Sex and Murder on the Wrong Side of Town

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 99
Walter Mosley, Devil In a Blue Dress

Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins needs the money, so when a big-shouldered White man in a slick suit comes nosing around a Black bar, looking to hire a leg man for a poorly defined private investigation, he takes the job. Who is he to complain? Turns out the White man’s rich White boss needs someone inconspicuous to find a glamorous White woman who frequents Los Angeles’ teeming illegal jazz bar scene. Should be a quick payday, right?

Walter Mosley’s debut novel contains multiple dense allusions to prior genre fiction, particularly Dashiell Hammet’s legendary Maltese Falcon. Like Sam Spade, Easy Rawlins gets roped into a case he needs, but doesn’t necessarily want. He must work with a woman who lies as quickly as breathing, and a man who kills because he sees no reason why he shouldn’t. But Rawlins has the added complication of being Black in the years after World War II.

Newly laid off, Rawlins accepts a private investigation job for which he’s not particularly qualified, and also unlicensed, because his house payment is coming due. Like thousands of Black veterans, Rawlins served with distinction during the war, and grew accustomed to being treated with respect. He wasn’t prepared for renewed discrimination. He certainly wasn’t ready for California racism, which he thought he’d escaped when he left his crime-ridden Houston childhood. Apparently bigots are bigots everywhere.

Turns out his target, Daphne Monet, doesn’t want found. When Rawlins tries directly asking the right people whether they’ve seen her, good friends suddenly turn evasive. For a White woman in segregated California, she certainly seems to have plenty of Black allies. But to Rawlins’ shock, the people he questions start turning up dead. The police believe he’s the last one to see them alive. Rawlins faces interrogation at the blunt end of a fist.

To make matters worse, Rawlins’ White employer turns out to be a psychopath. DeWitt Albright keeps a long-bore pistol inside his slick suit, and points it at whoever earns his displeasure. Of all the White people Rawlins works with, Albright might be the least racist, since skin color doesn’t bother him when killing time rolls around. Rawlins must work quick-time to avoid Albright’s wrath, which isn’t easy once Albright decides Rawlins is already dealing dirty.

Walter Mosley

In Rawlins’ world, moral scruple doesn’t buy lunch. He quietly resists racism, but also proves remarkably willing to accept it as inevitable. “I didn't believe that there was justice for Negroes,” Rawlins mutters around the halfway mark. “I thought that there might be some justice for a black man if he had the money to grease it. Money isn't a sure bet but it's the closest to God that I've ever seen in this world.”

Trapped between a working-class Black community closing ranks against him, and a White city demanding results at any cost, Rawlins teaches himself detective work on-the-job. He discovers how to ask questions which don’t directly bear on Daphne Monet, but which cause others to reveal truths about themselves. He uses his employer’s advance to buy drinks for working-class people desperate to make their days go away; in return they oblige him with sudden welters of information.

The longer his investigation continues, the more Rawlins despises his community. Like him, many Los Angeles Black people moved west, thinking they’d escape poverty and bigotry wherever they fled (a remarkable number apparently grew up with him in Houston). But they moved in such numbers that Los Angeles didn’t expect them, or the cultural change they hastened; racism followed them west, and with it, a closed, guarded attitude about intruders asking questions. Even Black intruders.

Rawlins proves resistant to one tool that might loosen tongues: he won’t exercise violence against fellow Blacks. He fled Houston trying to escape the pain poor blacks push on one another. To his horror, his childhood friend Mouse follows him to California; only Mouse has a pistol as big as DeWitt Albright’s. Rawlins finds himself caught between two killers he has to appease, even though he knows either one will destroy him if they choose.

Mosley uses the tropes of crime drama with comfortable panache; mystery fans will recognize the tropes he uses, like the jaded antihero, the femme fatale, and the truth worse than ignorance. But he repurposes these tropes to tell a story about people born down, and kept down by a system that judges them from birth. Easy Rawlins didn’t earn cynicism, he had cynicism thrust upon him. And he’s ready to thrust it back on us.

On a related topic:
Small Town Murder in Black and White

The Lost King of New Orleans' Floodwater Wizards

Bryan Camp, The City of Lost Fortunes: a Crescent City Novel

Jude Dubuisson used to be New Orleans’ foremost finder of lost treasures; after Katrina, he maintains a streetside booth, performing magic tricks to entertain tourists. Like his beloved city, he’s a hollowed-out vestige of his multiracial, French-Caribbean heritage. Until, that is, his former partner returns, bearing a message: Jude owes New Orleans’ own native-born Fortune god a debt. And Fortune is calling in its marker.

I confess, I needed time to acclimate to Bryan Camp’s debut novel. I got distracted by Camp’s fannish nods, some direct and others oblique, to other writers, from Charlaine Harris and Jim Butcher to William Gibson and even Graham Greene. But as I moved into Camp’s rhythm, I began realizing he wasn’t so much name-dropping as acknowledging the fan-base already drawn to books like these. He’s crafted a damned decent debut.

Dragged into his old haunts, Jude finds himself playing games with forces older than humankind. Literal games: some kind of tarot/poker hybrid primarily. Except the entire novel unfolds inside one hotly contested hand, as players literally bet their souls. It’s a killer hand, too, as the Fortune god gets his throat slit. Jude competes with a vampire, an angel, and an Egyptian god to assume the divine mantle; vast multitudes ride on one turn of the cards.

Jude resembles similar genre characters, like Harry Dresden and Sookie Stackhouse, in multiple ways. He has vast powers which could shake Earth’s foundations, but which he cannot fully control… yet. He inherited this power from a parent (or ancestor) whose secrets could tragically intrude upon his current life. And though not a detective himself, he must investigate a crime too profound for the police, before apocalyptic ramifications start rolling down.

So, Jude must discover who murdered the Crescent City’s most beloved god, having wagered his own soul. But even as he stalks the mysterious killer, the killer stalks him; without meaning to, Jude leaves a trail of bodies behind himself. He quickly realizes that his beloved city, his burg of jazz funerals and voodoo enchantment, hangs in the balance. And his trusted magical gifts… have gone missing.

Bryan Camp

On his journey, Jude travels with Regal Sloan, whose resemblance to William Gibson’s sidekick character Molly Millions deserves comment. She’s loyal but contemptuous, moral but brutal, and most problematic for post-Katrina New Orleans, she’s white. Jude gives flashes that he might love Regal, but certainly doesn’t trust her. Mostly he needs her, because she’s plucky when he’s discouraged. If only her motivations weren’t so murky.

Behind Camp’s urban-fantasy flourishes, Hurricane Katrina lingers, like Old Hamlet’s ghost. Everyone except Jude has fallen into their “new normal” routines, but Jude, whose magical abilities tie innately to New Orleans itself, can’t ignore the flood damage. His self-flagellation after the levees broke has stained everything in his life. This resembles other post-Katrina novels, like Tom Piazza’s City of Refuge or Erica Spindler’s Watch Me Die, filtered through Camp’s lens.

You’ve perhaps noticed how many prior novelists I’ve already name-checked. As I said above, this probably isn’t accidental. Throughout his first half, Camp is half author, half fanboy, like a reader at your favorite sci-fi convention. Then, around page 200, the novel takes a sudden, unexpected veer into new territory. Well, not really new, it’s actually quite Jungian, but new to Jude. Camp really kicks readers in the pants.

This sudden zigzag, coupled with Camp’s careful attention to detail, gives this novel a literary quality often missing from genre fiction. Camp charts a personal course between conventional beach reading and high-minded belles-lettres. This probably reflects his background: both an MFA scholar and a Clarion West graduate, his learning as a writer is unusually flexible. More writers, literary and genre, should aspire to such complexity.

One could pair this novel with Joseph Campbell’s Hero With a Thousand Faces and unpack deeper truths about now natural disasters create modern mythic journeys. I might do so later. Jude Dubuisson is a complex character with deeper qualities: not wholly mortal, he’s nevertheless as mortal as his city. But it’s also a rollicking genre adventure, if you prefer such fun escapades.

So that’s the experience. Camp starts off nerding out on genre stereotypes, and stuffy purists might want to quit. But as he progresses, and we settle into his groove, there’s so much more going on. Veteran genre readers might wish his early chapters didn’t rely on tropes arranged like Legos. But if we muster grit enough to persevere, Camp provides a deeper journey. If we stick with him.

