of one's capacity for top shelf booze, vintage wine, and caustic digestives.)

B fell into the advanced age category.  God knows he had a hollow leg.  I'd watched B and his boyfriend pass through opening rounds of Manhattans, knock off a warm-up bottle of Prosecco before moving on to Barolo, ease into desert on two glasses on limoncello, pause for a sip of port before closing on a tide of grappa (speaking of caustic materials), and sashay out without the slightest totter.

Which is why drunkenness did not rate high on the list of reasons explaining why they walked out of the place one night, and made it halfway up the block before B keeled over, dropped dead-weighted, and cracked his head on a steel trap that lead to someone's basement.

A customer standing out front, waiting for a table on a summer night, came inside and asked for towels.  I brought the towels.  I also brought a chair.  But when I saw the amount of blood, and the sprawl of B's limbs on the sidewalk, I dismissed entirely the idea of easing him up to the chair. 

"I want to get up."
"I know, B, let's just hang here for a bit."
"This is silly.  Who are these people?  I just fell, that's all.  This is silly."

There were some people standing around.  Not rubberneckers, it was a quiet neighborhood and these were neighbors.  They wanted to help.  There was nothing to do.  Just stand around while I held towels to B's head and watched them turn slowly red.  B's boyfriend was holding B's hand.

"He just fell down. He just fell.  We didn't even have anything to drink.  Just a bottle of wine.  We were walking and he just fell down.  He didn't trip.  He just fell down."
"I want to get up.  This is silly."

B kept trying to stand and we kept gently holding him down.  This was clearly one of those don't-move-them accident scenarios. 

Blood was all over my hand, running up to my wrist, dripping onto the trap, pooling.

The EMTs showed up.

They asked B some questions.  His boyfriend tried to answer and they hushed him, wanting to hear B put it together, listening for signs of concussion. 

In the end they loaded him on a gurney, allowing his boyfriend into the back of the ambulance, and pulled away, no sirens, no need to race, B was going to be fine.

I went back to the restaurant.  Someone had stepped behind the bar while I was gone and I asked him to stay there for a few more minutes while I found a couple plastic to-go bags, walked back to the scene of the accident, sopped some blood from the trap, dropped the ruined towels in the bag, and took them down to the basement where we stored our trash barrels, and where I dumped them.  Before going upstairs I stopped at a slop sink, rinsed my hands and arms, doused them in bleach, rinsed, repeated, washed with soap and hot water, dried off, and went back up to the bar.

B was never quite right after.  It was months before I saw him again.  I gathered he'd had a stroke.  And then his boyfriend started coming in alone. 

The blood that I'd smeared over the trap down the street was hosed away by a porter or a super, washed into the gutter. 

     I'm Charlie Huston.  I wrote a book about trauma scene cleaning and family.  It's called The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death.  I'll be here all week telling true stories about messes I've seen, helped clean up, and made. 
    Be well,
    -c

The Secret New Year's Resolutions of Detectives, from Huston, Meaney, Tremblay, and Berry

      Huston  Blackblood  Little sleep      Manualofdetectionlg

In honor of Charlie Huston's guest blogging this week, I thought it might be fun to get New Year's resolutions from him as well as John Meaney, Paul Tremblay, and Jedediah Berry, all three of whom have unusual noir/detective novels coming out this spring. Except the twist is, these are their detectives' resolutions. So now it's Amazon readers' turn to track down some clues: just what can you deduce about the books from these resolutions? No matter what you come up with, I can guarantee all four novels are feasts for fans of noir and imaginative fiction.


Web Goodhue (The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death
, Charlie Huston)

  • Figure out what that thing is growing at the back of the fridge.  Kill it if it tries to breed.
  • Get the decomposed dead guy smell out of my favorite jeans.
  • Remember to call my mom, remember to call my mom, remember to call my mom.
  • Remember not to let mom get to me when I call her.
  • Apologize for being such a d--- lately.  To everyone.
  • Don't apologize to my dad because he's a bigger d--- than I am.
  • Learn how to get tear gas smell out of curtains.  There's good money in that.
  • Renew Fangoria subscription.
  • Talk to that guy about that thing.
  • Try to get out of bed before noon at least one day a week.


