Living the Gimmick (2022)

Retired pro 'rassler Alex Donovan just wants to run his bar in peace, but when his former tag team partner Ray "The Wild Child" Wilder shows up at his door, Donovan knows the drinks will flow and blood may spill. And if the boys wanna fight you better let em. But what's this?! Somebody wants Donovan's good buddy Ray DEAD! So much so that they're willing to blow Ray's brains out on Donovan's doorstep just to prove how serious they are at this murdering business. Donovan must have been blinded by some powder in the eyes or a heel manager distraction at ringside though, because he didn't get a clear shot of who the assassin actually was. Determined to get to the bottom of the case and equally determined to not let the police simply do their own investigation, Donovan sets out on a mission of vengeance to root out Ray Wilder's killer and bring them to justice... one sidewalk slam at a time.

It pains me to say that I struggled to get through this one. As evidenced by my review of Big Apple Takedown, I'm a big advocate of pro wrestling being featured in fiction. I feel like there's an untapped goldmine of potential stories you can get out of using pro wrestling as your main tableau to entertain fans of grapplers and gimmicks, but while Living the Gimmick is indeed a novel featuring pro wrestling as the backdrop, I feel that it isn't exactly written for wrestling fans. Allow me to explain my thinking here...

So much of what is described in the text of this novel by author Bobby Mathews are things that are already going to be well known to any wrestling fan worth their salt. And yet they are relayed to the reader at times in painstaking detail, as if to let an outsider in on the joke and fully explain what some of the insider lexicon actually means. That's why I have a hunch this novel is written primarily for crime and mystery fans who are complete neophytes to the world of pro wrestling or non-fans entirely. A wrestling fan today knows what a double cross is. A wrestling fan today knows what a run-in is. A wrestling fan today knows what a blade job is. These things are all doubly true in the internet smart mark era. At worst, some of the flashbacks we see to Donovan and Wilder's heyday in the waning 80's territory period that were supposed to set up potential suspects who might have enough of a grudge against Wilder to want to murder the dude decades later came across to me as cynical attempts to inflate the page count, such were the lengths of certain asides about pro wrestling minutiae and trivia.

I also found it incredibly strange that while the author has created his own fantasy world where one character is clearly meant to be a representation of Vince McMahon and another character is clearly meant to be a representation of Ric Flair and so on, there are occasional references to real life figures in wrestling history. It's frankly jarring to have all of these fictional counterparts and suddenly there's a reference to a real-life promoter like Paul Boesch show up in the text, or a reference to the Funks. Again, these are small things that a non-fan will never notice. My best guess is the author put the real-life names that the characters are based on into the text while he was writing drafts and then went through and replaced those names with their fictional counterparts later and perhaps forgot to replace a few names here and there. It's either that or he made the baffling decision to sprinkle a few real names in with the others, which in the immortal words of Hulk Hogan, "doesn't work for me, brother."

If you're looking at Living the Gimmick purely from the mystery and whodunnit angle, it does work a lot better. Donovan as a character works well as the inadvertent makeshift sleuth pressed into service for the sake of a fallen comrade in arms. He's got the same world-weariness and beatdown temperament as a grizzled cop style character without actually being a policeman. The main difference is, Donovan acquires his blackened soul from hard years on the road doing the pro wrestling circuit as opposed to hard years working a beat in a crime-ridden neighborhood. There is a mild sense of absurdity where instead of say, canvassing a neighborhood for clues regarding a crime as a police officer might in a more conventional mystery potboiler, Donovan is instead seen trawling through the locker rooms and back offices at a wrestling show searching for leads. This discord exists because the tone of Living the Gimmick is mostly on the serious side, leaning far more towards something like The Wrestler for inspiration than say, Body Slam or No Holds Barred.

For me, this one was a miss. (Or a Dusty Finish if you like.)

The Fraudulent Broad (1958)

Dan Slick is a big lug who works a miserable 9 to 5 as a vacuum cleaner salesman. He has his eye on the soon to be vacant manager's position and the cute front office lady, but laments his lot in life and wonders if he'll ever get ahead financially. Things take a turn when Dan somehow manages to sell one of his cleaners to Cleo, the young wife of the chairman of the entire company. Taking more than a passing interest in Dan and his plucky charms, the chairman hires Dan for a very special job: fucking the living daylights out of his wife with a photographer hiding in the bushes so he can divorce the gold digging hussy and leave her with nothing! The only catch? Dan seems to have fallen in love with Cleo, and the only way out for them as a couple with the chairman's millions intact is for the chairman to die...

