The Perpetrators [Paperback]

The story starts in a hotel room in Tijuana with Marley in a life or death struggle with a knife-wielding attacker, whom Lina calmly dispatches, shooting the attacker with a silenced pistol. Already by this stage (and I'm talking 1 page, if that) the dialogue is dominated with pure gangster slang taken from the classic hardboiled novels from the 1930s and 40s. One full-on action scene, dominated by all sorts of violence and profanities and you just know it's not going to let up.

As Marley and Lina leave Tijuana on their way towards Sacramento we find out that she's a South American drug queen who is off to make a deal with a crooked politician that should see her distribution channels open up and he's her hired bodyguard. Trying to stop her is the man named Samson Twelvetrees who seems to have an endless supply of assassins and weapons at his disposal and so determined is he to stop Lina from making her meeting, he is prepared to throw everything at her.

The wild ride is punctuated with hair-raising car chases, motel room ambushes, helicopter dodgems and any number of shoot-outs. Bad guys are cut down with monotonous regularity and the good guys escape by the skinniest skin of their teeth. As you can probably tell, the story is blindingly spare in its narrative, short on intricate plot detail and characterisation and long on outlandish situations involving heavy artillery.

Be prepared for incredibly unrealistic dialogue full of every bad gangsta cliché ever uttered. I don't think there was a bad guy dispatched without receiving some sort of verbal send-off by Marley. (Thank goodness he never quite stooped to "Hasta la vista, baby" but I'm sure it must have crossed his mind once or twice).

Interspersed throughout the entire book are rough illustrations helping to add to the rough and ready style of the book. The illustrations depict either a map of the scene of the latest skirmish somewhere along the southern California landscape or a scene that takes place there, such as a car screeching to a halt (complete with the word "screech"). While not exactly adding any value to the story, the roughness of the illustrations suggest they were done in a hurry almost as if the illustrator was attempting to keep up with the extreme pace of the story.

Now, you can be forgiven for assuming that I didn't enjoy this book, but you'd be dead wrong. As a fan of the old detective classics made famous by Dashiell Hammett, Ross MacDonald, Mickey Spillane and the like, I loved every minute of it. Of course, I treated it as a homage to those classics and the hardboiled genre in general. Just how much of a homage to hardboiled was it? Well, when Marley used a false identity, two of his choices were as Mr Stark and Mr Pelecanos, coincidence or a tip of the hat?

It's graphically violent, perhaps even cartoonish, full of foul language with the occasional crude sex scene thrown in for good measure. But it is also a fast and furious ride that is guaranteed to entertain as long as you are a fan of the old pulp-fiction style crime story.

He uses huge chunks of slang and slammin' action to propel two muscular sexy people--Marley and Lina Guzman--from Mexico to California. Along the way you meet a coupla vampire-obsessed hit folks, a half Maori, half Native American crime lord (or whatever these types are called today), a 60-year old doctor who's full of lust, a trio of bodacious babe killers, and so on, and so on. But you don't meet any of these goonballs for long. They're there to do a job and only one job and they ain't got any personality 'cause why in the name of all that's, you know, holy, should they?

Nah. They just there to pop in and out, is all. They just got to be there to do their thing. Just like Marley and Lina. The thing these two do is mostly talk a lotta trash to each other and their enemies, like they was out on a basketball court. Guess that's what this is, the basketball court of life, and s**t. Yeah. Once the trash talking stops, they have this thing for each other and that's handled the same way. The old in and out. So to speak.

Seems like Marley needs to get Lina, an unbelievably rich (accent on "unbelievable", as is true for about 95% of this book) from south of the border to California to meet a Golden State politico who's willing to strike a corrupt deal with her for him to rake in a lotta extra cash and for her to not have the heat come down on her bigtime. That's what the whole deal is here, folks.

OK, the thing is that Phillips is not a dumb guy. He knows how to move things and the reader fast and all that. But there ain't no characters here, just caricatures. For those of you who like your fiction on the extra-light side, here 'tis. Me, I'll stick with Hammett, Dan Marlowe, and Vic Gischler (see Gun Monkeys) which in my humble opinion, is a much stronger take on modern noir.

The comic strip nature of the book is accented by the cover and interior illos which all have that kinda look. It fits. Yo.