ROUNDERS. Miramax,1998. Matt Damon. Edward Norton, Gretchen Mol, John Malkovich, John Turturro, Martin Landau, Famke Janssen. Directed by John Dahl.

   Included in the long list of things I didn’t know before, here is the definition of the work “rounder” as used in the title of this film: “a person traveling around from city to city seeking high-stakes card games.”

   It turns out, at least in this case, that a movie about poker players follows the same template as many a film about other sporting events, be they boxing, baseball, basketball and so on: protagonist loses big in the first twenty minutes, followed by a long struggle to recoup and get back in shape for a rematch, then of course the rematch, and (giving the ending completely away, perhaps) eventual victory.

   Note the use of my word “perhaps.” It is intentional.

   Poker games differ, perhaps, from the other sports I used as similar examples in that there is very little physical activity during the course of one. (There may be some afterward, however, warranted or not).

   There are two primary “heroes” in The Rounders. Mike McDermott (Matt Damon) who is both a young law student and an inveterate poker player, and his friend Worm (Edward Norton) who has just been released from prison, complete with debts incurred from before incarceration, plus interest. Object: find games to play to clear Worm with the mob, in spite of Mike’s promise to his live-in girl friend (Gretchen Mol) to stay clear of any such activity.

   When you’re addicted, promises are hard to keep, and of course Worm is a friend.

   Mike’s approach to poker to win by playing well. Worm can’t stop taking chances, just for the thrill of it, and thereby lies the tale.

   If you take me as a prime example, you can watch this movie, beautifully photographed in the dingiest byways of 1990s Manhattan (not a contradiction), without knowing anything about the rules of the various games played throughout the film. It might have helped, but once you realize what the basic template is that constitutes the structure of the whole setup and how it is (probably) going to turn out, you can skip the details.

   One last thought. If you would like to know a basic axiom of pick-up card games, consider this as a basic truth: “If you can’t spot the sucker in your first half hour at the table, you are the sucker.”

PHILIP K. DICK “Faith of Our Fathers.” Novelette. First appeared in Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison (Doubleday, hardcover, 1967; cover art by Diane Dillon and Leo Dillon). Collected in The Best of Philip K. Dick (Del Rey, paperback, 1977). Nominated for the Hugo Award in 1968 for Best Novelette of 1967.

   A civil servant in Hanoi, which incidentally seems to have won the war, is given an anti-hallucinogen so that he can see the reality behind the television image of the Absolute Benefactor. But is it reality when people see twelve versions? Or is it God? Barely succeeds as a story. (3)

MICHAEL MANN & MEG GARDINER – Heat 2. William Morrow, hardcover, August 2022; softcover, January 2024. Novelization of forthcoming sequel (in development?) to the film Heat (Warner Brothers, 1995; directed by Michael Mann).

   This.

   Is.

   A sequel, by director Michael Mann, and by successful suspense novelist, Meg, Gardiner, to the popular crime film, Heat starring. Robert de Niro, Brad Pitt, and Al Pacino,

   Okay, sorry, I won’t write all of the review in the style of the book. Unfortunately, unlike this book, I have some vague idea what syntax means and how sentences are constructed.

   If you have a copy of this book you have seen the rave reviews it received.

   I have no idea what these people were smoking.

   Heat 2 picks up where the film ends. Ghris Shiherlis (Brad Pitt) is wounded and hiding out in Koreatown hallucinating from his wounds and oxycodone while policeman Vince Hanna (Al Pacino) is hunting him. Neil McCarthy (Robert de Niro) is dead, but that won’t keep him out of the novel (I use the word reservedly) which switches back and forth from seven years before the events in Heat to now.

   The novel is written in a stream of consciousness fragmented jagged present tense voice that amounts to 613 page of nails on the blackboard prose. Reading it is as close to recreating the pain I used to suffer with Cluster Headaches as I hope to ever experience.

   You may want to borrow one of the oxycodone tablets Chris Shiherlis keeps popping, but honestly I don’t think drugs would help, though this book often reads as if it was written on them.

   I’m not going to go into the plot. Instead I’ll just quote a few short bits.

   Before I start you may want to find a bullet to bite on.

   And.

   Words. Fragments. Thoughts. A novel. Not.

   Did I mention metaphor and simile get the crap kicked out of them in this book?

   I really wanted this to be good. Where’s Elmore Leonard when you need him? Elmore Leonard? I’d settle for Orrie Hitt.

   I’m weary. Now. I need a. Drink. A Scotch. Maybe you. Do too.

   This is Heat 2. Be. Afraid. Very.

   Afraid.

JANE LINDSKOLD “The Drifter.” First appeared in A Girl’s Guide to Guns and Monsters, edited by Martin H. Greenberg & Kerrie Hughes (Daw, paperback original, 2010). Collected in Curiosities (CreateSoace, trade paperback, 2015).

