Welcome to the Game by Craig Henderson

Published by ‎ Atlantic Monthly Press on November 15, 2022

Spencer Burnham is British. He was once a champion rally racer but moved to Detroit and used his British charm to sell cars after he lost his competitive edge. Now Spencer has problems. Since his wife died, he’s been drinking and doing drugs, trying to kill the pain or dim the memories. The drugs put distance between Spencer and his daughter when she needs him the most. Spencer’s high-end car dealership isn’t paying its bills. His friend Chris is letting Spencer sleep on his couch while Spencer’s daughter sleeps in the spare bedroom. Child Protective Services thinks the daughter is in a dangerous situation. Spencer manages to avoid obeying the rules that CPS imposed on him by shagging the social worker.

Dominic McGrath operates criminal enterprises, including money laundering. He keeps competing drug gangs at war so they’ll be too busy to set up their own laundering operations. McGrath has a driver pick up their drug proceeds and exchange it for clean cash. When McGrath suspects that his driver has become a police informant, he needs a new driver. He thinks Spencer would be perfect for the job.

Some of McGrath’s subordinates aren’t all that sure about Spencer. His accountant Cal is humiliated when Spencer uses Cal’s car to demonstrate his driving skill. Eddie wants to do the driving himself. McGrath’s muscle, the Yo-Yo, is suspicious of everyone. On the other hand, Johnny Boy, a disbarred lawyer for the Chicago mob, believes McGrath is right about Spencer.

Threats and blackmail persuade Spencer to enlist as their pick-up driver, but McGrath really needs him for a scheme to steal the cash a bank intends for an armored car. The scheme requires the kind of precise driving that a rally racer has mastered. Spencer isn’t thrilled about taking a job picking up drug proceeds, but he needs the money and doesn’t want to lose his daughter and what little he has left of his life. He eventually realizes that working for McGrath may trigger the end of his life. He needs to come up with a plan of his own if he’s to survive.

Spencer isn’t an action hero. He takes a few beatings and never gets in a decent punch of his own. He’s a driver, not a tough guy. That makes him a refreshing thriller protagonist. It’s easy to sympathize with Spencer, although a reader will agree with Chris that four years is enough time to mourn a dead wife and get a life together for the sake of a dependent daughter. Whether Spencer will learn that lesson (and you know the answer to that, don’t you?) is the hook that keeps the reader invested in a protagonist who is, in many ways, a good-hearted loser.

The plot is entertaining and generally credible — more credible than many modern thrillers — although the reader will need to slide past a few improbable or unexplained details. Many of the novel’s action scenes center on fast driving. For that reason, Welcome to the Game might make a good movie — a better movie, for sure, than any movie with Fast or Furious in the title. Craig Henderson makes the driving scenes easy to visualize, giving the novel a cinematic quality. Violence isn’t described in gruesome detail, but this is nevertheless a violent novel. Not many characters, good or bad, are still alive when the story ends.

The story could have ended in many ways, but Henderson made surprising choices that assure an unpredictable conclusion. A clever plot and strong characterization make Welcome to the Game one of the better thrillers I’ve read this year.

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These Prisoning Hills by Christopher Rowe

Published by Tordotcom on May 31, 2022

These Prisoning Hills is a novella set in a postapocalyptic future. Christopher Rowe alludes to The First Athena War and related events in the novel’s past. He fills the reader in on a few details but never gets around to explaining how weaponized bears learned to fly. To be fair, Rowe has set other stories in the same future. I haven’t read them but I assume a reader who is more familiar with this future history will have a better grasp of the story’s background.

I did glean that an AI who integrated with a human declared war on the Federals. The AI called itself Athena Parthenos. Its forces occupied the Voluntary State of Tennessee. The AI is thought to have died or been vanquished before These Prisoning Hills begins.

The central character is Marcia. Flashbacks show the role she played in the war, having benefitted from some implanted technology that made the forces serving Athena Parthenos so fearful. That same technology is responsible for a variety of sentient combat machines, including massive “mechano-nano-biological creatures” called Commodores, not to be confused with Lionel Richie. Some of those machines are “dependents” that seed and fertilize the land, among other restoration or transformation projects.

