Customer Reviews

Ice Harvest

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Charlie Arglist is a crooked attorney who, with his associate Vic, has ripped off a large sum of money from his employer, the mob boss of Wichita. It's Christmas Eve, 1979, and Charlie is making the rounds of strip bars, killing time until he can make his escape in the morning. As the long night wears on Charlie gradually realizes that his scheme has gone horribly, horribly wrong. The bodies begin to pile up and Charlie becomes more and more desperate until it all leads to a mordantly ironic conclusion. "The Ice Harvest" is a short, sharp shocker. It's set in the worst year of the worst decade in recent American history, and is wonderfully satirical in its tour of the sleazy stripper-and-porn underbelly of midwestern America.

Like many others I first became aware of this novel because of the John Cusack-Billy Bob Thornton movie version. Screenwriters Robert Benton and Richard Russo came up with some memorably witty dialogue and fleshed out some of the characters like Thornton's Vic, Oliver Platt as Charlie's drunken buddy, and Randy Quaid's scary gangster. But uncertain and meandering direction caused the tension to slacken. Worse, rather than the book's swift decent into hell, the filmmakers imply that Charlie's ordeal has finally made a man out of him, which is a serious misreading of the novel. And they tacked on a ridiculous "happy" ending instead of Phillips' bitter surprise coda.

So stick with the novel. The blurbs on the hardcover edition compare it to James Crumley, Jim Thompson, and James M. Cain. High praise indeed, but "The Ice Harvest" certainly earns it.

I have to love a writer who can tell a great story in under 300 pages. And make no mistake, this is a great story. Mean, lowdown and dirty, with a cast of characters who have not one redeeming quality between them. It all takes place in Wichita on Christmas Eve in 1979. Charlie is a shady lawyer who, with his partner, Vic, has stolen enough money from their mob connected boss to leave town and start a new, better life. While Charlie waits to hook up with his partner, who has the money, and to catch his plane, he wanders aimlessly around town in a snowstorm, visiting the strip clubs owned by his boss, drinking too much, and visiting his angry ex-wife and the children he has always neglected. Phillips captures the lonely, dreary lives of the strippers, drunks and employees of the seedy clubs and bars still open on a snowy Christmas Eve. There's an incriminating photo, a package full of money, and lots of double dealing. Charlie is a man who has some good intentions and impulses, but generally manages to overcome them. It's a violent book, funny and ironic, too. Phillips creates an atmospheric world of lonliness, brutality and sleaze. It's a stunning debut. I can't wait for the follow-up.

Categorizing this book as another Simple Plan or Fargo does not do it justice. Many of those elements are in this book, but treating The Ice Harvest like a second cousin to those works undermines its excellence. This book is a gem that stands out as a tragic look at what happens to a good man, turned bad, who tries to get started again. Don't miss this one, it is in a league of its own.

The obvious comparisons the reviews are making are to Fargo (yes, it's blackly funny and full of snow) and A Simple Plan (whose author is quoted on the back). I'd add Fredric Brown's His Name is Death-- another book about a guy who doesn't plan to be a murderer but winds up shedding gallons of blood everywhere he goes during one long night. And maybe the legendary Christmas episode of Dragnet, for its picture of Christmas Eve as experienced by barflies and strippers and everyone who doesn't have a home to go to even on that night.

The first part of the book has an authentically Jack Webbian feel for low-rent lowlife, taking us on an amusing tour of the skanky, pathetic underworld of a place like Wichita, where only a few regulars manage to keep the hot spots from closing up by 8:00 (though there's some hope of business picking up once church gets out). You're just about thinking that you've seen enough of that when Phillips drops the ax with a loud, wet thud, and then it's a breathless ride to grisly disaster for everyone Charlie Arglist meets. Christmas Eve proves to be a wonderfully mordant backdrop for the mayhem this book perpetrates, the one night that a sleepy place like Wichita is even more somnescent, and by the time that Charlie is disturbing a small child by rifling a Christmas tree in the wee hours of the morning, you know you've found the noir Christmas fable to serve as the antidote to all the Grinch-mania and commercial cheer that's about to descend on us. Ho ho ho, indeed.

I recently read Scott Phillips' "Cottonwood" based on a favorable review and enjoyed it a great deal. As often happens when I like a newly-discovered author, I go back and check some of his earlier work. Thus, I found "Ice Harvest" and I'm glad I did.

It's a very slight work, both in terms of length and plot. Clocking in at barely 200 pages, it tells the tale of a mob lawyer about to hit the road after scamming a large amount of money. The story is old but the way Phillips tells it is fresh and new. He doesn't insult the reader by spelling everything out up front; he lets the story unfold leisurely as the lawyer, preparing to leave, makes his way around town on a bitter cold Christmas Eve. What I found refreshing is that Phillips doesn't spell out every character in terms of who he or she is; he lets you discover it. People pop up, their relationship to the lawyer is unclear, names are tossed out and the reader isn't sure who they are, but at the end it all makes perfect sense. In other words, Phillips is an author who has respect for the intelligence of his audience. His writing is crisp and the atmosphere he creates is vivid. You feel like you know the characters and their milieu; everything seems real.

