Angel's Gate by p.g. sturges

Published by Scribner on February 26, 2013 

Angel's Gate lampoons Hollywood and parodies crime fiction. If you're looking for a serious thriller, look elsewhere. Angel's Gate is more comedy than thriller. It isn't what you'd call deep literature, but it's funny and fast moving and written with an insightful eye for human foibles.

Any good Hollywood story has its share of obnoxious (and wealthy) producers and directors, as well as aspiring actresses who do their best work on their backs. So it is with Angel's Gate. A producer (Melvin Shea) plays the role of part-time pimp and drug dealer, supplying the roguish studio head (Howard Hogue) with cocaine to snort and actresses to shag, including Rhonda Carling. Badly behaving director Eli Navaria is notorious for abusing women. Devi Stanton, a tattoo-covered ex-Marine and current housemother at Ivanhoe Studios (Howard's place), is a less conventional character. She gets into a bit of trouble involving Melvin, Eli, and Rhonda, and needs the sort of cleanup help that only someone like the Shortcut Man can provide.

The novel's second plotline involves Ellen Arden, whose sister hasn't heard from her in years. The Shortcut Man is hired to find her. That plot thread appears early in the novel and then submerges until it resurfaces at the very end. Naturally, the two stories are connected in an unlikely way. The connection is a little too cute but it's not completely outrageous.

The Shortcut Man is Dick Henry, an ex-cop and "freelance opportunist" who specializes in solving problems in unconventional ways. Henry isn't the sort of morally stalwart hero who struggles to make ethical choices, although he occasionally struggles with just how unethical he wants to be. Should be earn a fee by blackmailing a bad guy? He has to think about that one.

Angel's Gate is a satisfying novel in that the bad guys get what's coming to them (more or less), often in ways that are quite fitting. Karma is in the air.

Some of the characters are sexually adventurous. Some are kinky. Some use foul language. If that sort of thing troubles you, this probably isn't the novel (or writer) for you.

At one point, The Shortcut Man compares Charles Bukowski's direct, minimalist writing style to Malcolm Lowry's erudite prose and announces his preference for the former because Bukowski leaves unspoken content between the lines while Lowry puts everything in the lines. I'm not sure p.g. sturges leaves much content between the lines, but he's adopted the "simple and clear" writing style that he attributes to Bukowski and it works for him. His prose is intelligent without being pretentious. The same can be said for the plot. It's light but smart.

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The Magic of Saida by M. G. Vassanji

First published in Canada in 2012; published by Knopf on March 5, 2013 

Martin Kigoma, a publisher in Tanzania, meets Kamal Kunja in a hospital in Kilwa. As Kunja recovers from his sickness, he tells his story to Kigoma. Kunja's story interweaves with the story of Kilwa, its people and its myths.

Kunja was born in Kilwa to an African mother and an absent Indian father. He was the childhood friend of a girl named Saida, the granddaughter of Mzee Omari, a renowned poet who doubled as a national historian. The second part of the novel recites the history of Kilwa as it was understood by Omari, beginning with Kunja's ancestor in India who, in the 1870s, answered the call of jihad against the Germans who claimed the right to lead the Africans out of darkness (at gunpoint, if necessary). Omari tells how his own life is shaped by betrayal and forgiveness as Kilwa moves from the harsh rule of Germans to the gentler oppression of the British.

After her grandfather's death, Saida becomes a mganga (spiritual healer or advisor). She gives Kunja a tawiz (locket) in which is sealed a prayer. Although Kunja eventually studies medicine in Uganda and becomes a physician in Canada, he never parts with the tawiz and never forgets his promise to return to Saida. As he continues his search for her -- a difficult task given the reluctance of villagers to discuss her -- Kunja recalls his life after his mother sent him from Kilwa to Dar es Salaam. The final chapters, in which Kunja finally learns about Saida's fate, have the flavor of a supernatural soap opera.

Kunja's trip from Canada to Kilwa ultimately becomes a journey of self-discovery. As he explores his past, Kunja contemplates his sense of rootlessness (not quite African, not quite Indian, certainly not Canadian), and begins to question whether he wants to be buried under several feet of snow on a continent to which he does not belong.

