The Firecracker Fails to Explode

In Firecracker, Haywood’s second novel under the pseudonym Ray Shannon, the firecracker of the title is Clarice (Reece) Germaine. Like Ronnie in Maneater, Reece is a strong woman who refuses to become a victim.

Reece is a partner in a public relations firm in Los Angeles. Eight months before her current situation, she spent a week in Las Vegas having fun with Raygene Price, the star tight end for the Dallas Cowboys. Raygene, feeling generous, gave her a $25,000 betting ticket.

Despite taking precautions, she became pregnant and is now eight months into her pregnancy. She agonizes over whether the ticket is really hers or whether it belongs to Raygene, and she should return it. Since Raygene won’t give her the amount of child support she believes she is entitled to, she decides she’ll use the ticket to bet on the Arizona Cardinals to beat the Oakland Raiders in the Super Bowl. If Arizona wins, she will be 1.25 million dollars richer.

Raygene has his own troubles. His money manager stole his money, and he is almost broke. His mother becomes his manager and refuses to give Reece the amount of child support she wants. But his troubles really begin when his boyhood friend, a “wanna be black,” white boy named Trip just released from prison, asks him for money to finance a drug deal. He refuses to believe Raygene doesn’t have any ready money, and threatens to ruin Raygene’s career with information about a boyhood indiscretion. Raygene decides the betting ticket is his way out of the situation. Reece refuses to give him the ticket, even when he tells her about Trip, thus setting up a confrontation between her and Trip.

The protagonist of the subplot is Aeneas Charles, a private detective whom Raygene’s agent, Stanley, hires to watch Raygene and keep him out of trouble at least until the new contract negotiations with the Cowboys are completed. Charles has a problem of which he is unaware. The woman who was his partner on the Newark, New Jersey police force is in Las Vegas. She has not forgotten that she lost her job due to his testimony. When she discovers Aeneas is in Las Vegas, she concocts a revenge plan.

The pregnant super woman is certainly an attention getter. The novel, for me, fails because of the uninteresting characters and an unnecessary subplot. Raygene is the stereotypical dumb jock whom I neither liked nor disliked. Trip the “wanna be black” white boy is interesting on first meeting but becomes rather predictable. EY, his Black bodyguard, has to be the dumbest bodyguard in all of crime fiction. Raygene’s Black bodyguard Brew gets religion after listening to an evangelist on the radio. The private detective subplot slows the pace and contributes nothing to the plot.

My purpose in this blog is to encourage readers of crime fiction to read novels by Black writers. Please don’t let my negative opinion prevent you from reading Firecracker. You may like the novel.

Strong Woman As Victim

Anthony Gar Haywood, using the pseudonym Ray Shannon, wrote two crime novels on the theme of the strong woman as a victim who fights back.

  

In the first novel, Maneater, Rhonda (Ronnie) Deal, a junior development executive at Velocity Pictures, is a beautiful woman fighting her way to the top in a business dominated by men. The problems she has in the office with her male rival dwarfs the trouble that finds her when, sitting in a bar drinking a beer and thinking about how to get even with her male rival, she witnesses a big, Black thug snatch a small, young white woman off a bar stool and start beating her. Ronnie gets up and hits the thug over the head with the beer bottle. While he is stunned, she cracks him across the nose with the bottle. When she looks around, she discovers the young woman has fled, and realizes it is time for her to run, too, before he regains his senses.

The man Ronnie knocked temporarily senseless is Neon Polk, a psychopath who hires out as a money collector for drug dealers and other nefarious characters. A pissed off Neon vows that Ronnie is his “blood enemy.” He gets Ronnie’s address, attacks and rapes her in her home, and threatens to repeatedly do it if she doesn’t pay him $50,000 in a week.

Ronnie knows that if she pays Neon, she will become his slave for the rest of her life. If she doesn’t, she is dead. She realizes that she needs help from a man as mean and dangerous as Neon. She finds her knight in shining armor in an ex-con who has submitted a screen play with an urban setting to Velocity Productions. After reading the screen play, she thinks Ellis Langford is the right man to go up against Neon.

Ellis, the protagonist in the subplot, is a parolee recently released from prison and is working as a pizza deliveryman. Aside from the constant aggravation his parole officer causes him by checking up on him, his own trouble begins when he delivers pizza to two Mexican brothers waiting in a motel room to complete a drug deal. The younger brother decides to beat up on Ellis just for fun. A mistake. Ellis tricks them out of the room one at time and puts both in the hospital. They escape the hospital and go looking for him with revenge on their minds.

