Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Under the Bridge

The Underbelly by Gary Phillips

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Because the hardboiled genre has become so mainstream, many forget it has its roots in anti-establishmentarianism. Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest is on some level a mea culpa for his time as a strike-busting Pinkerton agent. Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe frequently made an enemy of the local police, whom he never trusted. His last short story functioned as a screed against the American healthcare system. Gary Phillips’ The Underbelly may be seen as a unique take on the genre: a homeless PI maneuvering through the impoverished of LA trying to unravel the conspiracy […]

Love in an elevator

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The Wedding Date by Jasmine Guillory was simply lovely. Alexa and Drew meet when stuck in a hotel elevator together in San Francisco. Alexa is on her way to meet her sister to celebrate a promotion. Drew is begrudgingly going to his ex-girlfriend’s wedding. The two strangers hit it off immediately, so Drew takes a chance and invites Alexa to the wedding. He gets a bit carried away and tells everyone she’s his girlfriend. Luckily, Alexa doesn’t mind and they have an amazing time at the wedding and […]

Mystery and Racism

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In an alternate universe, names like Gar Anthony Haywood and Walter Mosley are known in the same company as those of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. For they too write talented PI characters set in California locations that deal with social issues. Fear of the Dark is Haywood’s freshman effort and it netted him multiple prestigious writing awards for best first novel, including the Anthony and Shamus awards respectively. He should be better known than he is and yet I hadn’t heard of him until I read […]

An Entertaining Mess

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To conclude his first LA Quartet, James Ellroy goes back to his roots a little: the entirety of this book is told in the first person as opposed to the shifting points-of-view we usually get from his other stuff. The result is as my headline says: an entertaining mess. When reading the first few chapters, I was relieved to only have to follow one character’s motives instead of three or four. But as with the rest of his books, the plotting here is dense and […]

A Fusion of Noir and Hardboiled

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I read Steph Cha’s first novel a few months ago and in that time, I’ve discovered her work outside of this series is as important as the series itself. She’s listed as the “noir” editor for the LA Review of Books and it appears she writes for the LA Times on a weekly basis. Her column in the Times which covered Linda Fairstein’s unfortunate history as a prosecutor in the Central Park Five case* (and her continuously unrepentant attitude for how the case was handled) helped inspire the Mystery Writers […]

I came to this book both too early and too late

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Well, this book ages really, really poorly. Some spoilers below. It reads exactly like the time it was written (1989): “progressive” enough to include, at least superficially, a cast of characters including a same-sex couple and people of color in mixed-race relationships, as well as treatment of the AIDS epidemic and drug abuse that leans more sympathetic than condemning. However, it’s not exactly “woke” enough to avoid stumbling into some major Don’t Do That’s. Weetzie, pixie bohemian darling protagonist, is signified as being creative and […]



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