Criss Cross

by Tom Kakonis

Ex-con "Meat" Pitts needs ex-cop Mitchell Morse as an inside man for his daring robbery scheme

Genres: Mystery, Crime

322 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Tom Kakonis has been hailed by critics nationwide as the heir-apparent to Elmore Leonard… and for good reason. His stunning thrillers Treasure Coast, Michigan Roll, and Criss Cross, among others, blend dark humor with gritty storytelling for compelling, and innovative crime noir capers packed with unique, sharply drawn characters and shocking twists

Reviews

[James Thane · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this, his second novel, Tom Kakonis brings together a disparate cast of odd, strange and curious characters who come together very uneasily in the hope of making one big score. Principal among them is Mitchell Morse, a former college football player and ex-cop who's spiraled downhill to the point where he's now employed as a security guard at a Fleets superstore in Grand Rapids, Michigan, chasing down shoplifters.

Before being fired from his last job, Mitch had met a fellow security guard named Jean Satterfield. Mitch has not had a lot of success in long-term relationships, but he recognizes that Jean is a special woman who appeals to him in ways that most other women haven't. Once at Fleets, though, he meets a cashier named Starla Hudek. Starla is no great beauty, but there's a sexual energy about her that Mitch cannot resist and before long, he's juggling the two women and hoping that neither finds out about the other.

As this happens, Starla's husband, a bruiser nicknamed "Meat", is released after eight years in Prison. After all those years, Meat and his former cellmate, Ducky, are anxious to make a big score. Starla wants nothing to do with her husband and desperately wishes that she'd finalized their divorce while she had the chance. But Meat forces his way back into her life and you don't say no to a guy that large and intimidating.

Meat soon decides that knocking over the Fleets store where Starla works could be his ticket to a life of luxury. He connects with an alleged criminal mastermind named Kasperson whose job it will be to formulate the actual plan. Kasperson, at the moment, is posing as a doctor who specializes in reversing male baldness. The conspirators soon decide that they will need an inside man to help pull off the job, and Meat orders Starla to use her considerable sexual prowess to lure Mitch into joining the team.

What follows is an hilarious and entertaining romp, filled with double and triple crosses. Three million dollars is at stake here and with a score that large, you never know who you can trust. This is a book that should appeal to a lot of crime fiction fans, especially those who enjoy the work of writers like Kakonis's fellow Detroit author, Elmore Leonard.

[Bandit · Rating 4 out of 5]

Second read by Kakonis and just as good. Quite similar in fact, definitely a formula at work. Was trying to come up with a way to describe his particular brand of crime fiction and came up with white trash noir. That's pretty close. Not that all the denizens of his novels are white trash, it's all blue to no collar, there is a particular sort of hopelessness of small towns and small lives, the exhaustion of every day muddles, weighing down the soul like gravity. The John Mellencamp's cast of characters, albeit with a lot more criminal tendencies. Not quite expertly thieves, not quite upstanding citizens and desperate dreams of cash that'll buy a life on the other side of the metaphorical fence. It's . The hasbeens and neverweres and almosts and the wannabes aspiring to that one score that'll make it all worthwhile. And yet, there is such an awesome cadence to Kakonis' writing and dialogue and his characters, despite their numerous shortcomings, are so well rendered, that it makes for really enjoyable reading. There is a genuine literary quality to be found here, occasionally even some really impressive turns of phrase. Not to mention it's just sheer fun to read. Very entertaining robbery snafu thriller. Recommended.