As much as it is Kunja's story, The Magic of Saida is the story of Kilwa. We learn enough about Kilwa's history and culture to understand the place, but not so much as to bog down the story. Celebrated in Milton's Paradise Lost and ruled by Persian sultans before becoming an important port in slave traffic, M. G. Vassanji describes the modern Kilwa, its culture and its people, in terms that are alternately loving and stark. It is a place possessed by djinns, haunted by the spirits of the dead who were hung from mango trees. Vassanji contrasts the old and the new Kilwa, questions whether the changes it has experienced are entirely for the better. What has become of tribal pride, Kigoma asks, now that Tanzania depends so much on foreign generosity? Even Kunja, who can well afford to be generous, doubts the value of charity as a response to "the outstretched hand of Africa." The tension between change and tradition and the struggle for African independence are the novel's strongest themes.

Unlike the chapters that take place in Kilwa, those that are set in other locations are less compelling. The frequent flashbacks to Kunja's life after leaving Kilwa interrupt the narrative flow while doing little to advance the reader's understanding of Kunja. His ill-treatment as a half-caste Indian is well illustrated in a couple of powerful scenes, but too many chapters seem determined to relate the history of Tanzania and Uganda. Kunja's time in Canada and a visit to India are covered in a whirlwind of words. The uneven pace and unnecessary scenes mar an otherwise enjoyable novel. The Magic of Saida is nonetheless worth reading for the picture it paints of Kilwa and for its intriguing story of a man struggling to connect his present to his past.

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The Demonologist by Andrew Pyper

Published by Simon & Schuster on March 5, 2013

Does the world really need another novel about demons and the Vatican? I'm not a big fan of books in which Satan is a character. I am, however, a fan of Andrew Pyper. I loved The Wildfire Season, a thriller with sharply drawn characters that has nothing to do with the supernatural. Based on my admiration of that book, I decided to give The Demonologist a try. It turned out to be a good decision. Yes, the plot involves a demon, but this is fundamentally a book about flawed mortals.

In the novel's first thirty pages, Pyper gives more life to his protagonist than most authors can manage in three hundred. David Ullman is a faculty member in the English Department at Columbia, specializing in mythology and religious narrative with a particular expertise in Milton's Paradise Lost. Ullman suffers from depression, which may be why his wife is openly having an affair with a physics professor. Ullman wants his floundering marriage to work and does his best to be a good husband to Diane, although, like many men, he can't remedy her complaint that he is rarely "present in the moment." His platonic friend, Elaine O'Brien, is Ullman's "clear-thinking inner self" but she has been diagnosed with an advanced stage of cancer. His eleven-year-old daughter, Tess, alienated from both her parents, seems to share his melancholy. David is alone in the world. But does he need to be?

A mysterious woman appears in Ullman's office on behalf of an employer that wants a demonologist to investigate a phenomenon she refuses to describe. The next day David and Tess are off to Venice. What he encounters there rocks the foundations of his belief system. As much as he would like to ignore it, he can't. He is given a task -- to "find and retrieve the dead ... from darkest limbo" -- that his life, and his daughter's, will hinge upon. Whether David will survive may depend upon whether he is "vulnerable to becoming convinced of impossibilities."

Throughout the novel, David is manipulated by unseen forces. He's being chased, but is his pursuer working for the Devil or the church? Or, as O'Brien sees it, has David created his own mythology, a delusional reaction to grief? While The Demonologist has the action and the pace of a thriller, this is also the story of a man reinventing himself. David takes a road trip to North Dakota ("a version of hell in itself") and then south and back north, a journey that advances the plot while giving David time for introspection. It is a journey of self-discovery that forces David to confront the part of himself that refuses to engage with the world. To battle the Devil, David must open his mind to horror. He must remember the past while learning how to think and feel at the same time. He must understand the death of his brother and confront his feelings about his father. The Demonologist is ultimately the story of a very personal hell.

Pyper has mastered the art of building fully shaped characters into plot-driven stories. Not just in its horrific subject matter, but in the intensity of its prose, the realism of its supernatural elements, and the intelligence of the story, Pyper has crafted a chilling tale of good and evil. The Demonologist reminded me of Joe Lansdale at his best. It is a book that will appeal not just to fans of horror, but to all readers who appreciate a thought-provoking story told with literary style.

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The Boyfriend by Thomas Perry

Published by Mysterious Press on March 5, 2013 

The Boyfriend opens with the murder of a beautiful young escort in Los Angeles. Her parents hire Jack Till to find the killer. The reader learns in chapter one that this isn't the only escort the killer has murdered, and it doesn't take Till long to search for similar crimes. Till's pursuit of the killer takes him to Phoenix and Boston and San Antonio before the action returns to California.