James L. Rubel, who also wrote under a plethora of pen names, produced a decent amount of novels ranging from crime to westerns during the heyday of pulp between the 1930's to 1950's. Unfortunately, his name doesn't seem to be talked about as much as some of the luminaries of the genre and the majority of his work existed for decades only in used bookshops, but perhaps that can change with some recent reprints from publisher Cutting Edge Books. One of these reprints is The Fraudulent Broad from 1958, a sleazy sex and murder tale with more than a hint of Double Indemnity in the mix.

While the press for this book warns the reader it's for "adults only" and there's some loose, adulterous women and themes of cuckoldry abound, Rubel never actually ventures into true erotica here. Beyond some scenes of heavy making out and implied sex off-screen, The Fraudulent Broad is actually rather tame by today's standards.

What the novel does have going for it is its sleaze factor. If this were a movie it would have been made in the 1970's on super 8 with that greasy, muddy hue of the cheapest film stock at the time. Every single character in this novel - from the lughead main character to the conniving chairman to the drunken money hungry wife to the flamboyant family attorney with his own agenda - they are all complete slimeballs. Even the minor characters like Dan's office rival and the police officers who show up towards the tail-end of the story are still dripping with sleaze. I honestly struggled to find a likeable character throughout the entire novel.

However, I don't necessarily see the lack of likeable characters as a drawback in a story that's intended to be this dark and salacious. As a treatise on greed and what the pursuit of easy money will do to already damaged people, The Fraudulent Broad is a home run. It doesn't have anywhere near the hypnotic poetry of something like a Chandler novel, but I still found Rubel to be a competent wordsmith who seemed to have a knack for pacing that the likes of Elmore Leonard would perfect to a science in the decades that followed.

And like any crime novel of this era, there's also plenty of twists and double-crossing to be had. Some you'll see coming, some you may not...

Recommended.

The Punisher (2004)

In the quaint, sun-drenched town of Pastryville, Frank Castle, once known to the public as the notorious "Punisher", has hung up his guns for an apron and traded in the skull and kevlar armor for a smile and a rolling pin. After a life-altering incident involving a misadventure with a down on his luck pastry chef, Frank unexpectedly finds himself the owner of "Castle's Cakes", a bakery that becomes the very soul of the community. Gone are the days of vengeance - now Frank's only 'war' is the war within himself to bake the perfect croissant...

...or not. I mean, I'd probably put down money before you could blink an eye to see a story where my favorite comic book character did something as ridiculous as become a pastry chef, but alas, we're actually here today to talk about author D.A. Stern's novelization of the 2004 film The Punisher starring Tom Jane as the eponymous gun enthusiast himself. The actual plot of this story is every single Punisher origin you've ever known about: bad guys kill Frank Castle's family - Frank Castle goes on murderous rampage against any and all bad guys - the end. For the 2004 film, screenwriter/director Jonathan Hensleigh made some... changes to the lore and the overall setting, including moving the action from the gritty streets of New York City to... Tampa. Yeaaah. Tell me your film project is trying to save money without telling me your film project is trying to save money.

Hensleigh also made sure to exclude characters like Microchip and Jigsaw because he saw them as "lacking the spirit of the urban vigilante". This tells me Hensleigh didn't actually 'get' fuck-all about the comics, because while the Punisher's roots are undoubtedly part of that 1970's Mack Bolan/Death Wish stew, there's just as much of a place for high-tech Bond style gadgets and over the top supervillains in the Punisher's universe. It is a comic book property, after all. As such, the 2004 film suffered from being turned into a mostly by-the-numbers 1970's style revenger flick. Tom Jane, who actually *is* a fan of the Punisher character, does his damnedest to give his performance as much of a tortured soul pathos as possible, but ultimately, the Punisher versus a fruitier than usual John Travolta as the bad guy is missing something and it's no surprise the proposed sequel was turned into Punisher: War Zone with a completely different director, writer, and lead actor several years later.

