Skip the soft-boiled stories; try them hard-boiled or over-easy.
Ellery Queen and Cornell Woolrich, the subjects of Nevins’s two Edgar-winning critical biographies, are the presiding spirits of this collection of 14 reprints (1973–2002).
Broadly speaking, Nevins’s Woolrich is better than his Queen. Although neither the Woolrichesque “The Last Passenger,” about a bus rider who fears she’s being stalked by a serial killer, nor the equally dark Raymond Chandler pastiche “Consultation in the Dark” ever achieves the intensity of their originals, they’re both worthy imitations. Formal detective stories like “The Kumquats Affair” (a case for Loren Mensing: Into the Same River Twice, 1996, etc.) and “Bagworms” (an adventure for Nevins’s series con artist Milo Turner) feature fact-based legal scams more interesting than the murder mysteries they provoke. Best of all, though least characteristic of Nevins’s longer work, are the stories that mix Queen’s ratiocination, Woolrich’s sense of looming menace, and a dollop of black humor. If the murderous games in “Funeral Music” seem merely playful, the face-off in “Counterplot” between a man and a woman who keep pulling new identities from their hats crackles with tension; “Bad Bargain,” whose hero labors to talk his wife’s hit man out of killing him, snaps shut as satisfyingly as a mousetrap; and the title story, in which a hopeful heir plots to murder a distant relative before his victim can be convicted of killing his own wife, is Nevins’s most successful combination of clever and ghoulish.
Skip the soft-boiled stories; try them hard-boiled or over-easy.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7862-4321-X
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Five Star/Gale Cengage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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