Currently Reading: Dust Devils by Roger Smith

UPDATE: I added the cover for the German edition of Dust Devils. The German title, Staubige Hölle, translates to Dusty Hell, which is pretty descriptive of the book. I like the simplicity of the AK47 on the German cover but the UK version tries to convey something about the location and characters. I can't say I prefer one over the other.

I am currently reading a pre-ARC version of Roger's third book, Dust Devils. No details until closer to publication, sorry. But, from someone who read Mixed Blood and Wake Up Dead twice, I call this is Roger's best work. Readers of his previous books will find Roger's distinct combination of lean, sharp, and hard-edged prose, fast pacing, action, and violence but he has also moved his writing in a new direction, placed it in a different context.

Dust Devils will have a major spring release in Germany (May) where Roger has been well received. Serpent's Tail will publish it in the U.K. in September. Roger assures me that Dust Devils will be available to readers in the U.S. More details to follow.

Dust Devils is available for pre-order from amazon.co.uk, amazon.de, and bookdepository.com.

Films: Thunder Road

Let me tell the story, I can tell it all;
About the mountain boy who ran illegal alcohol.
His daddy made the whiskey, son, he drove the load;
When his engine roared, they called the highway "Thunder Road".
--The Ballad of Thunder Road, co-written by Robert Mitchum in 1957 with music by Jack Marshall

Personal Note: I'm pretty far from country but I had a feeling of familiarity watching Thunder Road. Here is why:

My parents grew up in Southwest Virginia. My maternal grandparents moved out of the city and across the mountain into the country. To get to the valley where they lived you first had to cross a mountain with so many twists and hairpin turns that my father usually had to stop at least once for me to throw up.  Later I discovered that a bag of pork rinds on the way up settled my stomach. Yeah, it doesn't make sense to me now either.

A couple miles down the road was a genuine country store, the real thing and not some manufactured nostalgia impostor.

They lived in a log house (squared logs chinked something like cement) and cooking was with a coal stove. Water was gravity fed from a nearby spring.  Getting to my grandparent's house required careful driving to keep from leaving the oil pan on the rocky, narrow road. There were times when we had to leave our car down at the state road and get to the house in my grandfather's old dodge pickup truck.

During one visit, my father walking on the road and caught a ride. The driver reached under the seat and pulled out a mason jar of clear liquid and offered him a drink. "Skull buster" was the way my father described it with a rueful shake of the his head.

My grandfather tried his hand at making whiskey. He earned a visit from the revenuers who busted up his still. Besides the annoyance of having his still destroyed, he was insulted when they told him that his product wasn't very good.

Another time day a spotter plane observed smoke coming up near the stream behind the house and called it in. Several cars of law enforcement agents soon arrived. Imagine the reaction of armed law enforcement officers when, instead of a still, they found my grandmother making soap in a large black kettle near the creek. My brother related this story during show and tell in elementary school, to my mother's horror.

Thunder Road synopsis: Lucas (Luke) Doolin is back home in Tennessee after a stint in the U.S. Army during the Korean War. He resumes his job of transporting the moonshine his daddy makes, driving high powered automobiles fitted with tanks holding several hundred gallons of illegal alcohol.

Luke and the other moonshiners have problems, one old and one new. Their traditional enemy, agents of the Bureau of Alcohol and Tobacco, have a new hot shot in charge and he's leading a task force dedicated to eliminating the production of moonshine and to catching Luke. The new enemy is Carl Kogan, a Memphis gangster who wants to control the production and distribution of illegal alcohol. Where the federal agents chase the transporters, Kogan's crew ambush and kill them.

Unwilling to submit to Kogan and with the revenuers finding and destroying their stills, the moonshiners decide to stop production but Luke is bound to make one last run. It turns personal when he finds that Kogan is tricking his younger brother into making a run for him.

Review/Analysis: Thunder Road was filmed around Asheville, NC but set in Tennessee in 1954.

The picture of Mitchum on the poster doesn't have much to do with the movie. He never held a revolver, and an automatic only once. And he certainly didn't have that hunted expression on his face.

Is Thunder Road hillbilly noir as it has been described? Other than being in black and white, dealing with illegal activities, and coming out at the end of the classic film noir period, it would be a real stretch to call it noir. It is a solid classic B movie well deserving the cult status it gained in the southeast. Robert Mitchum's version of The Ballad of Thunder Road, not used in the film, was on Billboard's Hot 100 for a total of 21 weeks. The film has been a steady money-maker.

It starts and ends with a dedication to the agents of the Bureau of Alcohol and Tobacco. This is amusing since the audience's sympathies are with the mountain folk even if they are engaged in illegal activity. Read the full lyrics to the ballad, they are written about a hero:

Roarin' out Harlen revvin' up his mill
He shot the gap at Cumberland and screamed by Maynordsville

It's hard not to see fighter planes and calvary charges when you hear the song.

