Hurt Machine by Reed Farrel Coleman

Hurt Machine
by Reed Farrel Coleman
Tyrus Books, 2011

Reed's website.

Hurt Machine is being offered as a FREE eBook download from 12/20 - 12/24 on Amazon,  Barnes & Noble and Other eBook sellers.

Two reactions on reading The Hurt Machine: Wow, I'm glad I read this book; and Why did I wait this long to start the series?

First sentence: Death, not time, is probably the only lasting remedy for hurt and even that's just an educated guess.


Hurt Machine is an excellent hardboiled detective novel and one of my favorite reads of 2011. Normally I am fanatic about reading a series in order but I was offered a review copy of this seventh Moe Prager story. I've had the series in mind for a while and decided to chance starting at the end; I have no regrets. Coleman gives a new reader enough information that references to past events are not an obstacle to following the story. In fact, they make me want to start at the beginning to see how Moe gets to this point.

The Story
Moe Prager is under a lot of stress. His has been diagnosed with stomach cancer and this clouds the joy of his daughter's upcoming wedding. Moe doesn't want anyone to know until after the wedding and this includes Pam with whom has has a serious relationship.

Into this mix comes his ex-wife Carmella Melendez who he hasn't seen for 10 years. Carmella tells him that her estranged sister, Alta Consecos, was murdered, stabbed to death outside a night club. The police are not making progress finding the murderer and Carmella asks Moe to look into it. Moe hasn't been an active detective in years —he doesn't know where he put his license—but he can't say no to Carmella though it adds another level of stress since Pam isn't very happy about it. The case promises to be interesting as Alta was on suspension from her job as an EMS technician after she and her partner let a man die without rendering aid.

Review
Moe comes from the same line of hardboiled detective as Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe—pretend you know more than you do, poke around, piss people off, see what happens. And like the classic hardboiled detective, Moe makes pithy, humorous, and sometimes somber observations. If you read the comments sections on the Internet web sites you will appreciate Moe's thinking about hate mail: "...it occurred to me that people with hearts so full of hate must have no room in their brains for spelling or syntax."

With Moe not knowing exactly what he is looking for, he tries to find connections, figure out which events are related, who are the players. I can't say much about Moe's investigations without delivering spoilers but I will say that the author is a master at setting up situations that come to a head later in the story. I had several "OK this makes sense now but I didn't see it coming" moments.

There is a lot going on in the story and these other elements — Moe's health, his daughter's wedding, his relationship with his ex-wife, his current relationship with Pam —add layers and complications to the investigation. They are not a distraction though, they make Moe human, someone the reader can relate to.

What I didn't expect from Hurt Machine was the unexpected emotional response I have toward Moe. He and I are about the same age. With a cancerous tumor in his stomach, Moe can't help but think of life, death, things he's done in the past, what he will leave behind:

When you reach a certain stage in life, you do a lot of wondering about the people who've passed in and out of it. Soon enough, I realized, I'd be someone's absent friend. You add alcohol to thoughts like that and you get tears.

and

Time to think is life's Petri dish. It's the medium in which a random twinge of anxiety morphs into debilitating self-doubt, where a passing regret grows into paralytic guilt.

The way Coleman overlays the story with Moe's reflections adds a dimension to the story that sets it apart. Moe's thoughts can be brutally honest but the author doesn't let them turn maudlin or morbid. Rather, he has found a way to sum up the life of his character, a character in which he has a lot of emotional investment. I read somewhere that this is the last Moe Prager book. If so, the author has delivered a satisfying conclusion and one that is going to send this reader back to the beginning.

Pandemonium: Stories of the Apocalypse

Pandemonium: Stories of the Apocalypse is available as an eBook. Here is a list of the places you can buy it. Besides great stories, another reason the buy this book is that a portion of the proceeds goes to the Author C. Clarke Award.

I bought Pandemonium because it has stories by two of my "must read" South African authors, Lauren Beukes and S.L. Grey. That's technically three authors since S.L. Grey is actually the writing team of Sarah Lotz and Louis Greenberg.

