Harlan Ellison, Web of the City, 1958

Rumble was Ellison’s first novel which, after he was drafted and underwent Ranger training, he says was mostly written while sitting on the john with his typewriter on his knees. He drew on his experiences (call that ‘research’) with teenage gang culture in New York, and it’s quite apparent from just the well-written first chapter that Ellison had a way with both atmosphere and plotting: you immediately get on-side with Rusty Santoro, a teenage Puerto Rican street thug who wants to make good on the streets of Brooklyn, yet constantly gets dragged back into the gang and the gutter to settle one more score, and big scores they are too. How has the novel fared after more than fifty years? Now back under it’s original intended title Web of the City, it’s still very readable and maintains a believable level of authenticity, though with the higher tolerance for violence we have today it may now work better as a rather informative and cautionary Y/A novel than an adult read. The recent 2013 Hard Case Crime edition also comes with three of Ellison’s short stories from the same period that paint the same kind of picture; I have no great admiration for Ellison’s writing throughout his career (and I’ve read a great deal of it), but Web of the City doesn’t hurt his reputation as the enfant terrible of his era and still commands the customary grudging respect. As is so often the case.  PY

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Roger Zelazny, The Dead Man’s Brother, 2009

Written circa 1970 and only discovered long after Zelazny’s passing, this mainstream novel remained unpublished until Hard Case Crime were offered the manuscript, at which point it was snapped up and released as the mass-market paperback it could have been at the time it was written. Ovid Wiley is an art dealer with a shady past, and when a dead body turns up at his office he’s offered a kind of amnesty in return for a small favour to the CIA. Except that that favour leads him where he doesn’t expect, first via the Vatican to gather information on a heist, then on further to a dangerous adventure in Brazil’s Amazon jungle. If I was offered a blind ‘taste test’ of which genre author had written this I’d have probably gone for Zelazny, such is his way with language in general and dialogue in particular. That the subject matter is so unlike what we normally associate with Zelazny is one of the fascinating aspects of the novel, others being how Zelazny allows Wiley to be a far more reliable narrator than he perhaps deserves to be, and the structure to the novel that allows the reader to rethink what has gone before in pursuit of some questions that remain unanswered by the end, more or less putting the reader in the same position as Wiley himself.  PY

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