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Smoke 'Em if You Got 'Em
From shotgun shacks in the Tennessee backwoods to the black jack tables of Las Vegas, Chris Leek’s debut short story collection takes you on a wild road trip through the bad deals, tough breaks and dead ends that litter the highways of America’s underbelly.
Here you will find winners and losers, whores and gamblers, small time crooks looking for that one big score and small town mentalities coming home to roost. There are no rules, no speed limits and no turning back.
We’ve got some beers in the cooler and a full tank of gas. So come on, climb in. The road is waiting. Who knows, maybe we can outrun the cops and make it all the way to the ocean.
Here you will find winners and losers, whores and gamblers, small time crooks looking for that one big score and small town mentalities coming home to roost. There are no rules, no speed limits and no turning back.
We’ve got some beers in the cooler and a full tank of gas. So come on, climb in. The road is waiting. Who knows, maybe we can outrun the cops and make it all the way to the ocean.
93 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 1, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
May 12, 2016
Good things might come to those who wait, but trouble always seems to show up right away.I first became familiar with Chris Leek after reading "Last Exit," his great tale of gritty revenge on the streets of Brooklyn that opens the Zelmer Pulp collection Maybe I Should Just Shoot You In The Face. And when I discovered his debut collection, which has one of the coolest titles ever for a compilation of crime stories, I knew I had to snatch it up!
She played me like a goddamn slot machine and knew exactly how hard to yank the handle to make me pay out.I was so relieved to see that Leek's stories are exactly what they're supposed to be: short. Along with other authors I've been gravitating to recently, his efficient work is a breath of fresh air in this time of bloat in the crime genre. While there are so many short story authors out there who's stories sometimes feel like they're pushing into novella territory, the length of the pieces here average about 4-6 pages. In these little sketches of criminal life and the losers involved, Leek uses the great technique of jumping into a scene late and leaving it early, a technique that's perfect for the short story form. The stories usually open by throwing you right into the mix and then Leek's prose and structure knocks you around hard a bit and you barely have time to recover before jumping into the next round. As usual, some of the stories are better than others but it's a pretty damn good collection overall. My favorites were "The Johnny Cash Killer," "Take 'Em As They Come," "The Ties That Bind," and "Jacks, Queens, and Evens." Great pieces of work. If you enjoy good short crime fiction and you've got 2 bucks to spare, grab this short collection.
"Who the fuck are you?" he said.
I wanted to tell him, to scream "I'm Pete Jones motherfucker" in his face, making sure it was the last thing he heard before his organs shut down and he shit his designer jockeys. But my name wouldn't mean a damn thing to him and neither would hers. He didn't stop to ask it when he dragged her off the street and into the backseat of his beat-up Pinto. Names didn't matter; names were for toe tags and arrest warrants, not for revenge.
September 10, 2014
Chris Leek is one of the best practitioners of the crime short story, which he sets out to prove in Smoke 'Em if You Got 'Em. He's appeared a couple of times before in All Due Respect, stories with crackling dialogue and a strong sense of rural America.
In a genre that loves its despicable assholes and filthy sadists, he often writes about surprisingly decent characters. Sure, they've fucked up a time or ten, but they were just trying to get by, and maybe now they're even trying to set things right.
These are the kind of people from messed up families and messed up towns, who are struggling in more ways than one. Yet this book is a lot of fun--Leek's sharp sense of humor and narrative drive keep the pages turning. And these characters still have hopes and dreams--usually about Vegas or drinking or smoking that last cigarette.
Be sure to pick this one up--AND he's got another coming out soon from One Eye Press, Gospel of the Bullet.
In a genre that loves its despicable assholes and filthy sadists, he often writes about surprisingly decent characters. Sure, they've fucked up a time or ten, but they were just trying to get by, and maybe now they're even trying to set things right.
These are the kind of people from messed up families and messed up towns, who are struggling in more ways than one. Yet this book is a lot of fun--Leek's sharp sense of humor and narrative drive keep the pages turning. And these characters still have hopes and dreams--usually about Vegas or drinking or smoking that last cigarette.
