Rebecca Bradley launches Shallow Waters

© Rebecca Bradley

My blog friend, Rebecca Bradley, has launched her debut novel Shallow Waters, the first in her DI Hannah Robbins series. 

Rebecca’s crime novel is about teenage murders and a killer on the loose. She whets your appetite some more with this blurb.

“When the naked, battered body of an unidentified teenager is found dumped in an alleyway, post-mortem finds evidence of a harrowing series of events. 

“Another teenage death with the same MO pushes DI Hannah Robbins and her team on the Nottingham City division Major Crimes Unit, to their limits, and across county borders. In a race against the clock they attempt to unpick a thick web of lies and deceit to uncover the truth behind the deaths. 

“But it doesn't stop there. When catching a killer isn't enough, just how far are the team willing to push themselves to save the next girl?”

DI Hannah Robbins will return in 2015, says Rebecca.

Rebecca Bradley lives in Nottinghamshire, United Kingdom, with her family and her one-year old Cockerpoo, Alfie, who keeps her company while she writes. She says she needs to drink copious amounts of tea to function throughout the day and if she could, she would survive on a diet of tea and cake while committing murder on a regular basis, in her writing, of course.

Once a month Rebecca hosts a crime book club on Google+ hangouts where you can live chat about a crime book everyone has read and has members in the UK, the US, France, and Australia. She blogs regularly at rebeccabradleycrime.com.

Shallow Waters is currently available on Amazon and Kobo in all countries.

The 3Cs wishes Rebecca and her novel, a police procedural, the best of readership and sales.

Stone in the Crick by Granville Wyche Burgess, 2014

I received a review copy of Stone in the Crick by email recently. It is authored by Emmy-nominated writer Granville Wyche Burgess of Greenwich, Connecticut. 

Photos: www.granvilleburgess.com

Stone in the Crick, is a tale of mystery, romance, intrigue, and danger set against the backdrop of a traditional Amish community. According to the email, Burgess was inspired by his own marriage to an Amish-Mennonite wife. 

I have not read the novel but I loved the cover. It’s refreshing to look at. This is what the blurb says.

“Rebecca Zook feels as stuck as a stone in her family farm’s crick. On the surface, the twenty-two-year-old Amish woman seems happy enough. A talented quilt-maker, Rebecca is engaged to Jacob, an honest, God-fearing man with a successful farm of his own. Jacob would make most young women proud to be his fiancée, but Rebecca remains restless and unsure. Whether she’s performing her chores or working at Mrs. Ansbacher’s quilt shop, Rebecca finds herself resisting the Amish way of life despite her love for her family and her culture. Even her quilting seems at odds with her heritage. Rebecca yearns to be an artist and knows self-expression is vital for true art, but the Amish feel any act that draws attention to the individual can lead to the sin of pride, so artistic expression is viewed with suspicion. 

“Then good-looking Englisher Gregory Pinckney comes to the county, searching for the birth mother he never knew. Despite their differences, Rebecca and Gregory find a common bond in their love of horses, especially Gregory’s horse, Bojangles. As their friendship grows, Rebecca’s heart is torn in yet another direction.

“Rebecca has competition though, when Wanda, the beautiful daughter of dissolute horse-farm owner Ivan Heminger, sets her sights on Gregory. Then Rebecca’s old boyfriend reappears, and her heart is torn in many directions. When an insurance scam almost kills Bojangles, events are set in motion that will test Rebecca’s faith and her family’s future. Is Gregory’s life in danger? Must the farm be sold? And does Rebecca dare follow her heart, or is she destined to remain a Stone in the Crick?”

Of the novel, Elizabeth Oberbeck, author of The Dressmaker, has said: “Burgess weaves a page-turner tale of intrigue and romance. A skillful, colorful, witty novel, full of humor and intelligence, with memorable, well-rounded characters who feel life-like enough to hug. Burgess has treated us to a rare glimpse inside the rich and complex community life of the Pennsylvania Dutch Amish.”

