Published by Dutton Guilt Edged Mysteries on November 20, 2012
If someone set out to write a parody of a Sam Spade novel, Bullets Are My Business might be the result. The problem is that Sam Spade novels are self-parodying. Their over-the-top nature is what makes them fun. Bullets Are My Business is over-the-top, but it isn't fun. It could be that Bullets Are My Business is a tribute novel, but if so, it is a weak imitation of the real thing. The book is billed as "modern noir," but if people weren't listening to music on CDs, you might think you were reading a trashy pulp novel published six decades ago and deservedly forgotten.
Levi Maurice is a contract killer. Levi's sister Chenille is also a killer, albeit for different and somewhat obscure reasons. For a guy with an interesting job, Levi is surprisingly dull. Levi enjoys killing, torturing, and humiliating people, which seems to be his version of a personality. He also enjoys drinking heavily. He has bad luck with dames, perhaps because he thinks of them as dames when he isn't referring to them as broads. Other characters also routinely refer to women as dames and broads. Levi refers to Asians as "slants." Does this story take place in a parallel politically incorrect universe? The determinedly anachronistic language is puzzling. Reliance on language that has all but disappeared from use would make sense if the novel were set in a time when the language was commonplace, but its appearance in a modern novel merely emphasizes the story's detachment from reality.
One day Levi comes home and finds a letter. Thugs immediately try to kill him. He doesn't know why. For the rest of the novel, people are trying to kill him. Some think Levy killed a guy named Vincent, others want him to find out who killed Vincent (and threaten to kill him if he doesn't). I cheered on all the people who wanted Levi dead but, sad to say, Levi can out-fight and out-shoot a half dozen bad guys at once (on a good day, maybe a dozen). More letters pop up, people aren't who they claim to be, and it's up to Levi, with the help of Chenille and his cop-friend Jacks, to make sense of it all.
The plot is convoluted but it all gets untwisted in an explosion of words at the novel's end. Apart from the plot, nothing about Bullets Are My Business is original or interesting. A character is about to give Levi a vital piece of information when, a moment before he can say the name Levi wants to hear, a bullet takes him out. How many times has that been done? Josh Stevens' writing style is pedestrian ("I pull the trigger and the top of his skull erupts like Mount St. Helens." and "I get to see another day. Good for me."), too often dependent upon cliché (a wound is "screaming like a banshee"; Levi hates people who try to "knock my block off"). The final action scene is preposterous. A ton of people show up with guns but they all refrain from using them so Levi can fight them one-on-one. Whether they are staring at each other or dancing or playing cards while Levi is fighting, we just don't know.
Maybe the cheesy writing is part of an effort to make the novel sound like 1940s pulp, but this isn't the 1940s. If the writing had been of a higher caliber, Bullets Are My Business might have been a modest success. Unfortunately, it is what it is, and what it is isn't good.
NOT RECOMMENDED