Gritty new novel muscles to top of reading list

The Cobb Manor library specializes in trash, the deeper, darker descendants of Robert B. Parker’s Spencer detective novels.

The darker, the better. The more attitude, the better. The body count is not crucial. Sometimes a single murder is plenty if it is done in style and for a clearly defined purpose.

The height of Cobb Manor trash has always been “Dirty White Boys,” the tour de trash by Washington Post movie reviewer Stephen Hunter. His books are so good that you put them down to save some for later. You don’t want them to end.

There is a new book at the top of the shelf. The standard by which others will now be measured is “No Country for Old Men” by Cormac McCarthy. Although McCarthy is highly praised and wrote the well-received “Border Trilogy,” which includes “All the Pretty Horses,” I was blissfully unaware of him until the recent avalanche of publicity.

Esquire says the book contains “prose the most laudable, his characters the most fully inhabited, his sense of place the most bloodworthy and thoroughly felt of any writer.” When you finish this book, “you’ll have to wonder if you know any men at all,” Esquire warns.

Try the New Yorker. “McCarthy is a colossally gifted writer, certainly one of the greatest observers of the landscape. He is also one of the great hams of American prose who delights in producing a historic rhetoric that brilliantly ventriloquizes The King James Bible, Shakespearean and Jacobean tragedy, Melville, Conrad and Faulkner.”

The Boston Globe said the novel, “from its opening pages, carries a stripped-down doom-soaked prose that scares you before anyone rough shows up.”

Not bad.

I added the book to my ever-present shopping cart at Amazon.com. I now have 34 (count ’em) books to read in my room. But “Old Men” went to the top of the heap, just for its blood-red cover.

The plot, if you must know, opens with a (relatively) innocent cowpoke, Llewellyn Moss, stumbling upon the disastrous remnant of a heroin deal gone spectacularly bad on the prairie. He searches through the bodies and cars and finds a suitcase with $1 million-plus in cash. He takes it.

What a bad decision.

He knew it was a bad decision.

He did it anyway.

“It had already occurred to him that he would probably never feel safe in his life again and wondered if that was something you got used to. And if you did?”

The bad guys who want their money back hire the baddest villain ever, one Anton Chigurh (Sugar), who decimates the countryside and anyone unlucky enough to cross his path. Think of a 6-foot-6, demented Clint Eastwood. The assassin sometimes flips a coin to decide who lives and who dies.

When a shotgun is not good enough, Chigurh employs a hydraulic cattle gun that shoots a metal bolt into the victim’s head, leaving no ballistic trace whatever.

Chigurh is guaranteed to inhabit your future dreams.

As in Elmore Leonard novels, the good guy is not guaranteed to win in a McCarthy opus. In fact, the odds are stacked heavily against his very survival.

Good guy, third-generation sheriff Bell says of this cast of characters, “I used to say they were the same ones we’ve always had to deal with. Same ones my granddaddy had to deal with. Back then they was rustling cattle. Now they running dope. But I don’t know that’s true no more. I’m like you. I ain’t sure we seen these people before. Their kind. I don’t know what to do about them even. If you killed them all, they’d have to build an annex on to hell.”

Now that’s bad.

My new favorite.

Send complaints and compliments to Emmet Meara at emmetmeara@msn.com.