There’s hard-boiled fiction, and then there are novels by Charlie Huston. Huston’s books are so tough, bloody and undeniably sad that you can’t even call them hard-boiled. They’re petrified - but in the best possible sense of the word.
Huston’s aggressive, bruising style is on full display in the final chapter of his Henry Thompson trilogy, A Dangerous Man.” The book follows Caught Stealing and Six Bad Things in chronicling the downward spiral of Henry, a once-promising baseball player who now toils as a hit man for a ruthless Russian gangster.
Though I haven’t read Six Bad Things, I enjoyed Caught Stealing, which showed how Henry went from being a regular guy to a stone-cold killer. In A Dangerous Man, his steely resolve is denting. He can’t kill with the cold ease that he used to. And he’s addicted to painkillers, which help him cope with
the crimes he has committed. Henry’s problems have caused his boss, David, to doubt his usefulness. Since David has threatened to kill Henry’s parents should Henry no longer become useful, David’s disappointment in Henry is alarming.
David allows Henry a chance to redeem himself by acting as a bodyguard to Miguel Arenas, an up-and-coming baseball player with a lot of talent and a major gambling problem. As Henry gets closer to Miguel, he looks for a way to untangle the web he
is caught in.
In Henry Thompson, Huston has created a man who is rough, ruthless yet undeniably sympathetic. We
are treated to scene after scene of him cracking skulls, slitting throats and hitting below the belt, but Henry is never a simple thug. Huston always shows us the glimpse of the man he might have been, through his love for his parents and his pain over this monster he’s become.
In A Dangerous Man, we constantly root for Henry to escape his life of crime. We want him to be happy. Of course, he can’t be. It’s the kind of story that can’t end well. But Huston isn’t relentlessly bleak. There’s humor
here, although it’s of the darker variety, and there’s even a hint of hope, of redemption.
That’s why, despite the darkness and pain within, A Dangerous Man is compulsively readable. It will bruise and batter you, but it’s a good kind of pain.