Given the line’s stellar track record, I never thought I’d say this about an offering from Hard Case Crime: Eh.

An unabridged reprint of his 1986 novel, Madison Smartt Bell’s STRAIGHT CUT is a little more literary than the usual get-it-done language that has become a Hard Case signature, but it’s not necessarily to its benefit. This first-person narrative is told by Tracy Bateman, a Kierkegaard-reading film editor recently ditched by his wife. He’s called in by an old friend for a freelance editing job in Italy. The pay is double than what he’d expect, so Tracy suspects his pal Kevin has a surprise in store for him. All his instincts tell him not to go; he does anyway.

As it turns out – albeit many, many chapters later than I would have liked – Kevin indeed has a duplicitous intention in bringing Tracy halfway around the world, and it involves a suitcase full of heroin and his estranged wife. With so much history between the two friends, they speak kind of an inside-joke shorthand that makes this tale difficult to fully access, and Bell isn’t up for filling in the blanks. So we’re not always sure what’s gone on and what’s going on between them, so by the anticlimactic end, you wonder what the point even was.

STRAIGHT CUT is not bad on the whole, but at times it’s definitely boring. Though I learned a lot about the process of editing film and the jargon they speak, it sure didn’t advance the narrative. Nor did the 50-odd pages in the middle during which Tracy does little but skip from town to town, shacking up in hotels and finding nearby cafés for sustenance. Bell may have brought visions of the Italian countryside to life, but the main story just lies there.

And where there is no buildup, there is no payoff. The STRAIGHT dope on this suggests it’s for Hard Case completists only. I suppose a disappointing Hard Case is akin to bad sex: At least you had it, but you could have better. –Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.
Discuss it in our forums.