CAPTURE and DUST DEVILS by Roger Smith

I'm excited because February 20, marks New Pulp Press's release in PRINT, in the USA, for the first time of Roger Smith's novels, CAPTURE and DUST DEVILS. I highly recommend both of these books, or any book written by Roger Smith, really. I'm so happy that these books finally going to be available here in print format. Here are The Drowning Machine's previous reviews of both books:

DUST DEVILS

South African journalist Robert Dell, his wife and two children are all headed off on a holiday, when a black pickup truck runs them off the road. Dell's family is killed and he is framed for their murders.

If that sounds anything like a typical thriller, please, just hold the phone a sec. Because you haven't read anything like this book. No, you haven't. No, it's not like that book or that one or any of the thrillers you'll recall right offhand, and that's because Roger Smith isn't just any writer. In the span of just three books, his prose has gone from spare and evocative to darkly lyrical. His characterizations are masterful, his POV treatment is impeccable. And thematically, where once he was just pretty damned good, he now soars.

DUST DEVILS is a brilliant work, revolving around five major characters: Dell, a pacifist wrought by his grief and also by his sense of justice in a world that has none, into waging personal war on the men who killed his family; Inja, a corrupt, murderous cop and Zulu chief, a man dying of AIDS and looking to superstition instead of science for help, he will kill anyone who gets between him and his 16-year-old bride-to-be, Sunday, because he believes that sex with her will cure him. Sunday wants only not to have to marry Inja. She, as much as anyone, knows him for the cold killer he is. And then there is Disaster Zondi, an ex-cop as a result of having principles in a time and place where those things have no cash value. The author spins these characters and more through a space-time continuum where personal interactions go repeatedly nuclear. Oops, I said five characters, didn't I? South Africa is the fifth one. The varying cultures, the extremes of power and wealth matched again helplessness and poverty, places where AIDS harvests one out of three people thanks to neglect, superstition, and ignorance. Where news events don't begin to tell the depth of the stories.

Along the way, the reader gets a mini-education in the behind-the-scenes politics of South Africa as that country moved from apartheid to... whatever one calls it today, because freedom hardly seems the right word. Unless one is remembering the old song lyric from Me and Bobby McGee: "Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose."

Thematically, where other authors would simply push the characters examining their past sins toward a search for redemption or atonement, Smith takes his characters beyond and into a stark cultural landscape where the wages of sin don't include the possibility of redemption, and where careful preservation of innocence is futile because innocence was long ago the first victim of sin. Harshly violent, the book is a broken window onto the cultural indifference to massive suffering, but more pointedly -- and poignantly -- Smith highlights the effect of the neglect by those powerful enough to relieve such suffering, who make such suffering more intense and widespread through corruption and indifference. The story's end is a sorrowful angel, breathtakingly cinematic on one level, and on another so personal that the reader's heart bleeds. A brilliant work.


HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

CAPTURE

Somewhere on the Internet recently I came across a discussion about what constituted or defined neo-noir. This book is my idea of what neo-noir is all about: the same sick, twisted, desperate, going-down-the-tubes characters found in original noir plus the faster pace and action usually found in thrillers. In this latest release, Smith somehow manages to conjure up a character, Vernon Saul, who is evil incarnate. What kind of man can sit back and watch a child drown, his inaction solely for the thought that he might find an angle to gain some kind of power over the grieving parents? And yet the reader cannot help but sympathize with the abused child that preceded the man Vernon became. There is a line delivered by William Peterson in the 1986 Michael Mann film, MANHUNTER, that perfectly sums up my feelings toward Vernon Saul:

My heart bleeds for him, as a child. Someone took a kid and manufactured a monster. At the same time, as an adult, he's irredeemable... As an adult, someone should blow the sick fuck out of his socks.

CAPTURE is bit more of a psychological character study than Smith's previous novels, but the tension ratchets up, chapter by chapter, to a shattering and satisfying denouement.  

RECOMMENDED.

