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Litchfield reviews ‘Adiós to My Parents’ for the Colorado Review

Colorado Review - Adiós to My Parents by Héctor Aguilar Camín

“Given the private nature of Adiós to My Parents, you would think that the book would prohibit a readership beyond those with a personal attachment to the author, but, in fact, this is an astute and absorbing, deeply emotional family tale that can move, intrigue, and interest a far broader audience.”

First published in 2014 in Mexico as Adiós a los padres, distinguished Mexican author and historian, Héctor Aguilar Camín, offers up a bold and intimate account of his family’s checkered history in this powerful and uninhibited memoir, Adiós to My Parents, which has been translated into English for the first time. A recipient of numerous national literary awards, including the lifetime achievement award from Mexico’s Instituto de Bellas Artes—the country’s top cultural institution—Aguilar Camín is one of Mexico’s most revered writers. Although also a well-known novelist, with several of his works adapted to the screen, including Morir en el golfo, he is better known as a journalist and writer of Mexican history and politics.

Here, the emphasis of Aguilar Camín’s book is firmly on his ancestry and, in particular, his mother and father’s personal journey. Using a singular approach to chronicling his and their lives, Aguilar Camín jumps back and forth through the decades, offering a genealogical history, revisiting faded memories from youth, exposing ugly family secrets and painful truths, and sharing his parents’ candid stories.”

Published today in the Colorado Review is my review of Héctor Aguilar Camín’s memoir, Adiós to My Parents.

Read the full, in-depth book review here

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Litchfield Reviews No Law Against Angels, Doll for a Big House, and Chorine Makes a Killing by Carter Brown

LEP.CO.UK - No Law Against Angels, Doll for a Big House, and Chorine Makes a Killing by Carter Brown

“This triple dose of Carter Brown mysteries from 1957 finds homicide detective Al Wheeler investigating the deaths of two call girls, tracing a missing girl, and taking a job as a private investigator to clear a lawyer of a murder rap.

No Law Against Angels, Doll for a Big House, and Chorine Makes a Killing are three light and lively entries in British-born Australian pulp writer Alan Geoffrey Yates’ phenomenally successful mystery series which spawned 300 books.

Yates, who emigrated to Australia in his mid-twenties, penned 215 novels and approximately 75 novella-length stories between 1954 to 1984, using the house name Carter Brown. The international appeal of these tongue-in-cheek mysteries was such that they rapidly became Australia’s biggest literary export.

The opening story in this newly released collection, No Law Against Angels, was the first Carter Brown to be published in the United States. The revised US version, with slightly tighter writing and an extra polish, was titled The Body.

Nicholas Litchfield’s review of the third volume of Carter Brown novels to be reissued by Stark House Press is featured today in the Lancashire Post and syndicated to 20 UK newspapers. You can read the review here.

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Litchfield Reviews The Made-Up Man by Joseph Scapellato

LEP.CO.UK - The Made-Up Man by Joseph Scapellato

“Absurdist humour and existential noir intermingle in Joseph Scapellato’s playful and intelligent debut novel about a soul-searching archaeology school dropout who finds himself at the centre of a strange and risky performance art project in the Czech Republic.

Born and raised in the suburbs of Chicago, Scapellato, who now lives in Pennsylvania, is an assistant professor of English in the Creative Writing Program at Bucknell University. His previous work, the critically acclaimed story collection Big Lonesome, received high praise from Booklist, Kirkus Reviews, and the Lancashire Post, with the New York Times proclaiming: ‘Scapellato’s inventive, hallucinatory prose dazzles.’

His newest work is a wholly original hybrid between a detective story and a subverted examination of oneself, with the narrator, much like a previous character from Scapellato’s story collection, reflecting on his past, trying to make sense of the present, and exploring the myth of the self.”

Nicholas Litchfield’s review of Joseph Scapellato’s notable debut novel, The Made-Up Man, is featured today in the Lancashire Post and syndicated to 20 UK newspapers. You can read the review here.

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Litchfield Reviews Lead With Your Left and The Best That Ever Did It by Ed Lacy

LEP.CO.UK - Lead With Your Left and The Best That Ever Did It by Ed Lacy

“Singled out by Edgar and Anthony Award-winning biographer Marvin Lachman as worthy of rediscovery, these two forgotten novels are reprinted this month in a Stark House combined edition.

