AXEL HOWERTON: PULP NOIR BEAT-DOWN

By Red Hayes

August 6, 2013

He tossed me like a rag doll over a heap of scrapped wooden chairs and table parts, into the corner of the room. As I struggled to my feet, he lumbered forward, hurling debris like Godzilla clearing a path through downtown Tokyo. I stepped forward with a hearty “have at you” just in time for him to knock the weapon out of my hand and wrap his Christmas ham-sized mitts around my comparatively tiny throat. I gasped and choked and gurgled, slapping at his bulky frame like a grade-schooler trying to get his lunch money back from a bully.
—Hot Sinatra, Axel Howerton.

“Violence in Literature” is just one of the three writer’s panels Axel Howerton will be participating in at When Words Collide, a three-day festival for writers and readers taking place in Calgary August 9 through 11. And, as anyone who’s tore through Hot Sinatra, the Calgary author’s new novel will tell you that particular panel suits him to a “T.”

“I’ve been accused of using excessive violence,” says Howerton. “But to me as long the violence fits the character and situation, I don’t see a problem.”

He cites the scene where a shit-kicked detective—hard-boiled right out of every Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett novel ever written—finally gets the drop on Joey “Thumbs” Testaverde and unleashes a taser blast to the thug’s testicles. “I did get a few people saying, ‘Aw, you should have just slapped him around.'”

Naw. Thumbs deserves it, breaking digits and leaving a trail of dead bodies on a ruthless quest to snag the only known wax pressing of Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald singing together. Moss Cole—the bottom-scraping gumshoe who took the wrong case and is now in way over his head—just wants to stay on the wagon, avoid getting too entangled with a gorgeous redhead and remain living until the late night gig he’s supposed to play bass at.

Music intersects with this updated pulp tale everywhere, and bits of Calgary too. From naming an L.A. bar after First Street’s Drum and Monkey, to name-dropping Wagbeard, to basing one character off a deceased friend (well-known local musician Ryan Fox), Cowtown is innocuously represented. Evolved, the book’s Georgia-based publisher couldn’t have known how much extra cool they got.

And it all fits, part of Howerton’s plan to bring the gritty feel of a Bogart movie into a world we recognize. “I’ve got 150 to 200 of those novels but I didn’t want to just write a ’30s pulp detective novel and set it in the ’30s,” he says.

Those thoughts, and plenty of discussion on Howerton’s own approach to reinvigorating the genre, will likely be front and centre during “Pushing the Limits of the Traditional Mystery,” another of the panels he’ll be sitting on. “For me, I have so many influences it was just a matter of throwing everything I love in.”

http://beatroute.ca/2013/08/06/axel-howerton/

HARD AND FAST LIKE A VIAGRA THIEF: Axel Howerton's HOT SINATRA

By Falcon Storm Books

I devoured this book. For the longest time, I’ve wondered what happened to the old-school detective novel. I’ve contemplated the fate of the gumshoe. Hot Sinatra put my mind at ease that those novels can still exist.

“‘Watch your mouth, fracicone,” he growled with a salacious grin, like he wanted to tear me open with his bare hands and make sweet love to my left ventricle.”

Hard and fast like a Viagra thief and just as off-balanced, Hot Sinatra makes you feel like you’re rushing through the exciting world of private detectives, mafia justice, Irish rockers and vintage Sinatra. I couldn’t put it down because I simply wanted more.

“They turned in synch, like a fifty-limbed sex-bomb cephalopod, to greet us with one uniform of wide, sly smiles and smouldering eyes.”

There are very few living authors who have made me literally laugh out loud, and Axel Howerton’s witty and sarcastic style promptly placed him into that category. The clever turn of phrase had me reading passages out loud to my wife, who remained thoroughly annoyed that I chose to interrupt her reading with mine.

“She stabbed at the eggs with the spatula. My frying pan had never been happier that I’d bought silicone.”

While I respect the author’s decision to keep things open for a sequel, I have to call him a jerk because of the ending, which tugged on my heartstrings more than a little. (I might have to admit here, that the author’s jerk-ness, might be because he made my eyes water up a bit.)

So, if you’re a fan of movies like Payback and Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang or simply love the old style of pulp detective novels or the gritty noir genre, Hot Sinatra is a book I highly recommend adding to your collection. A great read that I plan on actually getting in a paper form as well. This is a book I want on my shelves.

http://www.falconstormbooks.com/hard-and-fast-like-a-viagra-thief-my-review-of-hot-sinatra-by-axel-howerton/

A modern pulp tale that keeps it real

by Rick Overwater

August 8, 2013

Local author Axel Howerton has never been a down-on-his-luck private dick.

Nor has he ever been battered to a pulp, pinballing between the mob, the Yakuza and the cops, with the only way out of his likely fatal situation lying in a hasty alliance with a violent Mexican drug cartel. So much for the old adage “write what you know,” right? Well, actually, there’s a lot more of Howerton in his new novel than you’d first think.

Hot Sinatra , a modern pulp tale that careens through all the tropes that made Hammett and Chandler novels and movies like the Maltese Falcon such enduring favourites, is about intrigue and action. But the glue that binds Howerton’s debut novel together is the characters, and that’s where you’ll find tiny pieces of the writer, carefully embedded, providing the spark that brings them alive. Take Moss Cole, the story’s barely off-the-bottle protagonist, for example.

“I was really close with my grandfather, so I used that relationship as the foundation for Mossimo Cole,” says Howerton. “I tried to use that desire to honour his grandfather, this revered detective that raised him after the death of his parents, to make a living anachronism like Cole believable in a modern setting.”

It works. It even explains the Rat Pack-era fedora that Cole wears, which once belonged to his grandfather. Going a step further, Howerton disperses pieces of his surrounding life into the story as well, much of it recognizable to Calgarians. Lifting the name of a popular local watering hole for an L.A. dive, building a supporting character out of a dearly departed local musician (guitarist Ryan Fox), demonstrating modern street cred by invoking the name of bygone indie stalwarts Wagbeard — Howerton uses his life to catapult a loved but timeworn genre into today’s world.

- See more at: http://www.ffwdweekly.com/arts/books/a-modern-pulp-tale-that-keeps-it-real-11059/#sthash.sp37JMO9.dpuf