Scottish Slumgullion in the CID

James Oswald, The Hangman's Song

Detective Inspector Tony McLean angers his superiors easily. His headstrong policing techniques, trust in justice over procedure, and frequently lethal resolutions tax Edinburgh’s finest leaders beyond breaking. So they’ve seconded this veteran homicide detective onto sex crimes. But when a suspicious string of hangings overlaps with a human smuggling operation, McLean finds his loyalties torn. He starts working two cases, in two divisions, simultaneously. That leaves him defenseless when seemingly supernatural events invade his house.

If that sounds excessively complex, I certainly won’t disagree. Scottish sheep farmer James Oswald exploded onto literature’s map under two years ago when his self-published first novel outsold bestsellers by established veterans. He sparked a bidding war, every self-published author’s dream, which few seldom achieve. Now his publishers, confronted with a complicated manuscript of George RR Martin-level volubility, seem afraid to ask him to pare it into bite-sized chunks, lest they alienate their golden goose.

Oswald floats three parallel stories. In one, Scottish pimps are secretly shipping Eastern European prostitutes from Edinburgh to parts unknown. Since that’s the opposite direction from where human smugglers usually travel, Inspector McLean’s spidey sense goes bonkers, especially when one prostitute proves British-born. The Sex Crime Unit detectives consider tracking the mastermind very low priority, even after Edinburgh’s flashiest pimp gets slaughtered. McLean suspects inside corruption, which may extend all the way to the top.

Meanwhile, several hangings occur across Edinburgh in quick succession. Every death involves hempen rope, a rare commodity anymore, and the knots appear identical. McLean’s station chief, a bureaucratic placeholder who considers McLean an unreliable Dirty Harry type, squelches the investigation as mere predictable suicides. Each successive hanging, though, brings circumstances closer to McLean’s door. Between managerial incompetence and criminal shrewdness, McLean must decide who he can trust, before he faces his own personal hanging tree.

Elsewhere, McLean’s sometime girlfriend, a dedicated crime scene tech, awakens from injuries sustained in Oswald’s prior novel. All isn’t well, though: all memories of her last fifteen years have vanished. Unable to resume adult life, Emma moves into McLean’s house, striving to get well. But as days turn into weeks, then months, things get only worse. Why won’t Emma heal? What bizarre lengths will McLean attempt? And why does Emma’s live-in carer ask such questions?

James Oswald

Somebody should’ve asked Oswald to subdivide this nearly 500-page book, enormous by genre standards, into two volumes. And then kill one. The sex crimes story has gripping themes, engaging characters, and genuine detective work. The hanging story sprawls out, leaving massive plot holes, until McLean tumbles bass-ackward into the accidental truth, which Oswald pinches from a CSI episode I found scorn-worthy ten years ago. McLean’s pseudo-scientific resolution, once finally achieved, elicits not catharsis but laughter.

And Emma’s story… well. It starts strong, channeling the pain and trauma that linger with anybody who’s ever been victimized by violence. I assumed Oswald must’ve spoken extensively with trauma specialists and victims, because initially, it precisely resembles the efforts I’ve undertaken to guide loved ones back to productivity. Then, sadly, it turns silly, incorporating unearthly woowoo concepts pinched whole from George Romero films. I pulled a facepalm and moaned: “I had such high hopes…”

That Oswald uses supernaturalism in a noir mystery doesn’t bother me. I love authors like Jim Butcher and Greg van Eekhout, whose novels are fundamentally hardboiled thrillers, where magic (or magical realism) plays the same role guns do for Dashiell Hammett. Oswald, though, doesn’t integrate the themes. We’re trucking along, immersing  ourselves  in gritty procedural horror, when—wham! Devil worship! Trapped souls! Demonic artifacts! Particularly since Oswald kicks the resolution into sequels, it doesn’t fit.

This really hurts, because Oswald writes so well, I want to like him. His characters have unique personalities, with motivations often invisible until the truth emerges. Tony McLean’s tortured struggle between justice and law reflects issues Americans will recognize, particularly after Sandy Hook and Ferguson. Emma’s suffering, before it turns terminally silly, will ring bells for anyone who’s ever suffered violence, and those who care for them. I desperately tried to like McLean, and Oswald.

Basically, between the overlapping stories and unmotivated cross-genre borrowing, Oswald attempts too much. Like a goulash with too many ingredients, even Oswald’s best efforts vanish into a bland, soggy mess. This really pains me, because he offers so much to like, that seasoned mystery readers find themselves rooting for him. This should be a much better book. But if Oswald cannot bother separating his best gems from the surrounding dross, I shouldn’t have to either.

Every Mother's Nightmare

Steve Jackson, Bogeyman

In the middle 1980s, four little girls in two states vanished. Ranging from three to ten years old, they disappeared utterly, leaving behind scanty clues—one dropped lunchbox, a sweatshirt. Only one girl narrowly escaped, witnessing her attacker’s face, but lost her friend to the anonymous monster. Bodies appeared months or even years later, across jurisdictional lines. Before networked investigation databases, police never noticed the connection between various crimes. Without evidence, cases languished for decades.

Veteran true crime author Steve Jackson channels the well-established In Cold Blood tradition of absenting himself from the plot, like a journalist, while constructing a narrative, driven by action and dialog, influenced by novel-writing technique. Jackson’s gradually unfolding story feels familiar to anybody accustomed to reading police procedurals and crime thrillers. The horrifying aspects of Jackson’s narrative, of the very killer every parent dreads their children encountering, become only more eerie because they really happened.

Garland, Texas, police detective Gary Sweet became interested in the unsolved murders one decade later, shortly after earning his detective’s badge, when he discovered the case documents buried inside the building. One decade already cold, the Roxanne Reyes murder had gone cold, lacking evidence. Sweet, a seasoned lawman and Christian convert who considered police work a religious calling, adopted the Reyes murder as personal campaign. But he had no clue how connected this case was.

The killer who murdered Roxanne Reyes proved crafty. He stalked victims assiduously, abducting only those whose absence wouldn’t be missed during those critical hours. He deposited bodies in secluded places, inside somebody else’s jurisdiction, ensuring they wouldn’t be discovered until critical evidence decayed. Everybody assumed his victims, all girls, were sexually assaulted, but evidence rotted away. Some bodies were so deteriorated, families could only identify their daughters by their clothing. No adult ever saw him.

Jackson describes Detective Sweet’s apprenticeship in crime’s most repellent side. Though outsiders often consider Garland just another Dallas suburb, it’s actually a fairly large, self-contained city, with big city crime problems. Sweet, with the dedication common to people who consider themselves on a mission, learned to befriend the most reprehensible criminals, unlock their secrets, and coax confessions from people who have committed acts so heinous, even dedicated crime fans couldn’t tolerate ten minutes beside them.

David Penton: literally the man
your mother warned you about

TV police make crime-solving look like lots of fieldwork, high-tech databases, and combing evidence to build incontrovertible cases. In Jackson’s telling, Detective Sweet actually spends hours, even days, running paperwork, engaging in jurisdictional politics, and finagling advantage wherever he can. Sweet needed to unpack this case gradually, working part-time over a decade while carrying a full load of active cases. Neither glamorous nor exciting, Jackson makes Sweet’s dedicated investigation look remarkably like hard, thankless work.

But humans’ natural tendency to talk proved Robert Penton’s undoing. Imprisoned elsewhere for a murder uncomfortably similar to Roxanne Reyes, Penton began building jailhouse credentials by boasting to fellow inmates of various crimes he purportedly committed, outwitting police and skating scot-free. He managed to offend and disgust even hardened sex offenders, until one finally turned informant. If even a fraction of Penton’s boasts proved true, he surely counts among America’s most prolific child killers ever.

Prodigiously smart but violently damaged, Penton represents every parent’s nightmare, the sexual predator smart enough to outwit police, game the system, and remain perennially undetected. Personally unassuming, Penton travelled widely, following work beneath his intellect. Bosses remember him as an industrious but undistinguished employee. But jobs, for Penton, mattered little. The travelling offered him opportunity to stalk new victims, prolong their torture, and amble away with absolute impunity. Life-altering trauma lingered everywhere in his wake.