The first story, initially published in 1956 in Mercury mystery book magazine as ‘Keep an Eye on the Body’ and serialised in newspapers, was expanded and published by Harper & Brothers in January 1957 under the title Lead With Your Left. Engrossing and action-packed, it features a very ‘cocky’ 21-year-old New York police detective named David Wintino who is assigned a homicide case involving a retired policeman shot dead in an alleyway while working as a messenger for a brokerage house.

The second novel, The Best That Ever Did It, published by Harper & Brothers in March 1955 as part of their hardback suspense series, is a lively, fascinating tale about a private eye’s investigation into the apparently motiveless killing of a contest winner and a police detective outside a dive bar in New York City. Again, Lacy presents a three-dimensional, sympathetic narrator who strays from the norm… this time, Barney Harris, a big, tough, 18-stone car mechanic who moonlights as a private investigator.

Famed New York Times book critic and author Anthony Boucher, an avid reader of Lacy’s work, selected The Best That Ever Did It as one of the best books of 1955, describing it as ‘the year’s most original and off-trail variant on the private-eye theme.’ As with Lead With Your Left, it’s certainly a riveting, stimulating novel, with a particularly engaging, likeable protagonist, a sure-footed plot, believable characters, smart dialogue, and hard-hitting prose.”

Nicholas Litchfield’s review of these two exceptional mysteries from Ed Lacy is featured today in the Lancashire Post and syndicated to 20 UK newspapers. You can read the review here.

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Litchfield Reviews End of the Line by Bert and Dolores Hitchens

LEP.CO.UK - End of the Line by Bert and Dolores Hitchens

“Born Julia Clara Catherine Dolores Robbins, prolific American novelist and playwright Dolores Hitchens began her career as a hospital nurse, and then a teacher, before becoming a successful professional writer. From 1938 until her death in 1973, she published forty books, utilising four nom-de-plumes. Her suspense novel The Watcher was adapted for the television series Thriller in 1960, and Jean-Luc Godard adapted her novel Fool’s Gold into the 1964 film Band of Outsiders.

End of the Line, first published by Doubleday in 1957 and newly reprinted as a mass market Black Gat Books edition from Stark House, is the third in a series of five novels she co-wrote with her second husband, Hubert Allen ‘Bert’ Hitchens, who was a railroad investigating officer.

All the books in the series feature the special agents of a railroad’s Los Angeles division, including regular character John Farrel, a veteran detective with an alcohol problem. Here, the wizened Farrel, a down-at-heel boozehound who lives in a boarding house, is teamed up with the inexperienced but enthusiastic investigator Calvin Saunders, an athletic, fastidious young man who drives a Chevy convertible. Former railroad bull (guard), now department chief, Ryerson, ‘a bear of a man,’ wants the pair to re-examine the Lobo Tunnel wreck, an unsolved case that resulted in sixteen deaths.

Suspenseful and methodical, End of the Line is a worthwhile mystery with a solid plot that is helped along by the understated rivalry between the two well-defined detectives, both of whom try to best each other throughout the course of their investigation. Pursuing clues to the town of Sagebloom, the place where the crash took place, the pair go undercover as section hands, eventually working together like a well-oiled team and following the intriguing tale to an exciting and satisfying conclusion.”

Nicholas Litchfield’s review of End of the Line, an exciting mystery from Bert and Dolores Hitchens, is featured today in the Lancashire Post. You can read the review here.

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Litchfield Reviews The Action Man and Terror Tournament by Jay Flynn

LEP.CO.UK - The Action Man and Terror Tournament by Jay Flynn

A former US Army soldier and journalist, the late John M. Flynn was a prolific American author of crime and espionage novels, occasionally contributing Westerns using the house name Jack Slade.  In a career spanning from the late fifties to the late seventies, he penned somewhere in the region of thirty novels, mostly for Ace Books, Avon Publications, Leisure Books, and Belmont Tow

He started out as a crime reporter for the Portland Express, also contributing to the San Jose Mercury and other California papers. He is perhaps best-known for his five satisfying adventure novels featuring the distinctive character McHugh, a rough, hard-drinking, two-fisted, Irish-American bar owner and secret agent.

