Sun 29 Nov 2020
MURRAY SINCLAIR – Tough Luck L.A. Ben Crandel #1. Pinnacle, paperback original, 1980. Black Lizard Books, paperback, 1988.
It’s been a while since I read this one. If it weren’t for the notes I made while reading it, l don’t think I’d remember any of it at all. What makes this so surprising, to me at least, is that I’ve always been partial to novels about hack Hollywood writers and rundown private eyes, and I was really looking forward to this one.
Anyway. Ben Crandel is the hack writer , making do with cheap porno novels (are there any other kind?) as his movie-writing career seems to be going nowhere fast. Then a friend of his, an ex-prostitute named Vicky, is found murdered, and he’s forced to pick up a new sideline, that of amateur detective. Crandel talks snotty to some ultrasensitive cops, however , and he’s immediately tossed into jail for a while.
There is also some business about a tontine. I thought they’d been written off as a plot device long ago. Complications are provided by a complex set of family relationships which I admit I never did figure out, and the whole affair is about as crazy as any pulp novel that’s ever been published.
Which, for those of us who dote on such stuff, might have worked out as a huge plus. Dashed with the appropriate amounts of cynicism, there’d have been hopes for this story yet. The cynicism is contrived and phony, however, and the pace, which starts out slow and then becomes even slower, never manages to pick up any traction at all.
According to my notes, this is how I felt about it a couple of weeks ago: “Except for one unbelievably imaginative sex scene, the book fairly crackles with boredom.”
In retrospect, I don’t think it was that bad, but what you could say is that it certainly didn’t match my expectations.
Rating: D
The Ben Crandel series —
Tough Luck L.A. Pinnacle 1980
Only in L.A. A&W 1982
Goodbye, L.A. Black Lizard 1988
November 29th, 2020 at 4:23 pm
John Gardner, the American one, wrote about what he called DisPollyana, an unearned phony cynicism that he complained was all too common in popular fiction. He was mostly writing about SF, and unfairly and wrongly pointed out Harlan Ellison, whose cynicism was hard earned if anyone’s ever was, but in books like this it is easy to see what he meant.
The problem with writing tough guy is that at some level you have to be a bit of one, at least emotionally, in order to make it work. The phony stuff shows all too clearly.
November 29th, 2020 at 4:44 pm
Absolutely right, David, and yet…? See the next two comments, Paul Herman’s and my reply.
November 29th, 2020 at 4:38 pm
So you must have asked yourself (as I did after reading this review), why did Black Lizard reprint this book? For the most part, B.L. did a fabulous job bringing back lost gems.
November 29th, 2020 at 4:43 pm
You’re exactly right, Paul. When I saw Black Lizard reprinted it, it really puzzled me. Everything else they’ve done, from David Goodis and Jim Thompson on down, has been top notch hard boiled noir. Obviously they saw something in it that I didn’t.
November 30th, 2020 at 6:52 am
I’m pretty sure I read this one when it came out, nearly 40 (!) years ago, but even your review didn’t bring it back to me, other than the fact that I wouldn’t have read a second one.
November 30th, 2020 at 7:22 am
It’s a lot of books under the bridge for me as well, Jeff. If you’d have asked me what remembered about this book before I found this old review last week, I’d have said “Nothing about the story itself, but I know I didn’t care for it,” and that’s all.
Now that I’ve seen my review again, I still can’t remember anything else about it except what I wrote then.