The Colorado Kid (2005) by Stephen King

Scene actually in novel, sort of

The Colorado Kid (2005) by Stephen King: Hard Case Crime recently reissued King's novel he wrote expressly for them when their line was launching back in 2005, complete with some new introductory material and illustrations. I think it's a dandy mystery. Is it a mystery? Well, you have to read it!

It's not the pulpy paperback material sometimes reprinted by Hard Case (God bless them), which makes the lurid covers of both this edition and the original comical rather than entirely representative of the tone of the novel. The Colorado Kid would form some of the inspiration for the TV series Haven, though Haven carried over just about nobody other than the eponymous Kid who, it's no mystery from the back cover blurb, is already dead when the novel begins. 

Nothing like this in novel

If the novel isn't quite a mystery, it is a novel ABOUT mystery. It's also a love letter to old-style journalism, old coots, and the fresh-faced enthusiasm of the young just starting out on their own. It's certainly the King novel that would work best with a David Lynch adaptation. Highly recommended.

The Knife Slipped (Cool & Lam #2) (1939) by Erle Stanley Gardner

The Knife Slipped (Cool & Lam #2) (1939) by Erle Stanley Gardner writing as 'A.A. Fair': The great Hard Case Crime book line published this 'lost' hard-boiled detective novel from the creator of Perry Mason, Erle Stanley Gardner. It was meant to be the second in Gardner's [Bertha] Cool & [Donald] Lam series but was rejected by Gardner's publisher in 1939 for being too racy and for having Bertha Cool be a little too criminal.

Cool, a Rabelaisian giant of a woman, runs a detective agency in Los Angeles. Donald Lam is one of her newish detectives. A woman and her mother hire Cool's agency to discover what that woman's husband is up to at night. The answer is... plenty! And not all Hanky Panky!

Gardner was certainly no Hammett or Chandler. His prose is workmanlike for the most part, while some of the characters and situations are stereotypical. Nonetheless, this is an enjoyable, pulpy time-waster. Bertha Cool is a memorable comic grotesque. And some of the perils and pitfalls of private detecting are highlighted as Lam makes some (near) rookie mistakes.

And the novel is surprisingly racy. And surprisingly cynical about pretty much everything, with most of that cynicism expressed by Bertha Cool, about as knee-jerk a pragmatist as one could ask for. Gardner's PI's aren't all that interested in the larger ramifications of the case, leading to a conclusion that's pretty much a dramatic fizzle. I won't read another of the Cool & Lam mysteries published between 1938 and 1970, but I am glad I read this one. It's a hoot. Lightly recommended.

Unconnected

Somebody Owes Me Money by Donald E. Westlake (1969/Reissued 2009): Very funny 'Wrong Man' suspense thriller by the great and prolific Westlake, reissued by Hard Case Crime for the first time in nearly 40 years (!). Our first-person narrator, a New York cabbie with a bit of a gambling problem, gets pulled into an increasingly dangerous situation between two criminal outfits after he discovers the brutally murdered body of his bookie. The female lead is tough and smart, the cabbie likeable, and the plot both twisty and fair. The funniest bit involves a low-speed chase through New York with the pursuers on foot and the leads in a cab that has to keep stopping for traffic lights. Recommended.

Simpsons Comics Explosion 1: written by Ian Boothby, Paul Dini, Chuck Dixon, Sergio Aragones, and others; illustrated by Phil Ortiz, John Delaney, Mike Kazaleh,Serio Aragones, and others (2014): Bongo Comics has done a nice job of doing humour comics for 20 years now. 20 years! As a long-time reader of all comics, I find one of the small joys of Bongo is its use of writers and artists who don't seem to get work at DC or Marvel any more, or not enough of it anyway. Here, those names include Paul Dini (the reason Season 1 of Lost was the best season of Lost may have had a lot to do with his work as story editor), Chuck Dixon, and Sergio Aragones. This 96-page collection is fun stuff. Recommended.

Superman Unchained: written by Scott Snyder; illustrated by Jim Lee, Scott Williams, Dustin Nguyen, and Alex Sinclair (2013-2014; collected 2014): Delayed so many times by Jim Lee, world's slowest artist, that it went from regular series to miniseries, Superman Unchained nonetheless gave us in the nine issues that came out over a two-year period the best long-form Superman story since Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's All-Star Superman. 

Much of this is due to Scott Snyder's writing. His Superman is thoughtful, stubborn, and painstakingly careful about human life. One of the high points of the series involves the Man of Steel trying to think his way through a battle with a more powerful solar-powered super-being than himself. Snyder gives us other scenes in which Superman's problem-solving abilities are on display -- why DC doesn't have him write an actual Superman on-going is anyone's guess.

The series doesn't ignore the current status quo in DC's main line, in which Superman dates Wonder Woman and has never dated Lois Lane, but it definitely doesn't foreground that state of affairs -- Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen are front and centre in the plot. Lee's work is its over-stuffed and often over-complicated self, though it works for the most part with all the shiny gadgets and giant aliens being thrown Superman's way. Highly recommended.

The Cutie (1960) by Donald E. Westlake

The Cutie (a.k.a. The Mercenaries) by Donald E. Westlake (1960): Early novel from beloved crime novelist Donald E. Westlake, handsomely re-released in paperback by Hard Case Crime. It's also been given Westlake's preferred title, though the Cutie of the title is not what you'd think from the cover.

Westlake's strengths include a talent for intricate plots, apt bits of metaphoric description, and precise and concise characterization. Even this early in his career, all those strengths are present in The Cutie: you don't need to read this just to be a Westlake completist. You don't even need to care who Westlake is, though you will by the end.

Standalone novels like this one put Westlake firmly in the line of James M. Cain and Jim Thompson. The Cutie's first-person narrator, a troubleshooter (pretty much literally) for a mob boss in New York, impresses the reader with his determination to find a killer even as his own almost split personality when it comes to violence becomes more and more apparent. He's not a dead soul, but he's probably damned.

Nonetheless, the narrator's pursuit of a murderer who's made things hot for his mob boss hums with menace and moral rot. And the narrator grows just enough in his own self-assessment that the ending comes as a grim epiphany: the things that the narrator  assumed worked one way may instead work completely differently, at least when you're the boss. 

Verisimilitude makes this sort of street-level thriller work. I don't know how accurate Westlake's depictions of the working of crime in 1960 really are, but they seem real. One of the best bits is a classification of all cops into one of four categories, with the pros and cons of each type. It seems like the sort of thing a killer who's always been too evolved for his econiche might formulate during his downtime. And it's moments like that, among others, that make Westlake worth reading decades after what were supposed to be disposable novels were published. Recommended.