   To begin with, here’s the first paragraph:

   Jane Lindskold is an author known for her stories of mythological fantasy – werewolves, shape-shifters, satyrs, merfolk, and unicorns, according to her Wikipedia page – but she wisely holds off on telling the reader was exactly the “trouble” is that she is on the trail of, but you can take it from me that that Wikipedia description is right on the mark.

   I will tell you this. Prudence Bledsoe is the kind of woman that when she rides into town, people notice. Not many women ride into town, you see, a drifter, you might say, on horseback, not one of the usual arrivals on the train or by stagecoach. That first sentence also lets us know that she is a woman on a mission, and I think the townsfolk know that, too.

   Jane Lindskold is a very good writer. Besides setting up the story as she does in the very first sentence, she also conveys the dustiness and the on-the-edge of nowhere feeling of the town and the townspeople. Cattle and sheep have been gruesomely killed, she learns, and young children have gone missing. And at length, Prudence Bledsoe’s own personal secret is revealed.

   This is not a classic unforgettable story, but any means, but it’s an effective one, and it’s a fine choice for the leading one in a collection entitled A Girl’s Guide to Guns and Monsters.

DASHIELL HAMMETT – The Thin Man. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1934. Originally published in abridged form in Redbook (December 1933). Reprinted many times. Film: MGM, 1945, starring William Powell & Myrna Loy. (A total of six films were made based on the characters.) TV series: NBC, 1957-59, starring Peter Lawford & Phyllis Kirk.

   Nick and Nora Charles are terrific inventions. Equals at witty repartee. Equals at powers of observation, if not detection. Equals at handling their booze.

   That’s what’s fun about the book: Nick and Nora. They’re screwball and they don’t care who knows it. But as screwball and drunk as they are, they’re still more deft than the daft coppers.

   Nick’s a retired detective. Retired since he married Nora and her rich uncle died, leaving enough for Nick and Nora to remain comfortably housed and soused from here to eternity.

   Nick wouldn’t be drug into any more detection, either, if he could help it. But help it he can’t. For a former client of his, the titular Thin Man, is a murder suspect. He’s disappeared, but leaves word with his lawyer that he wants Nick hired to find the real killer. Price is no object.

   Now Nick has no need of the Thin Man’s money. But gangster’s bullets, the cops, and the Thin Man’s ex and kids won’t leave Nick be. So he’s really got no choice but to solve the thing so he can be left alone.

   I’d remembered who ‘did it’, as this was probably the 3rd time reading it over the years. But it really doesn’t matter. The wit doesn’t grow old. And like Pound says, ‘art is news that stays news’. And this is art, for sure. At least in my book.

   A terrific, witty book. Nick and Nora are great fun to hang out with. The only thing I can’t figure is how the movie sequels got called “….The Thin Man….” (‘After…’, ‘Another…’, ‘Shadow of…’, ‘…goes home’, ‘Song of…’). Not to give anything away, but the Thin Man ain’t having any more adventures after this one.

STANLEY ELLIN – The Dark Fantastic. John Milano #2. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1983. Berkley, paperback, 1985.

   Stanley Ellin is one of the most honored of contemporary writers of mystery fiction. Beginning with his first story in 1948, he consistently won prizes in the annual short-story contests run by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. He is a three-time winner of the Edgar Award of the Mystery Writers of America: for Best Short Story in 1954 and 1956 and for Best Novel (The Eighth Circle) in 1958. Four other stories (the most recent in 1983) and one novel have appeared on the short list of nominees for the Edgar. His novel Mirror, Mirror on the Wall ( 1972) was awarded France’s Grand Prix de Littdrature Policifte in 1975.

   He was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America in 1969, and in 1981 received that organization’s Grand Master Award honoring his lifetime achievement in the mystery field. The point of this litany of awards is that they are all deserved. As a careful craftsman with an ear for language and a deep concern for its proper use, as an acute observer of the human condition, and as an inventive plotter with a flair for the unexpected, Ellin has maintained a consistent level of quality that makes him indeed a grand master of his art.

   A string of awards and a proven track record do not, however, guarantee that publishers will jump to accept a book with potentially controversial elements. The Dark Fantastic was rejected by several major publishing houses before being picked up by a relatively small specialty publisher. It subsequently gathered a stack of favorable reviews in the United States, sold to a major British publisher, and has become a feather in the cap of the Mysterious Press.

