by SE Mathews

Created on: March 24, 2009

Title: Pain Killers
Author: Jerry Stahl
Published in US by: March 2009
Category: CrackNoir

Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)

Summary: Manny Rubert (or Rupert) is a Private Investigator who used to be a cop with tendencies for drug abuse and for getting into all kinds of trouble, even when he isn't trying. When an old guy busts into his room with a deal that he literally can not pass up, Manny finds himself at San Quentin (the prison) to meet up with a man who says he's Josef Mengele. The problem is: He might just be the guy and that is the least of Manny's problems.

Impression: Pain Killers is the sequel to Stahl's PlainClothes Naked.

In Killers, Manny is a slowly recovering drug addict with a bad kidney and terrible luck. He's divorced from the love of his messed-up life, Tina, the woman who killed her husband with Lucky Charms and Drano (she had a decent reason if you believe her).

When an old guy named Zell breaks into his life and coerces Manny into taking a job where he must go to San Quentin to investigate if an inmate is really Dr. Josef Mengele, Manny ends up right where he doesn't want to be (except for being with Tina which happens in the weirdest way).

Pain Killers is truly a cracknoir story. Noir is the blackest, darkest sense in which everyone from Mengele to Zell is a terrible, vile person to a pacing that is like being on crack. Underneath the twistedness of Mengele-we-think's ranting about the purity of the Third Reich's agenda and the horrible common sense of a pimp who destroys young women even if he does preserve their virginity, there is an uncomfortable commentary on how the so-called will willingly shake hands with the devil if the devil has something good to offer.

Stahl writes this almost alternate-reality scenario with the confidence of a man who knows the people who inhabit its world. He has their language down and their hiccuping sense of morality. In one scene, Tina (the ex-wife) re-stages the victims of a murder to look like the victims were in a sex act, it would seem completely unrealistic in the hands of almost any other writer except for the freewheeling but oddly lucid Stahl.

It is that lucidity that Stahl gives his characters, from Manny to Mengele to Zell, that keeps the admittedly ridiculous plot into focus because the characters know just how screwed up they are and they don't make excuses for it. It just is what it is.

This is not a book for a mainstream fan of crime novels or traditional noir. The weirdness of it isn't a kink of the characters. It is part of the whole. Manny, the anti-est anti-hero to take the stage as a hero) is in love with a woman who can kill. He accepts it and they go on to eat their McD lunch in a Walmart parking lot.

So it is with that in mind that I recommend this book with reservation. I relished its thoroughly unrepentent black heart and immoral center, but others who prefer something that adheres to a more traditional storyline and characters might not be so inclined.

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