Customer Reviews

Hell and Gone (Charlie Hardie)

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If there is someone writing more original plots in high quality popular fiction today than Duane Swiercynski, please let me know who is are. I've been a fan of DS ever since The Driver. Some of his ideas work out better than others, but he is always the master of the unforeseen, but fitting, plot twist.

Hell and Gone is the second book in a series about an ex policeman named Charlie Hardie. The first book introduced us to Charlie as he withdraws from the world after getting his partner on the Philadelphia police department and his family killed by gangsters. In LA, Charlie stumbles into a young actress on the run from The Accident People, and there is about 350 pages of mayhem that ensues. The first book ends with a cliffhanger and Hell and Gone opens right where the first book left off.

I'm not going to spoil what happens in Hell and Gone. What I will say is that DS employs a 'couldn't see this coming in a million years' plot twist which involves Charlie being trapped in a facility where the dividing line between good guys and bad guys is very, very thin. This gives the book a claustrophobic atmosphere very reminiscent of Sartre's play, No Exit. Isolating the action to a small, cramped facility is a new twist for DS and he pulls it off very well. As with the first book, ~ 350 pages of mayhem occurs, and there is a plot twist at the end which is even more bizarre, and left me wishing the publication date of the final book in the series was RIGHT NOW and not March of 2012.

The only series close to what DS is doing here right now is the series by Charlie Huston that begins with Caught Stealing. That is a fine series by a very fine author who also has thought up some pretty bizarre plots, and I would recommend it to anyone. Not having read the unreleased Point and Shoot, I can't compare them completely, but both are very worthwhile for readers of contemporary crime fiction.

If you have not begun the Fun and Games/Hell and Gone/Point and Shoot series, you have a choice. Buy the frist two and then wait like me until the third comes out, or wait until March, buy all three, and withdraw from the world to read all three back to back. Or you can just skip the series, but if you do, you're missing out on one wild ride. Charlie is someone who will stay with you for a very long time.

I loved Fun and Games but found this follow-up to be tedious and implausible. The first book had richer characters (including Hardie's), more imaginative situations and and a far better payoff. DS gets stuck in his underground prison and never really emerges. I stopped caring by page 100.

I read the first book in the Charlie Hardie trilogy, Fun and Games, back in the spring and it wound up becoming my favorite book of the year so far. While I've been fortunate to read a lot of great books this year, Fun and Games easily remains in my top three and I wouldn't be surprised to see it stay there. But what about its sequel, Hell and Gone? After a powder keg of a debut, I had to wonder just how in the hell Hell and Gone would be able to make par, let alone surpass, the first book. Now, if you haven't read Fun and Games yet, stop reading this right now and go find a copy, because I'm about to spoil the ending of the first book.

Hell and Gone picks up almost immediately after the crazy shootout at the end of Fun and Games. Charlie Hardie is beat up, broken down, shot, and handcuffed to the gorgeous woman who tried really hard to have him killed. Law enforcement and paramedics arrive, separate the two, and whisk Charlie off in an ambulance. But before he knows what's happening, he's drugged and whisked off to a secret location, only to get drugged again and taken to an even more secret location. Eventually he's awakened and finds himself in a room with Mann, the woman who tried to kill him, the woman working for a secret organization of assassins called "The Accident People" (if you've listened to the diatribes Randy Quaid has spewed for the last year or two about celebrity killers, in his efforts to evade U.S. authorities, then you know the type I'm referring to).

So, Charlie wakes up with no idea how long he's been unconscious, or why he's even still alive. Mann confronts him and tells him he's been conscripted, in a sense, to work for the same organization she works for. Turns out he's sent way underground to a super-secret security facility known as Site 7734. Seem like a peculiar name for an underground prison? Well, punch those numbers into a calculator and turn the calculator upside-down. Do you get the significance now? Yeah, not exactly idyllic conditions.