Just because he had Penton’s jailhouse braggadocio, however, didn’t mean Sweet had his killer. Lacking physical evidence, and building only from the hearsay testimony of another convicted sex offender, Sweet had an unusually difficult case to construct, connecting Penton to not just Reyes, but four other cases Sweet could identify (others certainly went unidentified). The sketchy evidence, two-decade time lag between crime and conviction, and Penton’s tendency to fabricate, made this Sweet’s hardest case ever.

As police procedurals often do, Jackson starts with an acknowledgement of who committed the real crime, an acknowledgement shocking in both its nature and its specific detail. The only question remains: will Sweet get his man? We know, because we’re reading, that he already did, but Jackson’s telling emphasizes just how tenuous, just how contingent, any criminal case actually is. Even knowing the outcome, the tension leaves us sweating, because Sweet could be us, too.

Reality—For Sale, Cheap!

salem, Black Hole Butterfly

In a lawless future Manhattan, PI Rook Black traces a scientist’s murder to a secretive Chinatown underground of supertechnology, art, and crocodile wrestling. There he finds brewing war between Gasland, the organized muscle behind petroleum, and the Naranja Empire, whose solar-powered tech is reshaping society. The enemies square off over control of Shakespeare, whose prose constantly re-creates reality around us. Rook Black is a pawn in their operation.

In tone and technique, salem’s debut novel resembles classics from William Gibson and Pat Cadigan. The collision between human nature, with its dogged continuity from age to age, and our built environment, which refuses to stand still, feels almost exactly like the Reagan-era “future shock” novels I grew up reading, though rather than distrusting computers, the disquieting technology has reached a higher order. Confoundingly, this doesn’t go nearly far enough.

salem writes in slow, cerebral tones, a languorous prose poem of butterflies, Buddha, quantum mechanics, and sulfur matches. Rook Black is a gripping character, both soberly analytical and deeply sensual. His struggle to track Jack the Butterfly, who sells black-market reality to Chinese criminals, defies retelling. This isn’t some paperback potboiler you fall asleep under; you immerse yourself in salem’s lush prose, absorbing Rook Black’s struggle to understand the inexplicable.

This novel thrums with compressed energy so tight, you can practically hear the orchestral score beneath its silent prose. (salem’s career began writing unproduced screenplays.) Secrets come dribbling out, not predictable, but certainly reliable. salem’s language hides secrets: for instance, the Naranja Empire. Naranja, Spanish for “orange.” Significant? Yes, but the reasons why prove as elusive as the pseudo-reality Jack the Butterfly sells under the table.

But this same storytelling proves this novel’s greatest weakness. salem positions this novel as a sci-fi mystery, much like Cadigan or Jonathan Lethem wrote twenty years ago. But pages and pages pass without dialog, possibly salem’s Achilles heel. Though rich with introspective tone, the characters—a cast of thousands—don’t interact much. Mysteries require people to talk, to divulge secrets. We get scads of soul-searching, but precious little action.

salem’s reliance on darkness, rain, and an unchangingly bleak backdrop channels Alex Proyas’ 1998 sleeper classic Dark City, and when I realized that, problems set in. I began seeing echoes of the Wachowskis, Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next novels, and even Star Trek’s holodeck, stories and storytellers who cast doubt upon reality. This familiarity, this reliance on mass-media tropes we’ve already overanalyzed, takes readers outside salem’s profoundly immersive narrative.

Science fiction, more than any other genre except perhaps spy thrillers, is innately tied to the time when it was written. Our concepts of the future, our understanding of technological potential, changes regularly. Networked computers, which terrified Bruce Sterling and William Gibson, seem ordinary now. Rocket ships, far from recapturing the glamour of Spanish exploration, have less personality than dump trucks. Skiffy, generally, doesn’t date well.

But rather than address our era’s relationship with technology, salem revisits Mulder and Scully’s conspiracy theorizing. Though Rook Black gradually uncovers massive secrets, which salem reveals with grace and aplomb, they have a texture of unrelenting familiarity. salem, I came to realize, is an excellent prose stylist; but this narrative is a massive portmanteau of late-1990s stereotypes so comfy, one suspects salem has made a nest in another decade.

This is a novel of ideas. Rich, lushly deconstructed ideas, ripe with potential to demonstrate psychological profundity and social impact. salem’s characters unpack implications to make William Gibson look comparatively unambitious, expounded in language balanced on the cusp between Raymond Chandler and Allen Ginsberg. It’s both a throwback to my paperback youth, and a bold experiment. Stylistically and conceptually, I’ve seen little like this in the last twenty years.

This isn’t a novel of characters. Though salem has many characters with interesting motivations and enigmatic backstories, they don’t so much interact as collide, and each remains so bound by their respective situations, they prove slow to change, resistant to each other even under duress. Because they scarcely interact, their ideas get propounded, but only intermittently tested and refined. salem proffers profound viewpoint characters, but they interact only sporadically.

Thus, how readers receive this novel depends on what expectations they bring into the experience. I found plenty to enjoy, particularly how it recalls the science fiction that corresponded with my dawning maturity. Yet salem’s admittedly ambitious story never gains traction, partly because it gives little place to hang my attention. We have the rudiments of an excellent novel here. It just doesn’t go far enough.

Sam Spade in the Suburbs of Hell

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 22
Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon

Trusting a gorgeous girl's simple task costs Sam Spade's partner his life and lands Spade in hot water with the law. But Spade has crossed the law before in his pursuit of justice, and he won't flinch from doing it again. When the seemingly normal case of murder proves to be part of a large conspiracy spanning continents and centuries, that's just another payday for San Francisco's most ambitious detective.

Dashiell Hammett famously changed the tone of detective fiction when he moved away from simple puzzles into an unflinching depiction of how real crime-fighters talk and act. A veteran Pinkerton detective himself, Hammett understood that high-minded ideals of justice have no place in criminal investigations. His detectives, hard men of rigid honor, move among a criminal underclass so depraved, integrity becomes a liability.

Spade's particularly utilitarian brand of justice, based on consequences rather than rules, shook comfy readers out of Sherlock Holmes' essential cleanliness and lack of ambiguity, forcing us to examine what we mean by words like "truth" and "law." Sam Spade has stones enough to kill, to lie, to steal. He’ll sell out the innocent rather than risk himself. Yet his code, downright Gordian in its intricacy, remains immaculate and internally consistent.

Readers familiar with John Huston’s classic big-screen interpretation may find Hammett’s original novel disquieting. Unlike Humphrey Bogart’s chivalrous knight errant, Hammett presents Spade as a sort of maelstrom, sucking everything into himself with undifferentiating hunger. Everyone around Spade has strong feelings: cops despise him, criminals fear him, women want him. (Incidentally, women, in Spade’s world, exist interchangeably; his chest-thumpingly male ethos entirely excludes knowing or understanding women.)

Film noir, which generally rewards clear binary divisions between hero and villain even as it subverts such divisions, sanitized Spade for posterity. Cinema couldn’t stomach an antihero who sleeps with his partner’s wife, his secretary, his client, successively and concurrently; it couldn’t reconcile a man who mocks his partner, but insists his partner’s killer has to swing. It couldn’t let a protagonist answer a lady’s heartfelt “I love you” with “What of it?”

Yet the very qualities film couldn’t accept make Spade so compelling. Raymond Chandler, a generation after Hammett, wrote: “Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought duelling pistols, curare, and tropical fish.” Sam Spade’s internal moral consistency, as complete yet rootless as any criminal’s, force readers to empathize with completely awful people.

In a telling early sequence, Spade admits he doesn’t carry a gun. “I don’t much like them.” Not for Hammett (who served in both World Wars) the swinging machismo of today’s pistol-packing police culture. Yet twice he points some enemy through doors which inevitably open onto death in crossfire. Spade never pulls the trigger, yet he kills his foes as surely as any assassin. Thus Hammett acknowledges the flaccid boundary between cop and criminal.

