Charlie's Books

Charlie's Books
Buon Giorno, Amici!

Our motto ...

Leave the (political) party. Take the cannoli.

"It always seems impossible until it's done." Nelson Mandela

Right now 6 Stella crime novels are available on Kindle for just $.99 ... Eddie's World has been reprinted and is also available from Stark House Press (Gat Books).

Saturday, March 26, 2016

Voter Fraud in Arizona/Why the DNC/Hillary can’t get our support … Tommy Red Review … Good movie (The Girl in the Book) …

Amici:
Voter Fraud in Arizona … Helen Purcell is the widow of Bill Clinton’s former Lt. Governor in Arkansas, Joe Purcell. She was the person responsible for closing 140 polling station last week, securing a stolen victory for Hillary Clinton. Where there were 200 polling stations in the past, Purcell reduced the number to 60 stations. Anything funny going on there?
 
Yet the DNC and the Clinton campaign expects Bernie’s people to support her in November … talk about balls.
For the record, my balls will be roasting over an open fire pit before I vote for Hillary Clinton in November. If Bernie doesn’t run as an independent and/or form an independent Progressive Party, the DNC and Hillary Clinton can count on my vote going DIRECTLY to the GOP nominee in a protest vote.
 
 
Why the DNC/Hillary can’t get our support … I have many friends who remain baffled by my insistence on rejecting the DNC candidate of choice should it come down to Hillary vs. Trump/Cruz/Ryan/Romney, etc. It is a belief, on their part, that there’s no way a Republican administration, especially with a potential super majority, could be less dangerous than a Democratic administration. They ignore (willfully) the past disasters of Democratic administrations, to include: the decision to go into Vietnam, the repeal of Glass-Steagall, welfare reform, NAFTA, an overzealous crime bill, the overwhelming support to go into Iraq, regime change in Libya and now Syria, returning to the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time, a deporter-in-chief, TPP, etc. … and I’m left asking: if the Republican Party is so dangerous, how come it was the Democratic Party that did all the stupid shit above?
 
Both parties are a mess, we all know that. Yet, party loyalists assume there’s a true lesser of two evils. It is a false assumption. If both parties are owned, often by the same campaign contributors, how can one be perceived as so much worse than the other, it precludes the option for a true progressive candidate/party? We say it is a nonsensical argument. We say that what the tea party accomplished, while so-called liberals clung to an Obama presidency that proved more center-right than anything approaching progressive, was monumental. It moved the entire political spectrum to the right. We say the time has come to stop shitting your pants and accept the fact that we’re losing and losing badly to an oligarchical form of government that has so corrupted the political process, it has its minions (the DNC) cheat openly (i.e., the democratic nomination process thus far with/without Super Delegates), and is no less a form of fascism than any other government intolerant of change.
The response I most often get from posing these questions to loyal Democrats, by the way, is the following: as lemmings are won’t to do, they face the headlights like deer.
 
In the meantime, those of us supporting Bernie Sanders, especially those of us who’ve had to switch our party affiliation from independent to Democrat because of closed state primaries, aren’t about to support a party that hijacked the nomination process in so many states. They have literally fraudulently stolen several state elections. Nor do we accept the fact the DNC is pushing someone so damaged we believe she could lose the general election rather easily.
Will Hillary Clinton really be able to win over Bernie’s millennial women once the Republican Party throws out some of the FACTS of her treatment of women? Is it really worse when a blowhard makes misogynistic comments vs. a women who protected/defended her husband’s sexual assaults against women by demeaning the women he assaulted?
 
A footnote to those switches in affiliation mentioned above: I sent my switch in last August 2015, but when my wife checked last week, I was still registered as “unaffiliated” – we sent another application, but aren’t optimistic in light of the bullshit pulled in Arizona last week.
 
So, loyal Democrats need not ask us why we won’t support their candidate. We’re neither afraid of a Republican administration we think may well be a mirror of a Clinton administration (the way her husband’s was), nor are we about to reward the corruption the DNC has shown at every opportunity in the nomination process thus far. What we hope more than anything is that Bernie Sanders sweeps enough states to surpass Hillary Clinton’s pledged delegates, in spite of the cheating we all know will occur, but we don’t expect it will be that easy. We expect the DNC will be forced to use the corruption of its “super delegates” to further steal the nomination. The upside to that is the following: Beat us with the non-democratic Super Delegates and it’ll send more than just Bernie or Busters running away from the DNC candidate, it’ll mean she splits the party and whether Bernie runs as an independent or not, the bulk of his supporters won’t show up for Hillary Clinton.


