False Negative (Hard Case Crime) [Paperback]

Joseph Koenig (Author)

Book Description

Release date: June 5, 2012 | Series: Hard Case Crime

Adam Jordan wrote the best and worst articles of his journalistic career on the same day. The worst was bad enough to get him fired - but the best landed him a new job, penning lurid articles for Real Detective magazine, one of the last of the true-crime pulps. 

Only the case they've got him working on, involving a beauty pageant contestant found dead on an Atlantic City beach, is one some very powerful men would rather see covered up than covered. And if Adam keeps digging, he may find he's digging his own grave... 

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Koenig weighs in with another gritty, no-holds-barred, hard-boiled whodunit set in the 1950's. Razor-sharp prose, and a fast-moving plot."
                                                                 --Publishers Weekly

Koenig's gritty Jersey Shore milieu, a host of brazenly on-the-make characters, and lots of brilliant noirish dialogue make False Negative a must for readers who like their crime fiction old school.
                                                                     --Booklist

     By the time I finished False Negative one word lingered in my mind: Edgar. The milieu, the voice, the style and the narrative attack sweep you up in a twisting plot, some great serio-comic moments and as unique a story as I've come across in years. Grab it fast.
                                                                  Ed Gorman

"Twenty years after Brides of Blood, Koenig weighs in with another gritty, no-holds-barred, hard-boiled whodunit set in the 1950s. Gifted journalist Adam Jordan, too tired to attend a congressman’s routine speech, fakes an article, only to learn later from his editor that the politician dropped dead before going on stage to deliver it. Now a pariah, Jordan manages only to land work with a seedy New York City true crime magazine, Real Detective. When he tries to solve the fetishistic strangulation murder of an attractive 22-year-old waitress found hog-tied on a Long Island beach, his probing leads him to more corpses and a narrow escape from death. Razor-sharp prose (e.g., “Wing’s dreams were short on specifics until he was in New York with a knife in his pocket”) and a fast-moving plot will please Mickey Spillane and Cornell Woolrich fans. With any luck, readers won’t have to wait another 20 years for Koenig’s next book." - Publisher's Weekly

Joseph Koenig (author of Little Odessa and Brides of Blood) returns from a 20-year absence from the publishing scene with a whopper of a thriller. While written in modern-day America, Koenig captures all the spirit and flavor of the 1950s. - Celebrity Cafe

“False Negative marks the return of a writer who knows dialog, colorful yet real characters, and how to make an original premise.” – Comic Attack

About the Author

Nominated for the prestigious Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best First Novel for Floater in 1986, Joseph Koenig followed this debut with three more novels in close succession, culminating with the New York Times Notable Book Brides of Blood in 1993. He hasn't published a novel since - until now. False Negative marks the author's triumphant return to publishing with his most personal novel yet, a tale of the last days of the pulp era told as only a veteran of that era could tell it.

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Hard Case Crime (June 5, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0857685805
• ISBN-13: 978-0857685803
• Product Dimensions: 5 x 0.7 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #131,774 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A triumphant comeback for Joseph Koenig July 16, 2012

By Bookreporter

Format:Paperback

Joseph Koenig was nominated for an Edgar Award for "Best First Novel" for FLOATER in 1986. He then wrote three novels in quick succession with his last, BRIDES OF BLOOD, mentioned as a New York Times Notable Book of 1993. And that was it. Until now.

Besides being his first published work in two decades, FALSE NEGATIVE is a terrific piece of pulp fiction regardless of when it was published. It has a timeless feel. One can't help but wonder about the drought for such an obviously talented author --- and hope there's a 20-year supply of manuscripts sitting somewhere in Koenig's office.

FALSE NEGATIVE will appeal to mystery lovers, to fans of the pulps, and to those who, like me, enjoy "Boardwalk Empire." It is set in Atlantic City about 30 years after the time period depicted in the HBO series, which was really the glory days of the place once called "America's Playground." It is 1953. Booze is legal, but the city by the sea and its Beaux Arts facade are beginning to fade and start the long decline that will leave the city in virtual ruin within a few decades.

Andrew Jordan is a 26-year-old reporter for the local paper and has been working there for four years. He is now desperate to get out, as he feels he is "squandering his talent in a city where the major celebrities were beauty queens and a high diving horse." He arrived naively, like most of those beauty queens, expecting to be part of the city's earlier glory days. Koenig writes of the reporter's decision to come to Atlantic City:

"It was a set up from the Grand Concourse, an opportunity to make his name trailing after movie stars, and big band singers, and the gangsters who ran the clubs where they entertained. But he almost never saw a hoodlum outside court. Whores, bookmaking and loan sharking brought in too much profit for the mob bosses to jeopardize by calling attention to themselves. The luxury suites above the hotel nightclubs were a no-man's land for reporters. Frequent rumors of fights, drunken orgies, drug use, and midnight visits by abortionists were impossible to confirm. Publicists threatened libel. Jordan's editors told him to dig for dirt somewhere else. If Atlantic City couldn't keep its secrets, the stars would stay away, leaving it a swell place to buy salt water taffy, and build sand castles on the beach."