As in most noir fiction, no one is what you would call an upstanding citizen but Phillips makes you care about all of them. And the final denouement, which I have to admit I didn't see coming, left me smiling; it felt just right. It is so refreshing, after having recently read a James Patterson novel, to find an author who cares about such things as plot, characterization, and atmosphere. This is an excellent piece of work, highly recommended.

The Ice Harvest might not be for everyone. I say that because it is as unsentimental and violent as can be. Not that many people die here in comparison to even your average James Bond flick, its just you get to know everyone here a little bit and some of the acts are brutal in their cold boldness.

For myself, this was part of the appeal. I kept thinking that Scott Phillips had a remarkably similar narrative voice to that of Richard Russo. Russo is one of the great masters of character development you will come across, so by equating the two, even with a tenuous thread, is a high complement in my book. What you will get is a story chalk full of individuals that immediately come to life and take on personalities that separate them from one another in an adept manner.

If every mystery/thriller was as good as `The Ice Harvest,' you wouldn't need reviews like this because you would know that you were in store for a first rate read. I would say that if you wanted a hard boiled knock down read, this is your book.

The Ice Harvest is a very short book, barely clocking in at 200 pages. And yet, reading this was the most fun I've had in a while. This is a noir story that goes back to the earlier times of crime fiction, where the likes of Raymond Chandler ruled the genre.

This gritty tale of crime is full of twists and turns and surprises. The book has everything you'd dream of finding in a crime novel; sex, drugs, alcohol, violence and, of course, lots and lots of money. Here, we have an attorney, Charlie, who's spending his last night in the city. Christmas eve, during one heck of a freezing rain/snowstorm (and you can imagine the many great gags that emerge out of this situation).

Charlie works for people with lots of money, who own lots of bars and strip joints all across town. But Charlie has a secret. He's stolen a great deal of money from his bosses, and now he wants to leave his life behind and take the money with him. Of course, many people do not want to see him succeed and will try to stop him at all cost.

The Ice Harvest has a very simple plot. And yet, you can't help yourself, you just want to keep on turning the pages. I loved the characters in this book, especially Charlie, who's your anti-hero par excellence. There is as much to hate as there is to love in him. His choices are often amoral and yet, you also feel sympathy for him in the strangests of times.

The book is full of very colorful characters who all end up serving purpose to the plot. Phillips is a born storyteller; from the very first page, he takes you by the hand to bring you along a very wild and very fun ride. He knows when to end a storyline and starts a new one, when to end a joke before it gets old, or when to make a character disappear because he or she simply isn't needed anymore. This, you would only find in a master storyteller, so it is quite surprising to find these qualities in a first novel.

If there is one complaint I have about the book, it would be its length. Maybe I would have liked to see more. Then again, I'm not sure that anymore subplot would have helped the narrative. In any case, as it is, The Ice Harvest is a nifty little book that does exactly what it sets out to do; to bring you a few hours of much deserved, much sought-after entertaiment. What more could you want from a crime novel?

The Ice Harvest is a nasty little novel, darkly funny, and ripe with irony - perfect for fans of noir fiction. It's a short novel with a pretty straightforward plot. A mob lawyer is killing time on Christmas Eve 1979, waiting until it's time for him and an accomplice to skip town with a whack of mob money. The novel hovers, in kind of holding pattern, for the first half of the novel, but kicks into high gear during the second half.

This novel is not for everyone. The characters are unlikeable and the story is set in the seedy world of strip clubs and massage parlours. It's dark and ugly and free of sentimentality. It's also morbidly funny, well written, and uncompromising mean-spirited. The ending is ironic and nasty.

The Ice Harvest doesn't have the same emotional gravity of a novel like A Simple Plan, but it's great fun if you like crime fiction in the spirit of Fargo.

Nothing says Christmas like strippers, cocaine and free flowing alcohol. Well, it does if your name is Charlie Arglist and you're a crooked lawyer about to blow town for good.

The dark, shocking, frequently violent, but solidly funny narrative of The Ice Harvest begins at 4:15 pm December 24th and
ends at mid-morning the following day. All of the action, and there's quite a bit of action, takes place in or near Wichita. Kansas. Charlie has embezzled a staggeringly large sum of money from his gangster boss and is just hours away from disappearing to parts unknown with the cash.

While a major league snowstorm rages, Charlie spends his last night in town driving around visiting and sometimes revisiting a number of his old haunts. These include a few assorted bars, his ex in-laws home, an old girlfriend's duplex, a couple of strip clubs, a massage parlor and a porn shop. In keeping with the spirit of the season, he manages to stay more or less drunk the entire time, even snorting some coke for good measure.

As Charlie makes his rounds, bad things start happening. His ex sister-in-law's husband vomits in the car, the abusive boyfriend of one of the strippers gets his fingers broken one by one, and oh yes, several people are murdered.

The Ice Harvest is a no holds barred study of a man largely bereft of redeeming qualities and the rather sordid world he inhabits. Written with originality and a healthy dose of riotously funny dark humor, this book merits a 5 star rating.

I was inspired to read The Ice Harvest after seeing the newly released film of the same name. The movie is faithful to the decidedly noirish tone of the book, but the two differ in a number of places including the ending. In my opinion, if you like the movie, you will love the book.

I couldn't tear myself away from this book. It was hilarious, realistic, and concise. In other words, they don't make 'em like this anymore.