Donal Riordan (Black Blood, John Meaney)

  • I will recharge my heart every three days, with more than one minute to spare.
  • I will not be disturbed by the strange ideas of other zombies.
  • I will try to remain in cities where the sky is always deep purple, and the only place to wear shades is indoors.
  • I will try not to examine my own emotions so closely that they disappear.
  • I will run in the catacombs every day.
  • I will keep my Magnus fully loaded at all times.
  • I will be kind to cats.

Continue reading "The Secret New Year's Resolutions of Detectives, from Huston, Meaney, Tremblay, and Berry" »

Amazon SF/F Top 10's Jack O'Connell's Own Top 10

Jack O'Connell's surreal noir novel The Resurrectionist made Amazon's Top 10 Science Fiction/Fantasy Books of 2008. O'Connell is one of the best writers of dark fiction I know, often mixing noir with strange elements that skirt the edge of fantasy and horror. There's really no fiction writer quite like him. I thought it would be interesting to ask him for his own top 10 books read in 2008. I'll be posting more such lists over the next week. For more from O'Connell, check out this link to some blogging he did this past summer. - Jeff V

     Resur

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Donald E. Westlake, 1933-2008

Westlake_donald_600

Donald E. Westlake died on Wednesday night, just before the New Year, and with him died Richard Stark, as well as the no longer active writers Tucker Coe, Samuel Holt, Edwin West, John B. Allan (author of one book, the wonderfully subtitled Elizabeth Taylor: A Fascinating Story of America's Most Talented Actress and the World's Most Beautiful Woman), Judson Jack Carmichael, Curt Clark, Timothy J. Culver, J. Morgan Cunningham, Sheldon Lord, and Alan Marshall. Westlake was all these, as well as his best-known characters, Westlake's bumbling crook John Dortmunder and Stark's coolly efficient thief Parker.

There's a quote at the top of the endless bibliography on Westlake's own site that says, "I believe Amazon knows more about me that I do. However, here is most of what I know." The vast hive that is Amazon may indeed know everything about Westlake, but this representative doesn't know as much as I might, so I direct you instead to Sarah Weinman, who is sad and stunned at the loss (75 is much too young to lose someone as merrily alive and productive as Westlake) but is constructing a wonderful list of links to things already out there on the web and tributes coming out now. Every one that I've followed so far has been worth the trip, but a few favorites are his conversation in Newsweek with fellow pseudonymist John Banville about writing under two names (and Banville's appreciation of the Stark novels, written just before Banville's own Benjamin Black books began appearing), a tribute of sorts to his notorious co-creation, the 70s TV megaflop Supertrain, and Westlake's 2001 piece for the Times about how in the mid-70s he suddenly found he couldn't write as his more lucrative Stark persona until writing the screenplay for The Grifters two decades later, and channeling the Stark-like style of Jim Thompson, opened that vein once again. Here's a bit from the latter:

But then, in 1974, Richard Stark just up and disappeared. He did a fade. Periodically, in the ensuing years, I tried to summon that persona, to write like him, to be him for just a while, but every single time I failed. What appeared on the paper was stiff, full of lumps, a poor imitation, a pastiche. Though successful, though well liked and well paid, Richard Stark had simply downed tools. For, I thought, ever.

It seems strange to say that for those years I could no longer write like myself, since Richard Stark had always been, naturally, me. But he was gone, and when I say he was gone, I mean his voice was gone, erased clean out of my head.

The photo I borrowed above is from the Times too: I love the image of this genial-looking man, in his cardigan and sheepskin slippers, happily split between his two typewriters and his two comic and brutal personas. (His apparently pleasure in his work reminds me of one of my favorite images of a writer, Jill Krementz's photo of Isaac Singer that's on the cover of The Jewish Writer (although the impish glee with which his fingers are poised over his keys is not fully appreciable even in the large image on our site).)