What's interesting about the novelization of The Punisher is that author D.A. Stern (aka Dave Stern) appears to be a legitimate fan of the character. If he's not a fan, he certainly fooled me, but there are enough little tweaks to what we saw on screen to convince me he's down for some Marvel style street justice. I'm not suggesting the author went beyond his mandate here in adopting the screenplay to novel format, but I get the feeling nobody was really paying too much attention to some of the flourishes Stern added to this version of the story. From minor lore things, like the acknowledgment that Castle's family are actually the Castiglione clan, to an obvious foreshadowing of Microchip about halfway through the novel:

A shame, but the contents of this particular bin would probably end up on Saint's cigarette boats later today. Envisioning this morning's operation, Castle had originally thought to deactivate the bay's sprinkler system and burn the money, but he found he didn't have the necessary computer skills. A weakness, a chink in his armor: he would have to address it at some point.

The fact that the film's director hated Frank's sidekick enough to exclude him entirely from his film tells me he probably didn't find the time to read Stern's novelization and catch the above moment. But what really convinces me this novelization flew under the radar and was simply pushed out by the publishers for an attempt at a quick buck is THIS piece of beautifully batshit nonsense early in the novel where the author is describing some of Castle's escapades as a ruthless special ops guy long before the murder of his family takes place:

Buccaneer Bay was an Orlando tourist attraction that featured the Jose Gasparilla-the world's only remaining fully rigged pirate sailing ship. Six members of Sato X, a Japanese terrorist organization, had somehow snuck weapons onto the boat, which they then used to take sixty-five innocent tourists hostage.

The group they captured, however, included a sixty-sixth person, Frank Castle, who escaped during the terrorists' assault. He'd then donned a pirate's outfit, complete with skull mask (courtesy of one of the animatronic attractions on the ride) and set about rescuing the hostages. Within an hour, the terrorists were all dead, the tourists safe and sound, and their anonymous rescuer had mysteriously vanished.

I can assure you, nothing quite so gut-bustingly AWESOME made its way into the mostly drab film version of this property.

To me, these little flourishes are enough to make the novelization of The Punisher shine and might actually make it one of those somewhat rare instances where the film novelization outshines the big screen version of the same story. I figured going into this book that it would be a curio for hardcore fans of the comic books only, but I can see a greater appeal here. I won't pretend this is anything close to high literature, but Stern's novelization ends up reading very much like one of the Bolan novels with lots of action and goons getting exactly what's coming to them, so if that's your jam, this ain't a bad read at all. Recommended.

The Long Moonlight - Nightvale Book 1 (2020)

"I hate gang wars. They're coarse and rough and irritating... and they get everywhere." That's probably what the audacious thief known as Xerdes was thinking as he moved from rooftop to rooftop across the city of Menuvia. Xerdes has recently found himself in the crosshairs of rival crime lords, the city guard, hired killers, and a fellow outlaw lass who possibly just walked out of a Whitesnake music video. And all Xerdes wants is one big score to live the good life for a while... but will his next score be his last?

You all know of RazörFist, right? He's that guy on YouTube who cosplays as Bret "Hitman" Hart and has all the catchphrases like "Fuck you, I was right!" and "That's about all. Peace out. Godspeed!" Mr. Fist has also become something of an author in recent years, starting with this absolute banger known as The Long Moonlight. Coming in at a svelte 125 pages, The Long Moonlight is a delectable crossover of fantasy and noir in pulp format that simply drips with atmosphere from beginning to end. Rife with the kind of grandiloquent wordplay you'd expect from the heyday of pulps, it's unabashedly purple, but that's not a bug of the genre, it's a feature.

If you've read any press or watched any of his streams on the subject of his book series, you may know the author is refreshingly open about his writing influences: there's just as much Fritz Lieber as there is Dashiell Hammett in tone, setting, and style. There's a shot of Robert E. Howard with how some of the action is handled, and then there's a chaser of Raymond Chandler with portions of snappy dialogue. In particular, the wiseass rejoinders that emanate from main character Xerdes from time to time has an echo of Marlowe (minus the ungodly chain smoking). There's also Mr. Fist's computer gaming influences that come to the fore - the Thief series being chief among them. I'm about as good at stealth games as Joe Biden is at balancing a budget or keeping his hands off of small children, so I've never even attempted to play Thief. My only experience with these games is watching others play them, but I can absolutely see how some of the gloomy stylings of the series made their way over to The Long Moonlight.