And we haven't resolved Hammett's conundrums yet. Though many writers slavishly copy Spade's mannerisms and Hammett's authenticity, society hasn't yet found simple solutions to this complex novel's dilemmas. As we now recognize that the law can't solve all problems, and we must sometimes step off the safe road to do what's right, Sam Spade's quest to resolve just one crime seems more relevant than ever.

First published in 1929, this novel captures its moment beyond the mystery genre’s purported limitations. Spade, the man of honor who nevertheless works among society’s lowest, lives in a dingy flat and sleeps in a Murphy bed. He feuds openly with the police, who consider him another criminal; he, likewise, sees cops as instruments of a corrupt system. The novel implies its villain, Casper Gutman, has police in his pocket.

Law exists, Hammett implies, to impede the people; justice, then, must be illegal. Unlike the “Roaring Twenties” myth perpetuated by that expatriate Hemingway, or his frenemy, the sybarite Fitzgerald, Hammett sees a generation split in two. Spade’s dystopian San Francisco showcases America’s glittering accomplishments, but wallows in extreme poverty. Nothing exists between. In such a space, the just man’s enemy is the state.

Before Hammett, mysteries were primarily mental puzzles with little patience for realistic social commentary. After Hammett, mysteries became straightforward morality plays, where evil exists and law triumphs. But Dashiell Hammett occupied a space where good people needed to carve their own domain, and name it justice. Between today’s boomtown financial industry and gut-wrenching urban poverty, perhaps Hammett has become timely again.

D.P. Lyle's Frenetic Forensic Roulette

D.P. Lyle, Run To Ground: a Dub Walker Thriller

Everyone knows Walter Whitiker killed young Steven Foster. But when an Alabama judge excludes damning evidence on a technicality, Whitiker gets three years on an ancillary charge, and gets out after nineteen months. When an assassin’s bullet fells Whitiker as he exits prison, forensic consultant Dub Walker knows he has a real whodunit. But he regrets taking the case when Steven’s grieving parents become prime suspects.

Doug Lyle’s third Dub Walker novel begins with an engaging reversal: an execrable victim and touchingly sympathetic suspects. Lyle quickly establishes Whitiker as a man of low character, bad associations, and revolting habits. Tim and Martha Foster, however, prove willing to bend conventions and break laws to see justice for their son. Frustratingly, that premise doesn’t translate into a plausible story.

Lyle creates interesting characters with sympathetic motivations. Dub Lyle has multiple specialties and boatloads of guilt. His closest allies are his best friend, homicide detective Thomas “T-Tommy” Tortelli, and his ex-wife, ace TV journalist Claire McBride. This trio brings their diverse skills and connections to bear on a case so emotionally loaded that nobody could possibly emerge unscathed.

But having created such worthwhile characters, Lyle forces them into a story of such surpassing silliness that I wonder if the author was perhaps sleepy. Lyle, a cardiologist and forensic consultant, has worked with police and Hollywood. Surely an author so skilled and experienced realizes his audience reads crime thrillers every day, and knows enough to call bullhockey when the story parts company with reality.

From page one, this book relies on readers’ willingness to believe that two suburban civilians with no criminal history could not only organize an assassination, but their own subsequent disappearance, without anyone noticing. They could somehow teach themselves sniper shooting from the Internet. They could launder $500,000 into cash without ringing bells at the FDIC, DEA, or the Fed. And they could do it in absolute secret.

Not only must readers believe this, so must the cops. Because they believe such unbelievable precepts, they permit their prime suspects one full day’s head start. When Dub and T-Tommy finally decide to pursue their real quarry, they grasp at straws so desperately that they lay themselves open to barefaced manipulation. Their investigation quickly devolves into a comedy of errors.

For instance, early in the investigation, Dub squanders valuable time interviewing Whitiker’s potential prison enemies while the real trail goes cold. Wait, they let an accused pedophile walk the yard openly? Maybe it’s different in Alabama, but in most states, “short eyes” go straight to Keepaway for their own protection. In GenPop, they’d have very short life expectancy.

Then, what PD would allow a consultant they haven’t formally hired yet to take point on a high-profile investigation, essentially using his cop buddy as armed muscle? Dub shows remarkable autonomy in opening doors, conducting semi-legal searches, directing interviews, and handling evidence. It almost looks like T-Tommy wants his case ejected on some technicality. Considering his open sympathy for his suspects, maybe he does.

I repeatedly wanted to grab Dub’s lapels and shout “Pull your head out!” He transcribes multiple circumstantial interviews in which people who knew the suspects say exactly the same things—exactly, sometimes verbatim. He could afford to paraphrase for us. Meanwhile, Dub and T-Tommy ignore a red herring campaign so blatant that I remember it from an episode of Law & Order: SVU. What academy did these guys graduate from?

If this weren’t bad enough, Lyle’s prejudices dribble through his prose. Police may follow false paths occasionally, he says, but they never arrest the innocent. Cops are justified in pushing, or covertly ignoring, the bounds of legality, because criminals have no rights. Defense attorneys deserve to be shot. Any judge who doesn’t carry water for the prosecution is “corrupt.”

This might have made me less squeamish before Edward Snowden pantsed the NSA.

Dub’s confluence of weird actions, amateurish oversights, and excessive narration make this book feel really, really long. Seasoned mystery readers will recognize what Dub misses and wonder why he appears so lackadaisical about a case that could inflame public sentiment. Sporadic readers will just wonder why he recounts every single interview, even the useless ones

I wanted to like this book. I continued despite its implausible story. I persevered even when lifting the book became a Sisyphean effort. Lyle crafted a narrator and ensemble who made me care about them. But that doesn’t offset a story so implausible that it would make me laugh if it didn’t make me cry.

Jo Nesbø's Global Crime and Crimefighting Network

Jo Nesbø, The Bat: The First Inspector Harry Hole Novel

When Australian police find a beautiful Norwegian expat’s body on a secluded coast, Oslo detective Harry Hole (HOO-leh) joins the Sydney police investigation. But he finds himself stymied by bureaucratic intransigence and Sydney’s carnivalesque gay community. When his prodding uncovers a years-long serial murder spree, Harry sacrifices his sanity and goes off the rails to bring his target down.

Jo Nesbø’s procedurals have earned high praise in his native Norway since his 1997 debut, but his work has dribbled into international markets, completely out of sequence. Nesbø’s English-language publisher calls this “The First Harry Hole Thriller,” and it reflects its dated 1997 setting—we keep forgetting about the scarcity of cell phones or the early, sluggish Web. This gives it a naive quality almost like Agatha Christie.

The story roughly breaks into two halves. In the first, Harry’s local contact, a Europeanized Aboriginal named Andrew Kensington, seems downright uninterested in the case. Andrew drags Harry into a succession of strange meetings, introducing him to a panoply of eccentric characters and colorful personalities. Harry repeatedly complains about Andrew’s seeming wild hairs. But a darkly sophisticated pattern starts to emerge.

As Harry pushes his one lead, one brutal encounter upends everything that came before, forcing Harry, suddenly alone, to track a killer who has taken a sudden interest in Harry. When the killer targets a woman Harry’s taken a shine to, Harry must make an impossible choice: risk the woman he loves or risk losing his quarry. He quickly learns that everything he knows about criminology is flat wrong.

Nesbø distinguishes this thriller from the seemingly limitless interchangeable paperback mysteries with his laser-like focus on character. From the beginning, Harry shows a casual attitude toward procedure, playing his investigation by ear, openly chafing at rules and limitations. His finely-honed intuition leads him to remarkable moments of insight. His Columbo-like gift for “just one more question” repeatedly unlocks the right evidence at the right moment.

But Harry offsets his finely honed investigative discernment with a self-destructive streak like the broad side of a barn. If he feels stymied in the first half, it’s because he’s trying to accommodate official channels. He starts winning against his enemy only when he puts himself in situations that could easily kill him. Criminal scum fears and respects Harry because he’s mere inches removed from becoming one of them.

Not that Harry wants to implode. He tries to do well, follow rules, make friends, and even court a woman. But he sabotages himself so thoroughly, we suspect he’s doing it on purpose. The woman he loves is also a material witness, so their relationship skirts the law, especially when the killer spots her as Harry’s greatest weakness. When the rules impede his investigation, he chooses results over process.