[Kip · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like all hardcore bookworms, I can list the books that no one else seems to have heard of, but which have made a huge impact on my life as a reader. Daniel Woodrell, George Pelecanos, and Denis Johnson all mention this phenomenon in their admiring introductions to , respectively, They Don’t Dance Much by James Ross, Don Carpenter’s Hard Rain Falling, and Fat City by Leonard Gardner. “Books that didn’t catch a break,” in Woodrell’s words, “books that died early but just won’t stay dead.” Criss Cross, the second novel by Tom Kakonis, is one such book for me. This book came into my life more or less by chance over thirty years ago, and, though I wouldn’t learn the term for many years, in hindsight I can see it was my introduction to noir fiction – in terms of mood if not necessarily writing style. I opened it at random (to the nose-picking-at-the-dinner-table scene, if you must know) and was immediately drawn in by the book’s dark, twisted magic. And yet I’ve never met anyone who knows Criss Cross - or Kakonis for that matter, even though his first book was well-regarded (more on that later). And so, having lived with this book since eighth grade, I have lots to say about it, so much that I’m hardly sure where to start.

So I’ll lead off with the cast. The story is told from the alternating third-person perspectives of its main characters, who are introduced roughly in the order of their importance. The first one we meet is the downwardly mobile Mitchell Morse, a one-time college football star and former policeman with anger management issues (the latter is the reason he is no longer either of the former). Kakonis performs a neat little trick in opening the story with a scene that, at face value, would seem to have little to do with the synopsis on the back cover of the book. Next we meet Milo “Meat” Pitts, a hulking ex-con, fresh from prison and entirely unrehabilitated, and his former cellmate Ducky, whom another character rightly describes as a “moronic clown,” and who functions mostly as the comic foil for the dour and brutish Meat. There is also “Doc” Kasperson, a genteel fraudster Meat and Ducky know from prison, who is now running a bogus (and failing) hair-restoration clinic. Starla is our femme fatale, Meat’s ex-wife, whose magnetic sex appeal belies her trailer-park existence. And finally, there’s our wild card, Doyle Gilley, who until his very last appearance is nothing more than Kasperson’s “patient” at United Hairlines.

Meat has spent the last part of his time behind bars formulating a plan to rob a chain store – Fleets by name, a stand-in for Walmart or Kmart – on Christmas Eve. He figures the coffers will be full that night, and security will be loose, with everyone anxious to get out the door. But he and Ducky can’t do it alone. So they first recruit Kasperson, for his organizational and planning abilities (and because Meat incorrectly assumes that he must have money to invest), and then Starla, because she works as a cashier at Fleets and has, as Meat puts it, “ways of finding things out.” Kasperson makes some improvements to Meat’s plan, multiplying its potential windfall as well as its risk, and suggests they might need an inside man, “perhaps someone recruited from the ranks of Fleets’ security.” Meat agrees, but predicts this person “gonna be one of them dudes just natural born unlucky.” And guess who is a newly-minted security man at Fleets, after losing his last job over his latest eruption of temper in that fateful first chapter? None other than Mitchell Morse. The book gets its title from the intersecting loyalties, plotting and counterplotting that begins almost immediately. And what about Doyle Gilley, the asteroid blundering through this solar system? He’s just a handsome young guy who’s going bald at twenty-two. Tormented by his receding hairline and by his obnoxious, redneck girlfriend, Twyla, whom he’s swindled out of the money to pay for Kasperson’s sham treatments, Doyle slowly begins to crack under the pressure as Christmas Eve approaches.

If you read Kakonis’s first novel, Michigan Roll, Criss Cross may seem more than a little familiar. Meat and Ducky bear some resemblance to the earlier book’s criminal duo Gleep and Shadow, in that one is huge and the other scrawny, one is a sex-crazed motormouth and the other could care less and speaks only when necessary, etc. Starla is physically similar to the previous bad-news bitch Holly “Midnight” Clemmons, though they come from completely different backgrounds. Kakonis rearranges the character traits so they aren’t carbon copies, but they are recognizable types. Almost all the characters from both books share the same distinctive, wiseass-overdrive way of speaking, and you can even see some recurring phrases and descriptions popping up outside of the dialogue. Maybe it has something to do with having read (and re-read, and re-re-read) Criss Cross first, but I like to think of Michigan Roll as just a dress rehearsal; Kakonis was just trying things out before refining them and perfecting the recipe. Also, he replaces Michigan Roll’s gangsters, gamblers and shady rich people with a decidedly low-rent cast of characters. Instead of high-flying Miami and touristy Traverse City, Criss Cross’s lowlifes inhabit the underbelly of Grand Rapids. It’s a landscape of dingy apartments, trailer parks, seedy motels and dank bars - no less bleak for Morse’s dismissal of it as a “vanilla milkshake town,” and – this is crucial – a sense of failure hangs over everyone.

