The Next Time I Die by Jason Starr

Your next stop is the twilight zone

The Next Time I Die is published by Hard Case Crime, a company that specializes in producing crime novels with covers that are reminiscent of the mass-market paperback hardboiled novels of the 1950s and 60s. Based on appearances, you might expect this to be another straightforward crime novel in the line, but it actually has a science-fiction twist. Starr has said that for this novel his "biggest influence was Philip K. Dick’s novels, especially his early ones, such as his brilliant alternate reality novel, Time Out of Joint."

Review

Steven Blitz is a criminal defense lawyer who has taken on a high-profile client named Jeffery Hammond, a darling of the New York art scene who also happens to be a psychopathic serial killer. Steven thinks of himself as a virtuous man, but he's also honest with himself about the fact that he's much more invested in making his name with this case than in looking out for his client's interests. He's doing prep work for the case late one Friday evening when his wife, Laura, comes into his home office and announces that she wants a divorce. Laura is manic depressive and often goes off her lithium. Though he tries to calm her down, Laura keeps yelling that she wants him out of the house, to the point that he decides the best course of action is to pack an overnight bag and drive to his brother's house. After all, he still has to get the work done before the trial begins on Monday morning, and he can't do it in the midst of a tempest.

On the way to his brother's place, Stephen almost loses control of the car as it skids on ice in a tight turn and almost hits a tree. A bit later in the drive, nerves still on edge, he decides to stop at a convenience store to buy a pack of cigarettes. In the parking lot, an older man is having an altercation with a young woman, demanding that she get back in his car, which she doesn't want to do. Going against his self-preservation instincts, Steven decides to intervene and ends up getting into a scuffle with the man, who stabs him and drives off. As he lies in the parking lot, watching his own blood turn the snow red, Steven has the sensation of being in a spinning glass ball that shatters, and then darkness descends.

He wakes up in a hospital with a tube down his throat, shocked that he's still alive. As he gradually comes around, watching CNN on the TV across from his bed, he begins to realize things are off. A war is brewing between Pakistan and India. A chyron on the screen refers to President Gore. The nurse explains that he was in a car accident and suffered a concussion when the car hit a tree. When his wife is allowed in to see him, she is gentle and loving in a way she hasn't been toward him in years. Then she mentions their daughter, but Steven knows they don't have a daughter. Though at first he believes he is being subjected to an elaborate hoax, Steven comes to realize over the next few days that he has somehow undeniably slipped into another timeline.

While Steven tries to settle into the new version of his life without giving away the fact that it's all new to him, he keeps slipping up because so many things -- big and small -- are different. (As best he can tell from a bit of online research, this timeline seems to have diverged from his own somewhere around 1998.) But many things about this alternate life are better than they were in his "real" life. This Laura is much happier and healthier; he has a sweet, young daughter; and he is much wealthier because his investments have all been sound and he's a full partner in the law firm. The Hammond case doesn't exist. Through a bit of online research, however, he discovers that Jeffery Hammond exists in the new timeline. (Is Hammond a murderer here, too, he wonders; but one who just hasn't been caught?) Steven also discovers that the other version of himself wasn't such a good guy. He conducted extramarital affairs, and, worse, he committed a serious crime that is still under investigation. The new Stephen has to find a way to navigate these complications and to save his own neck despite the fact that he wasn't there when these things happened.

I had few quibbles with the novel. The protagonist's attempts to follow up the case that he had been working on in his other life seemed unlikely to me. And his interaction with a character named Justin, who we meet later in the novel, seemed very much out of character for this version of Steven. But those were minor issues. The changes to the world in the new timeline were amusing (for instance, Blockbuster is the leading streaming service in the country), dealing with the complications caused by the other, "bad" Steven created interesting situations, and the pacing and nimble style keep you engaged. It's not the kind of book that's going to stick with you, but it's a perfect entertainment for a lazy summer afternoon with a cold pitcher of sangria in arm's reach. I read it in a day.