084395357801_mzzzzzzz_ I don't know how you decide the next book you read (I'm sure it's not just what I tell you!). For me, especially before I started getting a flood of upcoming releases in the mail each day, it was often some combination of bookstore serendipity and the slow accumulation of recommendations from other readers. Those two combined a year or so ago when I finally picked up my first Westlake: after all the admiration I'd read for him (and Stark), often from Terry Teachout, had built up into a background roar, I came across a lovely little reissue, in the Hard Case Crime series, of one of his first books, 361. I loved the little package, I loved the cryptic title (I am a sucker for a book titled with a number), but I think it was this paragraph, the second in the book, that really sold me:

I was a mess. A twenty-three-year-old bum with mixed-up German and English in his head, two suitcases full of garbage, no plans. It felt fine.

Boy, that's enough to set you going, isn't it?  "I was a mess.... It felt fine." Needless to say, it doesn't feel fine for long...

Somewhere I came across a quote that Westlake was the "Neil Simon of crime" (presumably for his Dortmunder books), but at the same time (per Banville), it seems clear that he may have been our Simenon as well. I have a taste for baroque, or rather opaque, stylings at times, but I'd recommend his refreshingly stripped-down style (which of course is opaque in its own ways) for anyone trying to figure out how to write. I expect I'll be reading Westlake and Stark for a long time to come, now that I've begun, and I get the sense that he will end up being one of the writers who last long beyond our own time. His latest (and last?) Dortmunder book, Get Real, is set for release later this year. --Tom

Exotic Noir from Akashic Books: Trinidad, Paris, Istanbul

One of the more ambitious and exotic mystery short fiction projects of the past few years has to be Akashic Books' original noir series, which has branched out from volumes like Baltimore Noir and Bronx Noir to Havana Noir, London Noir, and more than 20 others. Each book features noir short stories by writers living in the featured city. The wealth of material presented reflects the current depth, worldwide, of the mystery genre.

Noirparis

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Michael Crichton: 1942-2008

It was an absolute shock to hear the very sad news today that award-winning author Michael Crichton has passed away at the age of 66. His family said that he had been fighting a "courageous and private battle against cancer", adding, "He will be profoundly missed by those whose lives he touched, but he leaves behind the greatest gifts of a thirst for knowledge, the desire to understand, and the wisdom to use our minds to better our world."

Inspired by his experience as a doctor and science background, his internationally bestselling high-concept thrillers often served as cautionary tales of the perils of technology. He's most famous for Jurassic Park, but his career as a writer also crossed over to television as the creator and producer of the long-running series ER. Many of his novels were adapted for the big screen, including The Andromeda Strain, Rising Sun, Jurassic Park, Disclosure, and Congo.

See more books by Michael Crichton.

Below is a 2006 clip of Crichton on The Charlie Rose Show, talking about his book Next.

--BTP

Tony Hillerman, 1925-2008

Hillerman_tony_3 As you've likely heard, Tony Hillerman, whose series featuring Navajo Tribal Police detectives Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee made him one of the most beloved of American mystery masters, known as much for the atmosphere of his New Mexico settings and the humanity of his characters as for his classic plots, died on Sunday of pulmonary failure at the age of 83. The New York Times has a lengthy obituary, by Marilyn Stasio, and Sarah Weinman is collecting other links to tributes and appreciations, including one that everyone is linking to, a moving story from Deanne Stillman, a student of his when he was beginning the series and who has gone on to write her own books about the West, including the recent Mustang. Here's an attempt at a complete list of his books:

Leaphorn/Chee series:

Other fiction:

Nonfiction:

Children's Books:

Anthologies:

About Hillerman:

--Tom

Stephen King at His Most Graphic

 

Today at Comic-Con it was announced that the always experimental Stephen King is offering an original 25-episode graphic video adaptation (running approximately two minutes each) of his previously unpublished short story, "N."
Included in his upcoming story collection, Just After Sunset, "N" concerns a shared obsession between a psychiatrist and one of his patients.

