Matt Wallace's THE FAILED CITIES

It can be easy to forget when reading this newly published hardcover collection of what once was a serialized podcast novel/anthology called "The Failed Cities Monologues" that it was originally penned in 2006 -- before the current financial crisis, before cities like Stockton and San Bernadino, CA and Detroit, MI went bankrupt. We were still riding relatively high, in 2006. Which is to say that Matt Wallace was maybe a little bit prescient.

The Failed Cities really concerns what was a single city bifurcated by a river -- which made it all the easier to let half of it go to crap when circumstances made its leadership give up on the poorer side of the river, withdrawing the police rather than utilities support after a rigged vote and thus letting the cheap side fall into lawlessness, a shanty town with seven story apartment buildings. The rich side, meanwhile, has its own problems, hosting, for instance, a giant crap crater that was originally a building site for what was going to be the most luxurious arcology build in the history of ever, until the financing fell through. Oops.

Within this world, eight point of view characters are living their lives: a street preacher (member of a sect of these, who have more or less taken on the role of the police in a wholly informal way), a pulp fiction writer (who makes ends meet by fighting in an arena and getting beaten to a pulp), a hot-rodder (who has a side business in acting as a one-man underground railroad for abused sex workers), a pair of brother and sister assassins (one of whom has had weird bone grafting surgery so all of her joints are essentially deadly edged weapons and the other of whom is Just. Huge.), a freelance moderator/negotiator (who got his start by talking his way out of a bar fight he kind of started), a Ukrainian immigrant escaping his family's legacy of heroism (who winds up backing into a heroic role as the Detective Who Will Catch The Serial Killer and immediately regretting it) and a black widow femme fatale (who sees through everyone else's schemes and plots to turn all those schemes on their heads). Each takes a turn at forwarding the overall narrative as their stories are intercut and overlap with one another to portray a world of lawlessness, struggle and occasional hope.

And yes, I'm going to mention the Godbody standard here, for The Failed Cities comes closest to meeting it of any book I've read, closer even than The Book of Skulls did. Which is to say that each character voice is distinct and believable, including those of the women, and I'm fairly certain a person familiar with the book could guess who was speaking from a randomly chosen passage read a loud, within a paragraph or two, if not a sentence or two. That takes talent.

So, top notch world building, top notch characterization, an interesting and intricate plot -- does this book have any flaws? Perhaps only the spidery typography, the font so thin it looks faint and was thus a little hard to read for these middle-aged eyes. But the contents thus displayed were so good -- and the hardcover containing them so gorgeous -- that I soldiered on with it. And hey, it's not like this was my first time visiting the Failed Cities; I listened to the podcast back in the day, which is why I knew I had to have this luxe edition. Go listen to the free original podcast version and see if it doesn't make you want one, too.

100 Books 58 - Seth Harwood's JACK PALMS II - THIS IS LIFE

Damn, but I think Seth Harwood would be a lot of fun to drink with. Ditto for the character that first made Harwood famous, Jack Palms, washed-up action movie star, sometime hustler, trouble magnet, and, in this, his second adventure, the guy the San Francisco cops turn to when things seem too dirty for them to handle (which means, in case you're wondering, that things are very dirty indeed).

Get a few beers or scotches in either one and I bet you're in for an evening of wild-ass stories. They might not be totally plausible stories, but they'll sure as hell be entertaining.

For this second Jack Palms outing, Harwood works more explicitly with a conceit that was only subtly present in the first one, Jack Wakes Up: that an actor, more or less playing a role, can stand in for the real thing when he has to. In Jack Wakes Up, though, Jack was playing a movie star, trading on his fame and what goodwill movie fans still had for him after his time in the tabloids (drug addiction, public ugliness with a pretty wife, etc.) to smooth the way for a complicated drug deal that wound up going wrong. He winked at bouncers, flirted with bartenders, showed the out-of-towners a good time in San Francisco, and juked his way out of crisis after crisis, all the while trying desperately to hold on to his hard-won health and sobriety.

This time around, though, Jack is having to play the role he played in his movie: a rough, tough Dirty Harry type. He has to act like a cop. And he gets in way over his head. As the title says, this is life: the guns, the bullets, the criminals and corrupt cops are all real.

I'm not sure I buy the premise that San Francisco's finest, even when desperate to exact justice/revenge for the death of one of their (corrupt) own, would resort to having a has-been actor* take the case when their hands get jurisdictionally tied, but I wound up not caring about that too much as I got sucked in to another intricate, messed up, tough, violent and shocking tale -- mostly, as always, by Harwood's care with the language. This is a guy who wants to get it right, a craftsman with his prose, and doesn't this reader appreciate that!

Harwood takes care, too, to keep us in Jack's head: he's an actor playing a role, and he's not firing blanks this time; the fights have not been choreographed, his dialogue has not been scripted. It's all improv, baby -- and sometimes Jack doesn't really know what to do, which verisimilitude (and again, craft in conveying it) more than makes up for the far-fetchedness of the premise that's landed him where he is. "This is the time, as he sees it, and there's nothing to do but act on what's here."

Plus, well, the action. As in prior books, the action is intense and incredible, and again, reminiscent of a good video game, complete with characters tossing away depleted weapons and taking up new ones. Jack winds up wielding every kind of firearm imaginable before the book is done, with varying degrees of success -- and quite a body count!

Now. Here's the interesting bit. As I mentioned in a prior post about Harwood, this guy is more than a bit of a maverick. He gives away his fiction first, in the form of free audiobooks over at Podiobooks, and releases it as ebooks and paperbacks later. This post of mine concerns the original ebook version of This is Life, but very soon, via a wonderfully successful Kickstarter campaign (and you'd better believe it, I'm a backer), a brand new edition of the book is coming out. And I'll be reading that new version -- and all the other stuff Harwood has in the pipeline -- just as soon as it lands in my greedy little hands. I'm a Palms Momma for life.

And the funny thing is, before I encountered Harwood, I didn't read crime fiction!

*Though as William Shatner says in a certain recent song, "Has-been... might again!"