Be sure to pick this one up--AND he's got another coming out soon from One Eye Press, Gospel of the Bullet.
January 21, 2015
There's a way to write about down on their luck characters without becoming mired in cliche. Unfortunately Chris Leek isn't that kind of writer. Every tired convention of noir and pulp is dragged through his short story collection, "Smoke 'Em if You Got 'Em" The title alone should give you an idea of what's between the covers. Everyone is named Johnny or Jimmy and has a checkered past and manages to come up with a one liner when they're staring down the barre of a gun.
The cliched characters and tired plots are what dooms these stories. The action movie-esque language is what really kills these stories. For example, after shooting the bad guy, "I picked up the joint and smoked it down to the roach while I watched him bleed out." Yes truly chilling. These sorts of tired action scenes are enough to make a Shwarzenegger movie look complex and nuanced. It isn't just that this sort of writing is tired when compared to the genre as a whole, Leek is repetitious even within the book. Within the first 100 pages he's referred to thrown punches as rusty no fewer than 5 times.
The cliched characters and tired plots are what dooms these stories. The action movie-esque language is what really kills these stories. For example, after shooting the bad guy, "I picked up the joint and smoked it down to the roach while I watched him bleed out." Yes truly chilling. These sorts of tired action scenes are enough to make a Shwarzenegger movie look complex and nuanced. It isn't just that this sort of writing is tired when compared to the genre as a whole, Leek is repetitious even within the book. Within the first 100 pages he's referred to thrown punches as rusty no fewer than 5 times.
July 20, 2014
Get it, read it.
Not a clunker in the bunch. I even enjoyed the ones I read before, like running into an old friend, with a drug problem, on the run from her crazy ex-con boyfriend, the law, and a meth dealer with only one arm, who needs a place to crash for a while, some cash, and if it’s not too much trouble, borrow a gun.
September 10, 2014
Got two bucks? You could piss them away on a big Coke, a bag of chips or a mediocre fast food burger, but all you’d end up with is diabetes, high blood pressure or gas.
Here’s a better idea: get yourself a copy of Chris Leek’s stylish anthology of short stories, Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em. No calories, no carbs, no artificial ingredients or preservatives. Just 93 pages of sharp writing served up in a classy fashion that will put a smile on your face for many hours.
Leek is an Englishman whose prose doesn’t read like it was written by one. In fact, it sounds more like it was cranked out by a peckerwood born in the cab of a 1947 GMC ton and a half truck.
Think what a Charlie Bukowski story might sound like if Henry Chinaski had been raised in an Airstream 20-footer in a trailer park outside Provo, Utah; got your brain wrapped around that image? Good.
His tales are classic rural noir, agrarian hardboiled yarns about hardscrabble folk in bleak, unforgiving landscapes living hand-to-mouth in single occupancy hotels, motor courts and trailer parks. People who drive pickup trucks in preference to passenger cars. People who measure the distance from one shit-kicker burg to the next in six-packs consumed en route.
Their crimes are many and invariably petty -- except when, backs against the wall, they are driven to kill.
Leek’s prose is rich and authentic. Lots of English writers get American slang wrong: they can’t pick up the rhythm, with its polyglot ethnicities, its complex traces of jazz, folk and rockabilly. They get the rural twang wrong, mess up the mechanical undertones of American urban dwellers.
If you don’t know what I mean, read something by Agatha Christie that has an American character in it, or look at the dialog spoken by Quincey Morris, the wealthy and cowboyish westerner in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. You’ll get it.
Not Leek. He may have been born in England and he may live in Cambridge but he kicked around the southwestern U.S. long enough to get the cadence and vocabulary right. His use of rural working class idiom is a pleasure to read. In fact, the characters running their mouths in his stories are as much fun as the twisted plots he concocts.
"Smoke ‘Em if You Got ‘Em" is as full of barbs as the razor wire fence around a county work camp. Some of Leek’s characters are kind-hearted souls filled with good intentions. Others are rotten SOBs only fit for a cell in isolation. All of them, however, are as twisted as a coil of cheap plastic rope.
