DOUBLE – Bill Pronzini and Marcia Muller

Somewhere near the end of Double the title’s relevance emerges. I’d be sharing it with you here had I read the ebook version. Alas, I’m holding the library’s hardbound copy, which has no speedy digital search function. As I recall, it sort of surprised me as clever but a tad contrived, and I have forgotten the contrivance. No harm done, my forgetting. I’d assumed from the get-go the title was a play on its double authorship, and I think that’s what I was meant to assume.

Husband/wife writers Bill Pronzini and Marcia Muller team up to put their well-known protagonists—Pronzini’s “Nameless Detective” and Muller’s “Sharon McCone”--into harm’s way, themselves teaming up to investigate a complex mystery linking murders, kidnappings, sexual high jinks, and endangered species (and possibly a couple of things I’m forgetting) that had me flipping the pages so fast I sometimes had to flip back to make sure what I’d just read was what I thought I’d just read. And while I was flipping forth and back and forth thusly I pondered a growing sensation of déjà vu that eventually morphed into full-blown certainty I had read Double some years ago.

Ordinarily such recognition would bring great swatches of remembered plot and scene slashing into my vicarious involvement in kibitzing the protagonists as they faced unthinkable dangers and wrestled with maddening conundrums tossed their way by clever authors bent on keeping me rapt and flipping pages and fooling me until pretty much the grand finale. This, I am almost entirely happy to say, the spoiling by memory, did not happen. My reluctance to go all out with entire happiness stems from a niggling worm of unease that my powers of recollection are flagging a tad, a concern that would seem to contradict my 200-milligram daily regimen of the memory “miracle herb” gingko biloba. But I shall leave that worry alone for now.

Pronzini & Muller

I vaguely recall liking Double the first time around despite occasional moments of confusion over which private detective—McCone or Nameless—was narrating which of the alternating chapters. Same as this time. I like McCone and Nameless. They’re believable, engaging characters. The ending surprised me this time, as it most likely did before, assuming my cognitive powers are not flagging. I wore a smile this time closing the covers. Then again, I read to be entertained, rarely employing a critical eye. I’d read one other of the Nameless series—Boobytrap--and none of McCone’s. I’d read one other Pronzini/Muller collaboration, The Plague of Thieves, a light, humorous mystery with a mysterious character who thought he was Sherlock Holmes.

Double has its moments of humor. It also has less savory scenes, albeit well written. Only one death is described as it happens, through the eyes of Nameless:

I came around a clump of bamboo, and straight ahead there was open space and I could see most of the east side of the hotel. The tower jutting up on that corner caught my eye: it had open arches on four sides with waist-high railings in them, so that people standing up there could take in the view in all directions. I saw movement inside—one person, maybe two. I couldn’t be sure because of the angle: the inside of the tower was a blend of light and shadow.

Overhead the droning of two or three approaching Navy planes began to build in volume. I glanced up at them briefly, then looked back at the tower.

And somebody appeared at the rail, came flying over it like a person diving off a high board—a woman dressed in something pink, arms clawing at the air, screaming.

She screamed all the way down, a death cry that was barely audible above the pulsating roar of the planes. Something moved up in the tower, a suggestion of someone there in the shadows peering down. Or maybe it was just an illusion; I couldn’t be sure of that either, because I was already running by then, with that sense of shock something unexpected and frightening always instills in you. There were fifty yards separating me and the hotel when the falling woman hit and the screaming stopped. But even with the noise of the planes I swear I could hear the sound of impact—that melon-splitting sound of bones breaking and tissue ripping that you can never forget once you’ve heard it.

Or once you’ve read a well-crafted description of it. I do remember this scene from my first dance with Double. But I didn’t recall it until it reached out again and grabbed me by the throat.

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

ALL DAY AND A NIGHT – Alafair Burke

Alafair Burke had already published a dozen novels before I had any inkling she existed. And when it finally sank in that she did, I put off reading anything she wrote until a couple of days ago. Took me awhile to get used to the idea the Alafair I had watched grow up in her father’s novels wasn’t the same. Even then I no doubt shall always see the real one, the nonfiction daughter of James Lee Burke, through the same Louisiana bayou’s misty glow as Burke’s fictional character, Dave Robicheaux, continues to see his grownup Alafair:

Whenever I looked at Alafair, I saw the little El Salvadoran girl I pulled from a submerged plane that went down in the salt by Southwest Pass. I saw a little girl I called Alf who wore a Donald Duck cap with a quacking bill and a T-shirt with a smiling whale named Baby Orca and tennis shoes embossed with the words LEFT and RIGHT on the respective toes. The image of that little El Salvadoran girl will always hover before me like a hologram.

