Review
Advance praise forThe Ethical Assassin
“Gripping entertainment from the opening pages–a terrific read with the page-turning energy of a first-rate thriller, but also far more than that. David Liss has written a genre-bender with more than its share of white-knuckle suspense, vivid characters, and surprising humor.”
–Joseph Finder, author of Company Man
“Hilarious, poignant, and laced with paranoia, The Ethical Assassin reads like a Hardy Boys mystery on acid. David Liss pulls out all the stops in this Homeric coming-of-age tale. A vibrant and sweaty page-turner, this book explodes with fresh, memorable characters and a soundtrack I’d like to own.”
–Mark Haskell Smith, author of Moist and Delicious
“Hypnotic and addictive storytelling.”
–Lee Child, author of One Shot
“Imagine David Lynch’s bizarre masterpiece Blue Velvet, scripted by Edna Buchanan and Carl Hiaasen. It’s a blast.”
–Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
About the Author
David Liss is the author of A Spectacle of Corruption, The Coffee Trader, and A Conspiracy of Paper, winner of the 2000 Edgar Award for Best First Novel. He lives in San Antonio with his wife and daughter, and can be reached via his website at www.davidliss.com.
From The Washington Post
David Liss has a nose for history. He can smell it hundreds of years away. His debut, A Conspiracy of Paper, and its sequel, A Spectacle of Corruption, reeked of gritty 18th-century London. The Coffee Trader captured the scent of unwashed whores along with the best part of waking up in 17th-century Amsterdam. Now, for the first time, Liss has written a contemporary novel, The Ethical Assassin, set in Florida, but his olfactory sense is as acute as ever. "A putrid miasma whirled and eddied through the streets of the trailer park," he tells us in the opening paragraph. "It smelled like a prison camp outhouse. Worse." Liss's previous novels were entertaining thrillers that also happened to teach us about the development of market economies in Europe. Intricate details about city life, including the smells of crowded streets without plumbing, were just part of the redolent charm of his scholarship. The Ethical Assassin is far less cerebral, but the stench is front and center, and the author is more didactic than ever. The story revolves around two of the nastiest enterprises in the world -- pig farming and crystal meth production -- but what really has Liss holding his nose is the moral rot of a society that eats meat. His narrator is a charmingly sarcastic 17-year-old named Lem Altick, who survived high school by looking forward to college anywhere but in Florida. But when he got accepted to Columbia, his stepfather reneged on the promise of tuition money, so Lem is selling encyclopedias door-to-door to people who would be better off spending their money on food or propane. "Let me be absolutely clear about this," he tells us at the outset. "Not once, not one single time, no matter how happy I was to make a sale, did I ever do it without the acid tinge of regret.... but I was good at sales, good at it in a way I'd never been good at anything in my life. Sure, I'd done well in school, on my SATs, that sort of thing. But those were solitary activities, this was public, communal, social. I, Lem Altick, was getting the best of others in a social situation, and let me tell you, that was new, and it was delicious." We meet Lem in a little speed-trap town that's home to a pig farm. Lem is working on a classic trailer-trash couple named Karen and Bastard. "It ain't my real name, but it's my real nickname," Bastard tells him. Lem runs through his shtick ("Would you be happier if your child was learning more?") and wins them over, but just as he reaches for their check, a man opens the door and shoots Karen and Bastard in the head. That's always a deal breaker. This "ethical" assassin introduces himself as Melford and quickly goes about framing Lem for the double murder, then helping him elude the police chief, who turns out to be a psychotic killer, rapist and drug manufacturer. Zany encounters ensue. A boys' club founder keeps his pedophilia just barely in check. His sexy assistant is a Siamese twin haunted by her dead sister. More bodies pile up. Chapters jump from one cliffhanger to the next. As Lem realizes that the encyclopedia biz is really a front for selling something far more lucrative, gangsters start to close in on him, and the only person he can depend on is Melford, the man who blew away his last two customers. All this is great fun, and if Liss is trespassing on Carl Hiaasen's turf, well, who cares? It's a big state. What's more troubling is the heavy-handed moralizing that Liss dishes out in this otherwise comic thriller. Once he's dispatched Karen and Bastard, Melford spends the rest of the novel patiently leading Lem (and us) to the wisdom of animal rights, with a dose of wide-eyed Marxism. There's a tedious earnestness to these passages, as though we've been trapped by one of those well-meaning volunteers on the street with a clipboard who wants to explain why our lives are immoral. Several times, the novel's humor evaporates, even