The Ice Harvest

The Ice Harvest by Scott Phillips is a noirish crime story full of bleak humor. It is dark and violent as Charlie, a mobster lawyer, makes his final rounds to various seedy joints. He plans on leaving town later that light as he has embezzled money from his boss. The setting is mostly of sleazy nightclubs and strip joints and there is a raft of unsavoury characters that bring humor and pathos to the story. The book takes place in 1979, on a snowy Christmas Eve in Wichita, Kansas and presents Christmas in a totally unpleasant way. In this story Christmas is an inconvenience.

Like an accident waiting to happen the reader can see that bad things are ahead. We discover that Charlie isn’t alone in his embezzlement, his partner Vic, with show more whom he runs a couple of strip clubs with, is also involved. When Charlie finally goes to meet him, Vic doesn’t show. This opens up the possibility of betrayal and gives the book a sense of inevitable doom. The long night is full of twists and turns and the final twist at the end of the book is a doozy.

Written in simple, straight forward language, the author gives this quirky noir tale a mid-western flavor. Ironic and darkly humorous, The Ice Harvest was a book that I really enjoyed although I could see that it’s nasty side could put some people off. show less

Innocent, wide-eyed, dewy-breathed readers, be warned: reading The Ice Harvest by Scott Phillips will knock the living stuffing out of you. The noir-flavored novel smacks you square in the gut like the well-aimed fist from a tough guy like Humphrey Bogart, George Raft or James Cagney. If you don't know what you're getting into, you'll wind up gasping for breath and quite possibly bleeding from several orifices.

On the other hand, if you're a devoted fan of film noir, Phillips' debut novel is right up your dark alley. There are crosses, double-crosses, low-life dames, itchy-trigger gunmen and so much booze-soaked action that desperate alcoholics might be tempted to lick the pages.

At the center of all this lit noir is Charlie Arglist, a show more low-life lawyer knee-deep in the shady underworld of Wichita, Kansas. The entire novel takes place in 24 hours—Christmas Eve in 1979. From the first nicotine-and-whiskey pages, you realize there is no peace on earth and certainly no goodwill toward man in Charlie's world. As he waits for a crucial 2 a.m. meeting with an associate named Vic, Charlie stumbles through the seedy circles of Wichita: bars, strip clubs, adult bookstores and massage parlors. Then, just because it's Christmas Eve, he drops in to see his ex-wife and kids for good measure. Though there are many scenes of violence (including a particularly memorable finger-breaking episode), the chapter where Charlie shows up, giftless and skunk-drunk, at his estranged family's dinner is perhaps the most brutal passage in the book.

Let's face it, Charlie Arglist is a no-good, shiftless s.o.b. He's also, in a strange way, one of the most compelling characters—I call him "sympathetically irredeemable"—I've come across in a long while. You can't help but feel for the bum as he lurches from bad luck to worse. The tension mounts as Charlie circles Wichita in the graveyard hour, waiting for his rendezvous with Vic, a meeting that will start a new chapter in his life. You see, he and Vic are about to extort a large chunk of money from the mob boss who owns all the strip joints Charlie's visiting.

Phillips releases details about Charlie's scheme sparingly. Until the final pages, we don't know much about what he's doing—other than the fact that it involves a lot of money, some cocaine and a sexually-incriminating photograph. However, the fine print isn't important here—eventually, the murky mysteries will be revealed and resolved. It's the smoky atmosphere of gloom and doom that makes The Ice Harvest the relentlessly good reading experience it is.

For a first-time novelist, Phillips' grasp of the craft is enough to make even seasoned writers green-eyed with admiration. The Ice Harvest is tightly plotted and populated with the kind of characters you feel like you could reach out and touch (just be sure to thoroughly wash your hands afterward). Rabid film noir fans—the kind of people who have entire passages memorized from Double Indemnity and The Maltese Falcon—might spot some of the plot twists coming before they arrive on the page, but there are still plenty of mean Bogart punches pummeling your gut without warning.

The book is as nihilistic as they come, right on down to the shocker of an ending (I guarantee you won't see that punch coming), and it might be too gritty and profane for the more lily-livered readers. But for the strong and black of heart, it would be hard to find a more perversely satisfying novel this year. show less

This book is not for everyone. It's dark, violent and disturbing. However, it is positively intriguing and horrifying in a 'can't look away from that train wreck' kind of way. The plot moves at a rather leisurely pace, quietly setting up what turns out to be a jaw dropping set of events. The story is told in a very neutral way, which gives the violence the ability to knock the wind out of the reader. The conclusion is surreal, dark humor at its best and worst.