In a story called “Jacks, Queens and Evens,” here’s Leek on how his protagonist, a dealer at a Las Vegas casino, is greeted by co-workers when his girlfriend dies after taking tainted cocaine:
“Entering the lunchroom was like walking through the saloon doors in an old western movie; conversations would stop mid-sentence and everyone became suddenly fascinated by their shoes. All that was missing was the fucking piano player.”
A little later, the protagonist is working a table when he is tipped who dealt his girl the poisoned dope: “There were four other players on base, all of them waiting for a ticket that would never hit the felt. I dropped the shoe like a fat girl on prom night and made for the door.”
In a tale called “The Johnny Cash Killer,” Leek’s anti-hero once “shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.” The victim – if you can use the term and keep a straight face – was an ex-con who had raped the protagonist's girlfriend.
When the soon-to-be dead man asks who the hero is, “I wanted to tell him, to scream ‘I’m Pete Jones, motherfucker’ in his face, making sure it was the last thing he heard before his organs shut down and he shit his designer jockeys. But my name wouldn’t mean a damn thing to him and neither would hers. He didn’t stop to ask it when he dragged her off the street and into the backseat of his beat-up Pinto. Names didn’t matter; names were for toe tags and arrest warrants, not for revenge.”
“Names were for toe tags and arrest warrants” is unquestionably my favorite line of the day.
Leek doesn’t just grace us with stylish language and a keen eye for detail in longer passages like these. He gives attention to smaller details, too. For example, in a grim little yarn called “The Cutter,” his main character watches the gum-ball on top of a state trooper’s car as the cop “swept the interior of my car with his disapproving flashlight.” The “disapproving flashlight” sells the scene, adding a touch of style and surrealism to what could have been a ho-humburger description of any routine roadside traffic stop.
Because the passage begins the tale, the surrealism serves the reader well, because it signals that the story, itself, is going to be more than a little surrealistic. Later, when the central character picks up a female hitchhiker, “She dug in her pocket and pulled out a crushed pack of Kools, lit one up and drew on it before answering. ‘I guess you know there’s a finger on the floor,’ she said in a matter of fact kind of way.”
This is another deft touch that gives the story a slightly off-center skew that underscores its nightmarish quality. The understatement of the outrageous is a time-honored technique for slapping the reader in the face and making him or her pay attention – in much the same way that a man speaking quietly makes the listener lean forward and attend his words in a way that a man who yells never can.
Another example: in a story called “The Honeymooners,” a man fleeing from an entanglement with the law is T-boned by a semi rig while leaving the parking lot of a cheap motel. The accident knocks him out temporarily. Leek has him awakened by a cop investigating the collision who yells, “Hey you, you alive in there?”
“I can’t swear to it,” Leek’s protagonist answers back as he peers from the cab of his ruined pickup.
“I could just make out a metal nametag called Gonzalez and another badge that read Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department,” Leek writes. “There was a pretty good chance they had a lawman pinned to the back of them.”
It’s the understated wit of lines like that last one – terse, tough, authentic – that give Leek’s stories their power and vitality.
Reading them is a treat. And at $1.99 a copy for Kindle, the thrills come amazingly cheap.
Here’s a better idea: get yourself a copy of Chris Leek’s stylish anthology of short stories, Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em. No calories, no carbs, no artificial ingredients or preservatives. Just 93 pages of sharp writing served up in a classy fashion that will put a smile on your face for many hours.
Leek is an Englishman whose prose doesn’t read like it was written by one. In fact, it sounds more like it was cranked out by a peckerwood born in the cab of a 1947 GMC ton and a half truck.
Think what a Charlie Bukowski story might sound like if Henry Chinaski had been raised in an Airstream 20-footer in a trailer park outside Provo, Utah; got your brain wrapped around that image? Good.
