Accident People, Delusional Heroes, Bad-Ass Chevys & the Devil's Daughter

FUN & GAMES, Duane Swierczynski
Another high-octane actioner from the guy who brought us The Wheelman, Severance Package and The Blonde, among others. This one finds former cop “consultant” and high-end house sitter Charlie Hardie in a fight for his life against The Accident People—a shady crew with unlimited resources who set up tragic deaths. Along with a washed-up young actress, Charlie struggles to stay one step ahead of the bad guys. Basically, FUN & GAMES is one amazingly suspenseful set piece after another. The thrills just keep coming and the fights, escapes, and close calls are relentless. It’s the literary equivalent a big-budget action movie.

GRAVEN IMAGE
A brutal but funny MF of a novella from Charlie Williams, GRAVEN IMAGE seems designed to keep the reader always a little off-kilter. The protagonist, Leon, tears across the pages in a mad search for his daughter, and he won’t allow anything to stand in his way. The real strength of this story is the slowly creeping realization that there is something… wrong… with Leon and his perception of events. About three-fourths of the way through, you start to get some ideas about what’s really happening, but that doesn’t lessen the horrible blow that comes when Leon finally realizes it himself. A different tone from Charlie’s Mangel novels, but equally compelling.

RAISE A HOLLER, Jason Stuart
This mad-cap romp through the backwoods of Colleden County is an amazingly fun page-turner. Redneck teens Hank and Billy, on a half-ass quest to find a cache of hidden bootleg booze, wind up on a—really, there’s no other way to put it—journey of self-discovery, encountering a family of vile females looking for a baby-daddy, a gaggle of drugged-out hippies, an escape by hot-air balloon, corrupt law, an insane swamp man, a bad-ass Chevy and a pampered tiger among other things. It’s a nicely episodic novel, one that makes it impossible to guess what madness the boys will stumble into next.

The Devil’s Music: When You’re a Stranger, Julia Madeleine
Julia Madeleine’s latest story of Sadie, the Devil’s daughter, claims another rock icon into the 27 Club. It’s Paris, 1971, and Sadie has come to claim her mad poet Jim this time. But WHEN YOU’RE A STRANGER is not just a simple appreciation of Jim Morrison, because that would be too easy. It’s a heartfelt meditation on the nature of love, beauty and loss that somehow still manages to avoid being maudlin or sentimental.

No Rules: CHARLIE WILLIAMS

CHARLIE WILLIAMS pens the black-as-pitch but funny-as-hell adventures of Royston Blake, the maniacal bouncer/half-baked tough guy/ne'er-do-well of the town of Mangel. These books are amazing fun, and unique in that Royston narrates in his hypnotic lower-class Brit dialect. I always find myself reading them out-loud.

But as fun as the Blake novels are, there's more to Mr. Williams than that, as evidenced by his new book, GRAVEN IMAGE, now available on e-readers everywhere and also as a traditional, you know, book.

I'm very pleased to have CHARLIE WILLIAMS here at Psycho-Noir today...

Cutting the brush

I've got a thing about genre. Or rather, I haven't. My thing is that I always thought I was in one genre, then somehow engineered a move into a different one. Then I found it hard to stay in that genre, and kept slipping back into the former one. Then a third genre reared its pretty head and beckoned me.

Fact is, I don't really give much of a shit what genre my stuff is. Genre is for publishers and readers, not authors. As far as I am concerned, all I have to do is get the stories down in the best way possible, making them as good as they can be. Who cares what genre they are? Maybe I should. Maybe, if I had made more of an effort to keep my novella GRAVEN IMAGE in the crime camp, it might reach more readers. But that would make it a different book, and probably not as good a one.

I have tried writing straight crime. I even tried to write some sort of generic thriller once, with a detective and some bad guys and a single-parent damsel in distress who the 'tec doesn't know whether to protect or sweep off her feet. But I couldn't stay interested in the po-faced-ness of it all. Whenever a serious moment cropped up where the narrator had to do some moralising, he would get an insatiable urge to drink massive amounts of rough cider and go on a spontaneous killing spree - using a random item of garden machinery.

And I knew why this was: he was making up for all those pages of playing the good boy, toeing the line and being the problem-solving hero. That is not what I'm interested in. I like main characters who are fucked up, whether they know it or not. I want to show how fallible we are, and how laughable our self-images are. If that detective of mine had just been a bit more laid back and honest with himself in the first half of the book - if he had tortured that witness just a little instead of reasoning with him, or hopped into the sack with Ms Damsel at the first opportunity instead of sticking to some code - the killing spree might have been avoided. Brush-cutters would have remained un-primed, lives would have been saved.

(Shit, why didn't I finish that book?)

So yeah, Graven Image, which is what I intended to write about here. It's crime, but it doesn't really stick to the tropes. The hero is a bouncer, but he is also something else, something you will have to read the thing to find out. And maybe you won't do that, knowing now that this is a book that is likely to veer away from crime. But I'm also hedging that you will, seeing as this here blog is concerned with a sub-genre called "Psycho Noir". And if I had to nail my stuff to a genre, psycho noir is pretty much what I would choose. But I can't do that, because it would be tempting fate. I would be damning myself to a subconscious struggle to break free from the confines of the psycho noir genre.

So if you should read a historical romance in a year or so featuring a brush-cutter death scene, that'll be me (under a pen name).

Kindle-fied Review 1: DEADFOLK, by Charlie Williams

Royston Blake’s a doorman, a bloke what relies on his rep as a right hard bastard. So when some wankers start in that he’s lost his bottle Royston has to step up. Worse even, the Munston brothers are after him for events that well, let’s not go into that just now, right? Royston needs to re-establish his reputation, like, but using his Swede ain’t his cuppa, normally. And one thing you can bank on in the town of Mangel. Ain’t nothing gonna go right, ever.
DEADFOLK was writ down by some tosser what calls hisself Charlie Williams, and he gets it all right, mostly. He seems to be on intimate terms with Royston. Not intimate like a couple of poofs or nothing, but like, he don’t make no mistakes. And DEADFOLK, well, it’s the first book in a series, innit? You’re going to like Royston, despite yourself. DEADFOLK is a great fucking book. All right, mate? All right.