Crimewave 10: Now You See Me

Disappearances, reappearances, and vanishing acts of all stripes are the name of the game for the tenth issue of Crimewave. As with previous issues, there’s a central theme around which the stories all revolve, to one extent or another. Some hit the nail dead on the head, and others flirt with looser interpretations, but all of them play somehow into the theme of “Now You See Me.”

First up on the block, we have a so-fast-you-never-know-what-hit-you story from Steve Rasnic Tem, “2PM: The Real Estate Agent Arrives.” All you need to know about the plot of Tem’s piece is spelled out in the title. Everything else is window dressing, directing your eye towards what’s left behind when an average suburban family decides to move, with a result that is akin to a fictitious gut-punch. It’s an amazingly effective piece, both subtle and brutal in its simplicity, and I found myself reading and re-reading it, trying to squeeze every last drop of story from those few words. “2PM…” is neither mystery nor thriller, as are most of the pieces that follow it, but is instead a crime story boiled down to its most basic and terrifying elements, and it is all the more effective for that reason.

Joel Lane’s “Even the Pawn,” conversely, is less effective but only because it is more diffuse than Tem’s piece. The story of a dead stripper, the strange little man who loved her, and the ugly world that made them both, is a first-person procedural that wavers between mystery, social commentary, and something altogether more speculative. The murder is less the center of the story than it is merely the cause of the events that follow it, which, given the flat, Law & Order voice of the piece, is pitch-perfect initially. We follow the narrator, a seemingly somber (if not outright depressed) police detective through an investigation that all involved know will reveal nothing; neither motive nor murderer. Lane is damn near Chandleresque in his simple, blunt style here, passing commentary on a broken society as well as those who do the breaking. However, when the aforementioned speculative elements come into play, everything goes off the rails. The deus ex machina through which a slightly off-kilter twist ending is achieved is completely at odds with everything else. It leaves the reader unsatisfied with the conclusion, and not in a “make ‘em want more” sort of way. Good twist endings are a staple of the crime genre and are generally built up throughout a story, just beyond the reader’s grasp. In contrast, this ending seems to come out of nowhere and, regrettably, detracts from the overall tone and rhythm, providing an uneven experience.

“Last Man” by Mick Scully, the story of the last POW in Vietnam and his captors both past and present, is a grim study of humanity, survival, and luck. The story juxtaposes the past and the present in such a way as to home in on the basics of war and survival in a foreign environment, and how a coarseness of soul is oftentimes the end result and is, indeed, the only possible result. The themes of survival, captivity, redemption, and freedom are all tangled together in a skillful fashion, weaving around the characters and drawing them tightly together. In fact, the story is so effective in its portrayal of the gathered characters that it can be forgiven the relative lightness of its plot. The story is a basic one, as are the means by which Scully illuminates his characters. There is little question that “Last Man” will end the way it does, but as stated above, this is by no means a weakness in the narrative. Indeed, it could be said that the ending Scully gives us is the only ending such a story could have, despite the slightest of hints that what the reader expects isn’t necessarily what occurs. As with several other offerings in this issue, we end just before the final scene, the story clipped agonizingly short.

While the previous two pieces have had intriguing, if not enthralling, characters, “Unlucky” by Lisa Morton isn’t so lucky (see what I did there?). Of all the stories in this issue, I felt this one was the weakest. Involving a down-at-the-heels narrator on an excessively long run of bad luck, this is an unsatisfying examination of what an obsession with something as ephemeral as “luck” can do to a person. It is told in a dry, clinical style that does little to emotionally involve the reader, relying instead on vague empathy to keep eyes on the page. But that plea for empathy is wasted as the narrator is singularly unlikable (though I expect that this, at least, is intentional), and his life reads like a bland Dickensian nightmare, spiraling further and further down society’s drain. Like “Even the Pawn,” this story goes for the last-minute twist at the end, and while it’s a clever one, it is a bit too clever to be believed and thus jars the reader out of the narrative flow. Hitting all of the right marks in terms of building the main character up towards the end; nevertheless, it’s all off slightly, as the character himself is simply too bland to make the reader care about what’s going on, rendering the story uninteresting.

“Appearances” by Murray Shelmerdine is another story, along with “Unlucky” and “Even the Pawn,” which reads with a flat voice. It’s a hallmark of a lot of crime fiction, I think, and not necessarily a good one, as it sacrifices language for pace. However, in some cases, it is not a weakness. “Appearances” is such a case. Told from the point of view of a former beautician and current undertaker’s assistant, April, it is a harsh but pleasant tale dealing with the importance of appearances, even among the deceased. The description of the day-to-day business of running a funeral parlor takes up a lot of space, but only enough to do the job and helps keep the tone leisurely until the very end, when the pace kicks up and drags the reader along to the ending. Like most stories in this magazine, there isn’t a happy ending to be had, but it’s a good one, as Shelmerdine goes back to his central theme of what you see isn’t always what you get.