the plot is suspended, and the colloquy begins: "What about medical research?" "Shouldn't we have the right to take advantage of our position on the food chain?" "Is cruelty motivated by capital less evil than other kinds of cruelty?" Liss is a vegan, and I'm deeply sympathetic to his cause, but while reading The Ethical Assassin, I was struck by what a shaky soapbox a novel makes. If he didn't shoot me first, Melford would explain that capitalist ideology has blinded me to the revolutionary possibilities of fiction, but there's no sense in trading off the power of storytelling -- particularly as well as Liss can do it -- for an ethical debate. Although I'm now determined to swear off buying encyclopedias from door-to-door salesmen, novels less polemical than The Ethical Assassin have brought me closer to Liss's point of view on eating meat. I started using free-range eggs after reading Rob Levandoski's Fresh Eggs, and I gave up pork altogether after Annie Proulx's That Old Ace in the Hole. Fiction should entice, not shove us, toward moral improvement. The key, as Melford knows, is in the execution. ~ Ron Charles is a senior editor of Book World. Reviewed by Ron Charles
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
It was friday evening, just after seven o’clock, and still bright as noon. In Florida, August is perpetual, relentless, refusing to unclench its fist, and despite the looming sunset it was close to a hundred degrees. The heat settled in my body, dull and enervating, and it accentuated the smell that hung in the air—a stink both tangible and elusive, like the skin of grease on a cold bowl of stew. It was more than a smell, but a thing, heavy enough to weigh like cotton balls shoved into the back of your throat. A putrid miasma whirled and eddied through the streets of the trailer park. I don’t mean hot-garbage-by-the-curb smells—rotting chicken carcasses and old diapers and potato peelings. No such luck. It smelled like a prison camp outhouse. Worse.
I stood there on the spiderwebbed concrete step leading up to the mobile home, propping open the screen door with my shoulder. Sweat trickled down my side and clung to my overworked undershirt. I’d been at it since a little after lunch, and I was in a haze now, an automaton lost in the blankness of ringing doorbells, delivering my pitch, lurching forward again. I glanced left and right at the faded white mobile homes and thought it both amusing and profoundly sad that I couldn’t remember coming down this street.
I wanted nothing more than to make it inside someone’s home, to get out of the heat. The trailer’s window-unit air conditioner hummed and rattled and almost bucked, trickling condensation into an eroded gully of white sand. I was overdressed for the heat, and every few hours I needed a blast of AC, like an antidote, in order to keep up the fight. I’d chosen my attire not for comfort but to look smart and to do business: tan chinos, wrinkles smoothed out by the humidity, a thickly striped blue-and-white shirt, and a square-cut, knit turquoise tie, maybe three inches wide. It was 1985, and I thought the tie looked pretty cool.
I knocked again and then jammed my thumb into the glowing peach navel of the doorbell. No answer. The muted hum of a television or maybe a stereo barely pierced the door, and I saw a slight rustle of the slatted blinds, but still no answer. Not that I blamed them, whoever they were, squatting behind their sofa, pantomiming Shhhh with fingers pressed to lips. I was on their stoop, a teenager in a tie, trying to sell them something, they would think—rightly so—and who needed that? Then again, who needed them? It was a self-selecting system. I’d been doing this for only three months, but I knew that much already. The ones who came to the door were the ones you wanted to come to the door. The ones who let you in were the ones you wanted to let you in.
The heavy brown leather bag, which my stepfather had given me reluctant permission to borrow from its mildewing box in the garage, dug a trench into my shoulder. Touching the thing always made me feel dirty, and it smelled like split-pea soup. He hadn’t used the bag in years, but my stepfather had still thought it important to act put-upon before he reluctantly agreed to let me clean out the mouse droppings and polish it with leather restorer.
I adjusted the strap to lessen the pain and plodded down the steps and along the old walkway that bisected the lawn—really just an ocean of sand peppered with a few islands of crabgrass. At the street I looked in both directions, unsure which way to go, which way I’d come from, but down to my left I saw a flyer flapping lazily against the corner mailbox, affixed with a long swath of dull silver duct tape. The missing cat flyer. I’d seen—what?—two or three of those that day? Maybe twice as many missing dog flyers. Not all the same dog or cat, either, and I was sure I’d passed by this one already. It had a photocopied picture of a white or tan tabby with dark splotches across its face, its mouth open, tongue barely visible. Anyone seeing a plump kitty named Francine should call the number below.