It's at this point where the story really goes down the rabbit hole--literally if you think about it. Where Fun and Games was a high-octane shoot-'em-up through the Hollywood Hills, Hell and Gone felt closer to a psychological thriller akin to The Prisoner. The only thing missing was a giant amorphous bubble chasing Charlie down when he tried to escape. There's an intriguing, albeit convoluted, subplot involving one of his fellow inmates, but the main focus of this book had Charlie trying to figure out where he was and how to get out in order to exact his revenge and save his family. But at every turn a monkey wrench is thrown into the gears of his surroundings and it becomes a game of simple survival.

The action and suspense is as palpable and hot-to-the-touch as I expected, but it was the setting and focus of the story that really threw me. I will heartily give Duane Swierczynski all the credit in the word for using rocket fuel where other authors might use gasoline to propel his books forward, but the Kafka-ish underground prison was about the last place on Earth I expected Charlie Hardie to wind up. And what's even crazier is where Charlie winds up at the end of the book. I can't even wrap my head around that plot twist.

In one sense I was disappointed with Hell and Gone because it didn't go where I expected it to go after Fun and Games. Conventional thinking on my part, I suppose. So in another sense, I have to tip my hat to Swierczynski for taking a Gatling gun to my preconceived notions. At this point, I have no idea what to expect when the third book comes out in 2012. I just know that I am on board Charlie Hardie's insane bandwagon and can't wait to read Point and Shoot.

HELL AND GONE is insane. Its author, Duane Swierczynski, is not, but rather a very talented guy who has written several comic titles for the Marvel Entertainment Group. He has also penned a number of thrillers, including FUN AND GAMES, the first installment in the Charlie Hardie series, of which HELL AND GONE is the second.

Hardie is an ex-cop who had been keeping body and soul together as a high-end housesitter. He is quite good at what he does, and is possessed of a skill set that makes him a very capable and dangerous guy. His problem is that he has run afoul of a powerful and seemingly omnipotent organization known as the Accident People, so that by the conclusion of FUN AND GAMES, Charlie was in custody for murdering an actress he was attempting to protect and grievously wounded. Things get worse in HELL AND GONE.

Even telling you a little about the book is telling you a lot, but I will tell you as much as I can without spoiling this crazy, upside-down story. Charlie finds himself in a hospital, is abducted by the Accident People, and spends some time with another doctor who apparently missed the "do no harm" part of the Hippocratic Oath. After an initially undetermined amount of time, Charlie regains consciousness in a prison. And it's not just any prison. Charlie has no idea where he is, or who is running things, or even why he is there. All that he knows is what he is told: he is the new warden. He supervises a few guards who in turn supervise some very dangerous, very violent prisoners under conditions that are horrendous for both the supervisors and the supervised.

Charlie undergoes a series of tests, some of which he passes, others of which he does not. Actually, the deck is stacked against him and everyone else in the prison, including a woman who knows who he is, even though he has never seen her before. The food is awful, the temperature is too cold, and the showers look like they haven't been cleaned since...well, ever. And Charlie is told there is no way out. But he figures that if there is a way in, there is a way out. His plan is to find that way out, escape, figure out where he is, discover who did this to him, and exact revenge. Of course, the Accident People are holding Charlie's family over him like the sword of Damocles, but Charlie has that covered. At least he thinks he does. He puts his plan in motion and carries it out. Well, some of it.

If you ever read a comic book story arc, or religiously watched "Breaking Bad," "24" or "Lost," you have to read FUN AND GAMES, HELL AND GONE and, when it's published in 2012, POINT AND SHOOT. The plot of the trilogy reads like it was created by Franz Kafka and Philip K. Dick after a night of drinking boilermakers. And it reads like it was written by Duane Swierczynski, who will keep you up all night long, reading and wondering just what will happen next and make you sorry when you find out.

Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

Ever heard the expression "Out of the frying pan, into the fire"? Yeah, that pretty much sums up Charlie Hardie's life. When we last saw Charlie at the end of Fun & Games he was in bad shape, having just been through two hellacious days culminating in a shootout of epic proportions which left him battered, bleeding and on the brink of death.

