Parker needs money and agrees to an art heist, but backs out when he loses confidence in his fellow crooks. Then the chance to pull another art heist comes along. It’s mostly successful until it’s time to exchange the paintings for cash. The middleman is extremely unreliable and things deteriorate from there.
Category Archives: Fiction
Slayground by Richard Stark
Parker and associates knock over an armored car, but the driver of the getaway car screws up. Parker grabs the loot and runs into an amusement park that’s closed for the season. He stashes the money and then tries to avoid being caught by a gang of local criminals and two crooked cops who know he’s in there with all that cash. Parker escapes but has to leave the money behind (for now).
Perfidia by James Ellroy
Crime writer James Ellroy goes back in time before L. A. Confidential to December 1941. It’s supposed to be the beginning of another Quartet of novels about crime and corruption in Los Angeles. Some of the characters appear in later novels. Others are new. The writing isn’t as austere as some of Ellroy’s recent work, but he’s still writing short, punchy sentences that skimp on description and just deliver the (mostly fictional) facts.
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
The Maltese Falcon was published in 1929, twelve years before Humphrey Bogart played Sam Spade. In the book, Spade and Brigid O’Shaughnessy have sex, Spade has blond hair and Casper Gutman (the fat man) has a daughter. Other than that, the book and movie are quite similar. The movie even borrows a lot of dialogue from the book, which is a good thing, because Hammett’s dialogue is excellent.
Spade spends most of the novel wandering around San Francisco trying to figure things out. Brigid O’Shaughnessy shares as little information as possible, but since they do spend one night together, it makes more sense in the book than the movie when Spade talks about them being in love. Although she still has to take the fall, of course.
Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
Published in 1874, Far from the Madding Crowd is the story of the young, independent and beautiful Bathsheba Everdene (what a name!) and three very different men. Gabriel Oak is a thoughtful, competent young shepherd who meets her and quickly proposes marriage. Mr. Boldwood is an older, gentleman farmer who has no experience with women and falls in love with her too. Francis Troy is a semi-aristocratic soldier who has experience with women and is not to be trusted. It wouldn’t be much of a story if Bathsheba chose the right one right away.
The novel is set in the region of southern England that Hardy called “Wessex”. There are many fine descriptions of the countryside and country life. The downside is that there are a few too many discussions between the local rustics, who speak in dialect and serve as a rural Greek chorus.
The title is from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”:
Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife
Their sober wishes never learn’d to stray;
Along the cool sequester’d vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.
The characters in Hardy’s first popular novel do live far from the crowds, but don’t always avoid madness. They might get under your skin a little bit (it’s remarkable how fictional people can affect us).
One of my favorite passages comes near the end of the novel:
Theirs was that substantial affection which arises (if any arises at all) when the two who are thrown together begin first by knowing the rougher sides of each other’s character, and not the best till further on, the romance growing up in the interstices of a mass of hard prosaic reality. This good-fellowship — camaraderie — usually occurring through similarity of pursuits, is unfortunately seldom superadded to love between the sexes, because men and women associate, not in their labours, but in their pleasures merely. Where, however, happy circumstance permits its development, the compounded feeling proves itself to be the only love which is strong as death — that love which many waters cannot quench, nor the floods drown, beside which the passion usually called by the name is evanescent as steam.
Whereof One Can Speak 🇺🇦 
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