McHugh aside, Flynn’s other notable success was his standalone novel The Action Man, a crime caper published by Avon in 1961 and adapted into the French film Le soleil des voyous (The sun of thugs), directed by Jean Delannoy in 1967. It’s a tense, neatly plotted, and ultimately thrilling tale about a calculating businessman and his elaborate plan to make off with over two million dollars of Army payroll from a bank in northern California. The central character, Denton Farr, who is cut from the same cloth as McHugh, is a smart, bold, tough-talking hard case with an eye for the ladies and a talent for getting what he wants. He is also a successful criminal with close ties to the Eastern crime syndicate.

Terror Tournament, Flynn’s third novel, was first published as a hardback by Mystery House in 1959 and reprinted in paperback by Ace Books as an Ace Double. Like most of Flynn’s novels, it’s a gritty, action-packed drama, heavy on suspense and with a tough lead character on the hunt for a significant amount of money.

This welcome double novel from Stark House also includes, as an introduction, an amusing, revealing, and utterly riveting article on Flynn by his friend, Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Bill Pronzini, which first appeared in Mystery Scene magazine. It’s the perfect companion piece to this pair of scintillating gems pulled from Flynn’s treasure trove of forgotten novels.

My review of The Action Man and Terror Tournament is featured today in the Lancashire Post and syndicated to 20 newspapers in the UK. The full review can be found at the web link below and elsewhere:

https://www.lep.co.uk/lifestyle/books/the-action-man-and-terror-tournament-by-jay-flynn-book-review-1-9464066

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Litchfield Reviews So Many Doors by Oakley Hall

LEP.CO.UK - So Many Doors by Oakley Hall

First published by Random House in 1950, So Many Doors is the debut novel by Pulitzer Prize-nominated American writer Oakley Hall, an English professor emeritus at UC Irvine and author of 25 books, who died in 2008.

During his distinguished career, Hall won numerous awards, including the Wrangler Award and the Western Writers of America (WWA) Spur Award for his magazine pieces. His western novel Warlock, a finalist for the 1958 Pulitzer Prize, was made into a film by Twentieth Century-Fox starring Henry Fonda and Anthony Quinn, and his 1963 book, The Downhill Racers, was later filmed by Paramount as Downhill Racer starring Robert Redford and Gene Hackman.

This newly reissued crime novel, which he wrote while studying at Columbia University, was initially overlooked when it came out in hardback, but the paperback went on to become a big seller and received wide critical acclaim. Set in the years following the Great Depression, it is an affecting, murderous tale about two inseparable lovers, consumed with overwhelming desire and corrupting jealousy, and the havoc their relationship causes to those around them. Divided into five sections, each told from the viewpoint of a friend or relative who interacted with the pair, the story spans a period of ten years, beginning in the early 1940s.

Hall’s vivid characters and intense, emotionally charged prose elevate So Many Doors to a compelling, unforgettable story of spurned love, flawed passion and pride, caustic obsession, and distrust and despair.

My review of So Many Doors is featured today in the Lancashire Post and syndicated to 20 newspapers in the UK. The full review can be found at the web link below and elsewhere:

https://www.lep.co.uk/lifestyle/books/so-many-doors-by-oakley-hall-book-review-an-unforgettable-story-of-spurned-love-flawed-passion-and-pride-caustic-obsession-and-distrust-and-despair-1-9456122

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Litchfield Reviews The Outfit: Outlawed! by Matthew P. Mayo

LEP.CO.UK - The Outfit: Outlawed! by Matthew P. Mayo

Prolific author Matthew P. Mayo, who often focuses on the American West and New England, has written more than two-dozen books in the past ten years. Arguably, he is at the height of his career and writing his best work to date. Earlier this year, he won the Spur Award, the Peacemaker Award, and the Wrangler Award for his historical novel Stranded, and his Roamer Western, Timberline, and Blood and Ashes, book two in The Outfit series, received glowing reviews in Booklist, the Lancashire Post and other periodicals.

A frequent contributor to anthologies of fiction, Mayo’s stories and essays are especially worth seeking out – his recent work can be found in The Trading Post & Other Frontier Stories (Five Star) and Invigorating Passages (Lowestoft Chronicle), both published in 2018.

