Charlie Huston’s Joe Pitt, a vampire detective living in a New York City that’s filthy with bloodsucking clans and factions, never seems to catch a break. Ever since the first Pitt book, 2005’s ALREADY DEAD, Joe’s gotten nothing but abuse and indignity for his hard work, and every victory is a pyrrhic one. But what’s bad for Pitt is great for readers, as EVERY LAST DROP, the fourth book in the series, demonstrates. 

EVERY LAST DROP opens with Pitt exiled to the Bronx, and if that wasn’t bad enough, he gets pulled back into vampire politics — and a brutal torturing — within the first dozen or so pages. As he tries to recapture the only thing that means anything to him, he uses or is used by nearly every black hat and ne’er-do-well that he wronged in his undead existence, and uncovers some seriously disturbing truths about the city-state in which he lives.

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Come on, folks, it’s Gary Gygax! He co-created DUNGEONS & DRAGONS, set us loose and allowed us to play in his world of Greyhawk, fathered the pencil-and-paper role-playing game, and spawned the universe in which I (and many, many others) grew up, sparking a love of medieval history and game playing that allowed us to proudly define ourselves as nerds. He is a cultural hero.

More than that, he’s a pretty darn good fantasy author. Oh, I knew he was a master at world building, at creating the logical mechanics (think 20-sided die and 700-page rulebooks) that would allow great stories to be told against its backdrop, but he was an excellent wordsmith as well. He wrote seven novels about Gord the Rogue, three novels about an Egyptian crime-solving priest, and this one-off — the last book before his untimely death — INFERNAL SORCERESS.

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Ib Melchior’s short story “The Racer” — the source material for 1975’s Roger Corman-produced cult classic DEATH RACE 2000 — doesn’t even receive credit in the 2008 remake DEATH RACE until the very end. No big deal — it bears little resemblance to the story, anyway.

That 10-pager — available in the Forrest J Ackerman-edited anthology REEL FUTURE — is little more than a quick morality tale, about Hank and Willie, two guys with a car equipped with bull’s horns on the front, competing in a cross-country race where scores are obtained by mowing down pedestrians. They’re skilled at making kills until one of them starts imagining the face of his daughter on all of their targets, and decries his participation.

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Thomas Perry marks the new year with the return of his sole series character, Jane Whitefield, after a nine-year absence. For those familiar exclusively with the author’s numerous stand-alone works, Whitefield is an American Indian “ghostmaker” — that is, someone who helps desperate victims disappear. They seek her out through personal referral, and she accompanies them into a new identity, a new life, and then covers the tracks so they cannot be found. And, as aptly demonstrated in five previous Whitefield novels, she is very good at her work.

So anticipation and expectations and for RUNNER are very high. It’s good, which comes as no surprise, considering Perry’s career of award-winning and popular thrillers. But therein lies the problem. For an author of Perry’s experience and skills, simply being “good” is not good enough.

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How does he do it? It’s a question any reasonable person would ask. How can one man — even one as extraordinary as our Mr. Rod Lott — find the time to work a full-time job as the managing editor of Oklahoma City’s finest alternative weekly, raise a family, edit a popular blog and actually read all of the books and movies he reviews in the course of a single week?

One possible explanation is that he can’t and that no one single person could. The proponents of this theory would argue that sometime in the past, Rod Lott agreed to have himself cloned à la Michael Keaton in Harold Ramis’ MULTIPLICITY or created a series of realistic robot dopplegangers à la Doctor Victor Von Doom in the Marvel Comics universe.

This seems far-fetched.

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Judge Samuel Sewall may have helped send 20 innocent people to their deaths in the late 17th century, but hey, at least he later felt bad about it, and that’s gotta count for something, right? Right?

Eve LaPlante — a descendant of Sewall — investigates his brave about-face in SALEM WITCH JUDGE: THE LIFE AND REPENTANCE OF SAMUEL SEWELL, a well-researched biography of the man who famous reversed his opinion of sentenced suspected witches to death. Instead of judging others, she writes, he started judging himself.

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One of crime fiction’s all-time greats, Donald E. Westlake, died of a heart attack on New Year’s Eve at the age of 75. The author of the Parker novels (under the pseudonym Richard Stark), Westlake also found success in screenwriting, most notably earning an Oscar nomination for adapting THE GRIFTERS. He will, it goes without saying, be missed.

BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF DONALD E. WESTLAKE:
• ASK THE PARROT by Richard Stark
• THE AX by Donald E. Westlake
• COPS AND ROBBERS by Donald E. Westlake
• DIRTY MONEY by Richard Stark
• THE HUNTER by Richard Stark
• KILLTOWN by Richard Stark
• LEMONS NEVER LIE by Richard Stark
• THE MAN WITH THE GETAWAY FACE by Richard Stark
• THE OUTFIT by Richard Stark
• PITY HIM AFTERWARDS by Donald E. Westlake
• POINT BLANK by Richard Stark
• SOMEBODY OWES ME MONEY by Donald E. Westlake
• THE SOUR LEMON SCORE by Richard Stark
• THE SPY IN THE OINTMENT by Donald E. Westlake
• 361 by Donald E. Westlake
• WHAT’S SO FUNNY? by Donald E. Westlake
• WHAT’S THE WORST THAT COULD HAPPEN? by Donald E. Westlake

Best in Fiction
You may be shocked — perhaps even find it sacrilegious — that we’d name a paperback original as the year’s best novel, but at BOOKGASM, that’s how we roll. And so it goes with Max Allan Collins’ THE FIRST QUARRY. Perhaps the best offering yet from Hard Case Crime, it’s the novel that thrilled me to the bone (I leave it you to guess which one) like no other in 2008. Of all the authors I read regularly, here’s the guy who deserves to be selling 10 times whatever he does now.

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1. SMALL CRIMES by Dave Zeltserman - Nothing like the bleakest ending of the year to top my list of great crime reads. This book is one gut punch after another and never lets up, which is why I’ve got nothing but high hopes for what Zeltserman comes up with next.

2. CHILD 44 by Tom Rob Smith - A book that started off the year really strong for crime fiction, this is definitely the one title that crosses genre lines with its literate tale of a Russian serial killer and the system that tries to stop him.

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One supposes it was inevitable that James Bond be spun into the world of newspaper comics, as he was for nearly 30 years in England. That doesn’t mean it worked for all that time, as JAMES BOND: POLESTAR — the latest collection of these strips — shows.

POLESTAR is comprised of five original story arcs, all consecutive and from the 1980s. The first installment continues the proud 007 tradition of odd titles by being called “Flittermouse,” and it pits literature and film’s favorite superspy against a horde of vampire bats in a spooky old castle.

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