Norwood by Charles Portis

You'll never read a funnier writer

Charles Portis is the thoughtful kind of novelist who, having published only five, makes it easy for the reader to be a completist. He was also thoughtful enough to make them all fun and worthwhile to read. True Grit (1968) was his most famous but Norwood (1966) was the first. The successful movie adaptation of True Grit in 1969 led to an unsuccessful and unfaithful movie version of Norwood a year later. Do yourself a favor and avoid it at all costs.

Review

Norwood begins with Norwood Pratt's hardship discharge from the Marines at Fort Pendleton in California. His father died and there was no one to look after Norwood's sister Vernell. On his bus trip back to Ralph, Texas, kindhearted Norwood befriends a couple who are traveling with their baby and invites them to stay at his place for a while. The next morning, Norwood discovers that the couple left during the night with the television, a shotgun, and two towels. How they got out of town with the TV is anyone's guess.

Vernell is a "heavy, sleepy girl with bad posture." While Norwood takes up his old job at the Nipper service station, Vernell mopes around the house. Eventually getting tired of having grimy stuff fall in his face and hair while greasing trucks, Norwood pushes Vernell to carry her own weight by getting a job waitressing at the local coffee shop. That backfires on Norwood when Vernell marries a disabled vet named Bill Bird who hangs out at the coffee shop all day reading Grit and Parade and brings him home to live with them. The laugh-out-loud conversation between Bill and Vernell at the New Ralph Hotel Coffee Shop is as good as anything Twain ever wrote.

Norwood owns a cheap guitar, knows how to play three or four chords, and is a walking almanac of information about country music. His life's ambition is to get over to Shreveport and make it big on the Louisiana Hayride radio show. One night, by chance, outside the roller rink he meets Grady Fring, insurance salesman, car salesman, self-proclaimed Kredit King, and talent scout, among many, many other endeavors. Norwood and Grady share an interest in watching the girls skate. Fjring explains that he is "connected with a New Orleans talent agency and that part of my work takes me around to many... highway institutions." Always helpful, Norwood replies, "That Creswell girl is a good skater." Fring offers further elucidation: "You will understand, Norwood, I am not necessarily looking for skating skills."

Eventually, Fring talks Norwood into doing a job for him, a simple job that will pay well. Norwood is to drive a car to New York, where Fring says that he can get a better price for it than he can locally. When he shows up for the job, Norwood discovers that he will also be towing a second car as well as taking along a passenger -- a young woman who is one of the "talents" Fring has identified. Thus begins the road trip from Hell. Along the way, Norwood will befriend a midget who got fired for getting too fat, rescue a rooster with a superior intellect, and meet his possible future wife. And then he has to get back.

Does Norwood ever make it onto the Louisiana Hayride? I will leave that for you to find out. But here's a hint: the book is not a stupid Hollywood movie starring Glen Campbell. You can start with this book or with any other (though Gringos is my personal least favorite), but you gotta read Charles Portis.

A Childhood: The Biography of a Place by Harry Crews

A hard-living son of the South who wrote like an angel

Anyone who's read a Harry Crews novel doesn't need me to tell them what an incredible writer this guy was. I'd never, until now, gotten around to reading his memoir A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, probably because it had fallen out of print for some time and first-edition copies were pricey. When I saw the new Penguin reprint at a local bookstore, I had to pick it up.

Review

It's a short book (174 pages in the Penguin edition) and a fast read. Except for a couple of brief skips forward in time, it only covers the author's life up until around age six. But what an eventful six years they were! Harry Crews was born in the Deep South in the middle of the Great Depression, and his early years chronicle a harsh level of poverty that is hard for most of us to imagine today. For many in the rural South during the Depression and World War II, electricity and flush toilets were marvels heard about but not experienced. Even the world-expanding miracle of radio was unavailable to the desperately poor. I often wonder how a few people who come from such limited circumstances are able to become such fine writers. That in itself is a miracle and a mystery not amenable to explanation.

