The Ice Harvest

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 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.

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.