   The story alternates between two viewpoints: that of Charles Witter Kirwan, a retired college professor with madness eating at his brain just as cancer is eating at his body; and that of John Milano, a private detective first introduced in Star Light, Star Bright (1979), who specializes in the recovery of stolen works of art. Kirwan, reluctant landlord of an apartment building in a black neighborhood in Brooklyn, plans to blow up the building with himself and his black tenants inside. Among the tenants are the family of Christine Bailey, who works as a receptionist in a Manhattan art gallery currently under investigation by Milano.

   From this tenuous connection, the paths of Kirwan and Milano are drawn inexorably together. Ultimately, Milano is the only person who has a chance to uncover Kirwan’s plot; but can he stop it in time? Ellin tightens the screws expertly. and the suspense intensifies up to the very end.

   Kirwan’s chapters are in the form of transcripts of a tape-recorded journal in which he attempts to explain the reasons for his destructive plan, while recounting the day-to-day progress toward its accomplishment. The transcripts are studded with racial invective-not mere ethnic name-calling, but the type of inventive viciousness that an educated mind can apply to the expression of its prejudices.

   These passages make uncomfortable reading, especially in view of the skill with which Ellin takes us into Kirwan’s mind and makes us understand the familial and societal roots of his attitudes. Another source of discomfort for some readers lies in the explicit descriptions of Kirwan’ s sexual victimization of Christine’s teenaged sister.

   But Ellin handles this highly charged material with assured skill and without a hint of sensationalism. The book is a serious psychological study, a detective story, an unusual love story, and an exercise in down-to-the-wire suspense: a worthy addition to the author’s already impressive body of work.

         ———
Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

DOUGLAS PRESTON & LINCOLN CHILD – The Cabinet of Dr. Leng. Agent Pendergast #21. Grand Central, hardcover, January 2023; paperback, September 2023.

   Previously in the Pendergast saga in Bloodless, volume twenty, FBI Special Agent Aloyious Pendergast had discovered that his apprentice and companion Constance was in fact immortal and had grown up in the madhouse and mansion of terror of serial killer and mad scientist Dr. Leng in the 19th Century.

   Now as volume twenty-one, The Cabinet of Dr. Leng, opens, Constance has discovered a one way ticket back to the 19th Century where she plans to destroy Leng and save the life of her brother and sister leaving Pendergast trying to find a way to save her while his friend Vincent D’Gosta of NYPD Homicide investigates the case of the frozen curator of the Museum of Natural History where his first adventure with Pendergast, Relic, took place twenty-two books earlier.

   Have to catch my breath after that.

   And if that hasn’t chased you off…

   The long running Pendergast saga of bestselling thrillers has been one of the great modern pulp sagas, half mystery/detective mixed with SF, horror, the Gothic tradition, monsters, immortal villains (Wilkie Collins’ Count Fosco showed up as the villain in Brimstone), and whatever else the two have chosen to throw in the mix. Pendergast is a Holmesian figure given to eccentricity and mysterious statements and perhaps the best of the series has been the two trilogies the Diogenes Trilogy and the Helen Trilogy (Diogenes is Pendergast’s dangerous and mad brother and Helen was his wife) while the work in question is the first volume in yet another trilogy so a cliffhanger is guaranteed.

   You can be certain Pendergast and D’Agosta will manage to travel back to 19th Century New York to match wits with Dr. Leng (shades of Berkeley Square and John Dickson Carr’s Fire Burn and The Devil in Velvet) and there will be thrills, melodrama, and twists enough for a French serial novel by Dumas, Sue, or, Feval (maybe all three) with a smattering of Universal Pictures Horror classics and Hammer Films.

   It is all done straight faced with absolute conviction, and whatever the flaws of the two writers, spinning a plot and creating interesting characters are not among their weaknesses. It’s all a bit like the theater of Grand Guignol where half the fun is how well they get away with all the theatrics. Mad men, serial killers, ancient monsters, mysterious Tibetian secret knowledge, and super villains haunt these pages all pitted against the eccentric and high-handed Pendergast and by now a small army of regulars who aide him.

   Pendergast is surely one of the great modern detectives however wild his detections get, modeled on Holmes, but more likely to face the kind of enemies Sexton Blake and Arsene Lupin did, and where else do you get dialogue like this bit addressed by Pendergast to D’Gosta:

   
   You just don’t get dialogue like that often these days. Frozen curators and nostalgic zombies just don’t haunt the pages of pulp fiction as the once did back in the good old days of The Spider, Operator # 5, and The Green Lama.

   This review is a bit tongue-in-cheek, as are the books, but the books are highly enjoyable and excellent time-killers that keep readers happily turning pages and coming back.

WILLIAM MAXWELL – So Long, See You Tomorrow. Serialized in The New Yorker, Oct 1, Oct 8 1979. Knopf, hardcover, 1980. Ballantine Books, paperback, 1981. Vintage, softcover, 1996, 2011. Included in Later novels and stories: the Chateau; So long, see you tomorrow; stories and improvisations, 1957-1999, Library of America, hardcover, 2008. National Book Award winner, finalist for the 1981 Pulitzer Prize.