The author

Granville Wyche Burgess is a playwright, lyricist, novelist, director, actor, producer, and teacher, and also co-founder and chief executive officer of Quill Entertainment Company, a nonprofit dedicated to creating and producing original history musicals. He is the author of two screenplays, a novel about Shoeless Joe Jackson, and a children’s book. He has produced, directed, or acted in over fifty musicals and plays.

The 262-page novel is published by Honey Brook Publishers. You can learn more about the author at his website and buy the book at Amazon.

Bullet Proof by Frank Kane, 1951

For Friday's Forgotten Books at Patti Abbott's blog Pattinase.

If you think being a walking shooting-gallery is my idea of a good clean night’s fun, you’re mistaken,” Liddell retorted hotly. “I don’t like cluttering up the sidewalks with corpses any better than you do. Especially when one of them is liable to be mine.”

My 1968 Dell copy
© Prashant C. Trikannad

Bullet Proof is the fourth book in the Johnny Liddell Mystery Series by Frank Kane (1912-1968), an American writer of short stories and novels and radio shows and television series. He wrote some four hundred short stories and thirty novels, most of them based on adventures of his popular New York detective Johnny Liddell, as well as screenplays for the Mike Hammer, Special Agent 7, and The Investigators television series. 

He also wrote the script for one of his novels, Key Witness (1960). It was directed by Phil Karlson, who specialised in gritty and violent crime films, and starring a young Dennis Hopper.

More than anything, Frank Kane was known for his pulp stories revolving around his private eye. These stories appeared in leading detective magazines of his era, like Manhunt, The Saint Detective Magazine, Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Private Eye, and Pursuit. It was a matter of time before Kane successfully novelised the adventures of his hero. Frank Boyd was his only pen name. 

© www.pulpcovers.com

Bullet Proof is my first trip into the hardboiled fiction of Frank Kane and into the crime-infested world of Johnny Liddell.

Liddell is fearless as hardboiled PIs are known to be; the kind of man who likes to take the fight right into enemy camp. When a bunch of hoods repeatedly use him for target practice, he turns the tables and instead uses them to prove just how deadly he can be with a .45. He takes out two gunmen right in the beginning and then goes after Frankie Cappola, the fat mobster who set him up. Cappola’s boss, Pete Velie, is cooling his heels in prison from where he's giving orders to his henchmen.

Liddell finds himself on the wrong side of the mob and the law the moment he accepts a $500 retainer from a beautiful socialite called Jean Merritt who hires him to find out the real truth behind her father Matt Merritt’s death. Jean, who mysteriously vanishes before their first meeting, is convinced that her father didn’t commit suicide and was, in fact, murdered. Liddell believes her and suspects that she has been kidnapped by the gangsters who probably killed her father and now want to silence him. They don’t want him to go sniffing around Merritt’s corpse and dig it out.

© www.occultnoir.com

Described as tall, broad shouldered, and ruggedly handsome, Johnny Liddell’s character reminded me of Mike Hammer who lets his trigger finger do the talking instead of his tongue, always in self-defence. The story and the style are a mixture of a Mickey Spillane yarn and a James Hadley Chase novel, while some of the characters, like District Attorney William Deats and Inspector Herlehy, sound like less civilised versions of Hamilton Burger and Lieutenant Tragg in the Perry Mason novels. Even Liddell’s redhead secretary, Pinky, is not unlike Mason’s Della Street although the detective has an occasional girlfriend called Muggsy Kiely, a lovely and know-it-all reporter who dreams of being an actress.

As the private eye piles up the corpses, Deats and Herlehy become more sceptical about his self-defence theory. The reason is they are after the mob and they know Liddell is on to something and they want in.

The fat man squinted at him, scowled, “Who are you and what’s the idea?”
“My name’s Liddell. Mean anything to you?”
“Not a thing.”
Liddell grinned tightly. “It must have the other night. You tried to part my hair with a tommy gun. I kept Scoda as a souvenir. Remember?”

Bullet Proof is an old-fashioned detective story written in a style reminiscent of mid-20th century pulp fiction: clean-cut and without fuss. The 191-page novel has a lot of gunplay, stakeouts at sordid bars and seedy joints, black suits and fedoras, guns and tommy guns, gangster’s molls and naked hookers, corpses and morgues, and beggars as informants. Kane knew how to tell an entertaining story. I was amused by his repeated use of words like “shamus,” referring to the private eye; and “torpedo,” a hired gun—both, a first for me, I should think.