Something else I know RazörFist enjoys are the Death Wish movies. Without spoiling too much here, there's a certain point in the story where a vengeance angle begins to unfold, and while it's not exactly Bronson-esque in the way it's executed, the brutal results do bear some vague similarities to said revenge flicks. It's good to know that even the fictional city of Menuvia can experience its own Summer of Love!

Which brings me to perhaps my only quasi-complaint about The Long Moonlight. In the midst of Menuvia's fiery but mostly peaceful protests is Inspector Coggins, a side character who features in a few brief interludes when our main character is offstage. I actually found Coggins and his no-bullshit attitude to be a pretty based character (well... for a cop, at least) - to the point where I was slightly disappointed this character's side story of solving grisly crimes and ferreting out corruption in the city guard didn't have a tad bit more time dedicated to it. I see this as a positive complaint though, for it means I found myself invested in the author's world, lore, and characters and wanted to see even more of it.

I'd be remiss if I didn't point out The Long Moonlight also features a few pieces of black and white art provided by the author himself that are peppered throughout the narrative. The art is just as evocative as the text and compliments it well, hitting the reader with a forlorn dungeon synth album cover vibe that I can get behind.

While I still heartily recommend neophytes go back and read the masters of pulp from yesteryear, there are more than enough worthy successors in this arena in the contemporary to read alongside them, and RazörFist's The Long Moonlight deserves a spot on your bookshelves if you're a pulp inclined reader. I look forward to delving into his follow-up Nightvale novella very soon.

Farewell, My Lovely (1940)

After a client is killed on his watch, Los Angeles-based private detective Philip Marlowe finds himself embroiled in another puzzle box of a case involving jewel thieves, a corrupt fortune teller, some crooked cops, a gambling ring evading the local law, and a not-so-gentle giant hoodlum on the prowl for his treacherous ex-girlfriend. Grab your cigarette case and the nearest carafe of black coffee, gumshoes, because we're about to get more concussions than a 1980's pro wrestler!

Murder, My Sweet starring Dick Powell as Phillip Marlowe is quite possibly my favorite film noir and after re-watching recently it occurred to me that the novel it was based on - Farewell, My Lovely - was one of the few Raymond Chandler pieces I hadn't got around to reading yet. I corrected this heinous oversight as quickly as possible and found myself once again sucked into the lights and shadows of Chandler's vision of the West Coast with Phillip Marlowe - perpetual smartass and would-be knight in shining armor - as my tour guide.

Those steeped in crime novel lore are likely already aware that Chandler often cobbled his Marlowe novels together by stitching previously written short stories into a singular narrative, but truthfully, the sometimes abrupt changes of pace and plot trajectory in Farewell, My Lovely might give away this trick to even a neophyte reader. I personally don't have a problem with this, but I concede this factor could be bothersome to some, especially keen mystery and whodunnit fans looking for a neat and comprehensive wrap-up by the end of the novel. In bringing different stories together as one, Chandler sometimes inadvertently creates plot holes, drops characters for long stretches of time with no apparent explanation, or introduces what should be an important character extremely late in the narrative.

However, the loose strands of plot surrounding the confounding mysteries Chandler presents never appeared to be of any major concern to the author. His primary objective was drenching the reader in atmosphere, and Farewell, My Lovely, much like its immediate predecessor The Big Sleep, is awash in a delightfully blackened ambiance from the sinful streets of Los Angeles to the broken and disaffected cast of characters each with a stain or three upon their souls. In the middle of it all is Marlowe, a man who should be broken in more ways than one but always finds a way to persevere through the mire and pursue justice... even if no one else appears to be interested in pursuing it.

There are moments of purple prose that wonderfully exemplify the pulp style, where Chandler goes out of his way to describe scenes in lavish detail to really transport the reader into the room. These are the moments where the reader can tell how much Chandler was in love with language, but there are just as many instances where instead of belaboring the point, Chandler's quick wit comes through like a blunt weapon over the head:

"I used my knee on his face. It hurt my knee. He didn’t tell me whether it hurt his face."