Luke's girlfriend, Francine, a Memphis nightclub singer, wants Luke to settle down. Luke where he came from:

[they believed] ...what a man did on his land was his business.

They came here, fought for this country. Scratched up those hills with plows or skinny little mules. The did it to guarantee the basic right of free men. They just figured that whiskey making was one of them. 

I suppose I knew that what he [Luke's daddy] was doing was contrary to someone's law but my granddaddy had done it before him and his daddy before him and so on back to Ireland.

Mitchum plays Luke with his trademark sleepy-eyed indifference, not showing much reaction but the way he carries himself brings a real power to the role. And the film gives some depth to Luke, he isn't just a hillbilly who likes to drive fast. He talks about how the government fetched his country soul out of the valley and sent him off to war. Now

My head is full of so many things. I've been across an ocean, met all the pretty people. I know how to read an expensive restaurant menu. I know what a mobile is.

One of these days I got to fall.

You could call him a tragic figure. He's been changed, he knows that he is probably doomed, but he has to play it out until the end. One of the other moonshiners sums him up saying "he's got a machine gunner's outlook and death doesn't phase him much."

Luke also talks movingly about growing up trailing his daddy up to the still on winter's morning:

I don't remember anything dark or shameful.

I just recollect the dogwood and laurels with little tugs of ice on the ends that snap off clean when you brush by them.

I remember the clear ice on the end of laurels myself.

The driving scenes are well done by the standards of the time. They use rear projection when they show the drivers so the scenery behind the car is flat. The exterior driving shots are still excellent. I read that the production company bought the cars from actual moonshiners who used the money to upgrade. While I never had a fascination with fast cars, I still feel the excitement listening to the deep rumble of the engines.

Thunder Road holds up very well 43 years later. If you are from that part of the South you know why it is still a favorite. If you are not, well, give it a watch and let me know what you think.

Thunder Road shows a little of Appalachian culture so I'm closing with my grandmother's recipe for cornbread. It isn't fancy but it is a recipe that was cooked in a coal stove in a log cabin. My mother got the recipe by measuring the "pinch of this" and the "dash of that" as my grandmother assembled the ingredients The shortening was most likely lard. I use an 8 inch iron skillet that belonged to my paternal grandmother and is well over  a hundred years old.
1 1/2 cups cornmeal
1/4 cup flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup buttermilk (or 4 tablespoons powdered buttermilk in 1 cup water. I put the buttermilk powder in with the other dry ingredients.)
1 egg
1 tablespoon shortening

Combine dry ingredients.
Combine milk (or water) and egg and add to dry ingredients just before putting in the oven.
Heat oven to 450. Put shortening in frying pan and the pan in the oven as it heats so that it melts. I put it in the oven when the temperature is around 350 so it is good an hot and you get a crust on the bottom.. Remove the frying pan and swirl the melted shortening around to coat the bottom and side of frying pan. Cook corn bread for about 20 minutes.

About.coms page on Southern cornbread says that "Northern cornbread use significant amounts of sugar and flour, while Southern cornbreads use very little or none at all." I haven't been able to verify this but I think the small amount of flour in this recipe is because flour was more expensive when my grandmother was learning to cook.

Wake Up Dead by Roger Smith

Picador, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-312-68048-0. 290 pages.




Why am I leading off with photographs of a knife? It is the Okapi 907E and it has a part in the story. It's the weapon preferred by one of the characters. The author told me that "the Okapi of choice is the 907 E. It has put many brown men into bodybags. Quite a pretty knife, too." The Okapi has a distinctive shape and knowing what it looks and feels like adds a feeling of immediacy to reading the story. That's my hand and my knife. There is a link to a website selling Okapis below.

Wake Up Dead has been recognized worldwide and I've included some of the acknowledgments at the end. There is a lot of link love there and you might find something new so check it out.

First sentence: The night they were hijacked, Roxy Palmer and her husband, Joe, ate dinner with an African cannibal and his Ukrainian whore.

The Story: Roxy is an American ex-model married to a gunrunner and broker for mercenaries. The book opens with a business dinner where Joe and the elegantly dressed cannibal (he might only have eaten one heart for the cameras) are finalizing a deal.

Unknown to Joe and Roxy, when they leave the restaurant they are followed by two low-level thugs from Cape Flats— Disco De Lilly and Godwynn MacIntosh. Joe and Roxy are hijacked at the gate to their house, Joe is wounded, and the gangsters leave in Joe's Benz. Roxy makes a decision that leaves her husband dead and her a not-so-grieving widow.

The point of view shifts to Billy Afrika, an ex-cop just back from Iraq where he worked for a contractor providing security services for the U.S. Billy's employment had been brokered by Joe Palmer and Billy would like to know why he hasn't been paid. Arriving back in Cape Town, Billy returns to the Flats to get a weapon. Billy came from the Flats and hasn't been forgotten—"Billy Fucken Afrika" is the typical reaction. He runs into a detective with the unfortunate name of Ernie Maggott who knew Billy when he was a detective. Maggott doesn't remember Billy fondly. He wants out of the Flats and is looking for the big case to get him promoted.