It's this cloud of doom, as much as the blighted landscape and the misfits that populate it, that elevates Criss Cross from a simple caper novel into noir territory. Except for Meat and Ducky, no one seems to have any real friends, and Morse’s drinking is the closest anyone gets to a hobby or pastime. All grapple with troubled pasts, precarious futures, and/or a feeling of time running out. Doc Kasperson senses his life “waning at a frighteningly accelerated pace”; Doyle notes “all the electricity leaking, watt by watt, day by day, from his life,” while Starla is “punching out the minutes and days and years” on her cash register. Morse makes his final choice and finds himself “swamped by a sorrow alien and acute and vast.” Even Meat, despite his assurances to Ducky, begins to question “if there was any power in money to change anything at all” – a question they’re all wrestling with in their own ways. This sort of existential dread and inability to escape who you are, as much as any convoluted cops-and-robbers plotline, is at the dark heart of noir. Hell, even the weather: only one notably nice day in a world of gray skies, bitter wind, chilly rain and sleet, and at best some “pale November sunlight.”

Yet, even with all this literal and figurative gloom, Criss Cross is an extremely funny book. You don’t have to wait for it either, as it opens with Morse, hungover and late for work, stuck in the checkout lane at Fleets, inserting himself into a farcical dispute between an elderly customer and a certain cashier we’ll come to know well. The only real sex scene is a grossly comic encounter between Starla and her sort-of boyfriend. Pretty much every interaction between Doyle and Twyla is an unsettling laugh – he can barely stand her, and she needles away at him with no idea that he might eventually snap. Morse draws on a bottomless well of rude sarcasm, while Ducky is a constant source of tomfoolery. In fact, what the book jacket describes as “Ducky’s bungled try for walking-around money” is one of the funniest sequences of events I’ve ever read. All the while Kakonis slowly tightens the screws, reminding us periodically of the date so we never forget that time is growing short. Every bit of slapstick is balanced by something horrific, often simultaneously, and there aren’t many laughs after Thanksgiving. Meat and Morse take an instant dislike to one another, coming as they do from opposite sides of the law, and Morse recognizes immediately that he and Starla are disposable in this scheme. Meanwhile, Doyle grows more and more desperate in his private hell, as his own personal deadline rapidly approaches. On Christmas Eve, zero hour for everyone, it’s dead serious – literally.

I have to talk a little about Kakonis’s writing style. Unlike the terse, clipped style of classic noir writers like James M. Cain, Kakonis is a maximalist. He never met an adjective he didn’t like, and describes everything in detail, from the grubby diner where we first find Meat, to exactly what Doyle eats for Thanksgiving dinner, and everything in between (including the men’s room at Morse’s favorite bar). This extends to marginal characters too, from Morse’s soon-to-be former colleagues at a private security company, to the diner waitress Meat intimidates, to the various shoplifters plying their craft at Fleets. We even learn that the receptionist at Starla’s tanning salon, whom we glimpse only once, has skin with “the shade and texture of a withered tangerine.” The same goes for the dialogue. That rule about how, as Elmore Leonard put it, “the best word for said is said” is out the window. Nobody just “says” anything in Criss Cross. Tom tells you exactly how they say it (“with all the lank enthusiasm of a man recommending cough syrups,” for example), or describes some accompanying gesture. (At one point, Meat and Ducky “nodded gravely at each other, like consulting surgeons simultaneously arrived at the same melancholy diagnosis.”) Yeah, it’s a little bit much sometimes, but it certainly creates very detailed, full-sensory scenes in your head, and those who don’t like the bare-bones style of classic noir may find relief.