To carry out his scheme (there's more to it than murdering prostitutes), the killer becomes an escort's boyfriend so he can stay with her in her residence. He manages to do this over and over in city after city. That's a trick that even Lothario would have trouble pulling off, and it struck me as implausible at best, despite the graduate level course in seduction that Thomas Perry provides. The true motivation for seducing and then killing the temporary girlfriends is even less plausible but I give Perry credit for coming up with an original and clever plot twist.

Till tracks the killer by scouring websites and finding photographs of escorts wearing a distinctive piece of jewelry that the killer has given them. That each soon-to-be-dead escort decided to have a new photograph taken as soon as her boyfriend gave her a necklace struck me as highly unlikely. It's even more unlikely that the killer would allow the photographs to be published on the net, given how carefully he covers his tracks in all other respects.

Perry devotes roughly equal attention to Till and to the killer. Some chapters focus on Till's methodical investigation and some describe the killer's methodical planning. All of that is moderately interesting (if not particularly exciting) and the story moves quickly.  The plot follows the formula of slasher movies:  naughty girls die while the audience wonders what's in store for the not-so-naughty girl who is with the killer in the end.  That's just too predictable to be enthralling.

Although a portion of the novel is devoted to the killer's backstory, he doesn't have much personality. Till's own backstory seems pieced together, bits carved out of other thriller protagonists and transplanted into Till so that he seems to have a life. There is nothing about Till that makes him stand out in the universe of thriller heroes.

The Boyfriend didn't grab me and hold me in a tight grip, nor did it give me much to think about, as do my favorite thrillers. The plot is surprisingly simple. I formed no connection to the characters and had little reason to care about them. Till is busy being stalwart, the killer is busy killing, and the hookers are busy dying. Still, I kept wondering what would happen next. In that sense the novel is more intellectually interesting than emotionally engaging.  In short, The Boyfriend is an easy read, but it isn't Perry's best effort. Nothing about this thriller is unlikable, but nothing makes it stand out.

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I Should Have Stayed Home by Horace McCoy

First published in 1938; published digitally by Open Road Media on January 15, 2013

Like many transplants to Hollywood, Ralph Carston craves fame and fortune and is just waiting for the miracle that will make it happen. His only friend in town is a sparkplug named Mona who starts out the novel by getting sent to jail for mouthing off to a judge. The momentary notoriety she earns from that episode leads to an invitation to a benefit for the Scottsboro boys hosted by a wealthy socialite. Although the hostess is a cougar with designs on Carston's chiseled body, she also has connections that could help him. Should Carston become her boy toy if that's his only chance at finding the break he needs?

At least by modern standards, Carston is an unusual protagonist. He's naïve, innocent, and polite. He's from Georgia, not well educated, and holds firm to racist beliefs. With his thick southern accent, he has no chance to become a movie star, despite his good looks, but he's ashamed to return to his home town without succeeding in his chosen profession -- particularly after the letters he wrote to his mother, bragging about his success, appeared in the local newspaper.

As he demonstrated in They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, Horace McCoy had a realistic (perhaps realistically jaded) view of Hollywood as the land of opportunity. As Mona points out in the novel's most dramatic moment, for every girl who leaves her job as a waitress to become a star, there are hundreds who ruin their lives chasing an impossible dream. Carston's attempt to bridge the enormous divide between the haves and the have-nots teaches him the difference between dreams and reality. Mona's participation in an effort to organize extras who are seeking better working conditions adds another dimension to the class division that supplies the novel's framework.

McCoy's hapless characters exemplify the mix of futility and misplaced optimism that prevailed during the era in which he wrote. All they want is a break, a chance to live the glamorous lives they read about in magazines. Yet for all but a few, the easy life is an illusion, well beyond their reach. Using stark, economical prose, McCoy captured those for whom luck is always bad, those who, desperate to climb the social or economic ladder, are exploited by the fortunate few they seek to emulate. He wrote about people who took chances with their lives, who didn't want to join their small town peers who "were doing the same old thing in the same old way and would go on doing it forever," but he avoided the fairytale endings that cheer people in hard times. His novels are grounded in harsh realism. I Should Have Stayed Home isn't his best work, but as an honest portrait of disappointed lives, it is true to the model he followed.

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