Recommended, if you like crime thrillers with nonstop action.

Further reading
Maura Fox, the granddaughter of Frank Kane, has written a nice profile of the writer at Thrilling Detective where she quotes fellow crime writer and our blog friend Bill Crider as saying, if it's a Frank Kane book, chances are “it'll be a competent, straightforward P.I. story.” Bullet Proof is exactly that. In May 2012, author James Reasoner reviewed Frank Kane’s Stacked Deck at his blog, Rough Edges. It's a collection of novelettes and short stories starring Johnny Liddell and, I'd think, a good place to start reading about the adventures of the private eye from the Big Apple.

Reading Habits #16: Reading out of peanut paper

A Reading Habits post is long overdue. The last one, The bitter taste of my tablet, appeared on October 28. I still read, of course; I just haven’t been writing about how I read, or in this case where and what I read.

It’d surprise non-Indian readers to know that, in India, you can actually read a story or an essay out of peanut paper. By that I don’t mean reading the literature on a packet of peanuts or something written on peanut paper; not that there is such a thing as peanut paper, although we do have something called butter paper (parchment paper) used in craft.

Here’s how it works. A fistful of roasted peanuts is one of the cheapest and healthiest street foods you get in Bombay (Mumbai) and elsewhere. In my city it costs Rs.3 to 5 ($0.05 to 0.08), the minimum price these days. Roadside hawkers use a small measure and serve it to you in a cylindrical cone made out of paper. The cone has a wide open mouth at the top and a closed pointed tip at the bottom. Imagine a miniature tornado.

This is the “peanut paper” I'm referring to. The paper could be anything, like a piece of newspaper or magazine, a page out of a school or college textbook or notebook, a cutout from an annual report or a red herring prospectus, or a leaf out of an old diary.

After eating your peanuts, you unroll the wrapper and read what’s on it. You’d be surprised the things you get to read, even if it’s incomplete. I have variously read a poem such as Milton’s Paradise Lost, an algebraic formula, a director’s report, an essay by G.B. Shaw, a company balance sheet, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and Moby Dick, to give you an idea. Sometimes the peanut paper is in other Indian languages like Hindi or Marathi.

Reading your “peanut paper” is a very old habit and I have yet to see one who throws it away without as much as a glance at it. Sometimes if you’re eating in a group then you compare your wrappers and find that you've all been eating out of the same book. And sometimes, you exclaim, “Hey, we studied this in school!” and then you crush the paper into a ball and toss it over your shoulder.

Unlike other street snacks, “peanut paper” remains clean after you polish off the peanuts. It’s mainly an after office hours snack though you can have it at any time of the day. They taste best in the rains. What it does is it educates and entertains you, however briefly, and kills your appetite till you reach home and have your dinner.

A slightly bigger paper cone is also used to serve sing (peanuts) and chana (chickpea) mixed with kurmura (puffed rice), small onion and tomato cubes, a shot of lime, a pinch of salt, and seasoned with a little powdered spice. It’s called chaat or bhel, a very popular snack that roughly means hotchpotch. Instead of eating with a spoon, you scoop up the concoction with a round puri (hard unleavened bread made from wheat flour) or a square piece of card paper, depending on how well-heeled the singwalla or bhelwalla is.

The sing-chana vendors are a common sight along the seafront, on beaches, and other tourist spots. They carry their stuff in a large circular wicker basket or metal container slung round their necks. Others sit along street corners, in narrow bylanes or outside railway stations, their sing-chana either heaped on a flat wood surface or stored in neat open compartments. They do brisk business.

The way I see it, you can eat and read out of your hand.

P.S.: I don’t have a picture of a sing-chana vendor but you can type “peanut seller” or “chanawala” in Google images and you’ll see what I'm talking about.

Gray Mountain by John Grisham, 2014

Coal was in the news in India, for all the wrong reasons, when I read Gray Mountain by John Grisham. In spite of its critical role in energy and economic growth, no news about coal is ever good news. 