Harry plays the perpetual outsider, asking questions that seem obvious to his colleagues. His unique perspective unblocks longstanding stalemates because he doesn’t share others’ blinders. Important clues lie in Aboriginal myths that the Australian characters have grown bored hearing, but which Harry encounters for the first time. He talks to people he doesn’t know others ignore, and focuses on details others see as mere background.

Which perhaps explains why international readers have embraced Nesbø over the last eight years or so. Though we recognize and understand how Nesbø fits neatly into the genre that gave us Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, he doesn’t share our English-speaking literary expectations; he tells a story for his own native Scandinavian culture. We know what kind of story he’s telling, yet it remains exhilaratingly foreign.

Nesbø’s episodic style takes some getting used to. His very short chapters combine copious dialog and Harry’s internal speculations into an atmosphere unlike typical American or British detective thrillers. Nesbø often introduces characters and details that appear tangential, not just at first, but for many chapters afterward. Only tenacious readers will realize how tightly constructed Nesbø’s prose actually is.

Because at root, Nesbø tells a different kind of story. Neither a mental puzzle nor a jaded procedural, Nesbø would rather witness what kind of person makes a life wrangling lawbreakers. Who would choose to plug the gap between honest citizens and the criminal subculture? Somebody, ultimately, who belongs to both worlds, and thus to neither.

Harry Hole makes an intriguing character, and the parallel between his personal disintegration and his investigative success is a real eye-opener. Longtime Nesbø readers will welcome this addition to his translated canon. New fans will find this a good place to begin Harry’s story.

Andrew Klavan's Hollywood on Hudson

Andrew Klavan, A Killer in the Wind

Inspector Dan Champion, ex-NYPD, dedicated his career to busting a child prostitution ring led by the enigmatic Fat Woman. But he shot a suspect in a narcotic haze, ending the investigation. Creative perjury saved his career, but now he works patrol upstate. Worse, he battles lingering hallucinations, especially lovely Samantha, who nursed him to health. So when Samantha washes up in his new jurisdiction, he cannot explain how his hallucinations have bled into reality.

Edgar Award-winning mystery novelist Andrew Klavan spends the first hundred pages of his newest novel spinning an intricate web of conspiracy, denial, and phantasmagoria. Then he spends the next two hundred pages squandering it. He heightens readers’ expectations through a solid premise and brief hints that he might upend genre expectations. Then he pisses his premise away and hits us with a boilerplate thriller dirty with the fingerprints of 1987.

The problems begin with first-person protagonist Dan Champion himself. He walks, talks, and thinks like second-tier Robert Mitchum antihero. In the first chapter, he hits us with this narrative fragment: “My heart was knocking at my ribs like a cop’s fist on a whorehouse door.” Though this tapers off by the final third, and he starts talking like a person, he never completely stops comporting himself like a postwar noir refugee.

When Champion finds himself confronted with a woman who cannot exist, he misses the most important clues because he fails to grasp that the investigation is really all about him. This character is completely immune to introspection. Late in the book, Champion’s part-time squeeze has to practically grab his lapels and scream at him that he needs to look inward. Until someone tells him otherwise, Champion’s world is entirely external.

Instead of pausing to ask the right questions, Champion surrenders his badge and goes all Charles Bronson on the case. I cannot believe a career cop would make this many mistakes. If you were on the run from your fellow cops, would you go visit your old haunts downstate? Would you continue using your credit cards for gas and motels? Would you pop a hallucinogenic narcotic right before a days-long drive to an unfamiliar destination upstate?

Andrew Klavan

Then, instead of unpacking the psychological depth of his premise, Klavan hits us with a story that might have seemed timely during the McMartin Preschool trial. His setup simmers with potential for the borderlines of reality, the dark side of community, and the fine line between cop and criminal. Instead, the meat of his novel is stapled together from half-digested bits of old Jimmy Cagney films, Raymond Chandler potboilers, and 19th Century white slavery myths.

Perhaps being a reviewer has jaundiced my opinion. I receive so many books, on so many topics, that I have become overeducated for this kind of novel. For instance, I cannot walk back the fact that I understand the difference between hallucination and memory. Hallucinogenic drugs do not produce a coherent narrative or unpack deep psychological meaning. Even where they have shown therapeutic merit, hallucinogens don’t produce one-to-one correlations.

I also can’t walk back the fact that I know noir is changing. Authors like Tyler Dilts and Alan Russell have pioneered a hard-boiled but introspective new mystery field I’ve dubbed the New Noir. These authors create characters who are as cynical about themselves as about the rest of the world, creating a greater field of psychological depth. By contrast, Klavan’s novel feels not just contrary, but downright regressive. History, even literary history, never runs backward.

You might have noticed that I’ve cited several movie actors: Robert Mitchum, Charles Bronson, Jimmy Cagney. Klavan, like Dashiell Hammett before him, writes both books and movies. In fairness, books bring more prestige, but Hollywood has the money. But this book just reads like a screen treatment. I shouldn’t imbue Klavan with my motivations, but perhaps he wrote this one in hopes of a future big-screen payday.

Perhaps being a reviewer has jaundiced my opinion. But I doubt it. I suspect Klavan flinched from his excellent premise because he remembered he has an established genre audience. But that audience reads this kind of literature every day. They know the boilerplates, and they expect better than sixty-year-old big-screen leftovers.

Surely a seasoned, award-winning author like Andrew Klavan must realize how tone-deaf this novel sounds. He proffers a smart, innovative premise, and does nothing with it. The product is not only ordinary, it’s a stark move backward. Mystery as a genre, and Klavan as an author, are both better than this.

JT Ellison's Mystery Romance Stew

J.T. Ellison, Edge of Black

Because law enforcement is heavily systematized, for good reason, and crime is often banal, mystery fiction tends toward repetition. If you’ve ever screamed at a novel, wondering why the hero can’t see the widow’s lies, that’s why. Good authors beat this curb through innovative characterization—like Charles Todd and Stef Penney. JT Ellison handles this by cribbing technique from romance, another repetitive genre, with, let’s say, predictable results.

A biological attack on the DC subway paralyzes America’s government and kills three, including a congressman. ME Samantha Owens accepted a Georgetown teaching gig to escape such drama, but the DCPD and State Department need her experience and insight. When her boyfriend goes vigilante to pursue the attacker, whom he may know from his Army hitch, Sam finds herself caught between the law she’s sworn to uphold, and America’s greater good.

Presumably, Ellison wants to court the same audience that loves authors like Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs. She uses much the same style: an alternation between wonky technical investigation, breakneck police work, and slow character exposition. But instead of creating taut, multifaceted character mysteries like Cornwell and Reichs, Ellison sprawls all over the map—literally, as the investigation caroms from DC to Denver and all points between.

I can’t identify which egregious mistakes bother me most. I began to get a sinking feeling when Sam Owens’ boyfriend, Xander, destroyed evidence and went off in pursuit of Lone Ranger justice. Does Sam, the career civil servant, recognize this vigilantism for the reckless endangerment it is? Nope, she considers it manful, assertive, and “the right thing.” When her DCPD contact is understandably angered, she stops barely short of calling him fascist.

Likewise, supposed professionals make such novice mistakes, I suspect they misunderstood the job questionnaire. Surely an ME with disaster training knows to volunteer her services at the perimeter of a biological attack, not to the men in the Tyvek moon suits. Police tracking a high-stakes witness should ping his cell phone now, not after he calls his girlfriend. Checking a victim’s Facebook page is victimology SOP; getting blindsided a day late is inexcusable.

J.T. Ellison

But perhaps the characters are distracted. They’re busy calibrating attractiveness: in each other, peers, bosses, and peripheral characters. Sam is deeply in love with Xander, but has to fend off romantic advances from her DCPD contact, Fletch. Meanwhile, Fletch seems to have crushes on his assistant, his boss, and a buxom vice cop. Shouldn’t skilled professionals in a national security crisis postpone the sexual byplay until happy hour?

Nor is it just the core ensemble. Ellison introduces new characters, not by name, action, or dialog, but by appearance. No character is permitted to speak, perform in-scene action, or advance the plot until Ellison establishes them as good-looking. No character who says or does anything in this book is less than ravishingly beautiful, man or woman, except one victim’s mousy mother and, in the final reveal, the culprit. Beauty equals virtue, evidently.

