James Ellroy called it "unheralded masterpiece of the noir genre." It is widely regarded as one of the finest achievements of moder noir - a classic that stands with the best of Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford. It is Lethal Injection, by Jim Nisbet.
Franklyn Royce hasn't achieved much in his life. His wife hates him because he's not ambitious enough to provide her with the standard of living she thinks she deserves. Frustrations with his marriage and job have made him an alcoholic. His own doctor's practice is lousy, so he has to earn an extra couple hundred dollars each month as a prison doctor in Huntsville, TX. Witnessing death sentences is one of the responsibilities that goes with the job. And so he meets the young, black Robert Mencken. During the robbery of a small shop in Dallas, for a whole $9, Mencken supposedly shot the shop keeper in the face several times. When the poison of the lethal injection is already in his veins, he confides in Royce that he's innocent of the crime, but prepared to die. His confession is an awakening for the doctor, and shortly before dying the condemned men seals the experience with a kiss.
By: John Mark Boling,
on 1/31/2011
Blog: The Winged Elephant (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: windward passage, jim nisbet, lethal injection, the damned don't die, dark companion, old and cold, Add a tag
Jim Nisbet, author of Windward Passage, Lethal Injection, The Damned Don't Die, and the forthcoming Old & Cold, recently sent us this note on what writers have influenced him most:
"That's a long list and, one way or another, it would have to include almost everything I've every read.
I've been around a long time, of course. So, for example, I read almost all of Dostoyevsky when I was 22 and maybe 23 years old. I went to my draft physical bearing a copy of The Idiot, and, basically, I never got over Dostoyevsky. Those translations were done by a woman named Constance Garnett. Now, 40 years later, we have in America a completely new and really interesting re-issue of all the novels of Dostoyevsky as translated by the team of Richard Pevear and his wife, Larissa Volokhonsky, and these translations are just terrific. As a result, to date I've reread The Possessed, The Devils, The Gambler, Notes From Underground... And, you know what? Dostoyevsky is still great.
Pevear and Volokhonsky, by the way, have made a big hit here with their translation of War And Peace. I reread that, too, but, you know what? As my friend the late, lamented Robin Cook (aka Derek Raymond; is he translated in Italy?) used to say, "Tolstoy? You can have Tolstoy." Apostasy! Sacrilege! But, well...
Stendhal (much borrowed by Tostoy); I have a collection of English translations of Le Chartreuse de Parme and reread it regularly. (My favorite one remains the first one, done by The Lady Mary Lloyd; my copy was published in 1901.) I hope one day to be able to read it in French. But I also just read La Vie de Henri Brulard. Cesare Pavese I could mention, and Curzio Malaparte -- why not? I'm talking to an Italian! I've even read Ferdinando Camon. Who can forget the entire family fighting over the anchovy hanging by a string over the dinner table? Not so much Moravia... All of Jane Austin. Most of Beckett. Moby-Dick -- what a book! A Story of A Life by Konstantin Paustovsky. All of the literature of single-handed sailing, particularly of course by the circumnavigators, starting with and often coming back to Sailing Alone Around The World by Capt. Joshua Slocum. Books on astrophysics...
But you probably want to know about thrillers. So, Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Dan J. Marlowe... which brings me to...
Chandler, Hammett, H.P. Lovecraft, Ross Macdonald ... and Kerouac. I've read much of what these guys wrote, and avidly, and years ago, and, you know what? Unlike Dostoyevsky, I've not been able to bring myself to repeat the experience. There you have it. But I very much admire The Factory Series, and that before I met its creator, the English writer Robin Cook, whom I came to count as a friend, but of whom, interestingly enough, I never read or heard of until I started going to France. He's still relatively unknown...
When I was nine and ten and eleven years old I read all kinds of Mickey Spillane and various other thrillers, A Coffin for Dimitrios, James Bond, but no more.
Christ, I forgot about Faulkner!... And never mind every book about Antarctic exploration, beginning and ending with The Worst Journey in The World, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard.... Then there's Wilfred Thesiger! And all the Voyageurs tramping North America, looking for plews and the northwest passage. A huge body of literature. Mad dudes like Celine and the Marquis de Sade...
By: John Mark Boling,
on 8/5/2010
Blog: The Winged Elephant (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: noir, crime fiction, windward passage, jim nisbet, lethal injection, injection, the damned don't die, Add a tag
Jim Nisbet's Windward Passage continues to received extraordinary review attention from all over the globe. Here's a new one, written by book critic Woody Haut for Crime Time, a terrific website from the International Association of Crime Writers:
"Jim Nisbet, author of The Damned Don't Die, Lethal Injection, Prelude to a Scream, Death Puppet and Price of the Ticket has long been one of my favorite noirists. In Windward Passage, his tenth book, he pulls out all the stops, combining his long-standing noir sensibilities with an off-the-wall post-modern disposition and cultural critique. Pacey, but filled with enough tropes to keep the most hardcore Jim Thompsonite happy- at least those partial to the final section of The Getaway or the surrealism of Savage Night- Windward Passage centres on a ship that sinks in the Caribbean, its captain chained to the mast. A logbook, a partially written novel, a brick of cocaine and the DNA of a President are all that remain. The appropriately named dead sailor's sister, Tipsy lives in San Francisco, where she hangs out at bars with her gay friend Quentin. That is until she runs into Red, Tipsy's brother's old employer.
Scrambling genres and voices, Windward Passage flits around geographically as well as linguistically, high-tailing it from San Francisco to the Caribbean and back again, dove-tailing from fast-talking, never-less-than-witty dialogue to tangential asides, reportage, paradoxical quips and a novel within a novel. With his ear to the ground, Nesbit not only updates the traditional noir narrative, combining it with a sea adventure story, conundrums, a dash of cyberpunk, and a sprinkling of literary concerns (including the likes of Tom Raworth, Paustovsky and Leonard Clark's The Rivers Ran East). From a prologue that will leave you scratching your head for at least a hundred pages, Windward Passage sometimes reads like a hardboiled Saragossa Manuscript, and bound to appeal to anyone looking beyond the confines of the genre. Still, I remember thinking while reading the novel that this is the sort of book we're told doesn't get published these days. So hat's off not only to Nisbet, but to Overlook Press. Because this is Nisbet at his wildest and weirdest. I'm still not sure what it all adds up to, other than an entertaining, insightful and highly recommended adventure."
