Lost City by Jay Stringer

Title: Lost City

Author: Jay Stringer

Publisher: Thomas & Mercer

Pages: 314 Pages

Release Date: January 14, 2014

Eoin Miller’s day was going pretty well until he got the call from his boss. At first it seemed straight forward. A stoned john got rough with one of the hookers and she knifed him. Simple fix. Except Eoin knew the john and he wasn’t the violent type. Then another murder happens. Before long Eoin is in a race against time to protect himself and the crime family he works for. He uses the skills he learned when he was a cop to piece things together. The only question is can he get the answer before it is too late.

This novel is full of interesting and dark characters. The protagonist, Eoin Miller, is a half-Romani (Gypsy for those who don’t know the term they use for themselves) living in a modern world still loaded with prejudice against his father’s people. He was a police officer before he left the force and went to work for a crime family. The other characters are just as conflicted. Veronica Gaines runs the Gaines crime family, yet all the while she is trying to find a way to get the family free of its criminal enterprises. There is his ex-wife Laura. What is happening with their relationship? How does she fit in to all of this?

Lost City takes place in an area outside Birmingham, England. This is classic hard-boiled pulp fiction at its best. There is a surprise around every corner. Stringer keeps the reader guessing as to what will happen next. The pacing of the book is very quick. I found myself flying through the book. Now be warned, by its nature hard-boiled fiction has sex and violence. No one wears a white hat in this story.

Ever since Philip Marlow appeared in The Big Sleep hard-boiled detective stories have had a following. Years of reading these novels have taught me that while it is easy to write bad novels in this genre, it is very difficult to write good novels in this genre. Jay Stringer has managed to write a very good novel and I look forward to reading more Eoin Miller mysteries in the future.  This book is recommended for anyone who loves to sit down with a fast paced story full of twists and turns.

Triple Play by Max Allan Collins

Max Allan Collins has given us a number of Nathan Heller novels. In this book he collects three novellas from the world of Nathan Heller. There is a grand tradition of these stories that are longer than short stories and shorter than novels. Once it was common to feature these in short story magazines. Authors (or publishers) would often collect three of these novellas and publish them in a single volume. Collins points out that this was a standard practice for Rex Stout. As short story periodicals have disappeared so have the novellas.

Collins says that he prefers writing novels to short stories. You wouldn’t know that from reading these stores. Of course they are not as in depth as a full novel, that would not be possible given the size of the story. For these stories Collins choose cases that were not as large in scope and so they allow for a shorter story. “Dying in the Post War World” covers the Lipstick Killer case. In this story Heller helps to track down a serial killer whose brutality leaves him ready to take matters into his own hands. In “Kisses of Death” Heller gets his first opportunity to work for Marilyn Monroe. While working for Ms. Monroe he is reacquainted with some members of the Chicago literary scene, mainly the obnoxious poet and author Maxwell Bodenheim. His look at this leading jazz age figure is less than flattering, but oh so wonderfully written. Finally in “Strike Zone” Heller goes to work for Bill Veek. Veeck was a well known character in the world of baseball. He loved to pull stunts to entertain the crowd. One of his best known stunts was to draft a midget as a pinch hitter. Eddie Gaedel will always be remembered as the shortest man who ever played professional baseball, even though he was later disqualified. Heller investigates the death of Gaedel after the man’s mother claims that he was murdered. There was a line in this story that had me laughing until I hurt.

All three of these novellas are well written and wonderful to read. I enjoyed each of them and can recommend this to any lover of great hardboiled detective stories.