Sunday e-mail 25th August

Pulp fiction, new readers, and grumpy Alphonse...

A royal welcome on board to all our new subscribers! It’s the red carpet and the brass band for you. Many joyful newcomers have joined the happy voyage of the good ship Crime & Psychology this summer. It’s wonderful to have you along on the cruise. Take a deckchair. Here’s a cocktail. Hang out. We have some wonderful sights to see, they’ll be coming up any moment now. The days may darken, the sun may grow a little less warm as we sail downriver into autumn, but, rest assured, Crime & Psychology will remain as sharp and warm as ever.

And if you’re not a new subscriber, you’ll be wondering what happened to my promise, earlier this year, to review a pile of of pulp for you, you lucky reader, you. Well, what did happen? Infinite Jest, that’s what happened. A colleague at work lent me David Foster Wallace’s massive, exhausting novel. I could not return it unread, but equally I could not turn a page of Wallace without thinking of you, dear reader, feeling sorrowful and neglected. So here are those late-summer thoughts I promised you:

We’ll start with a name you probably know: John D MacDonald. Kingsley Amis insisted that MacDonald was ‘by any standards a better novelist than Saul Bellow’. Well, MacDonald may never have received a Nobel Prize, but you and I both know which of the two tells the more exciting story. The Deep Blue Goodbye is the first of the famous Travis McGee novels. I’ve promised myself to read them all again, in order this time. The novel is awfully good but – how to put this? – awfully dated too. McGee have attitudes that might not make it onto the page these days.

John Godey was a new name for me, but a name that appeared somewhere on a list of Writers You Should Read if You Like John D MacDonald. So I did. The Man in Question was moderately exciting and, despite that generic fifties-style cover, quite unusual. For sure, it’s worth picking up if one day you happen to fancy a quick, light read one day after a quick, light lunch, but it’s about equally nutritious.

There aren’t enough Johns on this list. John Ross Macdonald was famous for not being famous. You might say he was the fourth member of the famous hard-boiled trio from the middle of last century. His almost-contemporaries were Dashiell Hammett, James M Cain, and Raymond Chandler. According to some reviewers, he was the best of them. For sure, Macdonald never wrote a book as perfect as The Maltese Falcon or as bleakly unforgettable as The Postman Always Rings Twice. He never mastered a style as individual as Chandler. But he certainly has elements of all three of those great authors. My only reservation is that some=times his heart doesn’t seem to be quite in it. Was he just too nice  chap to write convincingly about real baddies. Perhaps Experience With Evil should have been called Experience With Not Very Nice. Still, it’s a promising place to start if you’re new to Macdonald.

A Kiss Before Dying is terrific, partly owing to a startling twist in the middle. Don’t worry, I shan’t give it away. If you don’t know the story, pick up a copy now. You’ll be glad you did. I wondered how they’d bring off the twist in the film version. It didn’t seem possible. But, well, I guess they sorta managed it. Both film and book are worth your time.

Richard Stark was one of the many pseudonyms used by the great Donald E Westlake. He used it for his books about that amoral thief and robber, Parker, the man with the getaway face. The name indicated the literary style – stark, indeed (later, Stephen King borrowed it for the alter ego of his writer protagonist of The Dark Half). Comeback is one of the later Parker books and perhaps the style was beginning to grate on Westlake by this point. It read to me like a first draft, with enough small blips and bops to distract you from the story. Read the early Parker books, by all means, but please don’t start at this end of the great man’s career.

Finally, Ray Bradbury. Does he belong on a list of pulps? He was a proper writer and Something Wicked This Way Comes is a serious book – beautifully written, strangely charming, frightening and wistful in equal measure. If you’ve read it before, but you were a teenager last time, I encourage you to revisit the book. There is more in it than you remember.

On the topic of recommendations, here is this week’s bullet list:

PODCAST: I was late to the party, but really enjoyed the first series of Serial, about a (possibly) wrongful conviction for murder. It’s gripping and interesting and I like the presenter very much. Don’t come to me for information about her or the show’s beginnings in something called ‘This American Life’. I know none of that. Trust me, you don’t need the background any more than I did. I listened to this show on a very long drive one day and it kept my interest high all the way.

FICTION: Well, if you haven’t read it, you’ve got to read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, if only so you can put a note on your own Substack to tell people you’ve read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Oh, you have read it, you say? Reward yourself with one of Richard Stark’s early Parker novels. Or even two, why not?

NON-FICTION: The New York Times list of the best books of the century had one surprising omission. OK, yes, you’re right, it had more than one. Yes, yes, actually I agree - it had several. All right, there were lots of surprising omissions. Let’s put it this way: Among the many, many surprising omissions was a long book on politics called The Invisible Bridge by Rick Perlstein. Even if you’re not much for big old political biographies, you’ll enjoy this look at the Republican Party between Nixon and Reagan. A fascinating era indeed, stuffed with crime and sleaze, just the way you like it. The book is also marvellously well written. In places it is funny. Yes, I said it. Funny.

SUBSTACK: All readers will remember my repeated recommendations of Tracy Bealer’s True Crime Fiction and Aaron Jacklin’s Explaining Crime. If you like Crime & Psychology (and, c’mon, who doesn’t?) you’ll like them, too.

SUBSTACK AGAIN: Now for two other Substacks you’ll enjoy. For more on crime (from a more medical), please check out our friends at Curing Crime. They are doing an excellent job but don’t even get holiday pay, medical benefits, or anything like that. And Karl Straub continues to deal with the important things in life, like music and literature. It’s too easy, especially in today’s climate, to get carried away with politics and, er, other politics. Forget that trivia for a minute. Karl writes proper prose – he cares about the words – and we should be supporting writers like that just as much as the ones who happen to glitter in the sunshine of the passing moment. Here’s Karl's Substack.

..now, you’re doubtless wondering what’s waiting for you this week in Crime & Psychology. Never one to let you down, let me tease you with the titillating title: It’s called ‘The Incredible & Sad Tale of Grumpy Alphonse & His Doomed System for Measuring Criminals’. And if that doesn’t get you panting with excitement and praying for Wednesday, I don’t know what will.

Be brilliant! Beep a bright blue button below. You know it makes sense! See you on Wednesday. All the cool kids will be here.