When she finally meets Ellis, Ronnie sizes him up:

“Ronnie had seen her share of Hollywood poker faces in all their endless variety, but the one Ellis was wearing now was something altogether different. It was as blank and uninformative as a new oil canvas. She had no clue what the man was thinking, or what emotions, if any, she had stirred in him. Compounded by his edgy, catlike beauty, which Ronnie had immediately felt the pull of despite herself, the writer's indecipherability left her with no choice but to maintain a defensive posture toward him.”

Later, after she explains her situation and asks Ellis for his help, he explains to her why she thinks he can help her with Neon: “’The wannabe screenwriter, nigger ex-con you figured oughtta be a cinch to bribe into whacking a stranger for you. Man did it once for nothing, why wouldn't he do it again for a few thousand dollars, right?’”

Will the partnership work? And will they get Neon before the Mexican brothers get Ellis or Neon gets Ronnie?

I enjoyed this relaxing novel because of its fast pace, unrelenting violence, and the tough female protagonist. The villains are true villains with no redeeming characteristics. The two protagonists are flawed but, to use the most favorite word of reviewers, likable characters.

Although I enjoyed the novel, the plot is too pat. It reads as though the novelist was following instructions in a book on how to write a novel.

THE BOND OF FRIENDSHIP

After six Aaron Gunner novels and two novels featuring amateur detective Dottie Loudermilk, Gar Anthony Haywood abandoned detective stories and wrote a crime novel in which the friendship of three friends is severely tested.

In Cemetery Road, the central character and narrator, Errol “Handy” White, reflecting on his situation, remembers that his grandfather “used to say that there were many paths a man could take during his time on earth, but sooner or later, they all brought him down the same one: cemetery road. There was no running from it, there was no hiding from it”

 

He earned the nickname Handy because of his skill repairing mechanical and electrical devices. He takes things apart and puts them back together for exercise and “for the sake of learning the answer to a single, unrelenting question: Why?” Handy is not above lying for what he believes is a good cause, but sometimes knows his lying is self-serving. At times selfish, he still tries to be a good friend and father.

After an absence of 26 years, Handy returns to Los Angeles from his home in St. Paul Minnesota to attend the funeral his boyhood friend R. J. (Robert James) Burrow, who was allegedly killed in a drug deal gone bad.

Back in his repair shop in St. Paul, Handy is haunted by R. J.’s death. He doesn’t accept the official explanation, and fears that who ever killed R. J. might be coming after him because of a robbery he, R. J., and their friend O’Neal Holden committed 26 years ago. The robbery was his idea and it’s his fault that R. J. is dead. He convinces himself that he wants justice for R. J.

The fear that he is next on the killer’s list forces him to return to Los Angeles to search for the truth of what really happened. During his search, he learns that after R. J. was paroled from prison, he got married and has a daughter who works as a PI in Seattle, and, Handy, thinks she might help him find out who killed R. J. and why.

O’Neal, who is mayor of Bellwood, a small town not far from Los Angeles, does not believe that they are in danger and thinks Handy is being paranoid. Nevertheless, he agrees to use his contacts to help Handy.

Cemetery Road is a thoughtful novel. The rather complex plot relates what is happening in the present to what happened in the past. The back and forth from the present to the past and back again doesn’t slow the pace, which changes from fast-paced action to the slow working of Handy’s thoughts in which he takes apart his past life and views things from a different perspective. Cemetery Road has a few twists and turns, a red herring, and a sure fire surprise ending.

SENIOR CITIZEN DETECTIVE

Gar Anthony Haywood must have grown tired of his Aaron Gunner series, for in his seventh novel, the detective is a wife and mother. The narrator and central character of the humorous Going Nowhere Fast (ISBN: 0-399-13917-6) is 53 year Dottie Loudermilk. She and her 52 year old ex-policeman husband Joe retired, sold their home, bought an Airstream trailer home, and hit the open road.

Although they did not invite him, Bad Dog, nee Theodore, the youngest of their five grown children and the black sheep of the family is with them when they begin their journey. He wants them to give him money to get to Pittsburg where a trainer for the Oakland Raiders, he alleges, will give him a job.

When they reach the Grand Canyon, they think they have lost him at the last stop. Returning to the Airstream after their morning run, two unpleasant surprises that will keep them from “going nowhere fast” greet them.

Bad Dog followed them and is hiding in the closet with a gun.

In the toilet sitting on the seat is a dead man.

The investigating park rangers turn the case over to the police in Flagstaff. The Flagstaff police arrest a man caught driving the dead man’s car, and he immediately becomes the main suspect.