A theme that runs through much of the book is Crews' early-childhood love of storytelling, both the hearing and the doing of it. A tenant family of black farmers lived on the land where Crews grew up, and his best friend at that time was their little boy, Willalee. Harry, Willalee, and Willalee's little sister Lottie Mae would entertain themselves by sitting on the floor with the Sears "wish book" and making up stories about the flawless people in that catalog, with their perfect clothes and many possessions. "The federal government ought to strike a medal for the Sears, Roebuck company for sending all those catalogs to farming families, for bringing all that color and all that mystery and all that beauty into the lives of country people."

The old woman who lived with Willalee's family was known to all as Auntie. While his mama, Myrtice, would never deign to cook possum (it's "just like a buzzard"), the way Auntie made it was the best thing Harry ever tasted -- first parboiled, then stuffed with sweet potatoes and baked in the oven. Auntie was the only adult who would join the children in making up stories about the people in the Sears, Roebuck catalog. "Auntie was too strange -- weird even -- for the big people. She belonged with children, being as she was, full of the most fantastic stories and marvelous comments upon the way of the world and all things in it, whether of the earth or air." When Harry was bedridden because of a terrible accident that left burns all over his body, Auntie would sit up with him for hours and tell him stories. "She loved to talk about anything with snakes in it," he wrote. Auntie's often grotesque and fantastical stories made a deep impression on the young writer-to-be.

Harry's daddy had died when Harry was only two years old. His mama then married his father's brother, Pascal. Harry admired Pascal greatly, but his new father eventually became too enamored with whiskey and would disappear for weeks at a time. When he returned, loud and often violent fights would often ensue between his mama Myrtice and Pascal. One night, the fight ended in Pascal firing a shotgun into the mantlepiece, narrowly missing Myrtice. she gathered up the boys, left the house, and moved to Jacksonville, Florida, where she got a job in the King Edward Cigar Factory spreading tobacco leaves flat on a metal plate so they could be filled and then rolled. Harry never went back to the farm or saw Willalee and Auntie again. In Jacksonville, Harry became friends with a boy named Junior Lister, who taught him the art of stealing and selling ill-gotten goods. When the stealing got too dangerous, Harry talked his way into a job sweeping up sawdust in the back of a butcher shop; but the job didn't last a day. A man ran into the shop, grabbed a butcher knife from the knife block, and stabbed himself to death with it while Harry stood there watching with his broom in hand. "You don't have to worry about this," the man told the frightened boy as he was dying.

"Why?" I said.
"The knife feels good."
"Godamighty," I said.

Amongst the book's many tales of desperate people doing desperate things to survive, here was one who decided to give up. "I'm through with it all now," he concluded. "Somebody else gone have to look after it."

Five months after moving to Jacksonville, Harry's mama moved back to Georgia with him and his brother and made a down payment on a small farm not far from where they'd lived before. The memoir relates some of the events that happened after Myrtice and the boys moved to the small farm, hired a hand named Mr. Willis, and bought an old mule named Pete; but it does not go much beyond that point. Crews joined the Marines during the Korean War and was able to get a college education thanks to the G.I. Bill. At the very end, Crews briefly relates a story of coming back to visit his kin in Bacon County, Georgia, and realizing that he had grown apart from the place but that the place would always be a part of him.

I think the most powerful writing in the book comes in chapter 10, which tells the story of the terrible fight which led to Harry's mama gathering up the boys in the middle of the night and walking with them to her brother Alton's place. It goes on to recount the shocks of adjustment that came with leaving behind a rural life that could have belonged to the previous century and moving to a city with running water and flush toilets, neighbors living side by side in row houses and apartment buildings, mothers going off to work in a factory, and children roaming the streets on their own. "The only way to deal with the real world was to challenge it with one of your own making," Crews wrote. "For a long time after that, the next six months, from March to August, lived in my memory as a series of scenes, flashes of actions lit down to the most brutal detail under a blinding light." It would be hard to find a better description of the work Harry Crews left behind.

The Inugami Curse by Yokomizo Seishi

Yokomizo was encouraged by another classic Japanese mystery writer, Edogawa Ranpo

The Inugami Curse (aka The Inugami Clan) was first published in Japan in serialization from January 1950 to May 1951. The time period of the novel is the 1940s, with the Japanese invasion of Burma forming a backdrop. 

