Finally!

Well...I finally read a decent self-published novel. As all who read my blog should know, I am not a fan (to put it mildly) of the self-publishing scene. To me, it's like a gigantic slush pile with nothing worthy of my attention and time. I used to be first-reader for a literary magazine and going through the slush pile was agonizing, frustrating, and annoying. Almost everything sent to the magazine was utter trash and after a while I lost patience with the authors of the crap that was coming across the threshold every day. The world of self-published novels is like that. 99.9% of everything that I sample is of such low quality that I find myself wishing that there had been a first-reader to prevent it all from ever seeing light at my online booksellers.

And so, for years, I have been looking for a decent self-published novel. It didn't even have to be great. All it had to be was competent. Aside from some self-published short stories, I was denied even competent fiction. I was beginning to think that there was no such thing as a good self-published novel.

At last, however, I have found one.

THE COMPUTER HEIST by Michael P. King.

With most self-published books I can tell within a few lines (sometimes just one!) whether or not the author knows what he's doing and if the book is going to justify dedicating several precious hours of my leisure time to processing the material. THE COMPUTER HEIST grabbed me from the first paragraph and so, of course, I read on. The entire chapter was good stuff and I continued to read, waiting for the inevitable moment when I realized the self-publisher was not a true writer and that I was just wasting my time.

That never happened.

King introduces the readers to "the Traveling Man and his wife" currently going by the names Joe and Tess. Joe and Tess are a married couple (not sure if they're legally married, but with this pair that's not a problem) who are not just grifters, but criminals without the problem of moral ambiguities or feelings of real guilt. We meet them at the point where they are being interviewed by a prospective employer (Samantha Bartel) who wants them to run a scam against her software corporation employers.

Joe and Tess are similar to some archetypal characters of the anti-hero from older works, but without the glow of a heart of gold seen in most of their literary predecessors. These guys are not Leslie Chateris' Simon Temlar, and they're not even Jeff Lindsay's Dexter Morgan. If you had to compare them to a modern  pop criminal, it would be Walter White from the "Breaking Bad" TV series. Yeah, they're bad guys, but not quite as bad as some of the people around them.

The scam in this well-built novel concerns wrecking a computer program in the development stage at a software company, while stealing a copy after the source material is fried. As we who read crime novels know, the situation is all not quite what it seems even when it's a criminal act. Many and varied characters are eventually tied into the plot and their actions end up weaving a sticky web of spaghetti code that would give pause to even the most brilliant of hackers. The straightforward task begins to go awry very quickly and soon all involved find themselves stuck in a nasty situation.

Can even a pair of grifters like Joe and Tess, free from the weight of conscience, work their ways clear of the grasping tendrils of criminal fate? As they try to massage the situation and tinker with the outcome and babysit the amateurs around them, we are left wondering what will happen and who will end up with the nasty end of the stick.

Pick up the novel. If you like crime fiction, if you enjoy excellent characterization, then you will get a kick out of THE COMPUTER HEIST.

I've now bought THE TRAVELING MAN, the first in the series. And to answer your question: no, you do not need to have read the first novel to understand and enjoy the second one.

THE COMPUTER HEIST by Michael P. King.

The Myth of the Benign Fascist

Everyone seems to love them. You know, those bad-ass pulp fiction characters who let their male emotions do their thinking and their giant muscles do the talking. I've taken to calling them 'the benign Fascists'.

Of course, there really is no such thing. But that's part of the allure right? Reading fantasies that there might actually be such. We call them things like Batman, or The Equalizer, or Jack Reacher. It's a nice thought, I suppose. I mean, them taking out the human garbage and all.

But it just ain't so. It finally became such a reach for me to believe in that kind of fantasy that I put down the novels that are basically a gun-humper's wet dream. I got sick of those violent concoctions about men who are somewhere between the outlaw and the good guy.

My latest excursion into such territory was THE WEIGHT by Andrew Vachss. When I was younger I was a huge Vachss fan. I read several of his Burke novels, the title character kind of like Doc Savage if all Doc Savage did was go around slaughtering child molesters. Those were fun for a while, but then they got old and I stopped reading them well before I finished the whole series.

When I saw THE WEIGHT I figured I'd see what Vachss was up to in more recent times. This book came out around 2011 or so. At least the version I have is dated 2011. And he mentions such topical things as what a douche Eliot Spitzer is. Yeah, it's that kind of novel.

The book focuses on a professional criminal named "Sugar". He's a thief who is usually part of a team who go after high-dollar targets and then lay low for a long time. Sugar is not naturally violent (despite being well over six feet tall and composed of 240 pounds or so of solid muscle) and he cares a lot about the welfare of children and women and the mentally disadvantaged. And probably puppies, but we never get to hear about that.

The plot kicks into high gear after a big heist when Sugar is falsely accused of raping a woman and he can't voice his alibi because that would be admitting that he was in on the theft of five million dollars worth of jewelery. So he ends up having to take the blame for the rape so that he won't have to give up his fellow thieves. This is "the weight" of the title. He has to serve five years in the pen.

And there he has to do business with all sorts, including the Aryan Brotherhood, because Sugar is a white dude and he has to buy his shank from the AB. And the way the Brotherhood is described is that some of them aren't really bad sorts. They're just misunderstood fellows who happen to be covered in Hitler and Nazi tattoos. You dig that, right?

Most of the first half of the book deals with Sugar talking about the life of a career criminal. It's pretty good stuff and holds your interest. Because whatever Vachss may be feeding us about his benign Fascist, he's a very skillful writer. When the serious plot does finally kick in, it's convoluted and detailed and so crazy that mostly it makes no sense whatsoever. And that's generally okay in crime books, because many of the classic crime novels involve criminal plots that make absolutely no sense at all. But here it doesn't work. For me...it utterly failed.

But the book held my attention. I have to give it that. I think in the final analysis I just can't believe in the theory of the benign Fascist. Because those guys whose careers are built around breaking the law and stealing and such...they're almost all stupid assholes. And they have little to no morals when it comes to the welfare and safety of children, and women, and the mentally disadvantaged. To them, kids and women...those are targets.

THE WEIGHT by Andrew Vachss.

Selling "Pure Southern"

I'd never written much in the way of crime fiction. Only once, a high-dollar sale to an anthology some years back, a yarn with the title of "Two Gun Bob is Dead and I Ain't Feelin' So Good Myself".

Then, not too many months back, I wrote another one: "Pure Southern". Since I'm not into self-publishing (I consider it a mug's game for creeps and idiots), I looked around for a market where I could try to sell it. Sadly, there seem to be almost no professional markets for short crime stories in this day and age. All of the magazines are just about gone. There was ELLERY QUEEN MYSTERY MAGAZINE and ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE and...well, that's about it.

So, I sent it to ELLERY QUEEN and, after a few weeks, they rejected it, reluctantly, and asked to see more material from me. Just like old times! Unfortunately, I rarely write crime fiction and didn't have anything else to send them. But I still had "Pure Southern" to try to sell. There apparently were lots of small press markets that pay a few bucks for stories, but I hate giving my work away. That's for the self-published folk and the pathetic newbies and losers. I need money for my fiction, not the knowledge that it's in print and nothing else.

Then I recalled THE BIG CLICK, an online crime fiction magazine that pays real money for real stories by real writers. I sent it to the editor, Nick Mamatas. He accepted the tale, and now it's in the latest issue of The Big Click.

You can see it here:

THE BIG CLICK.

"The people, anyway; they’re always cold. Cold eyes, cold hands, cold hearts; like blocks of icy steel the whole sorry lot of them." (From 'Pure Southern' by James Robert Smith.)