Recently, India’s Supreme Court reversed a key government decision granting over two hundred coal blocks to power, cement, and steel companies because they were allocated in an “ad-hoc and casual” manner and “without application of mind.” Then, last week, environmentalists warned that India’s proposed coal expansion would prove catastrophic for the rural poor because of high levels of air pollution and coal dust, absence of emission standards, and lack of safety measures. In fact, one report predicted that India’s overdependence on coal-fired power stations and the increase in emissions would result in hundreds of thousands of premature deaths by 2030. And we’re not even talking about coal mine accidents.

If this review is beginning to sound like a news report, it’s because Grisham’s new legal novel—it’s not really a legal thriller—reads like a “docudrama,” as one reviewer on Amazon put it. I thought I’d add a little perspective on the fossil fuel which is big business for coal companies throughout the world and at the same time a harmful and terrifying reality for poor people who work with it. Coal comes with a very high human cost, as evident from Grisham's latest book.

In Gray Mountain, the author gives us one such reality—strip mining in Appalachia, the coal country, and its disastrous impact on inhabitants of the region. To be honest, I didn’t know this sort of thing happened in America. Whatever happened to human right? To checks and balances?

Grisham narrates his rather heartbreaking, albeit well-documented, tale of Appalachian coal and its consequences through his principal character, Samantha Kofer, and a few lawyers who have made fighting crooked and powerful coal companies their life’s mission, often at grave risk to their lives.

Samantha, young and attractive, is the daughter of separated and seasoned lawyers. Her mother works in the Justice Department and her father is an aggressive lawyer who once sued airlines after crashes. She loses her comfortable but high-stress job in Manhattan in the financial crisis of 2008. She is furloughed with several others when her global law firm downsized. As a consolation she is allowed to keep her health benefits provided she interns with a nonprofit organisation for a year, but she’ll draw no salary. If all goes well after a year, her law firm will take her back with no break in seniority.

The city-bred girl chooses the free Mountain Legal Aid Clinic in the small town of Brady, Virginia, the heart of coal country, and is soon caught up in the murky and deceitful world of coal mining.

In Brady, she meets Mattie Wyatt, head of the aid clinic, and her nephew Donovan Gray, a noted trial lawyer. Mattie and Donovan, who share a tragic family history associated with coal, are feisty lawyers fighting for the poor and the oppressed. While Mattie’s aid clinic handles smaller and non-criminal cases, Donovan is vengeful and goes after big coal with big money, suing them for millions of dollars in benefits due to black lung disease and other serious issues. From them and their clients Samantha learns what it feels like to be at the receiving end of coal companies with friends in Washington D.C. and backed by law firms with muscle power, and what it takes to stand up and fight for your rights.

And then one day Donovan dies mysteriously in his own plane crash and his brother, Jeff, who idolises his older sibling, enters the scene. He is not a lawyer but behaves like one as he prepares the final ground for litigation against the coal companies that was set in motion by his brother. He is depending on Donovan’s lawyer-friends and Samantha Kofer to take up the gauntlet.

For Samantha, what was supposed to be a temporary phase in her legal career soon turns into the most decisive period of her life. She is caught between her dream life back in New York and an uninspiring existence in Brady. Her selfish interest pulls her in the first direction; her conscience drags her in the other.

Gray Mountain is more than just a legal tale. It’s a chronicle of the sordid side of coal mining in Appalachia complete with a detailed explanation of strip mining and its dangerous import, land grab and displacement of poor folks, prolonged suffering and painful death from black lung disease, and economic starvation of coal families.

While the story is “interesting,” as my blog friend Bill Selnes, a lawyer in Saskatchewan, Canada, rightly observed in his review at Mysteries and More from Saskatchewan, it’s not as thrilling as many of John Grisham’s other novels. I found it inconclusive in some respects.

Recommended, if you are a Grisham fan.

Ruff Justice: Windwolf by Warren T. Longtree, 1983

When the wolves howled, the wind answered…

© Thayn Trikannad

Sometimes it’s interesting how you learn about the real identity of a pseudonymous writer.