Picking up right where Fun & Games left off, Hell & Gone opens with Charlie in the back of an ambulance being whisked off for life saving treatment. Unfortunately for Charlie his destination isn't a legitimate hospital, but a facility where the "Accident People" - the shadow organization Charlie ran afoul of in Fun & Games - nurse Charlie back to health in order for him to serve their agenda.

Waking after an indeterminate amount of time, Charlie finds himself in a concrete bunker faced with an ultimatum: try to leave and die, or get in the elevator and ride it down to... well, Charlie's not exactly sure where. Not wanting to die, obviously, he takes the elevator ride and ends up in a highly secrete, ultra secure prison facility far underground which he is informed holds the most dangerous prisoners in the world. Much to his amazement Charlie has not been sent there to join their ranks, but to become the facility's warden.

Knowing he must escape from the inescapable facility in order to protect his family from the Accident People, Charlie begins feeling out not only the guards but the prisoners as well. During that process he begins to question whether it's really the prisoners or the guards that pose the real threat, as no one is who they initially appear to be on the surface. What unfolds from that setup is a high octane, mind-bending adventure that only author Duane Swierczynski could have penned.

As he did in Fun & Games, Swierczynski shows himself once again to be a master of pacing, though here he downshifts gears somewhat to tremendous effect. If Fun & Games played out like a series of never-ending, rapid-fire machine gun attacks, Hell & Gone is the equivalent of a few very strategically placed bunker busters. Where Fun & Games unfolded at a breakneck pace that left both Charlie and the reader gasping for breath, Hell & Gone uses Charlie's creeping sense of frustration and confusion to slowly build to an almost unbearable level of tension.

You'll find yourself as off-guard as Charlie when Swierczynski rolls out twist after twist, and his depiction of the isolation of the cramped and oppressive subterranean facility is so realistic you'll get claustrophobia just reading about it. Of course there being a third book in the series and the main character being nicknamed "Unkillable Chuck" it's not exactly a spoiler to say that Charlie manages to find a way out of the facility. But just how he does it - and where he ends up - you'll have to read for yourself to find out. Just remember that expression, "Out of the frying pan, into the fire."

It takes a truly talented author to make going to hell sound like fun, but Swierczynski is unquestionably a silver-penned devil. Trust me on this, you definitely want to get yourself Hell & Gone.

"All human evil comes from a single cause - man's inability to sit still in a room."

The wait is over, and "Hell and Gone," the middle of the trilogy that started with July's deliciously warped "Fun and Games," is on the street. Not that more evidence is needed, but Duane Swierczynski is firmly established as the unconventional creative genius of pop thriller fiction: hip, irreverent, and unconventional - Charles Bukowski for a generation consumed less with anger than with entertainment.

"Hell and Gone" starts with the prologue of spoiled sorority girl Julie Lippman tracking down her missing boyfriend. Fast forward sixteen years, and we pick up where "Fun and Games" left off - kind of - with a battered and broken Charlie Hardy being whisked away, barely alive, in the type of ambulance who'd expect to find on the Styx. It goes from there to Kafkaesque surrealism as Hardy finds himself "warden" in an aging and decrepit underground prison with a handful of iron-masked inmates held in cages by a sadistic team of Nazi-attired guards. Hardy, virtually crippled with a bullet-damaged arm and leg, stumbles through a pair of mazes: one physical in trying to escape from apparently inescapable confines, the other psychological in figuring out where he is, exactly who put him there, and why. Time loses meaning but Hardy, focused on escaping to insure his wife and son are protected, manages - barely - to maintain his sanity despite the mind-twisting enigma of the guards and their wards, and violence that makes even "Fun and Games" look like Sesame Street. Without giving too much away, trust that Hardy's house sitting disaster of "Fun and Games," Julie Lippman's mysterious opening chapter, and Hardy's incarceration knit nicely together in a climax that sets up Swierczynski's final episode, "Point and Shoot," due in March.

"Hell and Gone" is a classic from the guy who dreams up off-beat fare like "Secret Dead Men," "The Blond," and "Severance Package" - a lurid light speed-paced romp through a parallel plane making all other black helicopter-themed plots look playfull. Swiercynski is a talented writer who so evidently enjoys his craft - will be tough having to wait till March to wrap this one up.