Note: Okay, then. The publisher told me the print editions were due out the 20th, but apparently amazon has had both books available for the past week. Doesn't matter. Do yourself a favor and read a Roger Smith book.

Overdue books.

I hate trying to play catch-up on writing reviews because it means (a) I have too much to write about, and (b) I can't do justice to any of it, let alone all of it. But here's how I've spent some of my precious (and precious few) reading hours of late.

It's redundant of me to express the pleasure I derive from reading Allan Guthrie's stories and novels. But honestly, I've never read anything by him that I didn't enjoy. Stories with dark edges and darker hilarity, that's my addiction, and Guthrie always delivers. The title story in this sparkling collection of four shorts, Hilda's Big Day Out, tells of a man who arranges to steal Hilda, an adorable Dandie Dinmont Terrier, for the purpose of placating the daughter he has kidnapped. A man who will steal a child certainly will not stick at stealing a dog. This is an Allan Guthrie story, so things aren't going to end well for somebody. But the reader will be more than okay. In fact, some will be lining to up to get their own Dandie Dinmont.

Chris Rhatigan's Watch You Drown, his first collection of short stories -- short shorts even -- is a series of noir vignettes. No, really. 'Noir' as in a cast of losers, as noir is supposed to be. Moving from story to story here is like walking down a street and turning your head to peer through dark windows, briefly seeing the losers in their homes, their interactions cruel and ominous like the flickering lights at dusk from unseen, unheard televisions. The story not to miss is In the Hard Nowhere, involving a petty criminal with something of a conscience -- not that you will like him any the better for it. But the stories, those you should enjoy.

Ishmael Toffee. What to say about this novella by Roger Smith, whose novels are, every one of them, stellar reads? I can say that Smith injects as much gut-wrenching emotion and as much action into the short form as he does his novels, and that's saying something indeed. This is the story of a murderous ex-con who wants, with all his being, to be able to ignore the pleas for help coming from a little girl being sexually abused by her father. Getting involved, as Ishmael knows only too well, will get him killed. But this lonely, friendless killer finds he can't turn a blind eye to a desperate child, and the question becomes not can he survive the fallout, but only how long can he avoid it. I've never read anything by Smith that didn't steal my breath, and this story is no exception.

REVIEW: DUST DEVILS by Roger Smith

South African journalist Robert Dell, his wife and two children are all headed off on a holiday, when a black pickup truck runs them off the road. Dell's family is killed and he is framed for their murders.

If that sounds anything like a typical thriller, please, just hold the phone a sec. Because you haven't read anything like this book. No, you haven't. No, it's not like that book or that one or any of the thrillers you'll recall right offhand, and that's because Roger Smith isn't just any writer. In the span of just three books, his prose has gone from spare and evocative to darkly lyrical. His characterizations are masterful, his POV treatment is impeccable. And thematically, where once he was just pretty damned good, he now soars.

DUST DEVILS is a brilliant work, revolving around five major characters: Dell, a pacifist wrought by his grief and also by his sense of justice in a world that has none, into waging personal war on the men who killed his family; Inja, a corrupt, murderous cop and Zulu chief, a man dying of AIDS and looking to superstition instead of science for help, he will kill anyone who gets between him and his 16-year-old bride-to-be, Sunday, because he believes that sex with her will cure him. Sunday wants only not to have to marry Inja. She, as much as anyone, knows him for the cold killer he is. And then there is Disaster Zondi, an ex-cop as a result of having principals in a time and place where those things have no cash value. The author spins these characters and more through a space-time continuum where personal interactions go repeatedly nuclear. Oops, I said five characters, didn't I? South Africa is the fifth one. The varying cultures, the extremes of power and wealth matched again helplessness and poverty, places where AIDS harvests one out of three people thanks to neglect, superstition, and ignorance. Where news events don't begin to tell the depth of the stories.

Along the way, the reader gets a mini-education in the behind-the-scenes politics of South Africa as that country moved from apartheid to... whatever one calls it today, because freedom hardly seems the right word. Unless one is remembering the old song lyric from Me and Bobby McGee: "Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose."