Review

Yokomizo was influenced by Western detective novels, which he hoped to emulate. He especially admired John Dickson Carr; but those unfamiliar with Carr might think of his work as being reminiscent of better-remembered British Golden Age mystery novelists like Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. Yokomizo's series detective, Kindaichi Kosuke, appeared in 76 novels and has several idiosyncrasies, including a stammer and a tendency to wildly scratch his always-disheveled hair when he gets excited. In The Inugami Curse, Kindaichi hardly does any detective work at all, simply observing events while being as puzzled as everyone else, until everything clicks into place in his mind near the end. As in an Hercule Poirot novel, the final chapters consist of Kindaichi gathering everyone into a room, along with the chief of police, and slowly unravelling the mystery to everyone present, extracting confessions in the process.

The novel begins with the death of the wealthy patriarch of the Inugami clan, Inugami Sahei, "at his lakeside villa in Nasu at the venerable age of eighty-one." The Inugami clan is an unusual family because Sahei never married. Instead, he kept three mistresses (all deceased by the time the novel begins), none of whom he made his legal wife. With them he had three daughters -- Matsuko, Takeko, and Umeko. The three daughters each have a son -- Kiyo (for Matsuko), Take (for Takeko), and Tomo (for Umeko). Takeko and her husband also have a daughter named Sayoko.

Although Sahei died wealthy, he had been born into poverty. Nonomiya Daini, the priest at the Shinto shrine in Nasu, took Sahei in as a young man. He was a penniless drifter (like a stray dog). Daini, in his forties at the time, was married to Haruyo, a young woman in her twenties. The sexual relationship between the priest and his wife was not strong, but the handsome young drifter became the lover of both of them. Sahei eventually moved out, and it was believed that the relationship between Daini and Haruyo became stronger as a result because they soon had a daughter named Noriko, who would herself eventually bear an extraordinarily beautiful daughter named Tamayo. Noriko and her husband both died when Tamayo was young, and the now-wealthy Sahei took her in and saw to it that the granddaughter of his revered master was treated as a special guest on the estate.

Sahei had always treated his daughters with a certain level of contempt, and that attitude extended to their husbands. Upon his death, the reading of the will revealed that Sahei's vast fortune and business empire would not be left to any of them. Instead, most of it would be left to Tamayo, but only if she married one of the three grandsons (Kiyo, Take, or Tomo). The situation was complicated by the fact that Kiyo, the grandson Tamayo favored most, had been hideously wounded in the war. His nose had been cut off and his face scarred beyond recognition.

Is the man in the mask that hides the deformed face really Kiyo? Will Tamayo choose to marry, instead, the brutish Take or the shifty Tomo? Complications ensue, and then complications compound upon complications, as murders and kidnappings take place and hidden identities are revealed.

If your tastes run to modern hardboiled detectives, Nordic noir, or forensic police procedurals, Yokomizo may not be for you. If, however, you enjoy old-fashioned British drawing-room mysteries in which the detective solves crimes mainly by observing and thinking, then The Inugami Curse will be just your spot of tea. Like the tumblers of a lock falling into place, every baffling enigma that has surfaced in the course of the novel is fully explained in the final chapters as private investigator Kindaichi sits the players down in a room and goes over the events with them.

Character development is not a strong suit of the author, at least not in this novel. We basically learn enough about the characters so that their moves around the chessboard are credibly motivated. Many of the details of the crimes committed depend on coincidence to a greater degree than most contemporary readers are likely to find plausible (one chapter is even titled "A Series of Coincidences"), but such contrivances aren't unknown to readers of the classic mysteries of the 30s and 40s that inspired Yokomizo. Those quibbles aside, it's an entertaining read for the cozy reader, not the least because of the glimpses into Japanese culture that few of us in the West are afforded in life. Plot twists and intriguing turns of events come quickly and often enough to keep the reader alert, and the short chapters with their cliffhanger endings make it imperative for that reader to keep turning pages.