#34: Money Shot by Christa Faust

A former porn star stumbles into a secret, illegal side of the sex trade and winds up--after a murder attempt--seeking revenge against those responsible.

Christa Faust's Money Shot is a contemporary tale in the Hard Case Crime series, a pulpy paperback line which, for the most part, features lost noir classics with retro covers. Faust's storytelling stands up well alongside her peers and is even more hard-nosed than some; and in the Hard Case Crime line, that's saying something. Like most of the line, Money Shot is not for the faint-hearted, but is well worth reading.

I read this on the recommendation of my pal Michael, who is a fan of Faust and loaned me his copy.

#33: The Wheat Field by Steve Thayer

A small-town deputy in rural Wisconsin finds himself the main suspect in a double homicide that leads him to become an unwilling accomplice to a larger conspiracy in Steve Thayer's riveting thriller The Wheat Field.

I picked this up on a whim at the Farmland Public Library and found myself an instant fan of Thayer, an author I had not heard of before. Deputy Pliny Pennington is a resonant character, a dark angel with sexual hang-ups and killing urges but his own moral code. The early 60s locale is strongly rendered as well. There are plenty of shocks in the storytelling, both pleasant and unpleasant. I enjoyed Thayer's writing style, probably most reminding me of Jim Thompson or James M. Cain.

I had been moseying along with fun, good enough reads for a while until this one jolted me into wakefulness again. I would strongly recommend The Wheat Field to thriller fans and will be nosing around for more of Thayer's writing.

#32: You Could Call It Murder by Lawrence Block

British ex-pat Roy Markham looks for a missing girl in a small, snowy New England college, quickly peeling back the veneer and exposing dark doses of blackmail and scandal.

An early detective yarn from Lawrence Block, this one featuring another one-off P.I. Curiously, a little googling turned up that the novel was a tie-in to an ill-fated television show that went off the air before the book came out.

Perhaps because I read this back to back with another Block in a matter of days on vacation (see previous entry), I saw a lot of connections between Markham and the other protagonist, Ed London. Both are more highbrow detectives not afraid to get their hands dirty, both centered in New York but frequently traveling.

In the end, a pair of entertaining novels in a collection called "Five Great Novels by Lawrence Block" that I purchased for five dollars on the specials rack at a San Diego bookstore.

#31: Coward's Kiss by Lawrence Block

Mystery writer Lawrence Block's Matthew Scudder mystery series is a notable achievement (with When the Sacred Ginmill Closes being one of my favorite mysteries of all time), but back in Block's peanut-butter days he penned this potboiler with P.I. Ed London. London is a somewhat highbrow detective who, in the end, isn't above helping his brother-in-law ditch a dead mistress. Naturally this becomes more complicated, and London gets drawn into the dead woman's web.

Coward's Kiss is a muscular, fast-moving detective novel, but to date London has unfortunately never returned in a follow-up case.

My wife spotted this one in a bookstore in San Diego, in a collection of "Five Great Novels by Lawrence Block" at the good-bye price of five dollars. I am starting on the next one right away on this sunny vacation.

#30: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick

Trippy sci-fi, with religious overtones, as a man returns from ten years in deep space with a new drug he is eager to try on the gloomy, drafted colonists of Mars. A precog working for a rival company may be the only person able to stop the spread of the drug, which has possibly alien origins.

I decided to take a break from reading the great work of Samuel R. Delany and refresh my palette with another worthy contemporary, Philip K. Dick. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is one of Dick's notable works that I had missed to date. It features a lot of Dick's themes and plotting, notably his ability to take everyday people and set them against larger events. There is also a character in this novel that is similiar, in name and mannerisms, to a character in A Scanner Darkly. Some of the religious thinking of Valis and other work is meditated on here. But I would definitely say Three Stigmata is one of the more hallucinatory Dick novels I have read to date, and PDK fans know that's saying something.

I checked this out from the Morrison-Reeves Library in Richmond, Indiana. It was part of the Library of America's excellent Philip K. Dick edition, a present I bought for my son and friends this past Christmas, in the way that people buy presents for others that they secretly want for themselves.

#29: Guns at Q Cross by Merle Constiner

A cattleman comes to town ahead of his herd, planning to sell to a prosperous Idaho rancher, and almost immediately draws the ire of every local resident, culminating in a shootout the first night. Our cattleman hero, with his own sometimes peculiar pride and code of honor, bulldogs along until he busts open a rustling gang, breaking its grip on the town.

Guns at Q Cross is the slender side of an Ace Western double that I picked up for a shiny quarter at a library book sale. I had never heard of author Merle Constiner, but a little googling led me to find out he was a well-regarded midwestern pulp writer (from the neighboring state of Ohio) who, late in the life, turned to westerns. This one featured some interesting writing and some stretches of slapdashery, which I suspect was from having to write at a pretty good clip for Ace. Overall a solid oater with some interesting Idaho locations.

On the other side is a longer western novel by Tom West, who some people suspect was actually Merle Constiner as well. I will flip it over and keep reading.