Quick takes and capsule reviews from the dark suspense master himself, Ed Gorman!

I often talk about writers who seem to do their best work late in their careers. I’d like to say that about Richard Lupoff’s magnificent, stunning, overwhelming MARBLEHEAD: A NOVEL OF H.P. LOVECRAFT, but even though it was only recently published in its original form, it actually was completed around 1970. But that doesn’t matter. Whenever it was written and published, it’s Lupoff’s masterpiece.

MARBLEHEAD is a faux biography, speculative fiction in the real sense of the term. A good deal of it is actual-factual, which is to say that Lovecraft was just about as loopy as his stories: an old-fashioned New Englander whom God or actually the dark gods chose to plunk down in a century he loathed.

Early on, Lupoff gives us a man whose neuroses are sometimes amusing – i.e., his snobbery, crankiness, Bush-like penchant for giving everybody nicknames, almost pathetic Anglophilia – a dotty literary man not without his very real griefs such as constant lack of money, his even more constant lack of literary recognition and his odd marriage to the Jewish Sonia – odd especially because Lovecraft is anti-Semitic.

This is the first of many unappealing sides of Lovecraft that Lupoff shows us. The anti-Semitism and the outright racism are factors that Lupoff uses to create an imaginary period in which Lovecraft is hired by a German Aryan supremacist to write a book about how white folks eventually will rid the world of all others. Lovecraft is reluctant, but needs the money.

I’m not coming close to doing the book justice. Its wit, wily melancholy depiction of Lovecraft, and careful depiction of Lovecraft’s era and strange burdened grief give it a depth and echo you just don’t find in most popular fiction.

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Graham Greene spoiled me as far as thriller writers go. His thrillers – or “entertainments,” as he chose to call them – always worked on at least two levels: the tension of the story itself and then the characters and the milieu they inhabited.

Cardboard cut-outs of Washington and its people just don’t do it for me, whether CIA or FBI, the men too bold (though always with that One Serious Flaw) and the women too beautiful (though always with that One Serious Flaw). Thriller Writing 101.

In her exciting new novel THE EVER-RUNNING MAN, Marcia Muller shows us how to write a thriller that honors the Greene method: tension-filled story, with believeable characters in a carefully detailed milieu.

Private investigator Sharon McCone’s husband is one of the owners of RKI, a security company that competes with the best and the brightest in the business. But RKI – home office and affiliates – has been set upon with a domestic terrorist who uses explosive devices with deadly cunning and precision. McCone, barely escaping such an explosion, glimpses the man who means to make things ugly for the company.

RKI hires McCone to see what she can find out. The search is intense, a relentless hunt to discover and stop the killer before he wreaks any more damage.

But in the course of the search, McCone is forced to confront certain truths about herself, her husband and his business partners. Muller gives us the world as it is – the world of Starbucks, reading the Sunday paper, the wind for lonely moments, the inevitable misunderstandings in marriage – seamlessly enhancing the chilling plot.

One of the year’s best suspense novels.

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Cornell Woolrich’s first novel emulated the novels of his literary hero, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Judging from the first act of the new Woolrich novel FRIGHT from Hard Case Crime, the Fitzgerald influence lasted well into Woolrich’s later career as a suspense writer.

The young, handsome, successful Prescott Marshall could be any of Fitzgerald’s early protagonists. New York, Wall Street, a striver eager to marry a beauiful young socialite and acquire the sheen only she can give him … even the prose early on here reminds us of Fitzgerald’s “Winter Dreams” and “The Rich Boy”: strivers dashed by fate.

But since Woolrich was by this time writing for the pulps and not Smart Set or Scribners, young Prescott Marshall’s fate is not simply to lose face or be banished from some Edenic yacht cruise … but to face execution at the hands of the state for killing a young woman he slept with once and who turned into a blackmailer. This is in the teens of the last century, by the way; a historical novel, if you will.

From here on, we leave the verities of Fitzgerald behind and step into the noose provided by another excellent writer and strong influence on Woolrich: Guy de Maupassant. In the Frenchman’s world, it’s not enough to merely die – you must die in a tortured, inch-by-inch way that makes the final darkness almost something to be desired. And dying for some ironic turn of events is best of all.

I read this in a single sitting. It’s one those melodramas that carry you along on sheer narrative brute force. I woudn’t say it’s major Woolrich, but I would say that it’s awfully good Woolrich, with all the master’s cruel tricks at work and a particularly claustrophobic sense of doom. Readers will appreciate its dark twists. Collectors will want to buy a few extra copies. –Ed Gorman

Buy it at Amazon.

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THESE AUTHORS:
• FRIGHT by Cornell Woolrich