This review originally appeared on Goodreads on September 17, 2021.

The Cocktail Waitress

By James M. Cain – Hard Case Crime – September 18, 2012

Review by Robin Marx

Joan Medford is a beautiful 21-year-old with a problem. Her abusive, alcoholic husband just managed to get himself killed in a drunk driving accident. The cops are still poking around the circumstances of his death. She's entrusted the care of her toddler to her sister-in-law while she puts her life back in order, but said sister-in-law is growing increasingly reluctant to return the boy. Joan needs money and fast, so she decides to put her head-turning curves to work at a cocktail bar. Her world-weary coworker clues her in that women with their kind of figures and flexible morals can earn even better money on the side, and the wolfish men in the bar make no attempt to hide their desire for the young widow. Joan's need for financial security sets her on a dangerous path, and not everyone she comes into contact with will survive.

This hard-boiled crime novel is written from the (first-person) perspective of a femme fatale. Or is it? The book reads just as well as the tale of a sympathetic and beleaguered woman in desperate circumstances. This ambiguity is key to the novel's appeal. She could be simply unlucky or a criminal mastermind. Joan runs hot and cold throughout the narrative and does display a ruthless streak when it comes to securing a better life for her and her son, but all of the men in her life are untrustworthy and trying to use her to satisfy their own desires. There's a mean matter-of-factness to the narrative, and sexuality and abuse are presented in a surprisingly frank way for the vaguely 1950s setting. The dialogue is deliciously snappy, in true noir tradition. And even when it looks like the major issues have come to a resolution, Joan's tale ends with one last masterful gut-punch from the author.

The book concludes with a lengthy Afterword by the editor, Charles Ardai, explaining the process by which this book was completed and released decades after James M. Cain's death. While it existed in complete manuscript form, Cain had continued tinkering with it in the years up to his death, and the book as published is a synthesis of multiple drafts left in various states of completion. While many posthumously published works tend to disappoint, this book was most definitely worth the effort to polish up and release. The final product is surprisingly seamless.

Lean, mean, and sexy, this book is an easy recommendation for fans of the hard-boiled crime genre.

★★★★☆

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This review originally appeared on Goodreads on September 19, 2021.

So Nude, So Dead

By Evan Hunter – Hard Case Crime – July 14, 2015

Review by Robin Marx

An addict wakes up next to a beautiful lounge singer he’d met the night before, only to discover two bullet holes in her stomach and the 16 ounces of heroin she showed him missing. Chased by the police, Ray Stone must find the killer and attempt to clear his name while fighting off the effects of withdrawal.

This book is a fast-paced tour of the underbelly of the city, bouncing back and forth from seedy hotels, bars, disreputable clubs, and the apartments of various temptresses. The prose is fast and the action tense throughout, but it sags a bit in the middle when Stone makes second visits to people he already visited during the course of his ad hoc investigation.

Overall this is a solid crime story with a driving plot, but the characters felt pretty stock. A decent read, but perhaps not worth going to great lengths to seek out.

★★★☆☆

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This review originally appeared on Goodreads on October 11, 2021.

Peepland

By Christa Faust (Writer), Gary Phillips (Writer, Artist), Andrea Camerini (Artist) – Titan Comics – August 1, 2017

Review by Robin Marx

Set in the seedy pre-gentrification Times Square of 1986, Peepland tells the story of peep show booth girls, pornographers, punks, and other outcasts who become unwitting witnesses to a murder committed by a rich kid with a connected father.

I’ve read a half dozen entries in the Hard Case Crime line of graphic novels and this is the best one so far. The art is consistently high quality throughout, and Christa Faust’s neo-noir prose is always a treat. In an afterword, Faust mentions that the feel and some of the characters are based on her own experiences working peep show booths in 80s Time Square, and the story does benefit from authenticity and the humanity with which the misfit characters are treated.

★★★★☆

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This review originally appeared on Goodreads on November 15, 2012.

The Punisher, Vol. 2: Kitchen Irish

By Garth Ennis (Writer), Leandro Fernandez (Artist) – Marvel Enterprises – December 31, 2005

Review by Robin Marx

Garth Ennis's dark and gritty run on The Punisher continues with a story involving warring Irish gangs in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan (hence the “Kitchen Irish” label). The Punisher becomes involved when a bomb intended to wipe out an enemy gang detonates prematurely, killing or injuring a dozen citizens. Looking to avenge those casualties, he comes into contact with an old ally from MI-6 and a British soldier, both searching for Irish terrorists involved in the bombing.

While the plot itself works, it wasn't quite as strong as that of the previous volume. There were many more characters than the previous storyline, too, meaning that some of them weren't as fleshed out as they could have been. My biggest complaint about the story is the distinct lack of Frank Castle. He gets minimal time in the spotlight, and it's the antagonists that do the most work advancing the storyline.

Leandro Fernandez's artwork gets the job done, but I missed Lewis LaRosa's moody, shadow-drenched work from the last storyline.

Minor gripes aside, I'm enjoying the Punisher MAX series and plan to track down further volumes.