The editors did a superb job selecting the eighteen stories for this collection. It has an excellent balance of styles and themes and there isn't a single selection that I didn't enjoy. You'll find a wide range of interpretations of the Apocalypse including: environmental, collapse of social order, quantum mechanics, unknown forces, alien invasion, and, of course, religious themes.

The anthology has a thoughtful organization with a lead story by David Bryher, The Architect of Hell. A light fun read to get us started. The anchor story is Sophia McDougall's "Not the End of the World" which left me both sad and hopeful. The last sentence is the prefect end to the collection.  In between are humor (a demon decides that the apocalypse isn't necessary), serious (a night watchman in an art museum thinks he knows how to keep the forces of chaos appeased, and a mix. One, Sadak In Search of The Waters of Oblivion, left me gutted (but not in a torture porn horror way).

To get yourself in the proper mood, I recommend that you look at the artwork of 19th Century painter, John Martin. Google has a nice gallery of his paintings here.

Since this is a blog that focuses on Africa, I'm going the highlight the four stories by South African authors. Being that these are short stories I'm going to be stingy with details but trust me, they are all excellent.

OMG GTFO by S.L. Grey
Sarah and Louis examine the important question "What role will social media play in the Apocalypse?" You'll get a taste of their sharp social commentary. The perverse twist at the end is why I love these guys.

Their first novel is The Mall and if you like intelligent horror you need to read it. Here is where you can buy it. Sarah is from Cape Town and Louis works out of Johannesberg.

Chislehurst Messiah by Lauren Beukes
Golddigger/slimy bastard Simon Thomas watches the disintegration of society through Youtube videos and develops an inflated view of his role in the new world order. The story could be subtitled "The Chavs Shall Inherit the Earth." Don't know what a chav is? Wikipedia can help. Also look at the Vickie Pollard episodes in BBC's Little Britain.

Lauren's book Zoo City recently won the 2011Author C. Clarke award. It is a terrific blending of the hardboiled detective and the phantasmagorical. She is based in Cape Town.

The Immaculate Particle by Charlie Human
In Charlie's Cape Town, something called the Dissolve has isolated the city and is cutting chunks out of it. A man is desperate to find his daughter even if it means striking at the heart of cult religion that arose from the Dissolve. This story is rich in detail and promise and could be expanded into a novel. Hint, hint.

Charlie is a writer from Cape Town. The first story of his I read was "Dance Dance Revolution" on the World SF Blog. It is an unusual take on special forces operations.

Postapocalypse by Sam Wilson
Sam's contribution falls into the "Yikes! how do we know what is real?" category. It takes a quantum mechanics look at how perception and thought might change reality. Scary stuff.

Sam is in the Cape Town area. The bio says that he "...once ran a web-based service where he would scream people's messages off the top of Table Mountain."

Crime Fiction and the 'Metaphysics of Disorder' by Jonathan Amid

A review and analysis of Counting the Coffins by Diale Tlholwe and The Lazarus Effect by H.J. Glakai. If you have an eReader that can handle Adobe DRM protected books then Counting the Coffins and The Lazarus Effect are available and affordable from kalahari.net where I purchased them.

Jonathan Amid review is in this post on The Stellenbosch Literary Project web site. As you might imagine from the title, Amid's review is academic in its approach, complete with Works Cited at the end. Since I wander around academic circles myself, I found Amid's analysis quite interesting. I've read Tlholwe's first book, Ancient Rites, and Glakai's The Lazarus Effect, and have Counting the Coffins queued up on my ereader. Amid has given me much to think about and I'll probably re-read these books with his review in mind.

An unexpected consequence came out of my reading this review. Amid includes Sifiso Mzobe among a list of "English authors." Since Mzobe is a Black South African author this confused me and I asked about it in a comment. This is an excellent example how a simple word can have a vastly different connotation based on the culture of the readers. One person responded

In my personal experience as an Afrikaans South African who grew up being educated in the English language, I’ve found that English-speaking South Africans, or South Africans of English descent, tend to correct one when one calls them “English”, since they are actually “English-speaking South Africans”. 

