“Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.”
– Walter Sobchak (The Big Lebowski)
An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England has got to be one of my favorite titles. Ever. The sentiment was at first chuckle-worthy, but is taking on darker, more credibly disturbing tones, the further I push into my (cough) “career.” So, as much as I love Craig McDonald’s pulp-writing hero Hector Lassiter, (and how could I not? – The dude knew Orson Welles and Pancho Villa as well as knew Marlene Dietrich and Rita Hayworth in a more biblical sense), I did find myself somewhat sympathetic for once toward his nemisises (nemisi?) this time around.
Yes, the baddies are a collective of discouraged Parisian writers and artists uniting under a nihilistic movement and murdering publishers for kicks, and while sometimes this may sound like not at all a bad hobby, even I must concede that there are lines that should not be crossed. This is not Nam after all, there are rules. Do they not sound like worthy adversaries? They get awfully creative with the modes employed to dispatch said targets (they're artists after all). Hector even crosses paths and intents with the likes of Aleister Crowley - creepy enough, yeah? - in one of my favorite passages.
So meet Hector Lassiter before he became "the man who writes what he lives and lives what he writes." In fact, as the ironies continue to layer in our Billy Pilgrim-esque understanding of Hector’s life, this latest chapter shows us that sometimes Hec lived what greatly irritated him to write (or read as it were). One True Sentence (fourth in the series, but first sequentially) presents us twenty-four year old Hector in Paris, before he’s written a single novel, hanging out with Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and the whole ex-pat scene as they get the gang together and try to solve a mystery. Those who've read the previous Hector books will know of his dislike of being labeled a "mystery author," (he writes crime, thank you very much) and of his rivalry with Estelle Quartermain the preeminent locked-room cozy writer of McDonald's alternate 20th century. But did they know of his erotic fixation on her? I thought not.
Finally Estelle and Hector get some screen time together, sizing each other up, he getting in her way and she into his head. Gems like the sexy visions of Hector's that feature Ms. Quartermain (disturbing to him, hilarious to us) as well as early appearances on the stage of future major characters like Donovan Creedy reward the series faithful, but if you have yet to pick up one of the Lassiter books, One True Sentence is plenty accessible for the uninitiated. For one thing, it's the earliest peek into Hector's life we've had. For another, it's only one time period where the other titles have hopped backward and forward across decades, this one is linear and compact in it's story line.
My fondness for the series is rooted (I suspect) in the same place as McDonald's inspiration to write it, a love of early and mid-century pulp fiction and in the legends and myths of our recent history. The Nada-ists of One True Sentence are pre-cursors to the avant-garde psychos of Toros and Torsos and the plotty connective tissue that binds the series becomes more dense and muscular with every installment, while the character blurs and focuses rapidly.
Following last year's Papa-centric Print the Legend, McDonald has now delivered the final chapter of the Hemingway trilogy within his eight(?) installment series. How's that for ambitious? And while Hec and Hem have made quite a pair, this is Lassiter's story and the further in the fore he is, the happier am I. Good to his word, McDonald has produced yet another distinctly flavored title within a series where he aims never to repeat the experience of a book and keeps his place at the front of the line whenever he's got a new book out.
Do you love crime fiction like I do, like Craig McDonald does? You'd do well to check out his two volumes of interviews with crime writers. Seriously - amazing and candid insight into some of the best living (and recently deceased) crafters of crime fiction out there. Check out the lineups for Art in the Blood, (James Ellroy, Dan Brown, Ken Bruen, Michael Connelly, Liza Cody, George Pelecanos, Walter Mosley, Dennis Lehane, Ian Rankin, Karin Slaughter, Lee Child, Steve Hamilton, J.A. Jance, Peter Lovesey, Peter Straub, Ridley Pearson, Tami Hoag, Tim Dorsey, David Corbett and Charlie Stella)
and Rogue Males (James Crumley, Elmore Leonard, Daniel Woodrell, Alistair MacLeod, Andrew Vachss, James Ellroy, Max Allan Collins, Stephen J. Cannell, Craig Holden, Pete Dexter, Randy Wayne White, Lee Child, Tom Russell, Kinky Friedman, James Sallis & Ken Bruen)
Jedidiah Ayres writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland. He also apologizes for the gratuitous Lebowski references in this piece. He just couldn't help it.