Other oddities of the war years include rock monkeys that carry broadswords and a mystic Owl of the Bluegrass. The Owl wears a helmet and seems to be an owlish version of Hawkman, although the Owls are usually accompanied by crows. The Owl knows how to pass through the Girding Wall that separates North from South. Marcia needed that knowledge when she was sent on a rescue mission.

In the present, Marcia is a civilian bureaucrat employed by the Commonwealth, but the Federal military demands her return to service to act as a guide in the hill country, where a military team disappeared while investigating … something. Drones and low-orbit satellites that keep an eye on treaty states spotted an anomaly in quarantined territory that merited personal investigation. Once again faced with something that might be a rescue mission, the intrepid Marcia discovers a threat that had gone dormant. Events ensue that might force the Federals to reconsider the nature of dependents.

Without detailed knowledge of the earlier books, I couldn’t make much sense of the background to These Prisoning Hills. I nevertheless give Rowe credit for building an imaginative future and describing it in polished prose. Still, Rowe gives more attention to background than characterization. Marcia might be any reluctant soldier in any war. The ending is ambiguous, although ambiguity fits in with the story as a whole.

A longer story might have supplied a meatier plot and more depth of character than These Prisoning Hills achieves, but readers who enjoyed earlier works in the series will probably enjoy this one. For other readers, this is enough here to warrant a recommendation, but it might be best to start with related stories that appear in the collection Telling the Map.

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I Am the Light of This World by Michael Parker

Published by Algonquin Books on November 15, 2022

A librarian tells Earl Boudreaux that her mother would like Earl because strange things come out of his mouth. I like I Am the Light of This World for the same reason. Earl is not well educated. He’s not a conventionally deep thinker. He prefers simplicity and yields to uncertainty. He seems to occupy an otherworldly place as an observer who is powerless to affect the course of his drifting life. Yet Earl’s thoughts, which tend to begin with and come back to pedal steel and lessons he finds in Lead Belly’s biography, lead him to ask intriguing questions and make insightful connections.

The story is told in two parts, separated by “the in-between” that spans all the presidents between Carter and Trump. Most of the events described in the first part occur over the course of a few days. Earl is 17, living in Stovall, Texas. His older twin brothers are troublemakers. He has friends with names like Sleepy and Moon, but Earl spends most of his time alone. He likes to sit in the woods and read about Lead Belly. That’s what he’s doing when he meets Tina. She quickly becomes his girlfriend, or at least his sex partner. Tina persuades Earl to drive her to Austin. She says she wants to visit her mother, who has been committed to a psychiatric hospital. As soon as they reach Austin, however, Tina changes the plan. Earl tags along, enjoying the weed that Tina’s friend provides. It's much better than the ditch weed he steals from his brothers.

Unhappy with what he sees Tina doing with the weed supplier, Earl decides to walk to a park that has a swimming pool resembling a pond. He hooks up with two girls who are about his age and with a guy in his mid-twenties named Tom, a man who makes his living selling meth and coke and ludes and weed. The girls are happy to provide sexual favors in exchange for the drugs. Earl finds himself doing the same, although he’s so high after sampling all the drugs he doesn’t quite understand what he’s doing or why he’s doing it. Earl spends the next couple of days and nights in a haze that is fueled by drugs and the absence of sleep.

Earl is at the center of a dramatic event. As he drives back to Stovall, fueled by meth, Earl is arrested and charged with murder. He can’t give a coherent account of his time, although his memories return over the next few days. His lawyer isn’t a legal whiz but he’s a nice guy who understands the odds of a teen with no money or social connections getting a fair trial in East Texas. The prosecutor injects a doubt about Earl’s sexuality to assure that his trial isn’t fair.

