Whatever develops the rest of my life, childhood memories have made a permanent and unshakeable foundation of holiday associations that can only be added to and built upon – never re-placed. For me Thanksgiving will always mean passing out in a tryptophan haze in front of the television, Thanksgiving television will always mean football, and Thanksgiving football will always mean the Detroit Lions.
Detroit however has a brand new association for me - Leonard Fritz. His new book In Nine Kinds of Pain is ten kinds of ambitious tied up in one kind of urban crime novel… kind of. It’s high-minded gutter-trawling, sincere pastiche and a sprawling story stuffed into a brief volume.
When a beautiful young streetwalker named Baby sees her chance to get out of the life and out of the city for good, she takes it and ends up playing a pivotal role in the lives of several desperate and disparate characters including a hustler, a cuckold cop, a killer and a disgraced clergyman. And though she holds the chewy center of this hardboiled yarn, the book belongs to each them.
Fritz switches gear, voice, style and even medium (the book includes several breaks into graphic-novel story-telling that each pay homage to the style of a different artist while remarkably effectively - and economically – providing character texture and back story) many times in under two-hundred pages making for a somewhat uneven, but ultimately engaging trip through the many levels of hell to be found in Detroit – the book’s biggest antagonist. Fritz has literally got style(s) to burn and I’ll be interested to see which, if any, of the many showcased in his debut will emerge as his dominant and preferred mode for future books. Somewhere between Iceberg Slim, Hubert Selby Jr. and Nikos Kazantzakis the direct literary parentage gets hazy, but all the prose-styles and character voices cannot be separated for In Nine Kinds of Pain which is just one more distinct flavor of crime and punishment among many spawned by the Motor City. Like what? Like these:
Robocop – Paul Verhoeven’s it-was-supposed-to-be-satire-not-prophecy classic is better than ever nearly twenty-five years later.
The Crow – James O’Barr’s Detroit-set graphic novels of supernatural revenge, eternal love and everlasting eyeliner spawned a single decent film and a trail of diminishing returns (and remain one of the most sure-fire ways to resurrect teenaged Jed – so be careful, I’ll get all broody up in here).
Narc – Joe Carnahan’s gritty cop flick opened with a desperate, breathless chase across urban wasteland Detroit and never let up. By far the brightest spot on Carnahan’s resume- the one that had me super-psyched when he was supposed to be adapting James Ellroy’s White Jazz with George Clooney (shakes fist - 'Clooney'). How did Ray Liotta not get a Best Supporting nom?
Out of Sight – Elmore Leonard’s dual legacies of sleazy Detroit hustlers and wacked-out Florida cons never complimented each other so well. A pretty breezy affair til Snoopy Miller puts the lights out in a terrifying crack-house massacre.
Grosse Pointe Blank – a cheat? Fine – an affluent suburb of Detroit, but still the setting for one of the last comedic crime films to really work for me. What? It didn’t work for you? How could “I killed the president of Paraguay with a fork. How’ve you been?” not land every single time? Not quite Miami Blues level George Armitage, you say? Maybe not, but waaaaay better than The Big Bounce, I counter. (Here's where you say touche.)
Enjoy your holiday. Especially you, Detroit.
Jedidiah Ayres writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.