He takes the opposite approach with the actual words that come from the characters’ mouths, and here is where things get dicey. In an attempt to be snappy and cinematic at all times, many of the people speak in a way that’s too hard-boiled by half. They’ll omit words like “of,” “the” and “that,” just as Elmore Leonard’s characters do, but he goes overboard with it, which sometimes contrasts jarringly with the surrounding writing. Occasionally, you wonder if this stuff even would make sense in real talk. At one point Kasperson, in conversation with his lady friend, muses that “ever since she met him, her speech had lapsed into a quaint slang lifted, it seemed, from the movie screens of her departed youth.” This is ironic, because most of the characters are equally guilty. Much of their speech is peppered with overcooked criminal slang; guns are “pieces,” cops in general are “heat,” and the ex-cop Morse is a “roller.” They even refer to silencers as “pillowcases,” which is a bridge too far for me. Other times, he tries so hard to make every line of dialogue pithy that the characters say things that are, well, out of character – i.e. Meat trying to sell the idea of the robbery to Starla by saying, “Look at that ratty bathrobe you got on. Frederick’s of Krakow. I’m offerin’ a proposition get you outa here. Get you fartin’ into silk, like you got comin’.” It’s always been difficult for me to hear these voices with midwestern accents; Ducky and especially Meat have always sounded almost black to me, as do the redneck pilot brothers who are supposed to aid their getaway after the robbery. Meat’s voice is described early on as “close to a monotone but for its snarly, wised-up quality,” but his language is way too colorful to fit that type of voice. Also, Kakonis was around sixty when he wrote this, twice the average age of all the major characters except Kasperson, and it’s hard to hear young(ish) people circa 1990 talking this way – I’m thinking late ‘70’s at most, with references to “punkers” and pet rocks, Quaaludes and Earl Butts. In other words, it sounds like an old man wrote it, despite his best efforts to sound hip and streetwise. He misuses the term “speedball” for example, seeming to think it simply refers to speed; another time he has Morse snidely referring to his boss, who has a Dutch surname as a “dike-jumper.” He does better with Kasperson, who is sixty-three and pretending to be a doctor, and so he thinks and speaks in a professorial manner that often confounds, or just irritates, his associates, but was probably a lot of fun for Kakonis to write.

The weakest part of this very inventive novel comes at the end, in the requisite police interview, a crime-fiction staple. Here is where the author tries to gather up any remaining loose ends and keep the main character out of jail if he so chooses. Because the original plan for the robbery was so utterly scrambled, Kakonis does the best he can, eventually saying simply that “Morse stuck to his story, and it held up … [and] eventually, grudgingly, they had to accept it.” And so does the reader. But I’m not one to bash a great book just because the epilogue fizzles. The ending is bittersweet, as Morse now has a war wound so to speak, and has never quite gotten over the vanished Starla.

I was 13 when I discovered Criss Cross, and probably wasn’t ready for it. But it’s important to read books you have no business reading when you’re that age. They scorch themselves into your brain, whether you understand everything right away or not. Truth be told, the first time around I had only a vague idea what the characters were even talking about half the time, and I let other aspects of the book whiz right past me in my rush to get to the next bit of action. I wanted laughs, and I got them, but the laughing sometimes prevented me from realizing how grim, brutal and downright scary the story could be. But since Criss Cross was a book I actually owned rather than borrowed, it was always there when I needed something to read. Despite being marketed as just another crime thriller, I always found something new whenever I opened it. Maybe I’m just warped, or my reading life was just ass-backwards, but Criss Cross is a stone-cold classic, and my own personal “book that won’t stay dead.”

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Milo "Meat" Pitts is released from prison with a dream of hitting the big score. His wife, Starla Hudek, works at Fleets grocery store. Although Meat hasn't seen her in recent times, they are still technically married. His scheme is to get her to tell him about the security in the store so he can rob the store when the receipts are being picked up by armored car.

Milo's planner is Doc Kasperson, a schemer who has a current business of selling a hair restoration program. Also involved is Milo's former cellmate, Ducky, an unimaginative bumbler.