Finally, I'll leave you with this: a fun Farewell, My Lovely drinking game. Point your browser to a completely cucked and compromised den of leftist gobbledygook like Goodreads and take a shot every time you scroll past a contemporary review of this novel where the reviewer clutches their pearls and nearly faints at Raymond Chandler's use of colorful language. Congratulations. You're now as much of an alcoholic as Philip Marlowe appears to be. It's no secret that Chandler, much like his pal Ian Fleming, wrote novels that are no longer suitable for mOdErN aUdIeNcEs, which is why you'd be best served picking up an older edition of this book if you're ever interested in reading it, because a master of prose like Chandler deserves to be read free of censorship or abominably tedious "content warning" invasions prefacing his work like bad graffiti.

Kill Me Tender (2000)

A killer has the diehards of the Elvis Presley fan club All Shook Up and the only man for the job is the King himself. Elvis skips out on recording sessions to become a private investigator and locks horns with an early impersonator, sings in random gospel choirs, cheats on Priscilla, and ponders the calorie count of one too many peanut butter and banana sandwiches.

I love Elvis. He's on my personal Mount Rushmore of rock icons. The voice, the style, the unbridled spirit of rock and goddamn roll - it's always going to move me. I'm even listening to Elvis as I type this review. So with that being said, you'd think I'd be more amenable to Elvis in fiction. I mean, he pops up everywhere, from films like Bubba Ho-Tep or True Romance to Douglas Adams and Kim Newman books. It seems like every creative mind with a kooky story idea wants to somehow shoehorn Elvis into the narrative... and I can't exactly blame them. Even now as we get ever closer to 50 years since his death, the King is still a hot selling ticket.

And I admit, I was lured in by the premise of Kill Me Tender. Elvis solving a murder mystery sounds like the perfect kind of goofy-ass yarn that's right up my alley. But turning over the last page left me with A Mess of Blues. I felt Way Down. Just like a Puppet on a String. I almost wanted to start Crying in the Chapel. Doncha' Think It's Time that I stopped wedging all of these Elvis song titles into the review as puns and just got on with it?

I think my biggest problem with this novel is the characterization of Elvis here is... it's as if author Daniel Klein watched a marathon of Elvis movies and decided "Ya know, I'm gonna write my novel just like one of his films... only cheesier!" This is one of the most cornball depictions of Elvis I've ever come across. The real life Elvis had his share of very human flaws. He was possessive and jealous, had a foul temper at times, and of course, he had demons that came in a pill bottle plaguing him repeatedly throughout his life. I understand not wanting to depict all of the man's foibles in a piece of fiction, especially if you're aiming for more lighthearted fare, but this version of Elvis becomes so hokey and fake it really does come across like some kind of kitschy novelization of a lost Elvis movie. The only thing missing is a goofy name for the main character like Rusty Wells or Lucky Jackson.

I was also put off by some of what I can only see as progressive politics talking points the author wanted to jam into his book for headpats (and probably to increase the likelihood of getting it published), showing us that social justice is a disease that stretches back a lot further than the past several years. The author appears to be extra hellbent on having his fictional Elvis bump uglies with a black woman. We know now that Elvis just liked all the girls, period, and it likely didn't matter what color they were to him, but Mr. Klein definitely wants you to know that his Elvis is progressive and oh-so-modern cosmopolitan when it concerns interracial relationships in the early 1960's deep south. He also has Elvis interact with a black lesbian psychic, which made me roar with laughter for all the wrong reasons. Honestly, I'm surprised Netflix didn't pick this trash up for their latest Elvis cash-in over Agent Elvis. You could adapt most of it for today's ESG-obsessed woke television standards with little to no changes.

I'll at least give the author credit for the whodunnit aspect of Kill Me Tender, as that's one of the most important things in a murder mystery. There are a number of viable suspects to be the killer and there are cryptic clues abound in the form of creepy records being delivered to Graceland to taunt Elvis. There's at least the bones of a satisfying mystery novel here, but everything else is T-R-O-U-B-L-E. (Yes, I said I would cease with the song titles. I'm very sorry.)