(also reviewed)
''You're built like a brick house now. What are you doing, lifting trucks for a living?''
''I was in prison.''
That killed the mood.
I'm sure you've had this awkward discussion before, ending with a friend earnestly telling you to watch SIN CITY, that it was the best film noir they'd ever seen. It happened to me several times, with different people. I liked SIN CITY all right, but it was a rather classic hardboiled tale featuring the usual suspects: a femme fatale, a rugged outsider, crooked cops, a conspiracy that unermines an entire city, etc. I liked it, but if you read enough hardboiled fiction, you're going to read that story over and over again. I've always liked the classic hardboiled setting, but I take it in limited doses nowadays. Joe Clifford's novel WAKE THE UNDERTAKER was a breath of fresh air in that regard since it mixes classic hardboiled and contemporary themes to create something original. It's bound to become the missing link between that guy who loved SIN CITY and you.
Colin Specter once was an up-and-coming singer, bound to bust through Bay City's scene and into international success. But when Colin falls in love with Zoey, Gabriel Christos, who runs the club he performs at, orders that Colin is dealt with. So Colin is disfigured, has his vocal cords mutilated and takes the fall for a drug bust. Seven years later, he's become a mountain of muscle and is release from prison into a very different Bay City. Gabriel's old man, once the head of Bay City's mob has branched into legitimate business and announced that he's running for mayor. With his back against the wall, Gabriel turns to Colin for help, but Colin has another agenda in mind: finding Zoey and figuring out what the hell happened during these seven years.
The first name I was remembered when reading WAKE THE UNDERTAKER was James Ellroy. Joe Clifford is not trying to ape Ellroy's trademark telegraphic style, but his novel crackles with the same dynamic energy than the L.A Quartet. There is also a larger-than-life, deliberately overdrawn aspect to WAKE THE UNDERTAKER that will remind you of comic books. There were these late night cartoons in cable television, back when I was a teenager, that featured the same kind of fearless and energetic approach to displaying a violent underworld. I don't remember the title of these, but WAKE THE UNDERTAKER triggered the fond memories I have of them. It's a novel deliberately painted with broad strokes, which is fine because it's not trying to be sophisticated.
I remembered seeing bums when I was a kid, but nothing like this. Maybe I'd been blind or delusional, the way the mind edits out the unpleasantness as you get older, recalling only novel politicians and honest cops, days when your dad was the srongest man in the world, but it seemed like the divide between the haves and the have-nots grew wider by the day in this town.
So, what does make WAKE THE UNDERTAKER original when it's built with variables that are borderline cliché? Joe Clifford established a distance from other similar novels by mixing these classic, boderline themes with contemporary ones. WAKE THE UNDERTAKER is a classic hardboiled novel with a contemporary point of view. The character are iconic and easily recognizable and relatable, yet the relationship between them are way more complicated than the boring crooked-cops-and-romantic-robbers dynamic that you usually find in classic hardboiled. Zoey, for example, stands in for the femme fatale, but she's way more complex than that. She's that beautiful, selfless woman who had to make difficult choices and turn her back to people she loved and her choices defined the lives of several characters around them.
WAKE THE UNDERTAKER is a gateway novel into the world of hardboiled fiction. It's accessible, straightfroward and it has a strong, visual style. It was a refreshing experience for me to fall in love again with that underworld that dragged me down the rabbit hole several years ago. The Bay City of WAKE THE UNDERTAKER is a timeless place in our collective consciousness, not unlike the mid-century Los Angeles of James Ellroy, except it's not bound by the shackles of reality. It's not an emotional experience, but it's not a novel that's trying to be. WAKE THE UNDERTAKER is meant to be enjoyed as a quirky love-letter to classic hardboiled and as another trip to that underworld/netherworld of the lost souls we've been fascinated by for a century. Whether you're feeling nostalgic or you're trying to turn someone to the dark side of fiction, WAKE THE UNDERTAKER is the novel you need.
