Crime spree

Mystic River by Dennis Lehane turned out to be pretty much what I was looking for when I asked people to recommend some good crime fiction. I got to walk through dark human interiors and cinematically depicted exeteriors, and there was a murder to be solved and deep tragedy and a good-but-flawed cop and complicated and not unsympathetic bad guys, and the coffee was stale and the food was greasy and everyone looked bad under harsh yellow lights. Very well done. But, man, I don't think I could handle a steady diet of this sort of thing because it was grim as a glass eye, grim like a fly on your pancakes, grim like a kid with a telethon disease.

I also read Stephen King's The Colorado Kid, his release from new hard-boiled crime publisher Hard Case Crime. So, put the clues together: publisher whose mission is to bring out old-fashioned pulpy crime paperbacks of the type traveling salesman used to buy at bus depots, and a book with a cover like such



and you might expect, you know, hard-boiled crime. What King gives us instead is a cozy, rambling, homey tale of two old, inoffensive New England newspaper men initiating their young, pretty, Midwestern and inoffensive college intern on the nature of unsolved mysteries. It's really exciting, ayuh. They drink Cokes from bottles while they sit and talk. They eat lobster rolls and talk some more. That's what they do in this book. They sit and talk. I'm not saying it's a bad book. King is a master storyteller and all that, and his voice in this one is the engaging Uncle With the Amusing Anecdote, and I'm not saying I didn't enjoy some things about it, but it has no business coming in a package that promises blood, boobs, and bourbon.

Last night I started on Best American Short Stories 2005, which includes Tim Pratt's utterly nifty, strange western, "Hart and Boot", as well as representation from Cory Doctorow and Kelly Link. I've only read the first couple of stories so far, including the Dennis Lehane short "Until Gwen", which starts off comic and then just gets darker and darker and grim as rain in an open grave, grim as a black toe nail, grim as rust on a pie fork. Grim business, crime.