Charlie Hardie has just survived a near death experience that rivaled his days on the force. He is supposed to be doing a routine housesitting job but wound up taking a bullet and becoming an accused murderer. Now everyone thinks he is on the run not being held in some unknown, top security prison. Charlie discovers all too quickly that the truth is more horrific that any fiction when it comes to the world of those that make your problems go away.

Charlie doesn't know why exactly he is being held, but figures it has to be about what he stumbled upon that is coming back to haunt him. Charlie discovered an infamous secret organization that "cleans" up the mess of the rich and famous by making whatever disaster they have created go away with no one the wiser. Everyone in the prison is being manipulated by a voice without a face, which treat the guards and prisoners interchangeably making you wonder who really is a criminal.

Every guard has an objective, all the prisoners have a story, but the only plan Charlie has is escape. Whatever means he has to use to make that happen will be enacted upon to secure his freedom. He has connections on the outside that are hopefully looking for him but when you don't know the day or time it is difficult to understand if too much time has passed for anyone to care anymore.

Duane Swierczynski has shown that he can take a story and keep running with it book after book. The difficulty is when your first book is phenomenal how do you top it? By writing a spectacular second book! The story picks up where the last book leaves off and continues the ride through the tunnel of confusion and deception with the reader holding on not knowing what is going to happen next. You don't have to believe in a shadow world of manipulation, but after you read this book trust me, you will.

It is very difficult to discuss a high concept novel without spoiling the story, particularly one as `high concept' as this. Hell and Gone is the second novel in the Charlie Hardie trilogy. Following Fun and Games and preceding Point and Shoot (coming in March, 2012), Hell and Gone is much more than a transitional book. It is a freestanding novel, with a brief summary of what occurred in Fun and Games and--at the end--a look ahead to what is coming in the final novel of the trilogy.

Charlie Hardie is (in Fun and Games) a professional detective/housesitter. Guarding a home in the hills above Los Angeles he comes into violent contact with `The Industry', a shadowy organization with vast resources whose summum bonum is the acquisition of money at any cost. Vicious, ruthless, cruel, violent, unforgiving, sadistic . . . you name it . . . that's The Industry.

In Hell and Gone Charlie is their prisoner. He is taken to a subterranean prison whose location is unknown to both its inmates as well as its guards. When a new occupant arrives, he or she takes a one-way elevator ride to the bottom. The top of the prison, at ground level, is then re-sealed with concrete and steel. If one attempts to leave the prison (identified only by a number) everyone remaining in the prison--including the aspiring escapee--dies. (We don't know how--gas? Flooding? An explosion?)

When Charlie arrives in the prison he is informed that he is the new warden, serving directly under the control of a shadowy `prisonmaster'. Suddenly, one of the prisoners recognizes him and informs him that the prisoners are actually the former guards and that the guards are the original prisoners.

How can Charlie sort this out? And once he has identified the good guards/prisoners and the evil guards/prisoners, how can he stage a revolt? And how could he escape from an inescapable, sealed space with a pre-programmed death device? And will he ever find the leaders of The Industry and get his just revenge for the hell that they have put him through?

This and other questions (one concerning a subplot that is detailed in the novel's prologue) will be answered in the course of Hell and Gone.

Duane Swierczynski is, simply speaking, the most imaginative crime writer in the business today. Hell and Gone is wild, woolly, seemingly over the top and, in its way, very plausible and even realistic. As his readers know, DS has written for Marvel Comics and his Charlie Hardie novels bring the hyper-serious, highest possible stakes ethos of comic book fiction to the crime novel. We're talking dramatic sound effects (Thwack!), unexpected, mind-blowing plot twists and real-life characters with superhero impulses. As has often been said, it's not much of a universe if it's not worth saving every day.

The wonderful foundational twist in Hell and Gone is that the most fantastic of plots and settings is grounded in something that actually happened (and is recreated fictionally here). Every question that the curious, sceptical, mind-blown reader could think to ask (why doesn't The Industry just kill all these people?) is answered in detail. This is very, very clever writing.

