QUICK SHOTS: A Lonely Place to Die by Art Bourgeau

Every now and then, I'll roll the dice. It's a big gamble. I'll buy a whole series of books without reading one of them or anything by the author. It'll usually be at used bookstore and a spur of the moment thing. I mean whatever more books is never a problem to me. That's how I ended up all four of Art Bourgeau's "Snake" Kirlin mystery series. I probably picked them up because they were slim Charter books. I don't run across a lot of Charter books, so I'll pretty much always take note of them if I see them and this being a rural set mystery seemed interesting. 

Art Bourgeau apparently had a mystery bookshop and wrote The Mystery Lover's Companion, a book of reviews of mystery novels that I remember checking out of a library at one time but remember nothing about. Either way, he's got mystery chops. He wrote a couple of stand-alones, but his main work seems to be this series about Claude "Snake" Kirlin and F.T. Zevich, two ex-marines who get involved with various murders. Sounds like fun.

A Lonely Place to Die is the first in the series and we are introduced to Snake and F.T. as they return to Snake's old hometown where there's a mayoral race happening where (gasp) a woman is running for mayor! It's riled up all dudes in the 1980s town. Small town life and its quirks is painted well throughout the book. I'm from a one-horse town and I instantly knew a lot of the people Bourgeau wrote about. Anyway, Snake and F.T. mostly want to hang out in a shack, drink beer, joke and fish. Until they do something, honestly despicable to get the murder plot going.

It's a book very much of its time and place. It seems like Bourgeau wanted to meld mystery fiction to the bawdy literary fiction (and its questionable sexual politics) that was happening in the 70's. This is a book more interested in day-drinkin' and vibes than getting down to any detective work. I found the writing pretty fun. I was curious to hang out with F.T. and Snake, even after they did something I found super gross (I'll get to it) mostly because it's not a big deal to the rest of the characters for the rest of the novel. Bourgeau is able to create some fun banter and good 'ol boy-ism's. It did have the feel of a 70s Hicksploitation B-Movie, with mentions of Waylon Jennings, Leon Russell and other musicians I dig which was fun. Anyway, here's the unfun spoiler thingy. 

 

MILD-SPOILER --

So, F.T. and Snake are in their shack in the woods and F.T. sees two women pull up to a nearby cabin. The women begin to kiss outside the cabin then go inside. F.T. goes and peeps on them through a window and the women are having sex. F.T. goes back and the boys wait for days, staking out the cabin for the women to return with a camera.

The women do return. Snake and F.T. takes photos of the women having sex, once they have them, they bust in a blackmail both women into having sex with THEM with the photos. It was a bizarre thing to have your two "heroes" do. And later it's pretty much brushed over, and Snake has a romantic relationship with one of the women and the other is the murder victim that spurn the whole plot.

SPOILER OVER --

 

So, I kept reading this to see if it ever seemed to be a big deal within the plot, nope, it just seems to be played as "boys will be boys," and other then the photos coming into play (minorly) later it's never a big deal. Just gross. It's a pretty dark lump to have in your mostly for laughs mystery-novel. I might not even think about it being in a twisted adventure of The Sharpshooter or in other trashy series, but it stuck out like a sore thumb here. I'm all for complicated characters but if you're not going to explore anything you set-up what's the point of doing it?

Anyway, the mystery itself is sorta not really explored too much. Things happen to solve it without Snake or F.T. doing much. The "red herrings" are all sorta light pink at best, most of the book is devoted to watching houses, bathing in rivers while always trying to get laid and drinking tons of beer. 

The books did have some minor Joe R. Lansdale's Hap and Leonard book vibes, but nowhere near as good. But I got all of them, maybe someday I'll check out the second book, The Most Likely Suspects to see if it was in better and if by the second Bourgeau rounded off the sharp edges any. 

And my now traditional sign-off, my first novel Gunpowder Breath is available on Amazon as an eBook!

QUICK SHOTS: TNT by Doug (Loup Durand & Pierre Rey) Masters

Oh, boy. Yeah, I got there. The TNT books are kinda mythic in the Men's Adventure circle. They are wild, dangerous, almost irresponsible adventure fiction with grotesqueness of Bosch painting, the antics of James Bond on acid wrapped up in a flat clinical style of writing. If you didn't know, the books originally were published in France in the 70s and written as Michael Borgia by the dynamic duo of Loup Durant and Pierre Rey. Both were authors before and after the TNT books and I think both of them had their tongues in their cheeks.

Somehow in the 80s Charter books decided to translate them an publish them for the over-stuffed Men's Adventure spinner racks. Bless 'em. I would have loved being a fly on the wall for that meeting, because the stuff in #1 alone is so wild that it's hard to believe that they considered it a smart move. But they did and again, bless 'em. There are 9 books in French and Charter got 7 of them out in English before cancelling the series. Now they are the book equivalent to a "cult movie" or maybe the "midnight movie" of Men's Adventure Paperbacks. They are for those with slightly (or more) perspectives on what they will accept from stories like this. TNT is all at once extremely adult, violent and downright disturbing in parts but at the same times it's goofily an over-the-top superhero-type story. Strange bedfellows. 