Thematically, where other authors would simply push the characters examining their past sins toward a search for redemption or atonement, Smith takes his characters beyond and into a stark cultural landscape where the wages of sin don't include the possibility of redemption, and where careful preservation of innocence is futile because innocence was long ago the first victim of sin. Harshly violent, the book is a broken window onto the cultural indifference to massive suffering, but more pointedly -- and poignantly -- Smith highlights the effect of the neglect by those powerful enough to relieve such suffering, who make such suffering more intense and widespread through corruption and indifference. The story's end is a sorrowful angel, breathtakingly cinematic on one level, and on another so personal that the reader's heart bleeds. A brilliant work.


HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

Review: WAKE UP DEAD by Roger Smith

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

And for Roxy, it's all downhill here from there. Driven by an anger she didn't know she possessed, she makes a decision that sets in motion a chain of events that leaves blood and body parts strewn across Cape Town as a string of deadly characters enter her life: There's the mercenary, Billy Africa, who wants the money Joe owed him. There are the two low-level gangbangers who are after Roxy for a lot more than the Mercedes Benz they took the night of the hijacking. The prison escapee who is determined to reunite with his "wife," one of the gangbangers. The cop, Eddie Maggott, who's after Roxy because he thinks she had more to do with the hijacking than she's admitted. The Ukrainian whore is lusting after the designer contents of Roxy's closet, and her cannibal friend wants to get back some money he turned over to Joe just before the hijacking. And out on the fringes is a murderous drug dealer who's after the gangbangers for reasons of his own. Roxy would gladly give up the money to save her life and get the hell out of Dodge, but there's just one problem. She's stone broke.

Wake Up Dead is not for the faint of heart. No, seriously. If you think Hannibal Lector is as bad as it gets, walk away now. But if you like a thriller that rides like a rocket, if you like unsympathetic characters that get under your skin like a dirty needle, stop reading this and go get a copy of this book right now. Me? Loved it. Loved it. This is a dark, brutal, and altogether satisfying thriller.

Part of the wonder that is Wake Up Dead, is that Smith works in backstory for each of his characters without any slowdown in the pace, enabling the reader to see motive and emotion behind the actions of even the most vile and irredeemable monster. When the motives and emotions morph into action, the characters become human bumper cars, slamming into and caroming off each other with no regard for life or any of the finer human attributes such as compassion and mercy. 

In simple, evocative prose Smith reveals the appalling underbelly of Cape Town with its racism, its sharp division between the haves and the have-nots, and the systematic tolerance of illegal drugs that allows for the sweeping under the rug of human life when it is not white and moneyed. And Smith exposes it all without any pedantry or patronization or rallying cry to a cause. He simply hands the reader a photograph, that's all. One that definitely won't lure the reader into daydreams of traveling through the tourist-friendly geographic and ethnic realms of wondrous African beauty; no, the Cape Flats is a place where you're more likely to Wake Up Dead. In fact, Roger Smith may just be a one-man wrecking crew for the South African tourist industry. But don't be surprised if he becomes a pillar of support for the South African publishing industry.

Here's a brief excerpt in which mercenary Billy Africa has just arrived back in Cape Town from Iraq:

Billy's journey down memory lane was interrupted when a car sped out of Vulture Street -- Dark City side -- nearly collecting him before it shot off down Main. It was a new BMW 7 series, sporting extras like fat tires, louvers, mud flaps, and a feature that definitely didn't come standard: a man tied to the rear bumper by his ankle, bouncing as he was dragged, leaving a strawberry smear on the dusty blacktop.

On the sidewalk a group of schoolkids, in the grip of the munchies after visiting their dealer, bought cotton candy from a one-legged simpleton. The kids pointed at the Beemer. Laughing fit to puke. The simpleton danced on his good limb -- empty trouser leg flapping -- clapping and whistling through his missing front teeth, enjoying the free entertainment.

Whoever said there's no place like home had got it one hundred percent fucken right.