Hard Case Crime's Songs of Innocence

Once in awhile a company comes along that impresses me with their whole catalog of products. It's usually a DVD company. To be honest, I'm a film fanatic so I tend to watch as many films as possible, different genres from different eras and I look for the large companies and the up and coming to get my fair share from. One of my favorite genres of film are film noir. Old or new, I love it when someone can give me a private eye who punches first and asks questions later. So it is in this regard that the company I'm speaking about isn't a DVD company. It's Hard Case Crime, who deal with crime novels that people like Dashiell Hammet, Richard Stark and Mickey Spillane would write for... actually, one of which does have books published with them (it's the second under his real name Donald E. Westlake).

Why bring this fine company up? Well, they had sent me three books to review awhile ago and I read through one in a matter of 2 days. The second book I read through in about 3 days. The third I haven't had the time to read due to work overwhelming my life, battling a rat the size of my Irish head and trying to still move in my apartment 10 months after I signed the lease. I will be reviewing two of their books here in the next two days, the first being Songs of Innocence written by Richard Aleas (pen name of Hard Case Crime founder Charles Ardai) with cover art by Glen Orbik and The MAX written by Ken Bruen and Jason Starr with cover art by Glen Orbik again.

In Songs of Innocence (released last July), it is the second book starring Aleas' character John Blake. Not having read the first novel starring him (2004's Little Girl Lost), it didn't take long to learn about this deeply scarred former PI. You already see the pieces in his life that are shattered; a lover who was killed by his last assignment and a good friend almost lost as well. He's now taken a low key position as an administrative assistant at Columbia University. He's also using this position to take a creative writing class to better hone his skills. This is where he meets Dorothy Burke, a beautiful younger dame (sorry, getting in the mindset of some pulp fiction), who he has a connection with. The only problem is that the story starts off with the police finding her dead in her bathtub, with the book Final Exit sitting right beside her, a plastic bag over her head and of course ruling it a suicide. Her mother thinks otherwise and wants to acquire John's detective persona to take the case and find out who killed her daughter. He tells her he isn't in that business anymore and tells the friend who almost died to take the case instead. But the problem is that he's mounting his own investigation to find out who killed Dorothy.

What Charles Ardai has done is take a simple premise of the lover/friend being found in a messy situation, and instead of taking the easy way out and calling it the way it looks, takes the character and the reader into an adventure around the sights and sounds not commonly seen in New York City. It's the violent NYC underworld we as the reader wants to hear about. We can't help it, it's something about stories, be it in print or on the screen that intrigues us. That tickles are fancy into wondering what happens next, no matter what time of day it is. I have to admit that while reading this story, I sometimes couldn't put the book down. I was like an addict, and sadly a book in the fiction section hasn't done that to me in quite some time.

Dorothy has confided in John her life as a prostitute named Cassandra, a call girl in the world of secret bath houses and happy endings that accompany them. So of course he tries to track down a list of johns, maybe one of which was a bit too 'hands on' and snuffed out the life of his friend. It leads him into many fights, call girls with hearts of gold but ice water running through their veins, the Hungarian mob being provoked by Blake and then being retaliated against by pinning a dead body on him, twist and turns, jumps between 60 foot crevices on the rooftops of buildings, cops getting closer to him, a manhunt for Blake, a estranged father Dorothy rarely talked about, a friend who betrays him and so much more. I don't want to ruin the story, which is why I'm being very aloof in what I speak about. But what Ardai is doing here is taking a old pulp story, one that would be written for the fans, and taking it to the new century, infusing new life in a genre that most people don't give too much credit to.

I'd like to point out that Ardai has said that his first Hard Case Crime novel, Little Girl Lost, took him only 2 or so months to write. It then took him roughly 3 years to finish Songs of Innocence, which doest surprise me. The character of John Blake is a difficult one to write about. A wounded man, one that doesn't look at himself the way he used to, slumming around and wishing he was somebody else. It's a hard book to write and to make the character likable, especially when he's being a real dick to people he loves is even harder, but Ardai does it here. A quick read that you just want to go back and read a few more times to find the little hints at the stunning conclusion that you have to read to believe. Plus the book is less than 7 bucks, so it won't hurt your pocket much. Give it a chance, especially since the book has been optioned for a film, so as soon as I hear more about it, I'll keep you posted.

Part two comes tomorrow night.