His newest novel, The Outfit: Outlawed!, the third installment in his lively, all-action adventure series set in the Old West, features an eclectic band of benevolent gunslingers led by former war hero-turned-spy Rafe Barr.

Bullets zing, blades clang, and heads roll as tarnished heroes and desperadoes converge on the Governor’s mansion and Yuma Territorial Prison, setting up an explosive, thrilling showdown. Fun and fiercely entertaining, Mayo keeps the story moving along at a good clip, and the scene-stealing presence of the depraved head-chopper assassin Mincher helps ensure that this compelling third adventure is the best of the series thus far. Let’s hope that Rafe, ‘Sleuthing’ Sue, Cookie ‘Dynamite’ McGee and the rest of the rapidly expanding gang ride again soon.

My review of The Outfit: Outlawed! is featured today in the Lancashire Post and syndicated to 20 newspapers in the UK. The full review can be found at the web link below and elsewhere:

https://www.lep.co.uk/lifestyle/books/the-outfit-outlawed-by-matthew-p-mayo-book-review-fun-and-fiercely-entertaining-1-9442419

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Litchfield Reviews The Red Scarf and A Killer is Loose by Gil Brewer

LEP.CO.UK - The Red Scarf and A Killer is Loose by Gil Brewer

Hugely popular and prolific during the 1950s, selling millions of copies of paperback originals, the late Gil Brewer is considered one of the best American crime writers of his era. Between 1950 and the late 1970s, he authored hundreds of short stories and dozens of novels, including The Red Scarf and A Killer is Loose, two early career novels commonly cited as among the author’s finest.

As veteran LAPD detective-writer Paul Bishop says of these novels in his introduction to this combined edition, Brewer’s ‘specialty of trapping his protagonist in a web of terror, paranoia, and dread and empathetically transmitting those feelings to his readers had been honed to the sharpness of a killer’s stiletto.’

Originally published in the Mercury Mystery Book-Magazine in 1955, and later in book form as a Crest reprint by Fawcett, The Red Scarf sold more than a million copies and received numerous favourable reviews in leading periodicals.

Arguably more blood-tingling, the second novel, A Killer Is Loose, is an unbearably tense, breathtakingly good thriller first published in 1954 as a Fawcett Gold Medal original. Penned in less than two weeks, this was Brewer’s sixth novel and, as with The Red Scarf, it is a fast-paced, first-person narrative featuring another luckless everyman who finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time and caught up in a nightmare situation.

It is hardly surprising that Brewer sold the film rights to the book as A Killer is Loose is a uniquely brilliant, unforgettable crime tale with an unpredictable plot, a sympathetic narrator, a frightening killer, and one heart-pounding, hair-raising moment after another. Full of frantic characters, anguished prose, and impending terror, it is perfectly paired with The Red Scarf.

My review of The Red Scarf and A Killer is Loose is featured today in the Lancashire Post and syndicated to 20 newspapers in the UK. The full review can be found at the web link below and elsewhere:

https://www.lep.co.uk/lifestyle/books/the-red-scarf-and-a-killer-is-loose-by-gil-brewer-book-review-full-of-frantic-characters-anguished-prose-and-impending-terror-1-9422316

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Litchfield Reviews The Count of 9 by Erle Stanley Gardner

LEP.CO.UK - The Count of 9 by Erle Stanley Gardner

“Habitually sparring with police officers, suspects, and adversaries, the petite, lightweight Lam once again finds himself up against rough cops and vindictive crooks eager to turn him into a human punching bag. Though competent at meting out verbal jabs, he leads with his chin while ‘somebody always works him over.’

In this especially bruising tale, which sees him looking like a mangled, ‘battered-up prize fighter,’ Inspector Giddings believes Lam has taken the full count. But Lam, a glutton for punishment, is never one to throw in the towel, no matter how tough the opposition.

Intricately plotted and continually entertaining, The Count of 9 is another solid entry in a highly enjoyable series, with the strong-willed Lam at his sardonic best.”

My review of The Count of 9 is featured today in the Lancashire Post and syndicated to 20 newspapers in the UK. The full review can be found at the web link below and elsewhere.

Read more at: https://www.lep.co.uk/lifestyle/books/the-count-of-9-by-erle-stanley-gardner-book-review-intricately-plotted-and-continually-entertaining-1-9408852