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Arizona Kiss
Raymond Ring
VG Crime paperback, 208 pages
Review by Gerald Houghton (1993)

Raymond Ring (or Ray Ring in the US) is according to the blurb, a former journalist and author of two previous crime novels. 

Arizona Kiss opens with journalist turned expose-photographer Russell Macky going literally underground to uncover a mining scandal that brings him to the attention of Alice Malone, a trailer-dweller carrying a grudge a mile wide against Judge Leo Harker, former hard-man of the bench with a nice sideline in illegal pit bull fighting. Intrigued by the faint smell of Pulitzer glory in his nostrils, Macky inveigles his way in to the shadowy world of the Judge and the bed of the increasingly sexually obsessed and progressively unstable Alice. But when he tries to go the extra distance to put a seal on the story, a colleague dies and the sassy photographer is sucked in to a maelstrom of violence and blackmail: 'I didn't set out to kill anyone,' he says. 'All I wanted was a good story.'

Ring dedicates Arizona Kiss to James M. Cain; Jim Thompson would have been equally at home in this world. This Arizona is a sun-baked environment peopled with characters ('defined by their state of mind') who operate not along lines of good and evil but on degrees of iniquity. Macky sees no problem in cajoling a beating from the Judge in pursuit of a greater truth, and by extension, a better story; the malodorous Judge for his part sees his cruel sideline activities as a perk of the years spent faithfully serving his community; and Alice has what looks to be a whole cupboard of ulterior motives that drive her on and only belatedly reveal themselves to the confused narrator.

There are inevitably echoes here: the Pulitzer-chasing Johnny Barrett of Sam Fuller's masterly Shock Corridor; and Kirk Douglas' criminally-bent newsman in Billy Wilder's classic Ace in the Hole come to mind. However, Ring brings enough of own hard-edged wit and sarcasm to carry the book over any potential comparisons, with crackling dialogue, a crash course in the etiquette of dog-fighting (recalling Charles Willeford's Cockfighter) and a final chapter that floats in and provides a pay-off of admirable inevitability and dreamlike looseness.

'Soon to be made into a major film,' completes the blurb and it's easy to see how Ring's sparse, energetic, sweat-soaked prose just cries out to go before the cameras. Just how you can pull it off without the late, great Warren Oates as the Judge remains to be seen, however. In the meantime, Arizona Kiss on paper is a delight. •

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