REVIEW: "The Kill Fever" (Wolf #1) by Dean Breckenridge

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If you like your action-crime fiction the same way you like your women—short, no fat, hard-edged, and packing a wicked punch—then you’ll be in hardboiled heaven reading this short story by Dean Breckenridge. The first in a planned series, “The Kill Fever” introduces us to Wolf, a shadowy protagonist who roams the gray wasteland between the law and the lawless. Wolf’s enigmatic appearance is summed up with this brilliant economy of prose: “Callaway knew him only as Wolf. Nobody knew his first name. Nobody knew where he had come from. Callaway didn’t think he was a bad guy; wasn’t entirely sure he was a good guy.”

This kind of sparse, stripped to the bone style suffuses this story from its first syllable to its final pronoun. Breckenridge wastes nary a single word; in fact, if there is a flaw—and that “if” is certainly debatable—it’s that setting and description take a back seat (actually, they take the trunk, right under the spare tire and the dead hooker) to dialogue, pace, and action. There is a vibe about “The Kill Fever” that is reminiscent of Richard Stark and in the hedonistic halls of hardboiled, there may be no greater compliment.

In fact—and forgive the imminent blasphemy—for action fans, “The Kill Fever” may actually be superior to Stark’s stuff, because Breckenridge ensures Wolf gets into plenty of gun scrapes over the course of a 51-page story. Hardboiled writers frequently fail to include enough gun-slinging to attract carnage-craving action aficionados, but Wolf packs plenty of heat and isn’t afraid to blow holes in the bad guys.

 

Granted, if you want graphic kills, this may not be up your dark literary alley. This is not that kind of story. You don’t write a lean, mean, pared-to-the-bone thriller and then go excessive to describe what a bullet does to human anatomy. So you get lots of “the bullet hit the man and dropped him,” but not so much “the bullet exploded deep inside his chest cavity, shredding the heart and blowing chunks of cardiac tissue into dripping rags of sodden meat as blood-fueled bone splinters shot across the room in a red, wet geyser and painted a crimson Picasso on the opposite wall.” See the difference? One is classic hardboiled. One is action splatterpunk. Nothing wrong with either one, but “The Kill Fever” is the former, not the latter.

 

I don’t read much hardboiled because of the aforementioned lack of action, but of the few authors I do follow in the genre, Breckenridge might just be my new favorite because he found a way to insert action-adventure tropes into the framework of hardboiled crime-thrillers. It’s not as easy as it sounds—I gave it a try (successfully or not is for the reader to decide) on “The Killing Question”—and I hope he continues to impress as this series continues. Because wolves are dangerous yet noble, fierce yet captivating … and so is Wolf.