- Click here to read Joe Hartlaub's review.
 

Review #1 by Tom Callahan

Besides the brilliant art work itself, one thing fans of classic pulp fiction love is that you can tell a book by its cover. Such is the case with Glen Orbik’s jacket for EASY DEATH. Half the cover is in light of a cheesecake pose of a naked young woman on a calendar marking Christmas in December 1951. The other half is a hard man in a fedora with a gun in the shadows.

Nobody does classic crime fiction like Hard Case Crime. And while set in the glory days of pulp paperbacks, EASY DEATH is actually the first crime novel by a 30-year police veteran of a Midwestern town writing under a pseudonym. His one prior novel, ’NADA, was published in 2010 and nominated for a Spur Award for Best First Novel by the Western Writers of America.

Boyd, who also spent four years as the police chief, is an excellent writer. EASY DEATH is a terrific, fun read for anyone who enjoys the crime genre. What he does is take a mainstay of noir fiction --- the armored car heist --- and make it wonderfully fresh. For one thing, Boyd sets a time clock in motion from the night before the robbery on December 19, 1951 to almost 11 hours after the robbery on December 20th to a postscript 30 years later. This constantly builds suspense.

Boyd is always contrasting the season of light and hope with the darkness present in the narrative. This is what Orbik captures on the cover. Boyd references the still-dominant medium of mass communications of the time; this being 1951, it is radio since television is in its infancy as noted by one character. Christmas music plays on radios throughout the book, and Boyd gives us snippets of the classic lyrics of songs like “White Christmas.”

"EASY DEATH is a perfectly satisfying read. So this holiday season, when the carols, obnoxious relatives, phony cheer and gifts you did not want begin to overwhelm you, turn to noir and you will feel better instantly."

And the season is going to play a huge role in the story. Bud “Brother” Sweeney is a local car dealer, crime boss and overall bad man who plans this elaborate half-a-million-dollar armored car heist. Men dressed as cops will waylay the armored car on a deserted road. It is well planned except for the weather a week before Christmas; a few predicted inches of snow soon turns into a raging blizzard.

The weather complicates everything, as will a trip though a National Park, where the ranger in charge has gone insane and completely snaps while the young junior ranger shares her last name with the then-current United States Senator from California. He will become infamous eventually as the only president of the United States to resign his office due to a criminal investigation. And (if Boyd did this deliberately, he is really good) that particular politician was often compared to a shifty-eyed used car salesman by his opponents. Not to mention a criminal.

But while telling an engaging page-turner, Boyd does something else here that is remarkable: he captures America at the start of the supposedly innocent 1950s with the turbulence of the next decade just simmering beneath the surface. He does this by creating vivid characters. Everybody in the book --- from the heisters to the small folks playing minor roles --- is a clear character. The Pierce Brothers, Logan and Chuck, are the unlucky armored car drivers. After small talk about the holidays, Logan asks his brother, “You think we’ll ever get shut of that war?” Chuck points out that the war was over a long time ago, six years as a matter of fact. “Yeah, we’re home,” Logan said. “But it seems like we are still there sometimes.”

At a time today when hundreds of thousands of veterans suffer PTSD as a result of our 13 years of nonstop wars, Boyd makes you realize that young haunted men suffered from that same condition many years ago before it even had a medical name.

Another wonderful characterization is of the two heisters. Walter and Eddy are a black and white team, unusual for still-segregated America at that time, though it was also the case in the great 1959 film noir, Odds Against Tomorrow, with Harry Belafonte and Robert Ryan.

But Walter and Eddy in this story overcome any lingering racial suspicions. Boyd does not typecast them as bad men, but as men with hopes and dreams and problems, like everybody else. The boss Brother Sweeney is the authentic bad guy. Eddy just wants to own his own gas station in life, while Walter wants to help his late brother’s wife and kids escape from the murderous American South.

In another eerie bit of foreshadowing, we witness in these pages a sniper in a high place.

The narrative jumps among various characters, and the getaway takes place among the falling snow and happy Christmas music.

EASY DEATH is a perfectly satisfying read. So this holiday season, when the carols, obnoxious relatives, phony cheer and gifts you did not want begin to overwhelm you, turn to noir and you will feel better instantly. There’s no reason to knock off an armored car or wander out in a snowstorm when you can settle down with the first holiday book ever produced by Hard Case Crime. Enjoy.
 

Review #2 by Joe Hartlaub

My immediate reaction upon reading the last page (and every page that came before it) of EASY DEATH was “Wow. They don’t make them like that anymore.” That would be wrong, given that this is an original, newly published novel. It’s written by Daniel Boyd, the pseudonym for a former police chief from the central Ohio area. It’s a remarkably sure-footed work by any standard, and all the more so when one considers that it is Boyd’s sophomore effort and first crime novel. Those who expect nothing but the best from the Hard Case Crime imprint, which is releasing EASY DEATH as its first Christmas novel, will not be disappointed.

"Boyd never lets the momentum of his story flag for even a paragraph. Both casual readers and rabid fans of crime fiction will hail EASY DEATH as one of the best books of 2014 in any genre, while eagerly hoping for much more from Boyd in the near future."

EASY DEATH (mostly) takes place over the course of 24 hours just a few days before Christmas 1951, when a group of guys, tough and otherwise, execute an armored car heist. One doesn’t see armored cars as much as they used to, but they were a major deal in 1951, given that people who shopped (and remember, there were no online retailers then) paid for their goods primarily with cash and occasionally by check. Conjure up a rolling metal bank in your mind, and you’ll get the idea.

The mastermind behind the plan is a rough-edged but very calculating guy named Bud Sweeney, who has things planned down to the last detail. Of course, as Helmuth von Moltke said, “[N]o plan of battle survives contact with the enemy,” and as Walt Kelly said, “[W]e have met the enemy and he is us.” Let us be generous and say that the employment pool of criminals in the south central Ohio environs where Sweeney executes his plan is a mixed bag. And, as the plan unfolds, things alternate between going right and going wrong with astonishing rapidity --- from an unexpected snowstorm (though no snowstorm in Ohio in December is truly unexpected) to a couple of wildcards in the form of two forest rangers with very different agendas.

The story that makes up EASY DEATH is told at several different times of day from several different points of view, including the first person narrative of the enigmatic Officer Drapp, who at times seems to be the only person who knows what’s going on. Drapp, who is unusually adept at the mental equivalent of broken field running, adds an additional noir element --- and then some --- to the proceedings. While you won’t necessarily miss him when he wanders out of the story, you’ll be happy to see him when he wanders back in. Drapp follows the proceeds of the heist as it is found, lost and found again. There are also a couple of secondary but nonetheless vital subplots that run through the book, one of which results in its somewhat bittersweet and gently philosophical ending.

While EASY DEATH might draw some comparisons to Fargo (both the film and television series) in spots, it is at heart an extremely original work, in both its concept and execution. Thankfully, Boyd is obsessive in using guideposts to lead the reader through the book, noting the who and when of the narrative at the beginning of each chapter as things do jump around a bit. More importantly, though, Boyd never lets the momentum of his story flag for even a paragraph. Both casual readers and rabid fans of crime fiction will hail EASY DEATH as one of the best books of 2014 in any genre, while eagerly hoping for much more from Boyd in the near future.