Mitch Morse, a former Detroit cop applies for a security position with Fleets. In his former job, he helped train Jean Satterfield. As they worked together in that security position, Jean became attracted to him.

With a group of characters who would make Elmore Leonard proud, the gang begin their caper.

Doc Kasperson is supposed to be the man who knows how to set up an armored car robbery. He tells Milo that he needs more information. Then, Starla states that she has met a new security officer, Mitch, and she thinks she can persuade him to join their plot.

One thing goes wrong after another as the story progresses with halarious results. The story is well done and the characters memorable. Mitch Morse, in particular, was shown with interesting character development as the story progressed. The writing was clear and the dialogue was superbly well done.

[Jeff Dickison · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is supposed to be a somewhat humorous book, but it's really just a very boring story about a bunch of losers who keep making bad decisions. A group of misfits decide to rob a chain of stores on Christmas eve but manage to botch it up pretty well. Even the main character is a life-long loser with the brains of a gnat. Not recommended.

[Stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve never heard of this author.
This crime novel is well-written, the characters defined so well they could actually exist in real life, all with an ending that satisfies.

I’m adding this line:
“”It’s one of life’s crueler axioms of our human condition that everyone’s death inevitably simplifies life for someone else.”” Touché.

And one other line (I promise this is the last one—found it in my notes function):
“”Don’t drop toothpicks in pisser—the crabs in here can pole vault fifteen feet.””

[Beau · Rating 5 out of 5]

A compulsive read

Kakonis has a knack for understanding the criminal mind. The ending of some of his novels leave are somewhat dissatisfied, but this ending is complete.
A rewarding story

[James S. · Rating 2 out of 5]

An obvious Elmore Leonard copycat, Criss Cross doesn't quite make the grade. The writing is too silly and self-conscious to disappear, and I wasn't interested enough to invest in the 300+page story.

[Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mr. Kakonis flies under the radar, but he could write a crime novel.

[Aimee Massey · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a pretty funny book, full of very unsavory and very weird characters.
There's Milo "Meat" Pitts, a hulking career criminal who has decided to pull off an armored-car heist on Christmas Eve, despite the fact that his previous robberies were far less ambitious, involving him threatening convenience-store cashiers with a bag of dog doo to get them to hand over the money.
There's Conrad "Ducky" Pickell, (pronounced Pick-ELL) Meat's former cellmate and biggest fan. Ducky's one foray into armed robbery was a bank job he and his brother pulled as teenagers, which ended messily when Ducky accidentally shot and killed his brother.
There's Starla Hudek, Meat's ex-wife, a small-town girl who fantasizes about somehow striking it rich but is stuck behind a cash register at Fleets, the Wal-Mart-esque chain of stores Meat and Ducky plan to rob.
And there's Mitchell Morse, a disgraced former Detroit cop who is smart enough but whose volcanic temper keeps costing him opportunities. He's just been fired as a security guard after beating up a striking beer-company worker, and is now reduced to patrolling Fleets trying to stop shoplifters. Starla, having been coerced and enticed by Meat into finding an inside man, sets her sights on Morse, and with very little trouble, seduces him and enlists his support.
Other characters include a smooth-talking con artist named Doc Kasperson, currently running a cure-for-baldness scam, who agrees to do the ligistical planning of the score; Doyle Gilley, a handsome but balding young man who has placed all his trust, plus his girlfriend's money, in Kasperson's hands; and Doyle's girlfriend Twyla, a dim-witted, loud-mouthed gal who is devoted to Doyle and also to insulting him.
And there's the Dokken twins, an identical pair of rednecks from Meat and Starla's hometown, ugly and vile in their habits, but with the single redeeming quality that they are both licensed pilots with their own planes. Meat plans to have the Dokkens spirit him and Ducky out of Michigan and into Canada after the heist. And what of his compatriots in crime? Well, let's just say Meat isn't planning on splitting their projected $3 million booty with more than one other person.

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very different and gritty story

Its a very dark but entertaining read. The characters are quite unique and very well developed, if a little course.