The FBI take over the case and warn Dottie not to interfere. Of course  curious Dottie ignores the warning because she wants to know who the man on the toilet is, who killed him, and why the FBI is involved. She feels the police have the wrong man in custody. Her curiosity leads her, Joe, and Bad Dog on a dangerous adventure in which she will confront two hitmen, the football player who is chasing Bad Dog, and a menacing mobster in the Federal Witness Protection program.

In the subplot, Bad Dog doesn’t tell his parents that he had a job with the Raiders looking after their star defensive end. He was supposed to keep him out of trouble, but, thinking he could do it better if he got him away from his friends and teammates, he took him to a place Bad Dog frequented, and they both got drunk. The player was suspended and find $1,000. Bad Dog must pay the fine or suffer a few broken bones.

In stories in which husband and wife work together, the wife wins most of the arguments. Dottie Loudermilk is no exception. She has a way of persuading Joe to do what she wants without him realizing he has lost the argument. She wants to return to Flagstaff to visit the dead man’s widow but Joe wants to heed the FBI’s warning and not meddle in the mess.

"’Dottie, for God's sake-‘ Joe sighed.”

"’If you don't want to go, we won't go. I won't say another word. But San Antonio, Texas-or, worse yet, New Orleans, Louisiana-is hundreds of miles away from Flagstaff, Arizona, Joseph Loudermilk the Second-and that's an awful long way to go without hearing the sound of another human voice. Isn't it?’"

“I smiled and dug into my salad again.

“A half hour later, Joe made a right turn out of the res­taurant parking lot instead of a left, and another page was written in the Dottie Loudermilk Handbook of Shameless Bluffing.”

She also has a way with words. Her description of the football player: “I was standing directly in front of him, my neck turned up at a ninety-degree angle so that I might see his face. It was like trying to spot the heliport atop the World Trade Center from down on the street”

The Loudermilks are two Senior citizens who do not go gently into the good night upon retirement, and that is why I like Going Nowhere Fast. Bad Dog and the football player provide misdirection, humor and Deus ex Machina. The Deus ex Machina is not a surprise or distracting because it is well prepared for. The ending is one hell of a surprise.

DEAD WOMEN ARE NOT PRETTY

In his three previous Aaron Gunner novels, Gar Anthony Haywood dealt with the themes of Black revolutionaries, gangbangers, and the conflict between the Los Angeles police department and the Black community. The theme of the fourth novel in the series is abused women.

It’s Not A Pretty Sight, (ISBN 0-399-14132-4), opens with Gunner reluctantly taking on a job for Roman Goody, owner of Best Way Store to find Russell Dartmouth, who owes Goody for merchandise he bought on credit. Gunner finds Dartmouth, a mean, dangerous man, and tells Goody. This angers Dartmouth because Goody hounds him for payment. Gunner is unaware at the time that he has become the target for the big man’s anger. However, the case is secondary to the primary case Gunner investigates but is thematically connected to the motif of how psychopaths differ.

The primary case involving the brutal murder of his ex-fiancée Nina is personal for Gunner. He didn’t want to get married so he broke up with her but remained friends with her and her mother, though he hadn’t spoken to either in many years. He wants to find the real killer because of his past love and friendship with Nina.

His investigation takes him to Sisterhood House, a refuge for abused women, and he learns some surprising things about Nina that he would rather not have known. What he learns causes him to include four women in the house as suspects. Everyone in Sisterhood believes Michael, her abusive husband, killed Nina.

The visit to Sisterhood House gives Gunner the opportunity to state his opinion on abusive Black men, and I suspect he speaks for the author.

Mrs. Singer, the director of Sisterhood House, asks Gunner his opinion of abusive Black men. Gunner opines that they  "have a self-esteem problem, number one. And number two, they can't handle pressure they feel black women put on them to be perfect. Perfect lovers,  fathers, providers--the works."

He blames Black women because “the standard some black women hold a man up to is unreasonably high. And…failing to meet that stan­dard can sometimes do as much to cut a man down at the knees as anything another man could ever do to him. Possibly even more."

From the police, Gunner learns that the gun that killed Nina also killed another man. The owner of the gun is another psychopath, a hitman named Angelo Dobbs.

Working two cases simultaneously requires, of course, two dramatic conclusions: in the first, Gunner faces off with the big man, Dartmouth. He has some sympathy for the psychopath because “Killers like Russell Dartmouth took no pride in what they did; they saw their acts of violence not as works of art, but as unfortunate measures the world had forced them to take.”  

