Tag Archives: Hard Rain Falling

My top 10 books of 2015

Bad Penny BluesIt’s time for my annual top 10 reads for the year. In no particular order they are as follows: 

Bad Penny Blues, Cathi Unsworth

Bad Penny Blues kicks off in London in the early 1960s. A young police constable finds the body of a murdered prostitute. His subsequent investigation into the crime and similar murders, spanning the better part of a decade, propels him into the heart of the city’s Soho vice district. Interspersed with this is the story of a young and up and coming fashion designer, Stella, who is plagued by nightmares about dead women.

The fact I found this book a pinch too long didn’t detract from my enjoyment of it. Bad Penny Blues is a solid piece of noir fiction and a great evocation of sixties London, taking in everything from the occult, teddy boys, bent cops, radical bohemians and debauched upper class aristocrats.

TattooMurderThe Tattoo Murder Case, Akimitsu Takagi

First published, albeit in a slightly different form, in 1948, a young forensic medical student with post-traumatic stress after a stint as a medic in the Philippines begins a passionate affair with a beautiful woman who is covered with strange, sexually alluring traditional Japanese tattoos. Soon after the affair begins, she is murdered, dismembered and her tattooed torso stolen from the scene of the crime.… Read more

Book review: Hard Rain Falling

HardWhile the argument can be made that Don Carpenter’s 1966 novel Hard Rain Falling is one of the best American crime fiction debuts of the late 1960s, no longer can it be said to be one of the least known. At least not since 2009, when New York Review Books released Hard Rain Falling as part of its classics series, with a forward by no less a crime fiction eminence than George Pelecanos, who stated the book “might be the most unheralded important American novel of the 1960s.” Since then, Hard Rain Fallingand Carpenter’s work more generally has undergone a wider critical reappraisal.

It was a very different situation in 1995, when the then 64-year-old author, beset by financial woes and facing multiple health problems, committed suicide. One of nine novels Carpenter wrote, Hard Rain Falling was lauded by critics and other writers upon its release, leading to the well-worn description of Carpenter as a writer’s writer, but the book never reached a mainstream audience.

There is some debate as to whether Hard Rain Falling is a crime novel. I’ll let others argue over the fine-grained literary questions. The book is about crime, criminals, and prison. That’s enough for me.

Hard Rain Failing opens in eastern Oregon in 1923, with a liaison between a cowboy and a 16-year-old female runaway.… Read more