I like me a good down and dirty crime novel as much as I like just about any other read. No one is going to mistake Scott Phillips’ The Ice Harvest for great literature any time soon, and that’s a shame because books this enjoyable often get overlooked by the literati. This crime noir moves fast and straight out of the gate with profanity and nastiness. We meet Charlie Arglist, corrupt lawyer and sleazy club owner who spends Christmas Eve moving from strip club to crappy bar and back to another strip club, sucking down the booze and snorting coke when possible.By chapter two, a man’s been clubbed with a bat, we’ve learned Charlie’s blackmailing some local politicians, and we hear of a bouncer’s plans to break a guitarist’s show more hands for blacking his (the guitarist’s) girlfriend stripper’s eye. It’s just that kind of book.The bouncer makes good on that threat, which is no surprise from what we’ve read previously, understanding just what it is we’re talking about here. Care for more? Well, here’s what the bouncer sounds like sweet-talking someone on the phone: “Well, if this isn’t the rat-fuck of the century, I don’t know what is! …As far as I’m concerned you can grease up that Yule Log of yours and shove it up your shithole!...You’ll rue the day you thought you could pull this shit on me, you toothless old whore! I promise you will regret the day you were fucking born!” He slammed the phone receiver down, then picked it back up and screamed into it at the top of his lungs, then slammed it down into its cradle again and again, until finally, breathing hard, he looked up at Charlie and Pete. “Sorry,” he continued, “that was my mom. She wants me to pick up my kids tonight instead of tomorrow.”Portraits of moral corruption don’t come any cleaner and dirtier than that. If there’s a character with a redeeming feature, I must have missed it. Though I suppose a couple minor incidents — a man asking if Charlie’s all right after he slips on some ice or an ex-roommate of one of Charlie’s old girlfriends — could count as two drops of the milk of human kindness amidst all the darkness and filth. Just barely.Often books with despicable protagonists are hard to get through. Your natural inclination to sympathize with and like the main character gets constantly sidelined. Here, you don’t technically “like” Charlie Arglist — you just dislike everyone else so much more that you do find yourself rooting for his success. He’s not a bad guy per se, even if he does, drunkenly, snort a couple lines of cocaine with his brother-in-law prior to dropping in to the Christmas celebration of his ex-wife’s family. He justifies this to himself by thinking he should see his kids one last time before he leaves town and by not wanting to slur in front of his them.So you see, he’s considerate in his debauchery. He even goes so far as to waive stage-fees for strippers screwed over by Christmas Eve’s slow turnout. Occasionally you might worry that Charlie’s softer side is going to get him killed, but combinations of dumb luck and unimaginably moronic bravado carry him through mostly. When he breaks into a friend’s home around 4am Christmas morning, the resulting scenario is partly the Grinch confronting Cindy Lou Who and partly slapstick of a nicely broad physical kind.Exactly what Charlie is up to isn’t entirely clear until The Ice Harvest has made it to past the halfway mark, but public and private corruption play major roles, naturally. While he clearly needs to get out of town at some point in the relatively immediate future, Charlie dawdles, and, in the process, manages to burn every bridge, to make a series of bad judgments and to nearly give away all his hole cards before his ticket is solid and his cash is in hand. As the speed of the double-crossing begins to heat up, Charlie loses more and more safe havens and resources.In that last respect, the book could almost present itself as a kind of allegorical deconstruction of a man, peeling away each successive layer of social and psychological wrapping until he’s left with only his own unadorned selfishness and ego. Phillips likely isn’t going that far, but to watch Charlie Arglist move ever further down, down, down is in itself a thing of black and amusing beauty. The conclusion of this comedy of disaster makes everything spectacularly worthwhile. show less

Noir as they come, the Ice Harvest unfolds over one night as a small-time crooked mob lawyer's plan to make off with embezelled money slowly unravels.

The book is tightly plotted and the prose as sparse and cold as the winter night of its setting. there is nothing particularly unsurprising about the way the plot unfolds, and the 'shock' ending seems rather forced. All in all, its a well-written but unremarkable noir thriller.

I purchased this book after reading about it in "Books to Die For" and learning that it had been nominated for several awards including the Edgar Award for Best First Novel. While it is no doubt a crime novel, unfortunately for me it is by no means a mystery. I might have been tempted to give this a higher rating if I hadn't already read a very similar sort of book earlier this month - "The Getaway" by Jim Thompson. If you are a fan of noir crime novels, you will probably like this book but I find reading books in which all the characters are unpleasant and there is no puzzle to solve is just distasteful... but I can't give this 1* because the writing was good and despite the fact I found the plot disagreeable, I read it right through.

A fabulously engaging crime story. Unpredictable, horrifying in parts, but nonetheless a page turner - worth every minute!