Country: USA
Genre: Noir
Pages: 168 KB (eBook)
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I found out about Anthony Neil Smith last winter and he quickly became one of my favorite living writers. That means I'm on a mission to read (and review) everything he has ever written. TO THE DEVIL, MY REGARDS intrigued me, because it's co-written by Victor Gischler. He's another great hardboiled/noir writer, who's also in the comic writing business. I know what Smith alone can do, so I was curious to see what happens when he teams up with another crime writer to turn things up a notch. I wasn't let down. TO THE DEVIL, MY REGARDS is a cleverly plotted little sucker-puncher with very strong characters that only have one foot in the conventions of the genre. I've read it in two sittings and had a hard time to let go of it. What can I say. Another ANS, another home run. But this time, we have Victor Gischler to also thank.
One thing I loved about TO THE DEVIL... was that protagonist Z.Z Del Presto starts neck-deep in shit. He's about to be convicted for murder, the police have proof and testimonies. But then, he's mysteriously let go by the Lieutenant. But that's only the beginning of Z.Z Del Presto's troubles. Prison would have been a good dream for him. Vacations under the sun. Out on the street, a lot of people want him dead. People he doesn't really know. As soon as he steps out of the police station, three new faces are tailing him. The only thing Z.Z knows is that Rachel, a seventeen years old girl he fell for during a job, is dead and that he's going to fall for it if he doesn't act fast. Any good lawyer could sell his conviction to a jury, like a heater to an Eskimo. The burden is on him to prove his innocence and in desperate times, desperate actions are taken. You know where this is going.
I absolutely LOVED the protagonist of TO THE DEVIL, MY REGARDS, Z.Z Del Presto. He's one of the best-crafted noir characters I've read. In many situations, you can read in his struggles with his inner demons in his actions. There is a beautiful scene about half way into the story where Z.Z has a difficult decision to take about the fate of another character and you can feel the weight on his shoulders right there on the page, in the words Smith and Gischler use to describe his torment. Z.Z is a good guy, not the best guy but he's decent and he's gonna do what he needs to do to survive. It's crazy how people you like and hang out with on any given day change and do crazy things under crazy circumstances. That was the main appeal of TO THE DEVIL, MY REGARDS, for me. To witness how such a human character (by that I mean kind, but flawed) rises tot he occasion and makes the difficult choices to save his own life.
Another great achievement of this novella is its approach of women. I have not read a more compelling portrait of how a beautiful woman can effectively play with men's minds and make them do whatever the hell she wants to. Smith and Gischler won't win many feminist awards with this one, but the womanly point-of-view is not the point here. Many men can get fooled by the smashing good looks of a woman who seem to take a tiny bit of interest in them. The dynamic duo does a find job to find words for such an unspoken feeling. TO THE DEVIL, MY REGARDS is on Amazon's Kindle Store for ninety-nine cents, which makes it one of the best stories you can get for that price. It's a fast-paced, scrambled nightmare and Z.Z Del Presto has to find his way out of there while keeping his sanity. While it doesn't have the visceral hatred of HOGDOGGIN' (still my favorite book by Smith), it's highly original, funny and visual. I would have paid ten bucks for this and would have been very happy.