I headed away from the flyer. I was sticking to the same side of the street, passing a vacant lot to get to the next trailer. My legs, defying the demand for pep from my brain, moved slowly, shuffling almost. I looked again at my watch, which hadn’t much budged since just before I rang the bell. At least four hours to go, and I needed to rest. I needed to be able to sit still for a while, but that wasn’t really it. What I needed was relief from thinking about the job, even a good night’s sleep, as if such a thing were possible, but I could give up all hope of sleep. It wouldn’t happen on the road, when I worked all day and half the night. Not at home, on my one day off, when there were errands to run and friends and family to see before the cycle began again. I’d been operating on less than four hours a night for three months now. How long could I do it? Bobby, my crew boss, said he’d been doing it for years, and he seemed okay.
I had no plans of doing it for years. Just one year, that was all, and that was plenty. I was pretty good at the job—more than pretty good—and I made money, but there I was, seventeen years old, and I could feel myself aging, feel soreness accumulating in my joints, feel a beleaguered rounding in my shoulders. My eyes didn’t seem to work as well, my memory had begun to frazzle, my bathroom habits were irregular. It was the lifestyle. I’d gone to sleep at home, just outside Ft. Lauderdale, the night before. The alarm had jerked me out of bed at six so I could get to the local office by eight, where I’d sat in pep meetings until we all hopped in the car and headed out to the Jacksonville area, checked into a motel, and got to work. Another standard weekend gets under way.
Tires rumbled behind me, and I instinctively veered over toward the empty lot, careful to avoid the nests of fire ants and the prickly weeds that would find their way to my dark gray gym socks, which only a seventeen-year-old could convince himself passed for respectable as long as no one saw the sporty stripes.
Keeping over to the side was the smart thing in places like this. Locals wouldn’t have to look at me twice to see that I was way out of my element. They would throw mostly empty beer cans or swerve at me, half-playful and half-homicidal. They would shout things, and I thought it a pretty good guess they were withering insults, insults that would sting like salt in my eyes if I could hear them, but they’d be garbled against the whoosh of a speeding truck and the crackling speakers blasting 38 Special. I didn’t know if the other guys had to put up with the same crap, but I doubted it.
A dark blue Ford pickup rolled to a stop. It looked freshly washed, and its paint glistened like a tar pit in the glare of the almost setting sun. The passenger-side window lurched down, and the driver, a guy in his thirties with a black T-shirt, learned over toward the window. He looked handsome in an odd way, like the debonair guy in a cartoon out to steal the hero’s girl, but like a cartoon character, he was oddly distorted. He was puffy. Not fat or heavy or anything. Just puffy, like a corpse beginning decomposition or a man suffering from an allergic reaction.
The puffiness was weird, sure, but what I mostly noticed was his hair. He kept it sheared to almost a military cut, but in the back it came down in a straight fan to his shoulders. Today they call this style a mullet. In 1985 I’d never seen a mullet before, had no idea what a mullet was, what it was called, or why someone might choose to endure such a thing except for the simple thrifty pleasure that comes from having two haircuts on one head. All I knew was that it looked monumentally stupid.
“Where you going?” the guy asked. His voice buckled under the weight of his syrupy accent, uniquely Florida. Half pecan pie, half key lime. We were about thirty miles outside of Jacksonville, and heavy accents were par for the course.
I’d lived in Florida since the third grade and had long been afraid of just about everyone outside a major urban center. In no way did I consider this cowardice, but common sense. Despite the popular belief that big cities like Ft. Lauderdale and Jacksonville and Miami were nothing but suburbs of New York or Boston, they were, in reality, dense with longtime Florida natives, a vocal minority of whom included Confederate flag wavers, “Dixie” hummers, and cross burners. These cities were also full of transplants from all over the country, so things balanced out reasonably well. Step out to the boonies, and the flavor became considerably less cosmopolitan.
I now stood, as far as I was concerned, in the boonies, which meant that the iridescent kick my jew ass sign on my forehead, visible only to those who preferred Hank Williams Jr. to Sr., began to throb and fire off sparks. I conjured a polite smile for the pickup driver, but the smile turned out badly, crooked and sheepish.
For an instant, I considered giving the guy my line, about how I was in the neighborhood to speak with parents about education, but I knew instantly it was a bad idea. Puffy Guy with his weird hair and his pampered pickup radiated a low tolerance for bullshit. My crew boss, Bobby, could probably get away with the pitch. Hell, Bobby would probably score off the guy, but I was not Bobby. I was good, maybe the best guy in Bobby’s crew—maybe the best guy Bobby had found in a long while. But I wasn’t Bobby.
“I’m selling,” I said with a startling realization, like the flip of a switch, that I wasn’t merely uneasy, I was afraid. Even in all that heat, I fe...
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