His tales are classic rural noir, agrarian hardboiled yarns about hardscrabble folk in bleak, unforgiving landscapes living hand-to-mouth in single occupancy hotels, motor courts and trailer parks. People who drive pickup trucks in preference to passenger cars. People who measure the distance from one shit-kicker burg to the next in six-packs consumed en route.
Their crimes are many and invariably petty -- except when, backs against the wall, they are driven to kill.
Leek’s prose is rich and authentic. Lots of English writers get American slang wrong: they can’t pick up the rhythm, with its polyglot ethnicities, its complex traces of jazz, folk and rockabilly. They get the rural twang wrong, mess up the mechanical undertones of American urban dwellers.
If you don’t know what I mean, read something by Agatha Christie that has an American character in it, or look at the dialog spoken by Quincey Morris, the wealthy and cowboyish westerner in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. You’ll get it.
Not Leek. He may have been born in England and he may live in Cambridge but he kicked around the southwestern U.S. long enough to get the cadence and vocabulary right. His use of rural working class idiom is a pleasure to read. In fact, the characters running their mouths in his stories are as much fun as the twisted plots he concocts.
"Smoke ‘Em if You Got ‘Em" is as full of barbs as the razor wire fence around a county work camp. Some of Leek’s characters are kind-hearted souls filled with good intentions. Others are rotten SOBs only fit for a cell in isolation. All of them, however, are as twisted as a coil of cheap plastic rope.
In a story called “Jacks, Queens and Evens,” here’s Leek on how his protagonist, a dealer at a Las Vegas casino, is greeted by co-workers when his girlfriend dies after taking tainted cocaine:
“Entering the lunchroom was like walking through the saloon doors in an old western movie; conversations would stop mid-sentence and everyone became suddenly fascinated by their shoes. All that was missing was the fucking piano player.”
A little later, the protagonist is working a table when he is tipped who dealt his girl the poisoned dope: “There were four other players on base, all of them waiting for a ticket that would never hit the felt. I dropped the shoe like a fat girl on prom night and made for the door.”
In a tale called “The Johnny Cash Killer,” Leek’s anti-hero once “shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.” The victim – if you can use the term and keep a straight face – was an ex-con who had raped the protagonist's girlfriend.
When the soon-to-be dead man asks who the hero is, “I wanted to tell him, to scream ‘I’m Pete Jones, motherfucker’ in his face, making sure it was the last thing he heard before his organs shut down and he shit his designer jockeys. But my name wouldn’t mean a damn thing to him and neither would hers. He didn’t stop to ask it when he dragged her off the street and into the backseat of his beat-up Pinto. Names didn’t matter; names were for toe tags and arrest warrants, not for revenge.”
“Names were for toe tags and arrest warrants” is unquestionably my favorite line of the day.
Leek doesn’t just grace us with stylish language and a keen eye for detail in longer passages like these. He gives attention to smaller details, too. For example, in a grim little yarn called “The Cutter,” his main character watches the gum-ball on top of a state trooper’s car as the cop “swept the interior of my car with his disapproving flashlight.” The “disapproving flashlight” sells the scene, adding a touch of style and surrealism to what could have been a ho-humburger description of any routine roadside traffic stop.
Because the passage begins the tale, the surrealism serves the reader well, because it signals that the story, itself, is going to be more than a little surrealistic. Later, when the central character picks up a female hitchhiker, “She dug in her pocket and pulled out a crushed pack of Kools, lit one up and drew on it before answering. ‘I guess you know there’s a finger on the floor,’ she said in a matter of fact kind of way.”
This is another deft touch that gives the story a slightly off-center skew that underscores its nightmarish quality. The understatement of the outrageous is a time-honored technique for slapping the reader in the face and making him or her pay attention – in much the same way that a man speaking quietly makes the listener lean forward and attend his words in a way that a man who yells never can.
Another example: in a story called “The Honeymooners,” a man fleeing from an entanglement with the law is T-boned by a semi rig while leaving the parking lot of a cheap motel. The accident knocks him out temporarily. Leek has him awakened by a cop investigating the collision who yells, “Hey you, you alive in there?”