So, when a South African talks of “English” writing, they are very often referring to writing by an author who writes in English, even if English is not their first language, and even though they are not natives or descendants of the country known as England.

 Amazing, isn't it, how easily misunderstanding can arise.

I did take exception when Amid disparaged the thrillers of Roger Smith and Mike Nicol, two authors I admire. He wrote

Tlhowle's writing is refreshing, unlike the predictably hard-boiled approach in Nicol's Revenge trilogy or the works of roger Smith. Rather than adopt the ultra-violent, no-holds-barred thriller character of these texts, Tlhowle chooses to write a limited yet memorable number of high impact set pieces in which the skill of the writing, instead of violent content grabs the reader.

 My feeling is that the style has to fit the content. Given the aspect of South African culture that these authors focus on, the violent thriller is the necessary framework. Tlhowle writes an entirely different book.

Read the article and my comment and let me know if you agree or disagree. I admin to a bias in this matter and might have had an overly sensitive reaction.

In any case, I commend Jonathan Amid for such a detailed analysis of these books and home his review generates interest. If Counting the Coffins is as good as Ancient Rites I know I will enjoy it and Golakai has give us a great new figure in South African Crime fiction in the female protagonist, Voinjama Johnson.

What to do when you can't get a book in paper or Kindle

I wondered what it would be like to read an ebook that I couldn't put on my Kindle. To find out, I purchased an ebook from kalahari.net which required that I use either a app on my Mac or android device, a Droid2 in my case. I give a description of this first experience on my other blog, Africa Screams.

Experiment with non-Kindle ebook

I've been known to whinge about not being able to get books I want to read because of geographic restrictions.  Elizabeth Fletcher's post at CrimeBeat on H.J. Golakia first Vee Johnson novel, The Lazarus Effect,  caught my attention. I was in pre-whinge mode when I looked at the digital downloads on kalahari.net.

The Lazarus Effect is available as an ePub, yea. Kalahari doesn't care that I live in the US, yea. It isn't compatible with my e-reader of choice, the Kindle, boo. Since I work in IT and thus am curious about technology and being the adventuresome sort and not wanting to be denied, I decided to try the Kalahari reader for Mac and Android. I purchased The Lazarus Effect and installed the readers on my MacBook pro and my Droid2 mobile.

The Experience
The Mac —you get a two page layout which can't be changed. The reader is anchored and can't be moved to a secondary display. You can add a book mark and notes and they are accessed through the table of contents but not on the actual page. This is a little kludgy. Unfortunately you can't highlight text when making a note and it looks like the size of the note is limited but I'm sure of the number of characters allowed. In addition to jumping to a bookmarked page through the table of contents, you can choose a specific page by clicking on the thumbnail that you can pop up at the bottom of the screen. The pages are easy to read though not comfortable if you have your laptop on a stand with keyboard and external monitor attached as I do. If I'm planning to sit down for a long read I will disconnect everything and take the laptop to a comfortable chair which will annoy the cats since the laptop takes up valuable lap space.

The Droid2 —The text is quite readable when I pop the magnification up one level. Obviously each page takes multiple screens. There is a slider bar to move forward and back in the book but it is useful only if you have Tinkerbell sized fingers. Swiping to advance the page doesn't always work the first time though this might be me or the Droid2.  You can get to the table of contents by pressing the info icon but I didn't discover that right away. Bookmarks and notes work the same as on the Mac reader. I actually prefer reading on the mobile phone since I have it with me always. Last night I was waiting for takeout and read a chapter over a beer. Convenient if awkward at times.

Rating: C
The experience of reading a book with these readers is OK but not close to the convenience of a Kindle/iPad/Nook etc. device.

Will I continue to get books from Kalahari this way? Yes. Having decided to specialize in African crime fiction this may be my only way to read some books. In fact, Sifiso Mzobe's novel Young Blood is already queued up on my wish list waiting for me to finish The Lazarus Effect.

I wonder if I can find a relatively inexpensive ebook reader in the US that supports Adobe DRM ePub and Adobe DRM ePub? Maybe something like the gobii reader selling on Kalahari for R899/$114.28.