QUICK SHOTS: The Backup Men by Ross Thomas

Ross Thomas could really write the hell out of a book. He seemed to do it with ease. The natural banter between characters, the natural banter between himself and the reader all pours out on the page like a aged scotch neat. He's a writer's author. He never quite made it super big but instead carving himself a nice career with cloak and dagger books that were like no other. He started late in life which seems to have been a colorful life and after two weeks in his 40's he had a book down that won an Edgar. Then BANG he had a career. I personally probably gleaned a lot of my views on what a politician is based on the descriptions of the folk who hang out at Mac's Place in D.C. in Thomas's books. As I got older I haven't found that Thomas's opinions of senators, congressmen, government types or bartenders were wrong. There's not really "nice people" in his books, but you don't mind spending time with them, the way it happens sometimes in life too.

The older I get the more open to re-reading. I first read this during a snowy winter in my 20's. I remember it distinctly as I read a chunk of it in a cold 1963 Ford Fairlane that I had just driven off the road after having a run-in with a patch of ice while waiting for a tow. I guided the car through a barbed wire fence and between two trees. It was a fancy bit of sliding. It was nice company. "The Backup Men" is the third book about "Mac" McCorkle and Michael Padillo, a barman and a deadly (sometimes) ex-spy. Mac's narration probably pretty close to talking Thomas himself, at least that's the way I like to think of it. Together they own the aforementioned Mac's Place formerly in Bonn, Germany but in D.C. in this book. Padillo is around sometimes, sometimes he's off doing the spy-bit. Mac runs the bar and tells us their stories. Open on of their books and skullduggery always ensues. In this one they are roped into being body guards to a new King and his adviser as they cross the U.S. to sign some important papers about the fate of the new King's oil rich country. Along the way they get involved with the personal revenge of Wanda, sister of the dead a-team, fend off professional killers, drink copious amounts of booze, fall into and setup up various traps, meet nice-old society ladies and exchange wise-cracks. It's a book full of old friends even if this is the first time you met them. You read a Thomas not for the plot (though those are always good too) you read them to enjoy a drink and dodge a few bullets in capable hands. 

Thomas is on my Mt. Rushmore of favorite authors. He writes with a thick brush of sarcasm and wit but never sacrifices the intrigue and action. He's best when he gets to write about a duo having wild adventures like Mac and Padillo or Artie Wu and Quincy Durant but his "professional go-between" Phillip St. Ives novels (as by Oliver Bleeck) are also uniformly good, if a little slight. St. Ives got a Charlie Bronson movie made out of one of them too. His novel "Briarpatch" was just made into a TV series, staring Rosario Dawson but even now Ross Thomas is vastly underrated and bordering on being a forgotten writer. I keep him next my Donald E. Westlake novels on the shelf, so you know, close to the heart. 

A Run in Diamonds by Alex Saxon (Bill Prozini)

Bill Pronzini, noted mystery writer who's "Nameless" Private Detective novels are legendary. I read a score of them when I was in my teens, at the time (also now) I looked for tough action packed books that would thrill me. The Nameless (so called because Mr. Pronzini purposely didn't give the character a name) books aren't that at all. They are quite and beautifully written down-to-earth stories of a regular beer-drinking schmo who collects old Pulps and solves mysteries.  They really are top-shelve books and the series has run consecutively since the 70's. No small feat. AND they still thrilled me.

Back in the 70's he got hired to start a Men's Adventure series about a badass named Carmody who hires himself out to badass things like body-guarding, black marketing and such. He's a true hard-case, very much in the mold of a character who would have been splashed across the pages of "Black Mask." In fact, when I read this I kept thinking of Raoul Whitfield's Jo Gar, a detective in Malina who appeared in that pulp. There's no real easy comparisons between the two characters other then being tough guys in exotic ports, since Carmody's beat is Majorca. But they spiritual connection was there for me. Or maybe I just got Pulps on the brain. Either way I like these types of stories, they are sort of like a good spy story but without a lot the governmental agency hang-ups that can slow down a story about shootin' bad-dudes and scoring with gorgeous women.

Basically it goes like this Carmody gets screwed on a diamond deal and goes out for revenge with only his wits and a Beretta. All of this is told in Pronzini's typical clean style. The action is well handled and brutal. Its really a damned shame that this wasn't a long running series, it has a nice pliable central character who's morally ambiguous and could get wrapped up in all sorts of a nasty schemes only to fight his way out. It could have avoided a stagnation of plots that appear in other series such as "kill a bunch of mobsters, then later killed a bunch of mobsters."

A lot of Men's Adventure books are simply "hack work," there I said it; lazily and quickly written for a buck. Sometimes that can be its own magic and sometimes it's just shit. Others are writers still honing their craft and learning as they go. Then there's good authors doing good work in a genre that they actually seem to appreciate. Bill Pronzini is too much a writer to write hack work. The world of Carmody is instantly colorful and as real as an action book can feel. Obviously there's not a lot of deep-thinking and self-analyzing. THANK GOD. But the novel moves, makes sense and provides a lot of entertainment in a short page count. Exactly what I want.

Carmody appeared in a few short stories as well in digest around the same time and in the 90's everything that had Carmody in it was republished as "Carmody's Run" by Bill Pronzini. It had all the short stories and a shortened version of the novel, as Mr. Pronzini states in the introduction that he was a little embarrassed about his earlier writing and "cleaned it up." That's the version of the novel I read and it's lean and mean. I need to track down the original paperback and give it a read to compare. I see some mention of a book from 1999 called "The Dying Time," credited to Pronzini as Alex Saxon, but can't seem to find any other info on it. Maybe there's a lost Carmody floating out there.

Mr. Pronzini has a few A.K.A. works including a nice two-book series about a pilot named Dan Connell who gets into frays and then has to extricate himself out of. He wrote these as Jack Foxx, "The Jade Figurine" and "Dead Run," both eventually published under his own name. They read like nice old B-Movies of the 30's, 40's and 50's adventures in the South Seas with crooks, dangerous dames and killers lurking about. Equally as good is a book called "Day of the Moon" he wrote with Jeffery Wallmann about a fixer/detective for the mob named Flagg. It runs along the same lines as say a Parker novel by Richard Stark or a Quarry book by Max Allan Collins. He's also wrote a bunch of westerns and stand-alone books, if his name's on a book it's a safe bet that it'll be good.