   William Maxwell grew up in the 1910’s and 20’s in a small farming town in Illinois. With a mother dead of the Spanish Flu and his nose always stuck in a book, he had few friends.

   His one friend was a boy named Cletus. Cletus and William would play in the scaffolding of William’s unbuilt home. Until one fateful day.

   That day, Cletus’s dad murdered the man who’d been his dad’s best friend. But friend turned fiend when he started sleeping with his wife.

   Dad murdered the friend, the shot singing thru the prairie, then drowned himself in the swimming hole, tying a stone to his leg.

   William Maxwell never saw his friend Cletus again. But once.

   He saw him in high school. In Chicago.

   They locked eyes. But William turned away. And walked past.

   He never forgave himself for this act. And fifty-some-odd years later, he tried to write about it, to purge his guilt. He wrote the story. The story of Cletus and his father, his mother, and his father’s friend, his mother’s lover, and a murder.

   A murder that ripped a boy’s life asunder. That stole two fathers and a mother’s love. That left a boy alone. Without a friend to recognize him, in the halls of a Chicago high school in the 1920’s. And the guilt.

         ——————-

It’s a soft and wistful wisp of murder’s memory. It’s short and yet seems much longer. It lingers. Like life. It was good.

ANNE McCAFFREY “Weyr Search.” Novella. Dragonriders of Pern #1. First appeared in Analog SF, October 1967, Reprinted in Nebula Award Stories Three, edited by Roger Zelazny (Doubleday, hardcover, 1968), among others. Nominated for the Nebula AwarD in 1968 for Best Novella of 1967. Winner of Hugo Award that year for that category.

   The traditions and ballads of Pern glorify the dragons and their masters, but the time of crisis is past, at least for the time being, and forgetfulness has come easily, A new Weyrwoman is needed for the dragon queen about to be hatched, and dragonmen venture forth to find a suitable girl.

   Well written, but there exists too much feeling of looking on from the outside, A sequel is definitely demanded. The map is of little use.

Rating: ***½

AARON ELKINS – Fellowship of Fear. Gideon Oliver #1. Walker, hardcover, 1982. Popular Library, paperback, 1986. TV series: Quoting from Wikipedia “Gideon Oliver is a prime time television series that ran on the ABC television network between February 1989 and May 1989 as part of the ABC Mystery Movie rotation, along with B.L. Stryker, Kojak and Columbo. On the air for only five episodes, the series starred Louis Gossett Jr., and was created by Dick Wolf.”

   The early 1980s spawned a great many new mystery writers, and Aaron Elkins is one of the best of them. This first novel introduces us to Gideon Oliver, a young anthropology professor (Elkins himself teaches anthropology in northern California) who signed up for a summer teaching stint in Europe with the U.S. Overseas College. He’s recovering from the death of his beloved wife the year before and needs a break from that reality. And he’s never been to Europe.

   Oliver gets a change of pace, all right. Far from the confines of academic life, he’s cast as the main character in an international spy ring — but not until he’s been robbed, attacked, and followed all over Europe does he take it seriously. He then teams up with John Lau, a U.S. security officer, who’s not quite so naive about these matters. After being suitably impressed by Oliver’s fine investigative mind — he is a physical anthropologist, after all, and used to solving mysteries with little more than a sliver of bone and some ash for evidence — Lau teams with him and they attack the spy operation with fresh enthusiasm.

   Elkins has a good sense of contemporary character, dialogue, and plot. Gideon Oliver is a good man, and Elkins is good, too. He writes sparsely, to the point, and is cagey enough to keep us wondering until the very end.

   Elkins’s second novel, The Dark Place ( 1983), also features Oliver and is set in the Olympic National Park in Washington State. It also has the distinction of being the first mystery to involve the ongoing hunt for Sasquatch, otherwise known as Bigfoot.

         ———
Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
   

      The Gideon Oliver series —

1 Fellowship of Fear (1982)
2 The Dark Place (1983)
3 Murder in the Queen’s Armes (1985)
4 Old Bones (1987)
5 Curses! (1989)
6 Icy Clutches (1990)
7 Make No Bones (1991)
8 Dead Men’s Hearts (1994)
9 Twenty Blue Devils (1997)
10 Skeleton Dance (2000)
11 Good Blood (2004)
12 Where There’s a Will (2005)
13 Unnatural Selection (2006)
14 Little Tiny Teeth (2007)
15 Uneasy Relations (2008)
16 Skull Duggery (2009)
17 Dying on the Vine (2012)
18 Switcheroo (2016)