In the novel’s second part, the in-between has passed and Earl is drifting again. He makes his way to Oregon, getting off the bus when the moment seems right, and starts a new life in Cliffside. He’s befriended by a librarian and by the librarian’s mother, who rents him a room above her garage. He’s befriended by a swimming instructor who becomes the first person in Stovall to guess some details of his past. He eventually agrees to work on a farm operated by the librarian’s son-in-law. Life is simple but good, the kind of life Earl wants. He seems content, if not happy.

Earl doesn’t want to blame anyone else for his troubles and wonders how he can prepare himself to die if he doesn’t blame himself. Earl has spent decades thinking of himself as a horrible person. The novel’s dramatic question is whether, with the help of supportive people who don’t treat him like trash, he can overcome that self-punishment and achieve a measure of contentment.

While the plot is engaging, the novel’s strength lies in its details. Earl is obsessed by memories of the long telephone cord on his mother’s phone, the transistor radio his father gave him, turnstiles and the negative adjectival. He rambles about those topics when he’s high, yet music is the only subject that Earl can comfortably discuss when he’s straight. He’s not keen on defending the South (Earl is offended by racism), but it’s the only place he’s known until he takes a bus to Oregon. In a discussion of music, he makes the point that jazz, blues, and country music originated in the South. (Rock was certainly influenced by Southern musicians, but Earl probably pushes the argument too far when he claims that rock also originated in the South.) There are so many references to songs I love that the novel seems to come with a soundtrack.

Earl's conversations about music with his lawyer before and during the in-between are one of the few sources of joy in his life. Earl feels his life moving in the syncopated time of music, draped in pedal steel: “There goes your heart, struggling to stay in rhythm and about to bust out all at once.”

I Am the Light of This World is told in the third person, but the narrative voice tracks the kind of language that would be natural to Earl. The narration takes on the rhythm of Earl’s life. For example, “it was hard to say what he was feeling because people did not understand him when he tried. He would say he felt like pedal steel and draw blank faces. He’d say he felt like a midnight train with two lights on behind and the red light was his mind and they would just study his mouth.”

While the story is fundamentally bleak from start to finish, it encourages the reader to root for Earl. Michael Parker makes it possible to understand Earl and even to care about him. Earl has little control over the events that shape his life. He’s not equipped to make good choices. He is nevertheless a compelling character, a young (and then an old) man with whom the reader can easily sympathize. The story seems to offer the hope that new friendships near the end of a life can turn that life around. Although he likely knows that redemptive endings are what book clubs crave, Parker avoids the temptation of a feel-good ending. He tells the story with honesty, compassion, and a good dose of pedal steel.

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The Double Agent by William Christie

Published by Minotaur Books on November 15, 2022

The Double Agent is a spy thriller that begins in Teheran in 1943. Alexsi Smirnov, a Russian intelligence officer who infiltrated the German army, is warning Churchill of a plot to end his life. That story is told in A Single Spy.

Churchill’s bright idea is to reward Alexsi for saving his life by sending him back to Germany as a British agent. Having betrayed the Russians, Smirnov is certain that he won’t last long in Berlin. Alexsi’s attempt to escape from the British embassy and make his way out of Tehran is foiled, leading Alexsi to agree to spy for Britain, but on his own terms.

Alexsi wants to pose as a signals officer, preferably in Paris, an affable location from which he will be well positioned to escape when Germany loses the war. The British like the idea but send him to Italy, where he gamely takes over the signals operation at a German base. In addition to supervising soldiers who search for clandestine radios operated by partisans and spies, Alexsi is in charge of encoding and decoding messages to the local German command. He uses his position to send coded messages to British intelligence, passing on tidbits about German plans and troop positions in Italy.

The SS officer in charge of the base is happy to have someone of Alexsi’s coding skill and organizational talents. The officer decides to use Alexsi to spy on an Italian princess who is helping the partisans and who has the ear of the Pope. While Alexsi has fun in her bed, the new assignment adds another level of risk to his life as a spy. He dodges Russians, suspicious SS officers, angry Italians, and an unpredictable princess as the war in Europe comes to a close.

The Double Agent offers a nice mix of tradecraft and action. Alexsi doesn’t pretend to be James Bond, but he’s good with a knife. In most instances, he manages to avoid violence by outwitting his adversary. He has a moral code that, while flexible, prevents him from helping the SS commit atrocities against innocent Italians as reprisal for a partisan attack upon SS soldiers.

