Natural Causes Book

Ladykiller
"…42nd Street had no more hope of being cleaned up than a toxic waste dump." The Times Square area and "the Deuce" (42nd Street) may be sanitized now, in 2013'but it wasn't in 1991, when the events in Ladykiller take place.

Nor was the Deuce sanitized in 1979-80, when I lived in New York and got my timid kicks just photographing the area. Handgun possession is illegal in New York without a hard-to-get permit but you could window shop for shoulder holsters in the Deuce...in case, like, you moved out of state, or something. Yeah. Right. That's it, Officer. I'm moving out of state.

The murderer in Ladykiller uses a .45 automatic, Model of 1911, US military issue from 1911 to 1985, and found in the hands of half the hardboiled noir characters who rolled off the pens of writers like Dashiell Hammett. Nice addition, that, to the ruthless style in which Ladykiller is written.

The writing voice in Ladykiller is a civilized third person voice, not the feral, urban male, first-person voice we know from the classics and from most contemporary noir. So, it's extra creepy'this distanced, relatively civilized voice talking about the most horrible things.

I did not see the final twist coming at the end of Ladykiller and I loved reading this well-crafted book by a husband and wife team of two New Yorkers, Lawrence Light and Meredith Anthony, who know what the Deuce was like before the city finally swept it, well, relatively clean. And I liked it all the more for seeing what I believed to be the interplay, in the writing, of masculine and feminine detail.