We start with an oft mentioned POV scene from a crab as it watches Anthony Nicolas Twin about to be caught in a nuclear explosion. TNT (Tony Nick Twin, get it?) is a super-reporter or something who after the explosion can see in the dark and bone chicks, like, really well. Then the evil CIA comes and blackmails him with TNT's mentally handicapped daughter to go kill a nut-job scientist at the end of a near-impenetrable death maze. Dante and the seven rings of hell, folks. There's some truly nasty shit in this part of the book, almost too much for me to keep reading but luckily the worst isn't really described and the flat tone of the writing sorta deludes the impact.

TNT is a non-character. The cover art aping "The Terminator" is kind of accurate as he's a stone-wall of a dude who says little and just sort of is let loose. He doesn't deliver one-liners or even seem to smile much, granted he's in a dire situation the entire time but don't expect a lively character. Yet I was interested in what was HAPPENING to him and his nonplused way of dealing with it. The narrative rockets forward and really keeps you guessing.

Book translations are a tricky thing. I wonder what was left on the "cutting room floor" or what was lost in the general French-zeitgeist when it was put into English. Was it funnier? Was it more extreme? Did TNT have a personality? I'll never know, unless I start my night-time subliminal lessons in French. I quite like the also French series about the police/spy guy San-Antonio (by San-Antonio) which was very popular and trashy with its own created language of "street slang." Now those are some books that you have dynamite your way into. Did TNT have some sort of lost hook? 

Loup Durand and Pierre Rey got together to do this series but also separately published other "straighter" tales of adventures, crimes and trashy airport novels. Quite a few of these were put out in English as well. The TNT books seemed to be the work of two guys trying the hardest to top each other in extremes. The TNT books must have been fairly popular since it even spawned a comic books version in France. The Doug Masters pseudonym is just hilarious to me. Some dude named Doug writing the wildest Men's Adventure books ever? Hard to buy.

So, I had already read this book. This go-around was the re-read to tackle the whole series since I just finally finished collecting all of them which is no easy feat for your wallet. I don't know if these could be republished today, there's certainly things in this book what would simply never fly today, so your only hope is finding the 80's editions. They are out there with regularity, just expensive price tags. I got lucky on quite a few of the individual titles but had to fork over some cash to complete it. 

The Hitman #1 "Who Killed You, Cindy Castle?"

I stumbled onto a good chunk of Kirby Carr's Hitman books and they followed me home where I quickly devoured the first in the series "Who Killed You, Cindy Castle?" It was an incredibly fast read, big type in a fairly slim paperback and a engaging over-the-top story about harvest human blood. 

Hitman owes a lot to the pulps, The Spider in particular but with more then a healthy dollop of The Executioner mixed in and told in a quasi-tongue-in-cheek manner. For example he wears a mask and strikes fear into the hearts of the mob but packs a lot of various lovingly described pistols with a little Ninja-type gear in thrown in as well. The Hitman (he has a real name but it's fairly forgettable) is in the trail of a string of murder where all the bloody is drained from the bodies. The Hitman immediately is convinced that it's vampires. There's very little question in his mind which is just FANTASTIC. So basically the mob (who should know better) is stealing and smuggling blood for a cult of "Vampires." This pisses off our Hitman hero because that's the kind of thing that does. He's just generally made at the mob like so many Men's Adventure heroes but add vampires? Really ticks him off. To help with his anger he dons his mask, loads up his holsters with various pistols and starts busting heads and asking questions.

Kirby Carr was really Kin Platt a noted author of children's novels, comic books, mystery novels, TV, about anything that involved putting words on paper. He handles the whole thing expertly, but you can tell he was hammering these sentences out.  It's also fairly obvious that he was having a lot of fun with the book. The comic book influence is there, it was easy for my to think about Mike Grell's utterly fantastic "Sable" comic or Max Allan Collins "Wild Dog," not that Platt was ripping any on off, it just rides that super-hero/Men's Adventure line, much like "The Punisher."

I enjoyed it on the whole, but it had problems. Platt spends too much time with the ultimately unimportant mob characters, though a lot of that was pretty amusing and it has the repeated problem that plagues so many of these type of books: a lot of build up to a rushed finale. You get full chapters about various mobsters taking about how scared they are of The Hitman, but also about how much they like to have sex and do criminal shit. Then The Hitman pulling a private eye moving around asking questions, finding out people are dead and then alternatively shooting them himself.  I might have missed the a few things, cause I could never really pin down if it was a "Scooby-Doo," type horror thing, i.e. humans are the playing vampires or if they really were a cult of Dracula's. But when it boils down to it I didn't care. It's a Kitchen Sink book; it was funny, it had horror elements, it had men's adventure derring-do and it was brutal as well. What more could you ask for?

Oh, man all that I forgot to mention The Hitman's badass Old-Man Ninja best friend? Good thing there's more in this series.