Between flashes of incipient sexcapades, Ellison cantilevers so many potential storylines into the book that she can’t resolve them all. Because it happens in an early chapter, it spoils nothing to say the DCPD pull Sam into the investigation because it appears the subway attack was targeted at the congressman alone. Tenuous prodding reveals that Peter Leighton may have sordid hobbies, unseemly connections, and a Moriarty-like double life.

Yet this, and several other byzantine subplots, disappear from the story for dozens of pages at once. Ellison has so many balls that she can’t juggle them together, and I kept forgetting she’d introduced something important. Then the investigation happens off-stage. Ellison introduces a possible serial rapist voyeur druggie congressman, then sends his DNA to a lab, and in the denouement, has her cop character basically shrug and say, “That was a red herring.”

BORRR-ring!

Ellison’s press biography claims she has worked with police, FBI, and other agencies to ensure the realism of her stories. After reading the slipshod techniques and outright illegalities of this story, I suspect she may have law officers asking to have their names redacted from her acknowledgments page. Her theatrics belong in a Vin Diesel movie, not in a police procedural with aspirations of verisimilitude.

This is not a serious novel. This is a mixed-genre slumgullion to fall asleep under on a beach or on a plane. Anybody who reads mysteries seriously will recognize it for a Rube Goldberg narrative, which might have worked as a parody, but is too earnest for its own good.

Alan Russell and the Marks of the New Noir

Alan Russell, Burning Man

One or two novels that break the established genre mold may be mere outliers; when you see it time and again, you know you’ve spotted a trend. Having recently seen mystery novels by Mark Mynheir, Tyler Dilts, and others, I’ve spotted a recurring theme where cynical noir antiheroes don’t just revel in their anguish. They want the path out. To that roster of authors, we can now add Alan Russell.

Detective Michael Gideon, a genuine LAPD hero, catches the case of the Paul Klein, a Beverly Hills teen whose body is found crucified in a local park. But when he begins poking the case, Gideon uncovers some unpleasant truths behind Paul’s seemingly charmed life: it seems young Paul had a fondness for antagonizing workers, immigrants, and anyone even slightly different. Suddenly, Beverly Hills High looks like a cauldron of suspects.

As if that wasn’t enough, Gideon, whose unique relationship with LA’s finest gives him the liberty to pick his own cases, also catches Baby Rose, an infant abandoned beneath a commuter rail line. The normally jaded PD always stumble on dead babies, and Gideon’s no different. But as he becomes increasingly entangled with his city’s most beloved child finder, and LA’s biggest Dominican monastery, he realizes his cynicism isn’t as complete as he thought.

Russell, probably the most seasoned mystery novelist you’ve never heard of, manages to keep several fires burning at once—pun intended, considering Gideon’s disfiguring burn scars. He takes the unusual tack of making his hero more brutally damaged on the outside than the inside. Gideon uses anger to defend himself against the world’s violence because, at root, he retains an essentially honest, unblemished, and very loving core.

The one storyline Russell doesn’t completely sell features Ellis Haines, the Santa Ana Strangler. Years earlier, Gideon and his K-9 partner Sirius courted death to bring Haines in through a raging brushfire. Now, Haines holds a Hannibal Lecter-like sway over Gideon, who has externalized parts of his soul: Sirius has become his better angel, Haines his dark side. Sadly, this story thread feels imperfectly transplanted from a Thomas Harris novel.

Alan Russell

Like Asta in Hammett’s The Thin Man, Sirius serves to highlight Gideon’s personality. We’re all only human, and we’ll say things to our dog we would never confide in another person. Sirius serves as Gideon’s police partner, but also his shrink and confessor. He gives Gideon the opportunity to come to terms with his own life. One wonders if Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe might have been better adjusted if they’d had a pooch.

But that’s a key part of the difference between Russell and writers like Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett. Where that founding generation of the noir tradition created characters steeped in psychological depth, these characters don’t think about their own depth. In the culminating scene of The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade turns Brigid O’Shaughnessy over to certain execution because honor says he has to. He never asks why.

The noir pioneers asked questions about society, crime, and violence. The New Noir heroes ask questions about themselves. This does not make them simple, uncomplicated characters from the pre-noir era, like Miss Marple or Auguste Dupin, who served as driving vehicles for the mental puzzle. Russell, Dilts, Mynheir, and other writers create protagonists who turn the same cynical eye on themselves as they turn on the larger world.

Thus, notably, New Noir characters do something the classic noir antiheroes never do: they fall in love. Spade and Marlowe progress through a succession of commitment-free sexual encounters (Spade’s discussion with his secretary, who is also his paramour, about his affair with his partner’s wife, while also sleeping with O’Shaugnessy, is typical.) These New Noir heroes, on the other hand, engage in courtship, unheard of in prior noir iterations.

If Russell and the other New Noir authors stumble—and they do—it’s because they’re trying something new. Too few working writers today have the courage to try something really innovative, so it’s a simply aesthetic pleasure to see authors taking risks. Even their mistakes have gravitas.

While Russell doesn’t completely integrate every component of his storyline, perhaps because he has so many, he nevertheless manages to sell Gideon as a compelling character whose struggles command our attention. If there really is a New Noir, with characters who actually live rather than exist at the mercy of their past, Russell’s writing is a good way to get into it. And Michael Gideon and Sirius are good characters to open that door.

Tyler Dilts' New California Noir

Tyler Dilts, The Pain Scale

A Congressman’s daughter-in-law and grandchildren are murdered in a manner both gratuitous and pointless. Long Beach homicide detective Danny Beckett thinks he’s seen everything, but even this is more than he expected. Just back from a year-long medical leave, Beckett has survived a disfiguring attack that leaves him in constant racking pain. But at least his physical pain gives him something to think about, besides his psychological pain.

Tyler Dilts makes good use of traditional noir boilerplates, upending readers’ expectations in ways that keep us wanting to pay attention. Instead of relying on our familiarity with traditions, like the sarcastic loner hero and the villain for hire, he creates them anew, giving us characters who want to rejoin the human race, but for whatever reason cannot. His attempts to imbue old stereotypes with new motivations revive the noir tradition for today’s generation.

Detective Beckett doesn’t want to hold the human race at arm’s length. He remains friends with an old case witness, tries to keep good working relations with his fellow LBPD detectives, and has a puckish sense of humor. And he isn’t a conscious “man outside his time.” He reads widely, savvies technology, and gets liberal arts in-jokes. His learned indie hipster persona resembles nothing so much as, well, me.

But his personal history is studded with suffering. He lost both his father and his wife violently, which plagues him, but also gives him remarkable sympathy for the victims he must investigate. His last major case left him a scar running the length of his left arm, so pain marks every moment of his life. In other words, unlike your typical smart-mouthed noir hero, Beckett has unusual cause to fend off the world with sarcasm and arrogance.

Also unlike typical noir heroes, Beckett understands himself as damaged. Where Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe think themselves honorable for alienating others and nursing grudges, Beckett realizes the trials he puts others through. He tries to make amends, but finds himself impeded by his constant pain, which prompts him to lash out at the worst possible moments. This alternating presence and absence of awareness gives Beckett’s edge real human dimension.

Dilts writes with a striking tenor that shows at once his familiarity with mystery standards, and his refusal to be bound. For one, his chapters are unusually long for genre fiction. He offsets this, however, by subdividing each chapter into short, action-driven scenes, many of which flash past with the urgency of a 1980s TV drama. This lets him linger on important developments as long as he needs, while still keeping the pace brisk.

He also numbers his chapters, not sequentially, but according to where Beckett stands on the titular pain scale: from one to ten, how bad is it? The worse Beckett’s pain, the more terse his language, so that, in chapters numbered above seven, sentences are often little more than noun-verb. Lower-numbered chapters have more introspection, studded with sudden moments of touching humor.

In the best noir tradition, Dilts avoids the simplest answer. After all, his murder victim is related to a Congressman, so how could anything be merely straightforward? Dilts’ intricate layering of conspiracy with psychological depth gives us three false endings, because each solution only opens more problems. I know I keep mentioning Sam Spade, but not without reason: this story has more cantilevered threads than anything I’ve read since The Maltese Falcon.