★★★☆☆

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This review originally appeared on Goodreads on November 14, 2012.

The Punisher, Vol. 1: In the Beginning

By Garth Ennis (Writer), Lewis LaRosa (Artist) – Marvel Enterprises – January 1, 2006

Review by Robin Marx

I've been a Punisher fan since I was a kid, but I wasn't reading much in the way of mainstream comics when the MAX series was being published. I'm glad I got around to checking MAX out, however, as it (or at least this volume) is the purest Punisher I've ever read.

Although he was introduced in an issue of the Amazing Spider-Man, the Punisher has always occupied a sort of uneasy place in mainstream comics. After losing his family to the Mafia, Vietnam vet Frank Castle takes up his guns and decides to wage a one-man war on crime. It's a similar premise to DC's Batman, but there's always been more of an edge to the Punisher. Unlike most incarnations of the Bat, he has no particular compunction about killing, and he usually works closer to the street, squatting in warehouses and funding his war with money scavenged from dead drug dealers rather than living the billionaire playboy lifestyle. The Punisher was a Marvel comic, however, so Castle was invariably drawn into tedious, goofy conflicts with super heroes and villains, and censorship (both imposed and self-) kept the series from becoming too dark and violent.

Here, under Marvel's adult-oriented MAX imprint, Garth Ennis succeeds in portraying the Punisher in a way only coyly hinted at in previous comics. Frank Castle is a singularity of hate, a broken machine driven to kill mobsters and thugs. He has no friends, no social life, no secret identity, no James Bond gadgets. There are no costumed heroes and villains. He's trapped in an ugly, brutal never-ending war, with his own violent death as the only possible conclusion.

This volume centers upon a reunion with Microchip, a computer hacker and Castle's one-time ally. In earlier comics, Microchip used to act sort of like James Bond's Q, providing a variety of plausibility-stretching tools for the Punisher. In this story, however, Micro is clearly alienated from his former friend, pushed away by Castle's relentlessness and borderline psychosis. In his interactions with Castle he repeatedly attempts to analyze the reasons for why Castle acts as he does, attempting to push him into a more socially-acceptable path, hunting terrorists for the CIA rather than snuffing Mafia enforcers and pimps. This sounds exciting. It sounds healthier. But Ennis takes the story in the direction truest to the character. Castle vehemently rejects the attempt to put him on a leash, and denies Micro's pat psychoanalysis; Frank Castle is a machine powered by smoldering rage, he's not yearning to break free from a dysfunctional feedback loop.

Some reviewers dislike the explicit language and the graphic violence in the MAX series, but I felt it was appropriate. It's true that these elements were minimized in previous Punisher series. However, that always rang false with me, just as his encounters with other residents of the Marvel Universe seemed unconvincing. It's a comic about an ugly, hate-filled character in an ugly, hate-filled world. Why try to sanitize it?

This was an excellent start to the series. I look forward to subsequent volumes.

★★★★☆

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This review originally appeared on Goodreads on August 6, 2012.

Blue Estate Volume 1

By Viktor Kalvachev (Writer/Artist), Various – Image Comics – September 27, 2011

Review by Robin Marx

I picked this comic up after seeing a glowing review on BoingBoing, but unfortunately the content doesn't live up to the fantastic issue covers. The interior artwork is a massive disappointment. Characters are all rendered in a sketchy style that makes it hard at times to keep track of just who is who. Characterization is likewise rendered in broad strokes, with much dependence on cliche (there's a Russian gold-digger, Italian thug, Eastern European dealer that can't resist his own product, etc.). I've been searching for a hardboiled crime comic that can live up to the standard set by Andrew Vachss's novels and TV shows like The Wire and The Shield, but it looks like my search continues. I'm not going to bother picking up future volumes.

★★☆☆☆

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This review originally appeared on Goodreads on March 9, 2021.

The Angel of Darkness

By Caleb Carr – Ballantine Books – March 25, 2010

Review by Robin Marx

The second Dr. Laszlo Kreizler story, this one involves a kidnapped baby and a disturbed nurse whose youthful charges tend to end up dead.

While this was an enjoyable read, it didn’t equal or surpass The Alienist. The pacing felt a bit off in several sections, with strange detours and an occasional lack of urgency despite the core conflict. While it’s not really a complaint for me, there are a number of action sequences (and one particular supporting character) that cross a bit into pulp territory, which is not something I remember from the first book. Also, Dr. Kreizler seemed to take a back seat to much of the proceedings. Perhaps it was due to the new choice in narrator, but Kreizler spent much of the story off-screen, doing vague psychology stuff while the scrappy kid narrator got into punch-ups with juvenile gang members.

That being said, this book offers an opportunity to spend more time with Carr’s appealing characters, which is what I (and probably many readers) wanted most. There’s not as much mystery or investigation as the previous book, but the characters are solid and the historical figure cameos are fun, if a bit forced at times.

The first thing I did after finishing this book was check when the next book in the series is expected to arrive. I think that can be taken as a solid recommendation.

★★★☆☆

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