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What he was before he entered the small prison mattered little. Sometimes it gave him special attention. But men, women and children, of any faith or background,were treated equal in the eye of labor and death.
Writing a first novel is an exercise in modesty of ambition. It's such a complicated task to accomplish that it's much easier to fuck up than to get right. People tend to perceive all novelists as masterful and visionary by default, but truth is that for every Picasso of the written word, there are a thousand kids training themselves not to draw between the lines. That's why I tend to judge first novels on precision, fluidity and leanness rather than emotional impact. Sometimes one brings a little more to the table, though. Anthony Schiavino's brooding debut Cold War grind SHOTGLASS MEMORIES is a finely crafted, atmospheric and somewhat challenging mystery that'll keep you reading even if your house has caught fire or got broken into by a Ninja assassin squad.
Joe Sinclair is a World War II veteran struggling to adjust back to normal life, even years after the conflict ended. He suffers from combat fatigue, post-traumatic stress disorder and the only medication he receives is at the bottom of a glass of hard liquor. The first body washes up on the Jersey shore on the same night Joe crashes his motorbike. Joe passed out on the road, but wakes up somewhere entirely else after a particularly colorful PTSD episode and realizes he cannot account for his whereabouts at the time of the murder. It's not the worst: the men turning up dead are all related to him one way or another, making him the prime suspect for these killings. Has war gotten the best of Joe or is he being set up?
Anthony Schiavino's writing style really is the calling card of SHOTGLASS MEMORIES. The majority of hardboiled mystery writers take great pride in the leanness of their prose, yet Schiavino does the opposite in his debut novel and uses a deep, poetic and metaphorical style that perfectly suits the mood of the story. SHOTGLASS MEMORIES is a slow, rather contemplative novel that's deeply anchored in its characters. I gotta say ,my favorite one wasn't Joe, but rather Thomas Gabriel, an anachronistic, ambitious journalist working the crime beat for some rag journal. The easy decision would've been to make Gabriel the symbol of a spoiled America, turning on its own veterans, but there's something of a generational gap between Thomas and Joe, which I thought was oddly moving and surprising to find in a tough guy mystery.
There are some aspects of SHOTGLASS MEMORIES I liked a little less. There are no overbearing flaws or anything like that, but it's not meant for everybody. For example, the fact tat it's a Cold War novel that's not historical. It's tricky right there, because it's written like a 1950s movie so in a sense it's more of an anachronistic piece of fiction that a novel that aims to document the past. SHOTGLASS MEMORIES has a couple of overwritten passages where Anthony Schiavino goes way overboard with the pompous metaphors, but it's never far removed from the tone he's trying to nail. He refers to Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall a couple times in the novel and it helps understanding the tone to imagine these two playing Joe and his love interest Kelsey. The anachronistic tone was hit-and-miss with me. Schiavino used it in an uncompromising manner, so it's good that he stuck to his guns, it's just that some passages (mostly the romance) read bizarrely in 2015.
SHOTGLASS MEMORIES is a rare animal in the contemporary crime fiction landscape. It's an unusually ambitious, yet controlled first effort that relies on a level of poetry too seldom used in hardboiled novels. While I wasn't enamored with the Cold War era edge there was to it, the fragmented mystery and the sheer quality and confidence of the prose did more than necessary in order to win me over. Anthony Schiavino has a distinctive style, an identity as an author, and it's not something every hardboiled writer can claim after only one release. If you're tired of the hardboiled/noir that reads all the same because everybody worships the same authors, give SHOTGLASS MEMORIES a try. It won't hurt if you're a fan of mid-century movies either, but it doesn't matter if you're not. It'll get the job done anyway.