Now we get to the story I consider the best of the issue, “101 Ways to Leave Paris” by Simon Avery. Jack Chappel, a man wronged by the woman he loved and the brother he cleaned up after, comes back to Paris after a stretch in prison, looking for some kind of justice. It opens with what appears to be an unconnected vignette of a young man playing matador in the middle of Parisian traffic, described in vivid detail by Avery. His language is lush and descriptive as he describes careening cars and the delicate twirl of a red coat. After the obvious occurs, we move to the meat of the story, which looks at first to be a stereotypical revenge plot but blossoms into something better and altogether more interesting. The personalities at play here are conflicting mirrors, their actions and reactions echoing one another in a cinematic style. Avery entices the reader into Chappel’s head and then makes it impossible for the reader to leave, layering the story on, hinting at some things and bringing others full out into the light, but always leaving the reader wanting more. This is noir at its finest, with the world blurring to gray around the characters as each struggles to find some measure of balance.

“People in Hell Want Ice and Water” by Nicholas Stephen Proctor is another excellent offering, with a more speculative bent than any other in the magazine save one, which I’ll be getting to next. The reader is introduced to the singularly named Case, a salesman in an airport bar with a strange tale to tell. This story is a sneaky one, much like “2PM…” above, and it wanders between past and present to tell both Case’s story and a story about Case simultaneously. Like “2PM…” it is effective because of its relative brevity, giving us just enough of a glimpse of Case to understand his situation and the realities thereof. Proctor’s writing is pitch-perfect in creating a sense of the unnatural, a dreamlike sense that pervades everything right up until the stinger ending that brings it all into chilling focus.

“Black Lagoon” by Alex Irvine is an engaging piece concerning a van load of copper, Chippewa gangsters, and the titular body of water. With a cast of characters that display Robert B. Parker levels of wit, the narrative moves easily between amusing and shocking. The description is sparing, except in certain cases, and the language is blunt. This is not to say that “Black Lagoon” possess the flat voice of either “Even the Pawn” or “Appearances,” but that it perfectly captures the style of, say, Elmore Leonard, with a reliance on dialogue and action as opposed to description. The speculative elements, while stronger here than in any other story of this issue, never intrude and properly propel the story along to its satisfying conclusion, a grotesque climax which does not fail to entertain.

“Your Place is in the Shadows” by Charlie Williams follows the exploits of one of the terminally unlucky, as Lisa Morton’s tale earlier did, only this time the setting is a London neighborhood as opposed to Vegas, and Williams’s protagonist is infinitely more likeable than Morton’s. Relying mostly on dialogue, the story moves so quickly one almost misses the speculative elements which begin to creep in and soon become the focus. And it is the dialogue which saves it from feeling slightly jerky as it moves along, jumping from scene to scene so rapidly that we barely have time to comprehend what has happened before it ends. Still, the plot is unfulfilling. It is a series of occurrences which are strung together along a thin line, until that line is abruptly widened. By then, however, the story is over, and it’s too late for anything to be built in the gaps. The ending is satisfying enough, but it could have been better. Some mysteries are improved by leaving questions in their wake, others only generate annoyance in the reader. Unfortunately, the latter is the case here.

“Saudade” by Darren Speegle, however, generates nothing but questions and is anything but unsatisfying. A troubled man, an equally troubled woman, and the curved roads of Italy are entangled in this crooked tale of sorrow and loss. The language Speegle uses is evocative and haunting as he takes his characters through a mystery within a mystery which ends with yet another mystery. It is a fluid story, changing direction so smoothly that the reader is very nearly unaware that the course has been altered until the very end, where it ends not abruptly, but gradually. It trails off, rather than being cut short, and carries the reader with it, all the way to a haunting ending.

“The Montgolfier Assignment” by Kay Sexton is another visit to Paris, this time by an expatriate bibliophile who has problems with snow, dogs, Russians, and a stolen book, not necessarily in that order. A first-person narrator lends a sense of immediacy, and the narrator’s sad-sack voice gives it a shiny patina of helpless desperation. Like “Unlucky” and “Your Place is in the Shadows,” this is a story about failure, but unlike those, the failure is cast in an amusing light, written in a firm, tongue-in-cheek style that goes well with its subject matter and the sub-genre of caper-crime as well. This is probably the easiest of the stories to visualize, as Sexton describes less what is going on than weaves pictures for the reader. The story is meaty without being long, and is engaging without being too in-depth, providing light entertainment, especially when compared to…

“The Opening” by Daniel Kaysen. A disturbing story of art, love, and psychopathology, it flits between what’s going on in reality and what’s happening on the painted page with ease, each story mirroring the other. The two stories parallel one another, each enhancing the other, building layer upon layer of menace that the reader is hard pressed to ignore. Beginning slow, it picks up to a frenzied pace as it reaches the climax, mirroring the mental state of the characters involved. Kaysen is effective in using the story-within-a-story to paint a horribly beautiful picture of obsession and madness, and gives the reader a more thorough understanding of the elements involved in the creation of the spectacularly grim ending. That said, Kaysen stretched both stories to their outward limit in doing so, and this might have been more powerful had it been shorter.

[Disclosure notice: The Fix is brought to you by TTA Press, publisher of Crimewave.]