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What more can a reader ask for?
Book Review
By Derryll White
Blauner, Peter (2009). Casino Moon.
“In dreams begin responsibilities.”
W.B. Yeats
I admit it! I am addicted to Hard Case Crime publications. They commission wonderful new covers, painted in the style of the 1940s and ‘50s pocketbook crime novels. They re-publish some of the best of the old crime fiction as well as bringing forth strong new writers in the genre. Perhaps best of all, they are significantly cheaper than most publishers when it comes to buying their books.
Peter Blauner writes in the old hardboiled style of Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane. He uses it to advantage, taking all of the romance out of the Mafia and leaving it as an anachronistic organization. They become a bunch of bums born out of an old Sicilian rape/revolt. There is a lot of bumbling and not much intelligence in the way Blauner has the Atlantic City mobsters do business.
The most interesting character is Rosemary, a 38-year-old single mom who used to do blow jobs in the back of Honda Preludes and now mud wrestles and dances at one of the Atlantic City bars. She is tough, smart, and knows that men are really only a bag of hormones lusting after tits and ass. But Rosemary has class, an inner strength and belief-in-self that takes her past the n’er-do-wells surrounding her.
This is a sad book – strong writing and a very good cast of characters, but sad. Old men stuck in old ways. Women being abused by life and the men around them are transformed by their ability to manage a rough and usurious world. In the end I liked the novel. Blauner uses a worn, jaded and tired voice to examine lives out of time with the universe surrounding them. He made me examine my own life. What more can a reader ask for?
****
Excerpts from the novel:
ATLANTIC CITY – I remembered all the stories Mike told me about how this used to be the Queen of Resorts before I was born. The place where all the old robber barons, industrial leaders, and flappers from the 1920s used to come and sun themselves. This was where they had the first Miss America Pageant, the first movie theatre, the first Easter Parade, the first bra-burning, the first Ferris wheel, and the first color postcard. And down at the end of the Boardwalk, there was the Steel Pier, where thousands of people would come to watch Frank Sinatra sing with Tommy Dorsey’s band while the horses dove off the end of the pier.
ATTITUDE – Teddy took an unfiltered cigarette and stuck it in his mouth. “You know what the problem was with that old greaseball?” he asked Vin. “He was like a pay toilet. He wouldn’t give a shit for nothing.”
GETTING BY – Rosemary felt as though she was watching the whole scene from somewhere very far away. It was the same way she felt sometimes when she used to dance on top of bars. Like her body wasn’t really her body. It was just a thing she could rent out for other people to look at awhile.
GAMBLING – The men seemed more resigned to losing. They put their money in, pulled the levers, and watched the dials tell them something they already knew. But the women were full of hope and determination. Some played two or three machines at a time. When they pulled a lever they put a lifetime of frustration into it, and when they hit a jackpot they celebrated like it was the birth of a grandchild, jumping up and clapping their hands with glee.
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