Personal disclosure: I read it in one day, setting all other responsibilities aside. I could not help myself. And I absolutely cannot wait until the arrival of Point and Shoot next month. As one commentator said, you have several choices on how to approach the trilogy. One way is to wait for the third book and then read all three of them together. Good luck with that. After reading Fun and Games and realizing I was in the midst of a trilogy, I couldn't wait for number three to appear before reading number two.

Bottom line: another winner from Mulholland Books. Devour it.

This book is the sequel to the author's "Fun & Games" which I read a week ago. That first novel features Charlie Hardie, a burned-out ex-something-or-other who worked sort of for the Philadelphia Cops. His nickname was "Unkillable Charlie" and he was more or less a hired gun. A horrific incident essentially sent him packing out of the department and the city, and now he's essentially homeless, going from place to place house-sitting and watching endless DVDs; his mindnumbing life is interrupted by a violent series of events which result in him being wounded and arrested. This second book starts where the first book leaves off, with Charlie being transported to the hospital---and then kidnapped from there. Eventually, he wakens in a "prison", somewhere underground, which is run by a series of pretty crazy guards. For whatever reason, Charlie's been put in charge, but it takes a great deal of work for him to figure out what's going on, and who's doing it.

Someone else here noticed the similarity to Charlie Huston's Hank Thompson trilogy, "Caught Stealing," "Six Bad Things," and "A Dangerous Man." The characters are very different from one another: Huston's Thompson starts out, anyway, a more or less harmless ex-baseball player who tends bar in New York City, while Charlie was once dangerous, and could be again if provoked. However, both have wounded personalities, tormented by events in the past that they'd rather forget. Both trilogies have a terrific first book. Huston and Swierczynski have similar writing styles, both using short, punchy sentences, and both plot their books similarly, with a sort of pulp-fiction style reminiscent of the '50s books. This probably stems in part from the fact that both men started their writing careers in comic books, where I'm assuming you hook your audience in a page or two, or go look for other work. This pulp style resembles the better books of the era, by authors like Jim Thompson.

However, the books aren't completely archaic and old-fashioned. One of the interesting things about Huston is that he's adopted what you might call "customs" from the Sci Fi and Fantasy world, and used them in crime fiction. The most obvious of these is the use of trilogies and the like for crime novels, something that typically is done with a fantasy or sci fi series, but is rare in crime fiction. The Thompson books actually should probably be reissued in one volume, because really it's one long book, as opposed to 3 short ones. "Caught Stealing" works by itself, but the other 2 books don't stand alone very well. "Six Bad Things" wasn't a bad book, but it definitely wasn't as good as "Caught Stealing."

I think the same thing holds true here, on several levels. For one thing, "Hell & Gone" isn't as good a book as "Fun & Games." The story is sort of confined to the prison that Charlie finds himself in, and though the first book spends a lot of time in the house Charlie's supposed to be sitting, somehow it's not the same. And like "Six Bad Things", if you picked up "Hell & Gone" having not read "Fun & Games" you might have trouble figuring out why these people are tormenting Charlie so horribly (though Swierczynski does add some exposition). It is, however, suspenseful, and the author involves interesting characters and has Charlie do interesting things, to figure out what's going on.

I like this series, to be honest, and I'm looking forward to the 3rd book. Supposedly it's due out in March.

The first book (Fun & Games) is a tribute, homage or rip-off of 80s action movies, which it mimics and references constantly, making an enormously enjoyable read with enough character to keep it interesting. This book is rather different, however. Less action oriented, instead we start with our impossible-to-keep-down hero in bad physical shape. Rather than keep in the same vein as the Fun & Games, Swierczynski bravely digs in a different direction - deep into the pains and mental battles of the protagonist. Does it succeed? Hell yes. Instead of the Die Hard era Bruce Willis against-all-odds hero, we see a man struggling against impossible odds both externally and internally. Less roller coaster (though this is relative - it still has enough action for any hardboiled junkie) and more introspective, but more interesting for it, this sets up the third book in the promised trilogy nicely. We've seen all this character can be and do on two fronts now, and I can't wait for the third.