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In Charles Aleas's debut crime novel, Little Girl Lost, he introduced John Blake, a NYC trainee private investigator named for the poet, who lends a title to Songs of Innocence, which any English Lit student would probably know. Blake, the shamus, would clearly know that, because since the disastrous events of Little Girl Lost in which, like all good dime-novel detectives, he got an innocent girl whacked, Blake's bid the life of the gumshoe a big Adios, and is working as an office assistant in the Columbia University writing program, so far uptown he thinks he might actually escape his past. Sound like his life's taking a turn for the better? Of course it's not; things go South when Blake's best friend and lover, a writing student named Cassie, is found dead in an apparent suicide. Blake's relationship with her was far from simple; in addition to being her best friend, he was Cassie's "porn buddy," which means if she ever croaks he goes over to her apartment before the cops get there and burns all the evidence of her more sordid ways. But in Cassie's case, there's no porn to be burned -- instead, the incriminating evidence is her laptop, with emails from strange men in response to an internet ad, and a closet full of sleazy little outfits she wears when making ends meet as a masseuse.
Knowing, as he knew in Lost, that his is the only flavor of white knight left that far uptown, Johnny Boy breaks out his Sherlock cap and packs his cooler with a twelve-pack of whoop ass -- he hopes. He's going to find her killer if it's the last thing he does, and it's probably gonna be. Plenty of this novel sounds like out-of-the-box noir stuff; sex, sleaze, violence, broken bones, gangsters, guns, and taxis. Blake's quest to find Cassie's killer takes him from the depths of Cassie's laptop to a long parade of internet sex sites, into a midtown brothel lorded over by a Hungarian crime lord named Ardo and an equally Hungarian, but even more psychopathic, motherfucker named Miklos, and into a late-night encounter in the sauna at a sex club where middle-class swingers slum their way into anonymous sex for the purposes of a little walk on the wild side. Pretty soon Blake's wanted for murder and on the run as fast as his gumshoes can take him, and by the time he finds out WTF is going on he's going to be infinitely sadder than Little Girl Lost could ever have made him. What makes Songs of Innocence a sickening thrillride of a book, though, is not the off-the-shelf crime thriller that cooks along at breakneck pace as Blake tries to outrun the cops and the Hungarian mob just long enough to find out who punched Cassie's ticket. It's not even the satisfying ways in which Blake is an improbable detective -- bookish, bespectacled, not particularly tough, about as much a badass as its author or any other typical detective-writer. And it's not even the landscape of New York, which Aleas renders with narrative ease. No, what makes this a viciously and cruelly effective existential crime novel is the underlying narrative of the thing -- with a denoument that spitroasts The Usual Suspects and buggers Angel Heart like it was an overcooked pot of Catholic gumbo, Aleas so throroughly brutalizes his narrator, reader, and days-dead female Macguffin as if he were the meanest son of a bitch in the world. This is a creepy novel, and it will not make you feel warm and fuzzy about life.
Ardai responded: "John Blake definitely has aspects of me about him: We're both thin, small, not dangerous looking, wear glasses; we both took writing classes at Columbia; we both hung out as children in the Hungarian neighborhood on the upper east side. And we both had a penchant for trying to play 'white knight' to women in distress. But Blake is singularly bad at it -- he latches on to grievously crippled souls and, try as he might to do some good in their lives, he fails. (I like to think my own track record is slightly better.) Ardai again: "And I've always been interested by the idea of writing an anti-mystery -- in a normal mystery the premise is that by conducting an investigation and uncovering hidden secrets a terrible situation can somehow be set right, but in the John Blake books the more the detective uncovers, the worse things get; the more truth he learns, the more he wishes he hadn't….The books are not really about who committed the crime as much as they are about the moral consequences for Blake himself of the roles he finds himself playing." Make sense? It will after the last few pages of Songs of Innocence, which you should read only if you like poisoned candies, razor-blade apples, and a whiskey chaser with your gasoline, or if you believe your quest for righteousness in the human condition must take you to its darkest corners where surely your good nature and belief in providence will protect you, and you need to be permanently cured of that delusion. The short version is that Songs of Innocence is a fantastically wicked book, one with an appreciation for the twist and shout that is the human condition -- a book steeped in noir and rich with mourning. It's such a tightly woven mystery that you won't even know how dangerous it is until Songs of Innocence smacks you in the face and knocks you to the floor. Thomas Roche is the author of more than 400 published stories in the erotica, crime, horror and fantasy genres, and a four-time contributor to the Best American Erotica series. He can be found at thomasroche.com.
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