Friday's Forgotton Book: Barry Fantoni's MIKE DIME

This is a tag-along to Patti Abbott's Friday's Forgotton Books series which can be found here, and here.

MIKE DIME by Barry Fantoni, first British hardcover edition published by Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1990.  The dustjacket illustration is credited to Allan Morgan, and the rear cover is also excellent.  The title appears on the spine as if in neon lights.

The private eye in a trench coat, the car, the neon lights glowing in the foggy night.  A great dustjacket for a period piece set in 1948 Philadelphia, on the eve of the election between Dewey and Truman.

The plot is convoluted in a parody of Raymond Chandler, and the prose and the sardonic tone are often very funny.  There are lots of fistfights, gunfights, and blood, but even these are funny in Fantoni's hands.

The opening lines:

It was raining hard and cold out of a night sky.  As hard as it knew how.  Rain lashed the walls and spilt over the gutters and poured like gurgling bath water down choking drains.  Rain as cold as Atlantic waves hurled itself at everything in sight, drenching it through.

I was sitting in my office with my lights out and my feet on the desk. . .I picked up a dead bottle of cheap bourbon and dropped it into the waste basket.  It was time to get a drink, rain or no rain.  A bolt of lightning ripped across the sky and made way for a stuttering crescendo of thunder.  A pink neon sign winked on and off non-stop outside and its reflection hit the inside wall of my office.  Sometimes I winked back.

I hauled myself out of my chair and shuffled through the grove in my carpet to the hat stand by the door.  I put on my raincoat and hat and told the puddle in the corner I was going to drown somewhere else.  Then something unusual happened.  The phone rang.

Some other samplings of the prose:

 "She was in her late forties and her figure was spreading faster than spilled milk. A lot of her was almost into a peg-top velveteen skirt with slits that were too long and a frothy organdy blouse that needed buttoning. Her face was the color of uncooked bread, her lips were large and puffy and painted with less care than drunks count change."

"If Frenchy had something to say, I didn' hear it. Someone else was making noise. It was Mrs. Summers. She had pulled herself from the sofa and was running the length of the room toward the window. She was screaming at the top of her cracked voice. Her housecoat billowed like an open parachute as clenched her fists and smashed headlong into the glass. It splintered into a thousand angular fragments and let the falling woman through."

"The scream died on the air as Frank Summers widow took the short way down to the sidewalk ten floors below. For a second that lasted an hour we all stood open-mouthed, gaping at the jagged edges of the hole in the window, which rose and fell like the Himalayas, their peaks capped with glistening blood."

Here the plot is secondary to the existential sardonic attitude of the protagonist, to the noir atmosphere and the time-piece elements, to the relationship between Mike Dime and the femme fatale, and of course to the language.

There was a previous Mike Dime novel entitled Stickman, which also features a fine dustjacket illustration by Allan Morgan:

If you like authors who write using Chandleresque hyperbolic similes, you might also enjoy Philip Kerr's series of novels featuring Bernhard Gunther, starting with his terrific March Violets.  My list of some other good ones sharing elements of this style can be found here.

Today's Rap Sheet provides audio links to Raymond Chandler's novels: "Chandler In Your Ear." 

Friday's Little Known Gem: DOGS OF GOD by Pinckney Benedict

Good grief, what a novel!  A richly written, darkly funny, terrifying country noir.  Part southern gothic, part murder mystery, with elements of a classic western parable in parody.

Dogs of God, published by Nan A. Talese, an imprint of Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, New York, New York, 1994.

Dustjacket: a dog coming out of a dark background, surreal and out of focus as if crazed or in motion.  The title is in some graveyard gothic type of font, in small letters and in halloween orange.  Likewise, low in the picture and in smaller letters, "a novel by pinckney benedict author of the wrecking yard."  The same dog appears on the spine of the jacket but looking sober and in focus.  The photo is credited to Barry D. Marcus and the jacket design credited to Kathy Kikkert.

Epigraph: "I will appoint over them four kinds, says the Lord. the swords to slay, and the dogs to tear, and the fowls of the heaven, and the beasts of the earth, to devour and destroy." -- Jeremiah 15:3

Opening lines of the prologue:  "I'm waiting there to see if they've got a bell they're going to ring to start the bout, and this weedy bastard I'm fighting skips right across to my corner and hits me in the face.  Only he's taller than me and doesn't get the point of the jawbone.  Instead, he catches the side of my head, on the ridge of the cheek, which smarts like crazy and takes some skin off, but it doesn't level me.  I guess he figured he could end the whole thing right there.  Hell, I thought he was coming over to shake my hand."

The fight in the prologue (in italics as if a dream) sets up what's to come later in a marvelous way.  This book is funny quirky, prose and plot, and, as with the fighter in the opening paragraph, it is full of surprises you won't see coming.  Don't read it if you can't take a punch.

Opening lines of the text:  "Goody knew the stench.  It had been growing steadily denser, more malignant, in the week that he had occupied the rented house.  It wafted over him as he lay in bed, borne through the open bedroom window on a hot gust of wind.  It pulled him gasping from sleep, from another of his frequent fight dreams."

The stench is the smell of death.  This book has one of the most darkly humorous openings ever written (chapters one and two together), a portent of things to come.

Telling paragraph later in the book:  When he asked where he could change out of his street clothes and into his trunks, Goody was pointed back to the jakes again.  He chose to disrobe in the shadow of the barn near the toilets, rather than inside one of them. . .Yukon followed him out into the barnyard, and Goody tensed himself for trouble.  Then he saw that Yukon also carried trunks and tennis shoes.  Yukon said to him, "They tell me your name's Goody."  Goody nodded.  "What's that?" Yukon asked, smiling.  "Some kind of cookie?"  He laughed and made for the first of the jakes.

"I wouldn't go in there if I was you," Goody called out.

That last line was a Cormac McCarthy joke, a line from Blood Meridian, but you needn't have read Cormac McCarthy to get the humor in this one, though it is often the same kind of humor.

Pinckney Benedict was compared to Cormac McCarthy long before Cormac McCarthy became popular.  Hell, now it seems like almost any new author is compared to Cormac McCarthy.

But McCarthy would have been the ideal author to blurb this one--if he ever blurbed a novel, which he never has.  Instead, they got blurbs from Elizabeth Dewberry Vaughn, Lee K. Abbot and two heavyweights, Barry Hannah and Madison Smartt Bell.  Bell said: "dogs of god is an invocation of dark, chthonic forces, a book which almost literally takes no prisoners.  It's a page turner for sure, but also worth reading slowly. . .elaborate, gorgeous writing."

You probably never heard of this one, even though it was published to high acclaim everywhere and the author won both the Nelson Algren Award and a James Michener Fellowship.  A mighty yet little known gem.

This is a literary string-along to Patti Abbot's FRIDAY'S FORGOTTEN BOOKS series, here.