Continue reading to watch a preview of "N" or visit the NisHere website for more details. The entire series will be collected on a DVD available in a limited-edition collector's set of Just After Sunset. "N" will also be adapted as a comic book series in 2009. Viewers will be able to purchase "N" online, and in five-episode blocks on Amazon Unbox. The first episode will be available on Monday, July 28, with a new episode shown each weekday through August 29.

King says: "I'm always interested in new delivery systems for stories and always curious about how those systems work with the old storytelling verities. This one, it seems to me, works extraordinarily well."

--BTP

 


 

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It Happened One Knife: Humorous Companion to Summer Movie-Going

Okay, so It Happened One Knife is a terrible pun on the movie title It Happened One Night, but don't hold it against Jeffrey Cohen--either the title or the knife. Cohen, who has been described as "the Dave Barry of the New Jersey Turnpike" (which actually makes him, er, Jeffrey Cohen), is a first-rate comedic mystery writer. It Happened One Knife features independent movie theatre owner Elliot Freed. Elliot Freed couldn’t be happier—his all-comedy-all-the-time movie theatre has gotten a makeover, he might be getting back together with his ex-wife, and he's lifted his ban on non-comedies so he can show his projectionist’s gory film-school debut. Then things go seriously wrong. The film goes missing and one of his boyhood heroes is implicated in a fifty-year-old murder. And that's just the beginning of Freed's troubles...

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The Resurrection of Jack O'Connell, a True American Original

                      Jackoconnell           Resur

Jack O'Connell's The Resurrectionist is one of the most original American novels of the year. A quest by a father to save his son, a tale of mad scientists and dream-logic, the story of a band of "freaks" on their own strange journey, and the chronicle of an odd coma clinic, the book defies easy classification. As I wrote in my recent Washington Post Book World review, "I've read The Resurrectionist twice now, and both times it came as something of a revelation. It seems odd we should care so much about the freaks, for example, when we know they're merely characters in a boy's comic book. Nor should the dream-life of a coma patient be so resonant, and yet it is."

The Resurrectionist has been reviewed by the LA Times, BookPage, The San Francisco Chronicle, and many others. The New York Times Book Review wrote of the book, "“To call Jack O’Connell’s novels imaginative, or even original, doesn’t begin to say it...There’s something both exciting and unnerving about [his] kind of hallucinatory writing.” Ron Hogan at Galleycat also posted a very nice feature. A website for The Resurrectionist exists at Enter Limbo.

The novel comes nine years after O'Connell's last, in part for reasons revealed in the interview below and in part because his previous novel, Word Made Flesh, "was an extremely dark book. By the time it was published, I had two young kids. And I didn’t want to go back in the darkness for a while. So I spent a couple of years writing a satirical road novel. It’s a book I still like but my agent convinced me that it was not what readers expected or wanted from me. And that it might diminish whatever small readership I’d built up over these last 15 years. So I put it in a drawer and launched Sweeney’s story. Which was soon invaded by a troupe of wandering circus freaks." Other novels by O'Connell include the cult classic Box Nine, The Skin Palace, and Wireless, all set in his iconic, uniquely American creation, the rustbelt city of Quinsigamond.

As a long-time fan of O'Connell's unique surreal noir approach to fiction, I was thrilled to have a chance to interview him. When I asked where he was while answering my emailed questions, he replied, "I’m in the lab. The sepulcher. The dreaming vault at the top of the house. Hermetically sealed and insulated with 40 years worth of collected pulp. It’s about 5 a.m. and I’m stupid with jet-lag..."

Amazon.com: Where did your city of Quinsigamond come from? How has it changed over the years?
Jack O'Connell: Quinsigamond is my home-city as refracted through a quarter century of fever dream. I’ve lived my whole life within about three square miles of central Massachusetts. That was not the intention. No kid ever fell so hard for the standard clichés of an imagined writing life. I haunted the corner Rexall store and memorized the bio-blurbs on the rear covers of the paperbacks. Was long convinced that I needed to travel the globe, drive dynamite trucks, pan for gold in the Yukon, and fight fascists in Spain in order to become a writer. Things didn’t work out that way. And so, to paraphrase Thoreau, I have traveled much in my old, rustbelt, native city.

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