That’s from Burke’s most recent of his twenty elegant Robicheaux crime novels, published three years ago with the Alafair character a graduate of Stanford Law School and writing her second crime novel. And still instructing her father, as she has from about the midpoint of the series, to stop calling her “Alf”. I’d be willing to bet (were it not illegal, of course) that Alafair Burke, a graduate of Stanford Law School, a former prosecutor and now a law professor in New York City, instructs her father as well to stop calling her “Alf”. Knowing this, and knowing the power of richly imaginative writing and how it can carry you to a magical landscape from which it is hard to take leave, maybe it helps to understand my ambivalence toward venturing from the bayou’s misty glow into another, perhaps more objective light, even and especially one emanating from the same corpuscular soup (despite the myth being more fun, the real Alafair is JLB’s natural daughter). There’s the curiosity and the caution. Ultimately the first prevailed when I decided to read Alafair Burke’s ninth crime/suspense novel, All Day and a Night.

Not her father’s style in any way, but smart and engaging in her own. All Day and a Night is the fifth and most recent in a series starring Ellie Hatcher, a thirty-something (I think—maybe fortyish) New York City homicide detective. She grew up in Wichita, same as Alafair Burke. The plot uses a familiar serial-killer trope but with several clever twists. Hatcher’s boyfriend, an assistant district attorney, arranges for her and her partner to re-investigate the murders of five prostitutes for which a man is already serving life without parole (known in prison parlance as all day and a night).Why the fresh look? Because the victim of a new murder was mutilated in the same way as the others, a way that was never made public, suggesting the real killer is still unknown.

At the same time a ruthless, publicity-hungry defense lawyer lures brilliant young corporate attorney, Carrie Blank, from her prestigious firm to help spring the convict. The attraction for Blank, whose half-sister was one of the victims, is that proving the wrong man was convicted might help lead police to the real killer.

Alafair Burke and her father

Complicated indeed. And it gets more so, much more so, before eventually it all comes together. There’s something of the classic police procedural here as well as edge-of-the-seat suspense. And the writing is deft. So are the main characters. Here’s a taste, right at the start, right after Hatcher has won a bet with her partner, J.J. Rogan, that she’d be the one to finesse a confession out of the woman they were interrogating in the stabbing death of her cheating husband. This is the banter shortly afterward in the squad room between Hatcher, Rogan and another detective:

Rogan was handing Ellie a crisp new set of twenties from his wallet when John Shannon emerged from their lieutenant’s office and witnesses the transaction. “Looks like a nice wad of dough you guys got there.”

Ellie could already see where this was heading. The most effort John Shannon ever put into the squad room was cracking wise. With money changing hands from Rogan to Ellie, his wee brain was probably overheating from the collision of potential barbs: Would it be the attractive female detective earning her money the old-fashioned way, or yet another comment about Rogan’s family wealth? Lucky for Ellie, more often than not Shannon had a way of opening the door for her go-to retort.

“You mean like those wads of dough you snarf down every morning at Krispy Kreme?” She tapped out a “bu-dump bump” on her desktop. “I’m sorry, man. You just make lame cop-eating-doughnut jokes so...damn...easy.”

“When you got it, you flaunt it,” he said, patting his oversized belly. At least the guy had as good a sense of humor about himself as he expected in others.

Ah, dear little Alf, look what you've become.

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

A MOMENT ON THE EDGE: 100 Years of Crime Stories by Women – ed. Elizabeth George

I committed a crime a year ago paying a mere 50¢ at my public library’s used-book sale for an excellent copy of A Moment on the Edge: 100 Years of Crime Stories by Women. I take some comfort knowing my crime was shared by the library itself for letting this sterling anthology of exemplary fiction go for what would be called in the ironically apt vernacular “a steal.”

The book, one of hundreds piled on long tables stretching across the library’s community room and arranged in no recognizable order, caught my attention with the name of its editor, Elizabeth George, a top-tier crime fiction author. Aha, I might actually have muttered aloud, as crime fiction is quite definitely an area of particular interest to me. Closer scrutiny of the cover revealed some of the contributors’ names scrolled around the perimeter. A few were already favorites of mine, and others I recognized as long overdue to feed my insatiable appetite for good crime stories. Clockwise from the top: Antonia Fraser, Nadine Gordimer, Shirley Jackson, J.A. Jance, Ngaio Marsh, Joyce Carol Oates, Sara Peretsky, Ruth Rendell, and Dorothy L. Sayers.