And it is on that beach where Jordan finds the story that perhaps will spring him to the big leagues of newspapers. Listening to the police scanner one day, he manages to beat the cops to the place where a young woman has been found strangled on the beach. She turns out to be a beauty pageant contestant. At that very same moment, Jordan apparently commits career suicide. He gets himself fired from his newspaper when he covers another boring event featuring a local politician by writing the article "from clips" of a past speech and then passing it off as if he was actually there. Of course, the politician chooses that event as the place where he drops dead.

But his dead beauty queen story has attracted the interest of an editor at a pulp detective magazine in New York City. Koenig describes the pulps of 1953: "At a candy store on his corner the pulps were racked with the slick girlie magazines away from Life, Look and Saturday Evening Post. A dozen or so detective titles all seemed the same. On the cover of each one was a tough guy and/or babe with a gun, or a doe-eyed innocent in the clutches of a fiend. Easy to snicker at, but he'd never look down his nose at five cents a word..."

But by the 1950s, the pulps were also dying. An editor tells Jordan about their readers: "`They're dying off, and we can't replace them because their children would rather watch TV than read.'" And television would kill off the pulps within a decade. The lack of reading among kids remains a problem six decades later.

Soon another body of a woman turns up on the beach, and Jordan is on that story as well. He has entered the world of noir; from the marijuana-filled jazz clubs where greats like Louie Armstrong play to the seedy photo studios, Jordan is on a journey through "the cool darkness under the boardwalk." And he discovers the deadly truth that "Atlantic City made its name on girls playing to the fantasies of old men, the sweet public face of blood sport."

FALSE NEGATIVE is a great pulp story that illustrates what is significant about noir writing. Yes, this is a story that will keep you turning the pages and entertained. But noir deals ultimately with the American Dream and the dark and sometimes deadly side of that dream for the dreamers, be they beauty pageant contestants or wannabe movie stars flocking to Hollywood or writers wishing they could pen the Great American Novel. In noir, there is always a price ultimately to be paid.

This is a triumphant comeback for Joseph Koenig and another example of why Hard Case Crime is such an invaluable publishing house for mystery fans. Let us look forward to his next book, though hopefully we will not have to wait so long.

Reviewed by Tom Callahan

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing June 18, 2012

By Jeff VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

If you're a fan of Koenig, or like period mysteries occurring around Atlantic City and New York, I can recommend this book. If you're just reading it because it is a Hard Case Crime entry (I'm a fan of their books in general; some are excellent), you can probably pass.

The book revolves around Adam Jordan, a newspaperman who dials in one too many stories without checking the facts, and is fired for it. He takes up writing pulp fiction on spec for a detective magazine while he begins to investigate the murder of a beautiful woman who washes up onto a Jersey beach shore. Although the jacket blurb portrays Adam's struggle to solve a crime that no one wants publicized, there's considerably more to it than that. Unfortunately, the more results in a plot that I found wandered quite a bit. Adam gets paid by the word for his pulp stories. If Koenig did not have such a distinguished writing history, I might suspect the same of him.

I did find the subplot around the life of pulp editors to be quite well done and compelling, but sadly, the overall plot did not match up to that standard. I would look back at his prior works before picking this one up.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Noir Sesibilities with a Novelist's Touch June 17, 2012

By Joseph J. Maniscalco

Format:Paperback

I have been a fan of Hard Case Crime novels since the line's inauguration some years ago. The books are consistently enjoyable reads from their pulp plots to the fantastic cover art.
Occasionally the books supersede their genre, and succeed as novels as well as genre fiction.
Joseph Koenig's "False Negative" is an example of the best of the Hard Case Crime line. The novel stays true to the familiar format of noir while including excellent characterization ranging from the gritty protagonist-- a flawed newspaper journalist, a victim or two, and even the villain.
The setting--mostly Atlantic City, New Jersey in a vague past, probably the mid 1950s or early 1960s, works as the perfect spot for young women anxious to become successful models, or even Miss America, and a chilling killer who preys on their needs.
"False Negative" is another Hard Case Crime success; it's why this reader anxiously awaits each offering.