CURSED TO DEATH – Bill Crider

Dan Rhodes, sheriff of Blacklin County, Texas, introduced me to the Zero® candy bar. Until then the Fifth Avenue® bar had been my favorite. It still is. Not that the Zero is a bad bar. It's not, in fact it's pretty good.

It's just not a Fifth Avenue. I've had only two Zeros in my life. I bought the first one at the Dollar General store out of curiosity because Sheriff Rhodes was hooked on them while solving a mysterious homicide in Murder in the Air, the first in the Rhodes series I read, and the 18^th in the series.

I had my second bar while reading another Rhodes mystery, the first in the series, Too Late to Die. I figured it would be fun to chew on my Zero bar as Sheriff Rhodes chewed on his while solving the murder. But Rhodes hadn't discovered the Zero bar yet. He still hadn't discovered it in Cursed to Death, the third in the Rhodes series. 

[Darn it, I hate to break up the narrative flow here but I got to thinking about the Zero bar, and suddenly had to walk down to the Dollar General and get another—my third. I ate it on the way back to the library. It was as good as I remembered, but it still wasn't a Fifth Avenue. The Fifth Avenue, by the way, is becoming a tad hard to find. None in the Dollar General or in the Rite Aid next door. Might be a mystery that needs looking into.] By now you're undoubtedly wondering if I've slipped off the trolley tracks of the standard book review format. Not that my reviews (which I prefer to call “reports” because I do not feel qualified to critique any literary endeavor) ever follow the standard trolley tracks. In fact the only trolleys I remember seeing were what my parents called “streetcars” and they were in Milwaukee when I was a child, and, so far as I know, are long, long gone.

Crider at work

To those of you getting angry or horribly bored now--and I'd be surprised if at least some of you aren't--I humbly submit that my attempt to write like Bill Crider writes his Dan Rhodes mysteries has fallen woefully short. Here's what I mean:

Details. They were always important in any investigation of any crime, and it was funny how often you overlooked them, even the most obvious ones. But it wasn’t as if they were forgotten, or never noticed in the first place. Sometimes the details suddenly jumped into your mind, coming all at once out of whatever dark corner they’d been hiding in, and made everything clear. Maybe things would work out like that in the Martin case, which was still bothering Rhodes. It wasn’t easy to think about murder and a missing man when your mind was on being engaged. Or it could have been the other way around. It wasn’t easy to think about being engaged when your mind was on murder and a missing man.

Rhodes gave it up. He went out back, fed Speedo [his dog], and drove back to the jail.

Did that help? Not yet? How about this:

Rhodes had entertained several thoughts. Kidnapping hadn’t been one of them. “No note,” he said. “No phone calls. At first I thought he’d just gone out on a party, but now I don’t know. It’s pretty certain that he didn’t leave that van there, all wiped down.”

“Then we can say that you suspect ‘foul play’?” She pretended to be writing notes on a nonexistent pad.

“I don’t say things like that,” Rhodes told her.

“I know. It’s part of your charm.”

Rhodes didn’t say anything to that. He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t think of himself as having any charm, and he thought maybe Ivy [his betrothed] was kidding him.

Ivy might have been kidding Rhodes, but she was right. His earthbound, uncomplicated common sense is part of his charm—a large part of it, and of Crider's narrative voice in the 24-book Dan Rhodes series (with the 25th due out in August.) I intend to read them all, gulp them down like Cheetos®, but I can't be obvious about it. They must be slipped in surreptitiously (a word Sheriff Rhodes would never use) between the darker, more complex works my literary advisor, Fictionaut's Kitty Boots, assigns periodically. I can do this, but I can't report on them all, not with Ms. Boots keeping an eye on this blog. The inadvertent confrontation might be similar were Ms. Boots, expecting me to be watching a televised production of Der Ring des Nibelungen, to catch me instead sneaking a peek at a rerun of The Andy Griffith Show. Truth be told, Sheriff Rhodes enjoys watching Andy Taylor, Mayberry's widowed sheriff, solve domestic problems and the occasional crime like those Rhodes handles in Blacklin County. Short of murder, that is. It's something Rhodes ponders (altho he would never use that word):

As he watched the episode unfold, Rhodes wondered if anyone had ever disappeared in Mayberry. Or if anyone had ever been murdered. He was sure that Sheriff Taylor could have solved things in less than thirty minutes and then made sure that Barney got credit for the whole thing. Rhodes wished his own case were that easy.