With these august names reaching out for me I could not afford to dawdle long enough to open the cover for the other 17 contributors and risk missing out on other treasures among the other volumes tempting the mob of other insatiable bibliophilic appetites stalking the narrow aisles I’d not yet attempted to navigate. I therefore thrust the intriguing volume into my voluminous Friends of the Library canvas bag, eventually making my way to the cashier who relieved me of five bucks and change for a bagful of books the combined weight of which came near to dislocating my shoulder by the time I’d toted it out to my pickup and thence from pickup to apartment where they’re yet stacked on the floor, those anyway that did not find room in the three nearby bookcases.

A Moment on the Edge remains in a special stack next to my descendent of the favorite-of-Anthony-Boucher Morris Chair (which I had to Google after seeing its ubiquitous mention in The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars and to my delight learned of its ancestry to the recliner I’ve just this second named “Morris” in Mr. Boucher’s honor.) Ensconced thus in the privileged pile, A Moment on the Edge has served me faithfully female contrived crime fiction over the past year as the occasional cerebral aperitif, dessert, or nightcap. I should suggest a precaution regarding my most recent sampling of the anthology’s piquant offerings: Ms. Oates’s Murder-Two likely is not the most tranquilizing bedtime reading one might choose. But then anyone who knows Ms. Oates’s work knows she does dark so dark it can leave one wondering if light ever really exists (we’re speaking metaphorically here, as one might wish to leave the bedside lamp lit after inadvisedly reading Murder-Two while nestled between the sheets). I read it this morning, and might well leave my bedroom light burning throughout this night as a ward against awakening in the dark, sweat-soaked from a dream of coming home to find my beloved mother dead at the foot of the stairs, her head in a pool of black fluid.

“Squid ink”, teenage Derek Peck says is what it seemed like to him when he came home and found his mother in said circumstance. He’s horrified, in retrospect anyway. We’ve little doubt his horror is less for his loss than for the murder he’s suppressing. We strongly suspect this for two reasons. The first is that Ms. Oates loves to build suspense in the manner of a boa constrictor strangling its prey, wrapping muscular coil upon muscular coil upon muscular coil, squeezing and squeezing...you, the reader. She doesn’t do surprises. You see everything coming. Coming incrementally into focus, gathering definition in a maddeningly glacial pace.

The second reason we suspect Derek Peck smashed the back of his mother’s skull in with one of her golf clubs is that the story’s very first sentence tells us to: This, he swore. Yeah, right, son, the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you God uh huh. Oh, we know the little punk did it, and we know Oates will string it out as she loves to do, building building building. And this is no police procedural. In fact I don’t recall a police presence in the form of a character appearing at all. Everything takes place, as is Oates’s genius, in the characters’ heads. Essentially there are only two characters besides the mother-murdering punk: his brilliant defense attorney, who’d gone to school with the mother, and, we gradually see, hated her, and, we quickly see, is helplessly in lust with her client.

The other character? The mother, of course.

Joyce Carol Oates

 

Oates’s sleight of voice moves with the slippery grace of a psychic viper through the living characters’ heads. Starting from an omniscient viewpoint, soon, quick as a wink, she has slithered into the head of the character she’s describing, becoming that character, and then back out again, and in and out, floating in through one eye and out the other. The way Robin Williams did with personae in his stand-up routines, only in writing—and there’s no laughter in Murder-Two.

But the writing. As girls of Derek Peck’s milieu would say: Oh. My. God. Snake-slick. Deathly deep. Super savvy. Astonishing. Sample? Here you go:

When Marina Dyer was introduced to Derek Peck the boy stared at her hungrily. Yet he didn’t get to his feet like the other men in the room. He leaned forward in his chair, the tendons standing out in his neck and the strain of seeing, thinking visible in his young face. His handshake was fumbling at first then suddenly strong, assured as an adult man’s, hurtful. Unsmiling, the boy shook hair out of his eyes like a horse rearing its beautiful brute head and a painful sensation ran through Marina Dyer like an electric shock. She had not experienced such a sensation in a long time.

In her soft contralto voice that gave nothing away, Marina said, “Derek, hi.”

Her? The mother-murdering punk’s lawyer. 

 

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