I bought a western titled Windwolf, No.9 in the Ruff Justice series, by Warren T. Longtree. The author was unfamiliar to me. However, Longtree sounded more like a pen name than a real name.

After surfing the internet for a while, I came across a review of a book called Ute Revenge by Paul Ledd at Black Mask. The review was written by veteran author James Reasoner, no stranger to this blog, and reproduced from his blog, Rough Edges, where it originally appeared in June 2013. There I learnt that Paul Ledd was actually Paul Joseph Lederer, another prolific author of a series of westerns including Ruff Justice.

Later, I read a review of Ruff Justice No.2 Night of the Apache by Steve M. over at his blog Western Fiction Review and learnt some more about this rather elusive author.

If it weren't for the internet, I’d have taken most western and other paperbacks at face value and read them as such, and the real identities of writers would have remained unknown to me.

The Ruff Justice series reminded me of another western series of violence and passion, of crime and justice, of fear and respect, that I’m familiar with—Edge, a half-breed and a Civil War veteran, written by George G. Gilman (Terry Harknett in real life), arguably the most popular western pseudonym.

One of the differences I see between the two series is that Ruff Justice is probably more adult than Edge.

Writer David Whitehead has written a fine article about George G. Gilman and his Edge character at his website Ben Bridges, which incidentally is David’s pseudonym.

I’m looking forward to reading my first Ruff Justice novel where “Ruff follows an icy-cold trail and a hot-blooded Indian beauty to track a savage killer.”

My copy of Windwolf, displayed on the shelf above, is a first edition paperback by Signet, New American Library, and printed in May 1983. This title was the 28th and the last in the Ruff Justice series.

Have you read this western series with the nice play of words?

War Against the Mafia by Don Pendleton, 1969

I offer this review for my ‘First Novels’ reading challenge as well as for Friday’s Forgotten Books over at Patti Abbot’s blog Pattinase.

Mack Bolan: The Executioner by Don Pendleton was the first action series I ever read, in my late teens. Since then, I have been hooked to the daring and often improbable adventures of the war veteran and one-man vigilante squad. His speciality is sniper fire and his calling card is a marksman’s medal.

Over the years I have collected over fifty original and reprinted The Executioner books as well as spinoffs like Phoenix Force and Able Team, and I read a few of those every year. In spite of the bloodshed and mayhem, I find the novels entertaining. Bolan may be a fictional character but he is like a superhero and as long as there are men like him around, there is justice on this planet and hope for humankind. You have to keep disbelief aside.

In War Against the Mafia, originally published in 1969, American author Don Pendleton introduces us to Mack Bolan and his adrenaline-pumping brand of justice and fair play, which could be described in three words—all guns blazing.

Bolan is forced to leave the jungles of a war-ravaged Vietnam and return home to bury his father, mother, and sister, and take care of his seriously-wounded kid brother. Sam Bolan, his father, has gunned down his family after loan sharks associated with the mafia make life impossible for him and his family, and force his daughter into prostitution to recover the debt. Bolan infiltrates the mafia to find out who is who and then takes revenge on the mobsters in their backyard. His only accomplices are his first sniper rifle, a Marlin, and a .44 Magnum Calibre revolver, besides a range of other arms and ammunition. 

Bolan is unrelenting as he seeks and destroys the mob, commando-style. He has the unofficial sympathy and support of the police force which realises the mafia needs its protection more than Bolan. Along the way he falls in love, waxes eloquent about good and evil, and justifies why he must fight the war closer home than in remote Vietnam. He stays back to deliver Bolan justice. 

Mack Bolan’s character is not well-developed and is somewhat unconvincing in War Against the Mafia but it gets better and even credible as you read the other novels in The Executioner series. Don Pendleton wrote thirty-eight Bolan novels ending with Satan’s Sabbath in 1980. Since then, there have been more than five hundred in the series, kept alive by a host of pseudonymous writers, many of whom write under the collective name of Gar Wilson.

Interestingly, Bradley Cooper is set to play Mack Bolan in a Warner Bros. film directed by Todd Phillips (Hangover series). Years ago, I thought Tom Berenger was the most suitable actor to portray Sergeant Bolan on screen.