Some parts of this story will certainly bother certain readers. Beckett’s remarkable frankness can be off-putting. Though there’s no sex, his descriptions of violence spare no particulars. This comes across especially in the crime that drives the novel, a triple murder, including two child victims. Beckett spells out details with a clinical detachment that thankfully prevents him getting needlessly florid. Dilts essentially warns the squeamish to get off this train right now.

If I had to fault one issue, I’d pick Dilts’ strange reliance on brand names to set the tone. It gets overwhelming. In one scene, discussing a Porsche Panamera, Beckett keeps calling it a “Panera.” His partner corrects him, reminding him that Panera is a bakery chain, which Beckett calls “Starbucks for bread.” Layering works well for story elements, not so well for hipster nods.

But of you push past his brutal frankness and brand name dropping, Dilts crafts a story melding noir storytelling with New Millennium accuracy. Call it “noir procedural.”. Dilts both keeps within his genre, and stakes out territory entirely his own. In a crowded field, that makes him distinctive.

The Sadness of Seeing a Great Mind In Decline

Dashiell Hammett, Return of the Thin Man

Dashiell Hammett is famous for rebuilding the mystery genre away from mere intellectual puzzles, into complex realms of psychological realism. But he only published five novels. So when a publisher claims to have discovered two previously unknown novellas in his personal papers, you can imagine the excitement among mystery fans worldwide. And I can imagine the disappointment they’ll feel when they actually read these stories.

Hammett’s fifth and final novel, The Thin Man, differs from his prior works in its sense of humor. The culture clash between hard-bitten, alcoholic Nick Charles, and his glamorous wife Nora’s old-money world, enlivened by the kind of quick banter Hammett perfected, remains funny decades later. That’s saying something, since humor doesn’t age well. Not for nothing is the movie adaptation, starring William Powell and Myrna Loy, considered classic.

But by the time The Thin Man hit shelves, Hammett had already grown bored of his own fame. Publishers, fans, movie studios, and paparazzi all thought they owned a piece of him. He felt estranged from the world he wrote about, and cared more about leftist politics than about his six-book contract, which remained incomplete at his death, nearly twenty years later. A known drunk with a razor tongue, Hammett was turning into Nick Charles.

These two novellas, written under contract for MGM, provide a glimpse into a mind on the verge of collapse. But calling them novellas does them, and Hammett, an injustice. These are screen treatments that the studio would turn into the movies After the Thin Man and Another Thin Man. And they look like exactly what they are, screen treatments. Hammett dedicates all his energy to action and dialog, and none to the atmospherics that make his novels so powerful.

In some ways, that isn’t much of a loss. So we don’t get a lot of insights into the characters’ psyches. So what? Hammett’s characters are notoriously immune to introspection. Can you imagine Sam Spade ruminating over the morality of his actions? Of course not. That was part of the point with his characters: they exist entirely as they are, driven by ad hoc honor codes, not chained to the exigencies of the past.

But by replacing Hammett’s unique narrative growl with a blunt, declarative voice, these stories drop us into a world free from nuance. Characters are introduced not by the subtle application of action and language, but by full name and a character note. Actions simply happen, spoken into existence. Hammett’s novels are beautiful in their ambiguity; Nick Charles could as easily be a villain as a hero. But in these stories, he expects the director to fill that in.

Moreover, Hammett appears tired of his own creation. Editors Richard Layman and Julie Rivett give examples from Hammett’s life and papers to back up that impression, but we would know that even if we didn’t have their thorough notes. We’d know it from the way scenes get shorter and less detailed, as though Hammett were physically weary of writing. We’d know it from the way he reaches for easy, obvious jokes.

And we’d know it from the way a third story at the back of the book, simply entitled “Sequel to The Thin Man,” runs only eight pages and stops mid-sentence.

In all, this is clearly the work of a man who knows that his own best work is probably behind him. Instead of creating anything new, he’s tied to Hollywood, trying to extract more life out of his last great accomplishment. And as Layman and Rivett note, he isn’t even doing his own work. His stories incorporate bits lifted whole from screenwriters Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, and the studio (and Hayes Office) excised many of Hammett’s best contributions.

Many writers have to do Hollywood work to pay the bills. Such diverse authors as William Faulkner, Ayn Rand, and Dalton Trumbo did the studio shuck for rent and groceries before their novels took on a life of their own. But Hammett, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, did his Hollywood work after his peak had passed. His resentment comes across in every line. And the weariness he carries, trying to finish stories he clearly doesn’t love, infect us, too.

These stories make interesting historical artifacts. I can’t say I’m sorry I read them, because they give new glimpses into a great author’s creative process. But unlike Hammett’s novels, these don’t invite repeated reading or close attention. Read them for what they are, nothing more, because they aren’t Hammett’s great lost works.

A South African Cop Hits the World Stage

Deon Meyer, Seven Days

Inspector Benny Griessel is tapped to solve the murder of pretty young attorney Hanneke Sloet. Unfortunately, the case has yielded no physical evidence, and the trail went cold months ago. But the case has new urgency, in the form of an anonymous sniper, who is shooting random police, and announces he will shoot one per day until Sloet’s killer is found. Now the case has two fronts, conflicting clues, and a deadline Griessel may not be able to meet.

This strange, risk-taking South African mystery, first published last year in Afrikaans... but let’s pause there for a moment. Despite having generated countless international headlines a generation ago for its apartheid policies, most people in the Northern Hemisphere still don’t know much about South Africa. It remains terra incognita, and as such, just the sort of place readers like me would glom onto, for the opportunity to discover something new about the world.

As Deon Meyer depicts it, South Africa remains a nation riven by deep divides. Although apartheid was officially dismantled between 1990 and 1994, skin color remains a shorthand code for privilege and authority in Meyer’s land, and most people need to savvy two or three languages just to make it through the day. Everyone pretends to aspire to equality, but being white and speaking English still open doors of economic opportunity.

I can’t blame Meyer for not pushing that storytelling prospect as far as he could. After all, I’m his secondary audience. He wrote this book for his fellow Afrikaners, immersing the story in the kind of details they live with every day, not those which differ from my life. Yet in reading, I felt a pervasive ordinariness. Change the proper nouns, and you could set this story in upstate New York, Cumbria, or any other area overcome by forced diversity and working class malaise.

Deon Meyer

Captain Benny Griessel enjoys the privileges of a white Afrikaner, yet cannot free himself from punishing rounds of guilt and self-recrimination. He has had a swift ride up Cape Town’s ladder of police authority, and enjoys remarkable respect and power, despite being relatively young. Yet he holds himself responsible for everything. At the beginning of this novel, he is only a few months removed from nearly destroying himself at the bottom of a bottle.

Griessel suffers because he blames himself for everything. Not just stuff that actually is his own fault, like drinking his family away, but stuff over which he has no power. He attempts a fumbling romance with a washed-up singer and fellow recovering alcoholic, but he blames himself for her every setback and relapse. Many of his guilt soliloquies make little sense. Meyer, in narrating this story, doesn’t seem to regard Griessel’s relentless self-flagellation even worthy of commentary.

Is it perhaps a cultural thing? If so, it’s the closest Meyer comes to what I hoped to find in this story. Griessel holds himself responsible when the sniper evidently changes his MO, catching the police constantly on the back foot. He blames himself when the chain of command makes unreasonable demands for quick resolution. He blames himself when press blowback hits his superiors in the face. Griessel practically blames himself for everything but the tide.

Then, the investigation bifurcates in a way that deserves more comment. Griessel hurries to figure who killed Hanneke Sloet, a quest that circles the upper echelons of lingering white power. Much of the inquiry deals with “Black Economic Empowerment,” a government scheme to level the economic field, but which makes Black wealth into a form of white patronage. Meanwhile, the constables whom the sniper keeps bringing down are overwhelmingly black.

Even within the national police force, the races evidently communicate with each other primarily in tones of inherited guilt, punctuated by brief bursts of Afrikaans vulgarities. Anyone who has traveled through Compton, East London, or South Detroit will find the communication styles remarkably familiar. Old resentments don’t go away just because the laws change. And when power flows from the top, those at the bottom learn not to wait too long.

Time and again, I felt like something remarkable lingered beneath this story’s ordinary surface. Maybe the fault lies with me, because I wanted something more exotic, and Meyer is writing about his familiar world. The uninspiring result has a quotidian Hill Street Blues predictability, and I find myself moving limply from chapter to chapter, propelled by the occasional glimpses of surprise. The product isn’t bad. I just wish Griessel’s world didn’t feel so blandly familiar.

27th Precinct Book Club—Serial Slayers

Chelsea Cain, Kill You Twice

Detective Lammers needed a slug of lukewarm precinct coffee to bolster himself before walking into the waiting room. Hargreave was waiting out there. The man was an excellent source of information, but talking to him always took all the courage Lammers could muster. His training officer claimed he’d been allowed to fortify his coffee with bourbon. Sounded like a story.

Ah, well, no sense prolonging it. Lammers took a threadbare chair opposite Hargreave. “Whaddya got for me?”

Hargreave reached into his attaché with an inscrutable grin. “Just one this time. The new one from Chelsea Cain.”

“That ex-hippie who keeps turning up on the bestseller chart?”

“The same one.” Hargreave tossed the book to Lammers. “This is the fifth in her Beauty Killer series, which is a naked rip-off of Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Lecter novels. But don’t let that fool you. She’s actually a good writer, with a strong focus on character and psychological nuance. When you read the books, it feels like you’ve read this story before, but somehow, the characters remain new enough to be interesting.”

Lammers riffled idly through the pages. “So this one is a serial killer drama?”

“Don’t focus on the killer,” Hargreave said. “If you treat this like a cop drama, you’ll feel like you’ve read this before, which you have. In terms of the mystery aspect, Cain’s novels are really ordinary and derivative. But if you read this like a character drama set against a crime background, you have a smart, intriguing ensemble who push each other to reveal strange and powerful personalities.”

“I know a little about the story,” Lammers said. “Gretchen Lowell is a sadistic genius, and Archie Sheridan is the cop she’s obsessed with. Though she’s locked up, she has the power in the relationship, and demonstrates it through repeated breakouts. Nobody knows what to do with her, in part because nobody knows who she really is.”

“Bingo,” Hargreave said with a smile. “Have you read them?”

“The first one was a lukewarm market grab, the second was actually damned good, and the third one rambled without a clear sense of purpose.”

Chelsea Cain

“The fourth book?”

“Missed that one.”

“Well, you can jump into this one without it. Cain takes the time to explain what you might have missed. This time, Gretchen is under sedation and restraint, so when a killer uses her sgnature on locals, everyone knows it can’t be her. But then she calls Archie into her cell and asks him to intervene, because she thinks this new killer is after the child nobody knew she had.”

Lammers rubbed his chin. “So the torturer asks a favor from the man she tortured?”

“More than that. The woman who holds power by refusing to open herself up, opens herself up. This makes us wonder who Gretchen really is, and if her expression of ultimate evil might just be a cover to protect herself from something even darker. To put it another way, how can the sins of the past torment a person who has no past?”

“So I take it we start to get a glimpse at who Gretchen Lowell really is.”

“Yes, no, maybe so,” Hargreave said, flashing a theatrical shrug. “Gretchen lies with such intricate aggression that we never know what’s true. Then, as the story goes along, clues conflict with her story, suggesting the killer is no mere psychopath; he may be a time bomb Gretchen herself set running when she realized she’d be at somebody else’s mercy. Especially when the bomb starts to go off, and she demands quid pro quo for information.”

Lammers shook his head. “I don’t care for novelists who make crime so complicated. Most crime is banal—even murder usually has perfectly ordinary motivations.”

“Like I said, you can’t read it like a crime novel.” Hargreave leaned in and tapped the hardback with two fingers. “This is a story about characters who push each other to the limits of human endurance. They expose each other’s weaknesses, but they also provoke each other to go further and do more. Even Gretchen in her psychosis turns out to have superhuman qualities. She just uses them to kill people.”

Lammers tucked the book under his arm. “I think we’ll give this one a try.”

“Good choice,” Hargreave said. “It may be a bombastic, implausible premise, but if you read it the right way, the rewards hit you in subtle ways.”

“Good enough,” Lammers said, rising. “Now get out of my station house, you lowlife pissant.”

Also in this series:
Heartsick
Sweetheart
Evil at Heart
The Night Season

See also:
27th Precinct Book Club—Nicely Noir

The Steel Trap Detective and the Lost Little Girl

When mousy suburbanite Carol Wentz vanishes, no one thinks anything of it. Another unhappy housewife on the lam. Until her wallet appears in the house where six-year-old Iris Neff vanished eleven years ago. And in that wallet, the address and website of Manhattan PI Brenna Spector, missing persons specialist. Brenna couldn’t find Iris Neff a decade ago, so she ventures into a new and surprisingly intricate mystery today.

Alison Gaylin’s and she was introduces an interesting character in Brenna Spector, who, because of childhood trauma, cannot forget anything once it enters her head. Everything she has seen, heard, read, or experienced since she was eleven years old is embossed on her long-term memory. While this has its advantages, she can’t prioritize, can’t shirk pain, and can’t stop crippling waves of full-sensory memory intruding on the present.

If that sounds familiar, that’s because it resembles the premise behind the current TV series Unforgettable. Because of mass media lag times, the two were probably in production about the same time. But don’t let that fool you; Gaylin is no mere trend-watcher. She uses hyperthymestic syndrome, a very real illness, to plumb the psychological depths of a character who cannot abandon her personal quest because time doesn’t heal all wounds.

Brenna Spector struggles to endure the day. Because she forgets nothing, everything in the present is a potential trigger for elaborate memories. Some of those memories are extremely painful, and she can find herself trapped in an elaborate tape loop of trauma. This drives a wedge between her and the human race, alienating her from family and keeping her from making friends. She develops strenuous rituals to keep herself in the present.

The current mystery initially offers Brenna the opportunity to evade her weaknesses. The upstate bedroom community of Tarry Ridge has changed so much in the decade since Brenna last visited that she assumes she’ll have no trouble separating past from present. But that proves her greatest limitation. Because the two disappearances are so tightly linked, many clues she needs have been bulldozed by recent big-city development deals.

Brenna partners with Detective Nick Morasco, a professorial cop who has already taken his lumps for how this case has unfolded. Morasco has glimpsed the tawdry network of secrets over the Iris Neff case—and now the Carol Wentz case—but since his neck is already on the chopping block, he can only help Brenna so far. As the case unfolds, though, and both detectives keep their cards close to the vest, we start who wonder who’s helping whom.

Underlying the whole case is the original trauma that caused Brenna’s steel trap memory. When she was eleven, she witnessed her big sister get in a blue car and vanish. She’s blamed herself ever since, and cannot permit herself to forget anything. Strangely, the longer she investigates the Wentz/Neff disappearance, the more parallels start to appear with Brenna’s sister and her twenty-eight-year absence.

In some ways, Alison Gaylin is almost too hip for her own good. She pinches her title from a Talking Heads tune and her premise from the same well as prime time TV writers, and she name-checks movies, teenpop singers, classic TV shows, and more pop culture than I can track without Google. Keeping up with this willfully hip story is no small task.

But Gaylin resists obvious stereotypes: nobody saves the little girl at the climax, and Brenna and Morasco evade the too-easy romance. Her mystery remains so alive and active that readers won’t figure out the answer around page 100. I found the resolution both completely unexpected, and wholly earned. And that’s plenty rare.

Gaylin reminds me of two mysteries I’ve enjoyed in the past. On the one hand, like Alex Kava’s A Perfect Evil, Gaylin presents a female protagonist in a primarily male world, standing up to a villainy so integrated into its community that it almost evades notice. On the other hand, like Paul Tremblay’s The Little Sleep, Gaylin takes a detective who cannot see the world like ordinary people do, and forces her to explore her own inner depths.

It would be too easy, and false, to say Gaylin has produced deep literature. This is a paperback detective novel, and doesn’t pretend to be anything more. But by showcasing an interesting character with a complex, nuanced struggle, Gaylin evades the traps that make culture snobs like me sneer at detective novels. And in so doing, she creates a whole that exceeds the sum of its parts.