But Angelo Dobbs is a different creature altogether. Gunner and a police detective go after the crazed killer. He has no sympathy for Dobbs: “The men and women cut from his mold were ashamed of nothing; they treated their every accomplishment like a badge of honor, something to show the world with pride and self-satisfaction.  No ­crime was too vile or too senseless to confess to; no theft, no rape, no disfigurement of the innocent. And certainly no murder. Murder was the greatest trophy of all.”

Haywood suggests that abusive men are psychopaths, and that not all psychopaths are the same, and some may need our sympathy. His handling of the psychopathic theme is good. However, as a Black man, I felt uneasy about his opinion of why Black men abuse Black women. It allows Black men the luxury of refusing to accept their violent behavior. The devil didn’t make him do it, the Black woman did.

The novel shows that somethings in the Black community are no different from those in the White community—dangerous psychopaths come in all colors.

It’s Not A Pretty Sight is an entertaining and informative novel.

DOING WRONG FOR RIGHT REASON

In his first novel, Fear of the Dark, Gar Anthony Haywood’s PI, Aaron Gunner, battled Black would-be revolutionaries. In the second novel, Not Long For This World, Gunner’s attitude toward gangbangers changed from hostility to sympathy.

The theme in You Can Die Trying, the third novel in the series, is the uneasy relationship between the Los Angeles Police Department and the Black community.

Sixteen year old Lendell Washington and his cousin Noah Ford attempt to rob a liquor store and flee when things go wrong. Officer Jack McGovern chases Washington into a dark alley. McGovern fire two shots into the darkness, killing Washington. Since no gun or bullets are found, the Department concludes that McGovern killed Washington in cold blood.

Because of his policing methods, the Black community hates and fears McGovern. Some members on the Department, including the Chief, believe getting rid of McGovern will improve the reputation of the Department in the Black Community. The Chief also hopes it will help his chance of becoming mayor.

Mitchell Flowers, a concerned citizens who believes in justice, hires Aaron Gunner to prove that McGovern shot in self defense. Flowers claims he saw the shooting and that Washington fired first. He didn’t come forward when the incident happened eight months ago because he had been warned not to.

Gunner thinks the warning made Flowers feel like an “Uncle Tom”:

Being made to feel answerable to the whole of one's own race was a burden few white men ever had to shoulder, yet it was a black man's birth­right from day one.

Still, he is reluctant to take the case because it means going up against the LA police department, and he must convince the Department that he is not working for Washington’s mother, who is suing the Department.

For Gunner, Mrs. Washington and her lawyer Milton Wiley are more trouble than the police. With Wiley’s encouragement, Mrs. Washington believes Gunner is working to help the LA police Department white wash the case. Wiley, sensing that Gunner mistrusts him, tries to explain his actions in terms of his two laws theory:

There has never been only one law in this country, Mr. Gunner. You know that. From the moment your ancestors and mine were first brought here, there has always been two separate codes of behavior in effect: the white man’s and the black man’s. that I have spent seven years of my life practicing the former does not mean I am ignorant of the latter.

The murder of Lendell’s cousin Noah further complicates Gunner’s investigation because it suggests an unknown player, someone who didn’t want Noah to talk.

Gunner’s search for the gun, the most important evidence, leads him into a poor section of Los Angeles to a homeless man called Dancing Fred who may have information about the gun. This allows Hayward to editorialize through Gunner’s thoughts on homelessness:

In alleys and old warehouses, along railroad ties and freeway off-ramps, Dancing Fred's comrades clustered against the cold, trying to eke dignity out of a beggar's existence. White men in lifeless sport jackets and soleless brown shoes; black women swathed shawls and blankets three layers deep; children wearing clothing others had given up for rags—all of them made for a slow parade to nowhere that was difficult to take in.

The theme of the police versus the Black community is made explicit through Gunner’s discussion with his policeman friend Kupchak. He doesn’t accept Kupchak’s explanation that the police see the relationship as a war because they feel the Black community hates them. Gunner explains that it is fear not hate. Kupchak admits that some decent people live in the Black community but points out that those whom the police have to deal with are lowlifes and that an officer cannot mistake one for the other, or he is dead.

In the end, Gunner realizes that Kupchak’s view is similar to that of Dancing Fred. Dancing Fred describes the world as cold and life as dangerous and that “You can die tryin’” to survive. For the police it is about survival; for those in the Black community facing the police, it is also about survival.

Haywood presentation of his societal ideas through dialogue not narrative comment by the author helps give his novels some plausibility. However, his telling rather than showing that McGovern is a bad cop lessen the plausibility but helps maintain the pace of the novel .

You Can Die Tryin’ is not best of the three novels, but it is still enjoyable.