Alexsi doesn’t have much of a personality beyond his desire to stay alive and his refusal to participate in bloodbaths, but that’s all the personality he needs in a novel that is about survival rather than political idealism. Fans of A Single Spy will probably enjoy the sequel. The novels are similar in style. The second novel is sufficiently independent of the first that a reader will not miss much by reading The Double Agent without first reading A Single Spy.

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Paperback Jack by Loren D. Estleman

Published by Forge Books on November 15, 2022

Paperback Jack is a tribute to the writers who published their original creations in paperback (as opposed to writers whose books appeared in hardcover before they were republished in paperback) when paperbacks were first being widely distributed. As Loren D. Estleman tells the story, pulp fiction magazines that were popular before the war gave way to paperback originals in the post-war years. Many pulp writers made the transition to paperbacks because that’s where the money was. New writers also seized the opportunity of mass readership that paperbacks made available.

Estleman cites his sources for the history of paperback publishing in a Recommended Reading section at the end of the novel. He also gives a shout out to writers like David Goodis, John D. MacDonald, Harlan Ellison, Donald Hamilton, and Leigh Brackett, important and gifted writers who primarily published their original novels and story collections in paperback. He left Philip K. Dick off the list, but I’ll forgive him. Dozens and dozens of outstanding writers wrote paperback originals during the post-war years.

History lessons aside, Paperback Jack is a work of fiction. Before the Second World War, Jacob Heppleman wrote stories when he wasn't working in his day job. He sold a few, then wrote a crime novel that was serialized over five issues of a pulp magazine. The novel caught the attention of an agent who persauded Heppleman to retain his services.

Heppleman is drafted before his agent can sell his novel. He comes home to an America that has abandoned the pulp market. Preferring the life of a writer to a job that made him listen to a boss, Heppleman tries to buy a slick portable typewriter from a pawnshop owner. When Heppleman attempts to negotiate a better price, the shop owner insults his war service. That night, Heppleman gets drunk, tosses a brick through the shop window, and steals the typewriter.

Heppleman writes a war novel and tracks down his old agent, who tells him that the public has had enough of war. Paperback crime novels with lurid covers (as well as westerns with lurid covers and comic books with lurid covers) are the new rage. Heppleman is skeptical until he learns that while he was overseas, the agent sold his crime novel to a paperback publisher for a hefty sum.

The publisher is focused on brand identity rather than literary quality. Heppleman has reservations about writing books that will be marketed with lurid covers, but he needs to make a living so he signs a book contract. He pitches a novel about a reformed fence. To gather accurate background information, Heppleman gains an introduction to an actual fence who expects a share of the profits (including movie royalties) if the book does well.

The publisher changes Heppleman’s name to Jack Holly, has the company’s best artist paint a lurid cover, and Heppleman is on a reluctant road to success. The plot takes Heppleman through his writing career, a courtship and marriage, a friendship with a gay cover artist, testimony before a congressional committee that puts on a show at the expense of comic books and paperbacks with lurid covers, and a conflict with the fence. The novel’s ending flashes forward to give Heppleman a chance to be grateful for an industry that allowed him to make a living.

Estleman always writes with economy and purpose. As his publisher says of Heppleman, Estleman is incapable of writing a bad sentence. He’s the kind of prolific writer whose books would have been published as paperback originals in the 1950s, although his work began in the 1980s and Paperback Jack is currently published in hardcover. I wouldn’t call the cover of Paperback Jack lurid (it’s missing blood and a dead body while the busty blonde only bares her shoulders), but it does suggest a tame version of a cover from the golden age of paperback originals.

Heppleman struggles to maintain his independence and decency while respecting the practical advice of his wife, who understands that raising a child requires at least a modest income. Heppleman, his wife, and the artist are all likable characters. The story is entertaining, but its true value lies in Estleman’s reminder that the post-war explosion of paperback originals made an important contribution to the history of American literature.

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