Meanwhile, hijacker Disco De Lilly is consumed with the fear that a psychopath named Piper might get out of prison. Piper is still in Pollsmoor but that doesn't lessen Disco's anxiety. Disco was Piper's prison "wife" and the crude tattoos Piper carved into his body reflect Piper's obsession with him. Billy and Piper also have a history.

The hijacking, Roxy's actions, the obsession of an imprisoned psychopath, an ambitious cop,and the return of Billy Afrika start a chain of events that will leave a bloody trail through the Cape Flats and culminate on a Cape Town beach.

Review: Wake Up Dead is a crime thriller and there are elements I want to be present if the story is to appeal. I need a good story. If I don't care what happens next I'm not likely to continue reading. With a thriller I expect a faster pace and more intense action. I also look for a strong sense of place, sharp writing, and well developed characters. If I feel that the story and actions of the characters are plausible, all the better. Wake Up Dead nails everything I want in a good read.

Thrillers can be long on action and short on developing the world in which it is set but Wake Up Dead is grounded in basic human weaknesses like greed, lust, ambition, and revenge.

The lead up to the scenes of action and violence is very well done. Sometimes you know something is about to happen, other times it's "huh, I wasn't expecting that." Roger's thrillers are very violent but I've never thought that the violence was gratuitous. Brutally honest, yes. He writes about a segment of society where sudden and senseless violence is the norm and he has met the people capable of those acts.

A strong sense of place is something I enjoy in a story. After reading Wake Up Dead, I looked at images of Pollsmoor Prison and former gang members, scenes of Cape Flats. I felt I already knew those places and people from the vivid descriptions in the book. You will find links below that will show you how closely fiction can mirror life.

Wake Up Dead is written from multiple points of view. These points of view gradually build up a composite image of the people and events and their relationships. In some cases you can see that event A will probably lead to  consequence B but other times I found myself sitting there thinking about what I just read.

Roger's style of writing will appeal to fans of the hardboiled style. Crisp, punchy, and frequently laced with dark humor.

Try to get this image out of your mind:

The whore had yellow braids, the dark roots cross-hatching her skull like sutures on a cadaver.

The cannibal is described as having an elegant French accent leading to this scene

Then Joe gave her the look, invisible to anyone else, and she knew that the men needed a few minutes to talk business. Weapons or mercenaries. Or both.

Roxy stood. "Let's go to the bathroom."

"I don't need," the whore said, clearly new to this part of the game.

The cannibal elbowed her beneath her plastic tits. "Go and piss." Coming from his mouth it sounded almost like a benediction: Go in peace.

In Mixed Blood and now Wake Up Dead I've admired the way Roger builds his characters. He does evil really well though he says the characters write themselves. Piper, for example, is about as scary and real a character a as I have encountered in fiction. Billy you want to root for but he isn't an agent for good. Disco you feel sorry for, his life on a course for destruction, but you wouldn't want to be his buddy. Roxy is a basically good person who does bad things but isn't someone you can consider sympathetic. There aren't many innocents here. You know who the characters are and where they came from.

Wake Up Dead is a well done and exciting crime thriller that I recommend highly.  If you haven't read Roger's first book, Mixed Blood, pick up a copy at the same time. It also is set in Cape flats, has everything I like in a thriller (see above), and a wonderfully nasty detective named Gatsby.


Links to give you insights into the story, the setting, and the characters.

Roger's Website.

Video trailer for Wake Up Dead.

The Okapi pictured above came from World Knives where you can buy one for yourself. You can also use it to slice fruit and carve decorative items.

Slide show of Cape Flats and Cape Town on Roger's web site.

Slide show of prison body art with voices of former prisoners.

Photographs of South African prisons by Micheal Subotzky.

Recognitions:

Aside from being published in the U.S. and Germany, it is also out in the UK and Commonwealth via Serpent’s Tail, and will be published in France, Italy and Japan.


Roger interviewed by Dave Zeltserman.


The German translation (Blutiges Erwachen) was a bestseller and voted one of the Top 10 crime novels of 2010 by the influential Krimiwelt in Germany. (19 of the top fiction reviewers from Germany, Switzerland and Austria chose 10 crime novels out of the 800+ published in German each year. Roger was in the company of Pete Dexter, James Ellroy, Richard Price and Don Winslow.)


Wake Up Dead was the Philadelphia Inquirer Best Book of 2010.


It made the Top Ten lists of author Dave Zelsterman, Crimefactory editor/reviewer & noir man-about-town Keith Rawson, Drowning Machine reviewer Naoimi Johnson, UK review site CrimeSquad, and blogger Garrett Kenyon on Literary Kicks.