Afbeelding van de auteur.

Max Phillips

Auteur van Fade To Blonde (Hard Case Crime)

8 Werken 444 Leden 11 Besprekingen Favoriet van 1 leden

Over de Auteur

Max Phillips is the author of the highly acclaimed novel, "Snakebite Sonnet" & his fiction & poetry have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, the Village Voice, & the Threepenny Review. (Bowker Author Biography)
Ontwarringsbericht:

(eng) Forrest DeVoe Jr. is the pen name of Max Phillips.

Fotografie: Phoenix Media/Communication Group

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Werken van Max Phillips

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Pseudoniemen en naamsvarianten
Devoe, Forrest, Jr.
Geslacht
male
Woonplaatsen
New York, New York, USA
Ontwarringsbericht
Forrest DeVoe Jr. is the pen name of Max Phillips.

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Well, I was pretty into this book for the first hundred pages or so. Guy gets hired by gal to kill other guy who is threatening her. Standard fare, but it kept me turning the pages. Then it just bogged down, and seemed to be a bit of stuffing added to make a the 200 page number. Like the scene in the whorehouse - well written and such, but what did it really have to do with the overall plot? I think this would have been a very good short story, but in this format, it just seems stretched way more than it should have been.… (meer)
½
 
Gemarkeerd
Stahl-Ricco | 6 andere besprekingen | Aug 7, 2021 |
Good ol' pulpy fun. Love these things.
 
Gemarkeerd
morbusiff | 6 andere besprekingen | Sep 20, 2018 |
This book, although written in the modern era, is terrific reading because Phillips has captured the mood and spirit of the fifties-era pulp and he captures it better than anyone else in modern times. If you did not know better, you would think this was written fifty years ago. Maybe, Phillips is just an old soul or maybe he just succeeded at what he set out to do here.

Who is Max Phillips? He is the cofounder of Hard Case Crime along with Charles Ardai. He has also written under the pen name Forrest DeVoe Jr a series of sixties-era spy novels.

Ray Corson is an ex-boxer who has Hollywood connections and is now doing day labor. He also tries to write screenplays, but most of that ends up in the desk drawer. While working on a roof, he is approached by the ultimate femme fatale, Rebecca. "Well, maybe she wasn't all that blonde, but it'd be a crime to call hair like that light brown. It was more sort of lion-colored." Rebecca La Fontaine is driving a big blue convertible Studebaker. "She wore a pale blue dress with cream piping, a dark blue belt, and a silly schoolgirlish collar. She had nice straight shoulders. There was nothing wrong between them and her open-toed shoes, so I guess trouble must have been somewhere behind those blue-gray eyes." Rebecca must be a synonym for trouble because that is just what she brings to Ray. She is a dame in trouble with a hood named Holliday. Seems she came to town all innocent and made a blue movie with Holliday one night when she had too much and now Holliday won't lay off her. She says Holliday threatened to throw lye on her face and mess her up good. She wants Ray to do something about Holliday. He doesn't necessarily believe anything Rebecca says, but figures its worth poking into. After all, he's got nothing else going.

Ray is a bit wild and when the contractor he is working for says he doesn't have money to pay him, Ray puts a chain around the contractor's mouth and pulls until the contractor opens the safe and pays him. Ray's moments of craziness put him in trouble with local mob figures, like when he lays waste to two guys who came to tell him to cool off the investigation and they end up in the hospital or when he singlehandedly burns down the mob's whorehouses out in Calabasas because he did it without thinking.

Ray lived in a two-bit motel, right behind the Sun-Glo billboard. "The Sun-Glo Girl was seventy-five feet long and lay around all day on an elbow and a hip. Her job was to lie there, smiling and brushing back her hair." Descriptions like this I could read all day.

When Ray pays a visit on Rebecca, he finds her in a room without much space for anything but a bed, "which Rebecca was just then sharing with the biggest ole Cowboy I'd ever seen." She tells him yet another story and Ray goes to visit the gangsters in their bars and casinos and goes to work for them, sort of. There, he quickly raises trouble. The bartender hit a button and Ray sees two men in dinner jackets strolling toward him. "One of the dinner jackets was a pretty little fellow, a real pocket edition. But I've known," he explains, "some pocket editions and I wasn't giggling." When he sits with the gangster leader himself, "A slim brunette with a neck like a gazelle had appeared at [his] shoulder, wearing just about as much cloth of gold as you'd need to keep the chill off a canary. She set a fresh gimlet in front of me as if she were kissing her baby goodnight." Wow!

Of course, when Rebecca comes to see Ray, he finds her in the motel pool. "She opened her eyes again and her smile turned mocking. I'd been staring at her endowments, and she'd noticed it first."
It's a great story filled with Hollywood floozies, blue movies, hoods, casinos, bars, flophouses, drug dens, and more. The story moves very quickly and is worth reading over and over again just for the great descriptions that Phillips gives, which absolutely evoke the fifties gangster pulp era.

He visits a drug party to get the goods on Halliday and uses a connection to get in. "Joan Healey was the most generous and least worried person [he] knew. She was about thirty-five and looked ten years younger and acted like a high school girl who'd just discovered malteds. [He] never figured out whether she thought she was ugly enough that she had to take what she could get or beautiful enough that she had a civic duty to spread it around, but she'd pretty much throw a leg over anybody who asked." That really gives the reader the full-on hardboiled, cynical attitude!

At the farmhouse turned whorehouse, the door was opened by "a thin woman of fifty or so in a party dress that showed too much of her and tried to push around what it didn't show. She smiled at me and said hello honey."

This was just one great book filled with great writing. Phillips has the talent or the attitude to convey in just a few sentences what might take others paragraphs to tell.

My biggest complaint with this book is that Phillips has failed to publish other hardboiled novels of this ilk.
… (meer)
 
Gemarkeerd
DaveWilde | 6 andere besprekingen | Sep 22, 2017 |
Fade to Blonde, by Max Phillips, finds Ray Corson, ex-boxer and ex-Army man, down on his luck in 1950s Hollywood; he moved there to be a screenwriter, but he can only find work as a casual laborer or sometimes as hired muscle. When Rebecca LaFontaine approaches him for help in getting rid of an ex-beau who is threatening her, Ray agrees, more in response to her beauty than because he finds her story convincing. And indeed, it isn't long before he catches her out in a lie, or several, but that only serves to intrigue him further. Doing some digging on his own, Ray soon finds himself coming into contact with some unsavory characters, including a drug lord who wants to hire him himself.... This is a novel published in 2004, but representing a continuation (or comeback) of the sort of sleazy hard-boiled pulps of the 1940s and 1950s; as such, it's pretty well done. I thought I caught a couple of anachronisms, for example when a character finishes a sentence with "... and afterward? You wouldn't forget this guy's face if you saw it," the problem being that "afterward?" bit which sounds more like today than the 1950s. Other than that, though, this is a fast-paced fun read, as long as you keep in mind what it's trying to do - the women are all femme fatales or sex objects or both, the men are quick with their fists (and guns) and slow with their brains, and there's hardly a non-white person in sight. Just like the pulps of the 1950s that this book emulates. Mildly recommended.… (meer)
 
Gemarkeerd
thefirstalicat | 6 andere besprekingen | Oct 20, 2014 |

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Statistieken

Werken
8
Leden
444
Populariteit
#55,179
Waardering
½ 3.6
Besprekingen
11
ISBNs
23
Talen
3
Favoriet
1

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