The modern mob is a shell of its former existence. La Cosa Nostra is now La Cosa Freak Show. Used to be if a wiseguy got convicted, he did his time in silence. Now, they all want to cut a deal and stay out of prison. Dominick Farase has dirt on the Cirelli family and manages to work a deal to get into WitSec that places him on an island just off the coast of New Hampshire.

NYPD organized crime cop Quinlan King travels to New England with his artsy wife to scope out the place where she will do some residential art course, stumbles across Farase and snaps a few shots on his phone. First stop when he returns? Why, retired family capo Gasper Cirelli, of course. The word gets passed to the son, Frank and the wheels are set in motion for a hit reaching out to James ‘Doc’ Adamo to get it done.

Red-haired ‘Mick’ Tommy Dalton chose his own path and knows what probably awaits him. He is not likely to die in bed of old age. He married a stripper, fathered 3 daughters, then was divorced by his wife when she finally realized that Tommy was a bit more than just a thief. Being of Irish descent, he was unable to become a made man within any NY crime family so he went freelance specializing in contract killing. Pretty good at it and well paid to boot.

But right now, Tommy has bigger problems on his hands. Seems his ex decided that his oldest daughter (Alysha, NYU Pre-Vet student) deserves to know just who her father really is by telling her that Tommy is a murderer. The ex is pissed off because her newest man, a lawyer with political aspirations, found out Tommy wasn’t on the up and up and dumped her because Tommy’s history would kill any chance at holding public office; the press finds out everything.

‘Doc’ Adamo and Tommy are longtime friends and Doc acts as the middle man between the Cirelli family and Tommy. The hit goes down. Piece of cake.

But La Cosa Freak Show these days is more about CYA than pure retribution so the Cirelli’s have the bright idea that all loose ends need to be tied up. Hits are ordered on Doc, Tommy, Detective King, and lord knows who else.

Not all goes as planned. Doc survives the attack and manages to take out one of the hitters. A guy was tasked with following and killing Tommy on the island; bad idea. The FBI gets involved (they don’t like protected witnesses getting whacked), lower level wiseguys hoping to move up don’t have quite the talent of the old days. And going after Alysha in order to leverage Tommy wasn’t a bright move.

Dalton is a character from a short story Stella wrote for one of the terrific series of ‘Noir’ books, this one was Baltimore Noir (where I first stumbled across Stella). I once read where Stella said Tommy was one of his favorite characters and really wanted to pen a book with Tommy as the central character.

Holy crap. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Why the hell isn’t Stella on every mystery lover’s must-read list. All those supermarket bestsellers are all about marketing, certainly not about story, characters, dialogue, tone, setting, and (fictional) reality. This taut, tightly presented story of misplaced loyalties and retribution is nicely tied up in a fast-paced tale that, once you get used to the rhythm of the dialogue, just begs you to turn the next page.

To me, the best crime and noir novels absolutely require dialogue that both leaps off the page and drills under your fingernails. Dashiell Hammett, George V. Higgins, George Pelacanos come to mind. Higgins was a Boston lawyer in the DA’s office so he saw the underbelly of crime up close. Pelacanos (one of the original writers for The Wire) writes about DC crime and gets his feel for the voice of the street by volunteering with the DC Metro Juvenile division counseling kids to get out of the life. Stella grew up in the neighborhood and knows of many of the people who are/were the source material for the movie Goodfellas. And his cover blurb says that was ‘a former window washer, word processor, and knockaround guy’ (apply your own definition). While the plotline may be a figment of Stella’s imagination, the interaction between and amongst the characters is the absolutely the real deal.

One hallmark of Stella’s books is a mostly innocent good guy caught in the middle who must find a way out. Tommy Red doesn’t really have that ‘good guy’ who now has to scramble. But true to form, Stella skillfully makes a contract killer into a sympathetic figure worthy of us pulling for. Let’s hope we haven’t heard the last of Tommy Dalton.
 


The Girl in the Book … I put off watching this one on Netflix because I didn’t think I liked the synopsis … finally I gave it a shot and really enjoyed it. The cast was really terrific. Emily VanCamp (the protagonist), Ana Mulovy-Ten (the protagonist 15 years younger) and Michael Nyqvist (the literary wonder). The daughter of an arrogant literary agent was taken advantage of when she was very young by Daddy’s newfound literary wonder. Fifteen years later, he’s back in her life because of her job. She’s also a writer (how the literary wonder back in the day managed to seduce her), but she’s got a block she can’t overcome. Worth watching, amici.

—Knucks

So, here's the deal ... watch the video, throw up, and pledge NEVER to vote for this corporate shill, warmongering piece of shit. This is the person the DNC is ramming down our throats … as is often repeated in the video: we don’t believe she’s telling the truth … duh!