Rhodes's case is indeed perplexing (nor that one—I'm not trying to mimic Crider anymore). A local dentist whose hobby is buying rental properties goes missing after one of his tenants, enraged because he removed the TV from her home for nonpayment of rent, came to his office and put a loud, frightening curse on him in front of his entire office staff. And then, as Rhodes bumbles genially along trying to find out what happened to the dentist, the dentist's wife turns up clubbed to death in their home. Definitely not your customary Mayberry scenario.

Sunday-go-to-meeting Crider

Sheriff Rhodes, unlike my recollection of his TV likeness, gets into some serious scraps. He's neither a macho type nor a big man, like Sheriff Taylor. He just wades in and does his job. Here's Rhodes expecting trouble at the start of a confrontation with a suspect he wants to question: “Swan looked even bigger than he remembered. Rhodes’s pipsqueak neck tingled in anticipation of Swan’s fingers encircling it.” They fought. Rhodes's neck survived.

Rhodes doesn't like to use his sidearm, either, but he uses it, and not to especially good effect. Does he solve the murder? Does he find the missing dentist? Does he manage to keep from screaming at the two wiseass geezers who run his jail and handle the dispatch radio? Of course, to the first and the second, and yes to the third.

[For more Friday's Forgotten Books check the links on Patti Abbott's unforgettable blog]

DOUBLE DEBUT – Bill Crider and Megan Abbott

A single word in the titles of their debut novels gave them away, told the world they were rolling their die in the crime-writing game. They won, and their streak is still hot. Bill Crider went first, in 1986, with Too Late to Die, a mystery featuring Sheriff Dan Rhodes, set in a small Texas town. The novel won the Anthony Award for best first novel, and Crider went on to write nineteen more Dan Rhodes mysteries and several other series and a bunch more novels and stories. His total of published novels has climbed to more than fifty.

In 2005 Megan Abbott gave us Die a Little, a noirish Hollywood underbelly mystery. Three years later her third crime novel, Queenpin, won an Edgar for best paperback original, and a Barry for best paperback novel. After publishing four more crime novels and a collection of stories, Abbott is coming out near the end of July with a new crime novel, You Will Know Me. Just so you know, it can be pre-ordered.

Being published for the first time is the last in a string of debuts for every novelist. The first for most, one presumes, is the act of putting the first words on a blank screen or sheet of paper. “Zounds,” you might whisper when this happens, celebrating with a Shakespearean expletive your embarkation upon the time-honored craft of engaging the imaginations of others with stories. The struggle itself, with plot, character, dialogue, scene, and an ever-present self-doubt, would be a sort of elongated debut leading to the next zoundsworthy debut, that of writing The End. There are the debuts then of writing the query letter to agents and/or publishers, the debut of sending the novel to strangers—agents or editors—any one of whom can help you celebrate the next debut, that of having a stranger like your novel enough to take a chance on it, either to send it around to publishers or to sell it to a publisher's decision makers, and probably a few more debuts I haven't thought of until finally, perhaps the biggest zounds eruption of them all, when you find yourself holding your first copy in your proud, trembling hands.

Whether Bill Crider intended his Too Late to Die as the debut of a twenty-book series featuring Sheriff Dan Rhodes, or just a stand-alone mystery, I cannot say. Too Late to Die was not my introduction to the series, as I had started somewhere in the middle. This made the series' first book the more interesting to me because I already knew most of the main characters and felt at home in Blacklin County, where Rhodes is sheriff. Would I notice any difference, in voice or style? Did Rhodes or Blacklin County change? Not that I could tell. I'm guessing you could switch all twenty in the series around like walnut shells in a find-the-pea game and, if I didn't know, I would be hard-pressed to pick the order they were written. I should add that Crider's writing is impeccable, packing much into an understated, authentic voice.

Here's what I mean: as the novel opens, Sheriff Rhodes is talking with the owner of a store that's just been burglarized. It's an election year and Rhodes has stiff competition in his bid for another term. Rhodes figures the store owner, Hod Barrett, probably won't vote for him.