“I can’t swear to it,” Leek’s protagonist answers back as he peers from the cab of his ruined pickup.
“I could just make out a metal nametag called Gonzalez and another badge that read Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department,” Leek writes. “There was a pretty good chance they had a lawman pinned to the back of them.”
It’s the understated wit of lines like that last one – terse, tough, authentic – that give Leek’s stories their power and vitality.
Reading them is a treat. And at $1.99 a copy for Kindle, the thrills come amazingly cheap.
September 21, 2014
"The two things I inherited from my old man when he died were in an old shoe box under the bed; his Marine Corps ring and his nickel plated .45."
Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em is a collection that spans lots of the wonderful aspects of American life that I love to read about in crime fiction. There are drive-ins and casinos, hitch-hikers and hotels, prison cells and cops, Vietnam hangovers and drug-dealers, hold-ups and bleeders. There’s also a good variety of voice, style and length which means you never quite know where you’re going to end up next.
What I think Chris Leek is extremely good at is nailing a character in a very short space of time and, where it’s appropriate, making you care. Many of these pieces are superbly rounded and leave a powerful emotional reaction. Some of the endings are incredibly satisfying and left me having to pause to draw breath and allow my reaction to take shape.
He also has a real turn of phrase, using few words to tell you all you need to know:
"He was a man who liked to work with his hands. They had worked on me from time-to-time. On my mother too."
And Mr Leek’s take on revenge can also be very sweet indeed.
Among my favourites here are Jacks, Queen’s and Evens; He Ain’t Heavy; My Father’s House; and Always On The Ride. They all had a solid impact and left a big exit wound.
I thoroughly enjoyed my journey through this collection and think you will too. It’s always good, often great and there are flashes of real brilliance. I’ll be looking for more.
Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em is a collection that spans lots of the wonderful aspects of American life that I love to read about in crime fiction. There are drive-ins and casinos, hitch-hikers and hotels, prison cells and cops, Vietnam hangovers and drug-dealers, hold-ups and bleeders. There’s also a good variety of voice, style and length which means you never quite know where you’re going to end up next.
What I think Chris Leek is extremely good at is nailing a character in a very short space of time and, where it’s appropriate, making you care. Many of these pieces are superbly rounded and leave a powerful emotional reaction. Some of the endings are incredibly satisfying and left me having to pause to draw breath and allow my reaction to take shape.
He also has a real turn of phrase, using few words to tell you all you need to know:
"He was a man who liked to work with his hands. They had worked on me from time-to-time. On my mother too."
And Mr Leek’s take on revenge can also be very sweet indeed.
Among my favourites here are Jacks, Queen’s and Evens; He Ain’t Heavy; My Father’s House; and Always On The Ride. They all had a solid impact and left a big exit wound.
I thoroughly enjoyed my journey through this collection and think you will too. It’s always good, often great and there are flashes of real brilliance. I’ll be looking for more.
January 3, 2015
This collection of shorts had been on my radar for a while, and I had a chance to turn to it today. It's a strong batch -- with the longest entry, "The Honeymooners", standing out for me as the star of the show. There are plenty of other good ones, however, and Leek's vision of America (especially Nevada and other parts of the Southwest) is what will linger after reading it.
Just one little thing in passing, though: as convincing as Leek's Americana is, here and there you can pick up "tells" of his British origin.
Just one little thing in passing, though: as convincing as Leek's Americana is, here and there you can pick up "tells" of his British origin.
July 22, 2014
One of the most unsung talents out thee right now. This collection of short stories travels at a fast pace but each and every one is enthralling. They're like quicksand. You get in, and you can't get out. From card table games to the trailer parks, dope, lowlifes, losers who can't help but follow their hearts to losing some more, Leek has it all here. Seriously. Get this.
January 8, 2015
The author sent a copy for me to read while I spent a couple of weeks in the hospital with my son. Leek churns out hard hitting crime stories one after the other in Smoke Em!
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews