The Postman Always Rings Twice - James M. Cain

For some reason, I always assumed The Postman Always Rings Twice was a spy novel. I don’t know why that is. It’s one of those titles I heard about through pop culture at a very young age without any additional information, and my brain made a bunch of assumptions that I assumed to be true.

The Postman Always Rings Twice is not a spy novel. It doesn’t even have a postman in it. I’m not clear why it’s called that (nor is anyone else, apparently) but it’s got a nice ring to it, and I suppose when it comes to titles, that’s the most important thing.

The story is narrated by a drifter named Frank Chambers, who comes across a Greek diner owner named Nick and his beautiful young wife Cora. Frank and Cora share an attraction galvanized, in part, by their profound lack of moral character. Quickly, almost casually, they conspire to kill Nick so that they can be together. The novel follows their attempts and the legal aftermath. I’ll refrain from spoiling the story with more detail, but in the end it becomes clear why and where Frank is telling this story, which is something I appreciate in first-person novels. Too often the perspective seems to be used simply because it feels more literary, without any logic behind the narrator’s decision to speak.

Frank is a nasty but compelling character, his casual, detached description of heinous acts revealing ugly depths beneath a blandly charming surface. This is a strong novel, daring for its time.

Holly - Stephen King

It pains me to say this, but I didn’t really like this one. Holly is the first Stephen King book I struggled to finish.

The problem wasn’t the main story, which was an engaging mystery using the Columbo formula of giving away the villains and the outset and making the cat and mouse discovery the source of tension. King knows how to spin a yarn, and he does this well, teasing out revelations and using our knowledge to build dramatic irony.

The villains, likewise, were well-drawn and satisfyingly nasty (spoilers ahead, though you learn this within the first twenty pages). Emily and Rodney Harris are retired professors of English and Biology, respectively, who have descended into cannibalism under the belief that human flesh—livers and brains especially—hold restorative properties. They make for interesting villains with believable (if deplorable) motivations, though the focus on Emily’s racism and homophobia felt more like easy tags for her vileness rather than natural extension of her character. A person like her could certainly be prejudiced, but would she really be that preoccupied with her own prejudice?

The Harris’s insatiable hunger leads to a string of kidnappings, the latest of which Holly Gibney is hired to investigate. Through her sleuthing, she begins to connect the latest disappearance to previous ones. It’s clear King loves Holly, and she is indeed a good and interesting character. But I think one of the problems with this book is that he loves his characters too much. One of King’s great strengths as a writer has been his moral ambiguity. The line between good and evil is clear, but the good aren’t angelically so. They have flaws. They disappoint and hurt people. They are human. I don’t get that sense so much with Holly, and especially side characters Jerome and Barbara Robinson, who feel Mary Sue-ish in their fundamental goodness.

I’ll admit to a certain amount of sour grapes, as well, because not one but both Robinsons fart out lucrative literary careers without any effort whatsoever. Jerome receives $100,000 advance for a book about his grandpa, and Barbara is basically the Poetry Messiah, bequeathed by a character who is the greatest living poet of the 20th century and serves exclusively to beatify her. She also somehow makes $25,000, which is not something poets generally do. As someone who has written novels and sweated the requisite five pints of blood to get them published, the sheer ease of their success is galling, and makes King seem more than a little out of touch.

The late pandemic setting is an interesting touch, but this too proves distracting. I don’t think it’s by any means necessary to ignore COVID in fiction, but the constant references to it (though justifiable; it was all encompassing at that time) tended to take me out of the book, as did the repeated mentions of Trump. I know King’s politics, and while I share many of them, it still felt a bit cheap, as Trump supporter or COVID denier read like shorthands for “don’t like this person.”

To end on a positive note (and this really is a spoiler), I thought it was a clever choice to make the Harris’s cannibalism entirely a product of madness, and that the regenerative properties they feel are simply placebos. King doesn’t cheat with this, showing us impossible recovery that he then goes back on, but he does provide enough hints that, in the context of the Gibneyverse, where supernatural events have already occurred, such occult powers could conceivably exist.

Up In Honey's Room - Elmore Leonard

This was a weird one. Most of the Elmore Leonard I’ve read has been contemporary crime fiction, so if it took place in the 70s it’s because it was written in the 70s. Up In Honey’s Room is set during World War II, and is a follow up to another historical crime thriller, the Hot Kid, which I haven’t read. The setting might not seem that different, but Elmore Leonard’s dialogue is so distinct that it felt weird coming out of the mouths of these characters. Maybe people talked like that in 1944, but I found it jarring.

Leonard’s novels are never particularly plot heavy, and the principal plan or focus tends to shift midway through. I like that about them, as it feels more realistic, but it can also muddy the action. In this case ,the story is ostensibly about Carl “the Hot Kid” Webster chasing down a pair of escaped German POWs. His pursuit brings him to Detroit, where he encounters Honey Deal, a young woman previously married to a pro-Nazi German immigrant named Walter.

Carl suspects Walter might be involved in hiding the POWs, and enlists Honey to help interrogate him, under the reasoning that her presence will throw him off balance. There are some other characters, including a spy named Vera and an officer named Kevin, but their roles aren’t always that clear, and Walter’s plan to murder president Roosevelt is mentioned suddenly and comes to nothing when the man dies of natural causes. Walter’s lame attempts to make people think he was responsible were funny, but they leant to the overall sense of narrative drift.

I wouldn’t want Leonard to write tight, plotted novels like Frederick Forsythe, as the meandering stories and bumbling criminals are part of the charm, but for whatever reason this one didn’t feel like it came together as nicely as his previous work.

52 Pick-up - Elmore Leonard

Elmore Leonard has long been a standby author of mine—someone whose work I would pick up at random whenever I wasn’t reading anything in particular. For whatever reason, I hadn’t read a book by him in several years, so when I found a copy of 52 Pick-Up in a Little Free Library I grabbed it eagerly.

52 Pick-Up is classic Elmore Leonard, full of skeezy characters, excellent naturalistic dialogue, and crisp, effortless prose. Leonard never feels like he’s trying to impress, and thus always impresses. As far as the plot goes, I wouldn’t rank this among his best, but it’s certainly engaging. Harry Mitchell, a former soldier and autoworker who studied engineering and opened a successful auto plant, is captured by masked assailants and shown a porn film starring him and his mistress. They demand he pay up or they’ll leak the footage. Stubborn Harry refuses, and the ante is steadily upped, resulting in murder, kidnapping, and other Leonardy mayhem.

The characters are archetypal but distinct, filled with life through Leonard’s keen eye for detail and even keener ear for capturing spoken language. He has mastered the art of dropping words form sentences in a way that mirrors speech, something I see surprisingly rarely in other books (perhaps because it sounds hackneyed if done wrong)

I wouldn’t call 52 Pick-Up my favourite of Leonard’s novels (that’s Freaky Deaky, incidentally), and the title is incredibly arbitrary (referring, I assume, to the $52,000 in bribe money the perps settle on, a number I’m guessing he chose after he thought of the title), but it’s solid and worth reading.