The two men were standing on the cracked gray sidewalk in front of Hod’s store, shaded by a heavy wooden awning. Rhodes looked through the screen doors of the store with their faded Rainbow Bread stencils. He could see some of the old men on the red loafer’s bench by the soft drink cooler lean forward and perk up their ears. One of them spit a stream of snuff into a Styrofoam cup he held in his left hand. Any minute now, they would get up the nerve to walk outside and join in the conversation. Rhodes didn’t want to make a campaign speech, so he changed the subject. “Tell you what, Hod,” he said. “Let’s us go take a look at where the break-in was.”

Mayberry set in Texas, that's how Blacklin County comes across to me. There's not as much comedy, but there's some, mainly in the regular characters, two of whom are a couple of old geezers who work for Rhodes—one's the jailer, the other the dispatcher.There's also murder. The young wife of a fellow who works nights is found strangled in their home.The case gets complicated as Rhodes learns that various local men had a habit of stopping by at night to visit the woman, who, they all insisted, merely loved to chat. The investigation gets trickier when two suspects are murdered, one of them while Rhodes is questioning him at the stone quarry where the suspect was fishing.

I liked Too Late to Die a lot. Although I'm usually drawn more to voice and character and atmosphere than I am to plot or action, this novel has a good balance of all these aspects. In a burial scene at the local cemetery Crider masterfully combines comedy and high drama as well as giving Rhodes insight into a couple of suspects. And a chase near the conclusion is as exciting as any I have found in some of the most commercially successful thrillers.

The word “die” in the title and its debut status, and talented writing, are about the only things Megan Abbott's novel has in common with Crider's. Where Too Late to Die has a persistent upbeat feel broken by an occasional harsh downbeat, Die a Little brings a continuing crescendo of suspicion and foreboding. This from the get-go as narrator Lora describes meeting Alice, her future sister-in-law, at the hospital where she and Lora's brother, William, are being treated for minor injuries in a car accident. Alice had caused the accident, and William, a police investigator, was smitten while helping her out of her damaged car. At first, Lora is happy that her brother obviously is taken by the pretty young woman:

He laughed when he said it, which was how I knew the driver was young and pretty, and troubling and helpless, all of which seemed, suddenly to me, to be just what he wanted, what he had been waiting for all along. It happened just like that. I realized it about him just like that, without ever having thought it before. “Is she all right?” “She had a concussion, but she’s okay. She sprained her wrist trying to break her fall.” He touched his own wrist as he said it, with great delicacy. This gesture confirmed it all.

We already know something's not right, though, before we reach this part early in the first chapter. We feel it at the very beginning, from Lora's wistful tone as she remembers William. The two lived together before Alice entered their lives. Lora taught school:

Later, the things I would think about. Things like this: My brother never wore hats. When we were young, he wouldn’t wear one even to church and my mother and then grandmother would force one on his head. As soon as he could he would tug it off with soft, furtive little boy fingers. They made his head hot, he would say. And he’d palm the hat and run his fingers through his downy blond hair and that would be the end of the hat.

When he began as a patrolman, he had to wear a cap on duty, but it seemed to him far less hot in California than in the South, and he bore up. After he became a junior investigator for the district attorney, he never wore a hat again. People often commented on it, but I was always glad. Seeing his bristly yellow hair, the same as when he was ten years old, it was a reminder that he still belonged to our family, no matter where we’d move or what new people came into our lives.

Lora's misgivings grow to suspicions after William and Alice are married. It's Alice's background that concerns her. Too mysterious, things don't quite add up. Alice said she'd worked as a seamstress for a Hollywood film studio, but also claims to have credentials to teach. She gets a job at the school where Lora teaches, but her promised credentials never arrive at the school. Lora, feeling protective of her brother, begins secretly trying to learn more about his new wife. Her efforts lead her into the dark side of Hollywood where drugs, prostitution, and eventually murder occur. She finds her own innocence slipping away in the corrosive environment.

Her voice is strong and clear, her intelligence a constant to the very end. I'm not ordinarily attracted to dark novels, and I'm not sure why. I've always preferred happy endings, is one reason. Another, I'm wondering, is the danger of being seduced by the dark side along with characters I've come to like who rarely end up the way I would like them to. Die a Little's dark suspense and inevitable end are a credit to the genre. The novel seduced me as I'd feared it would, and I'm glad it did.

 

[find more Friday's Forgotten Books reviewed at Todd Mason's amazingly eclectic blog: 

 http://socialistjazz.blogspot.com/]