SHOT IN DETROIT – Patricia Abbott

I rarely abandon a novel once I've started it. There have been some—Moby Dick and Gravity's Rainbow come to mind—I've needed several false starts before getting up enough traction or momentum to finally read to the end. Most recently I gave up on a debut novel by a brilliant writer I won't name whose narrator is a serial killer sexually aroused by his murders. Creeped me out, and I doubt I will ever come back to it. Squeamish, some might say, but I prefer “humanely sensitive.” I can't help identifying with compelling characters in novels, and there are some I just cannot abide.

Violet Hart, the narrator in Patricia Abbott's new novel, Shot in Detroit,

seemed at first to be one of these. Hart is an artist obsessed with taking photographs of dead young black men in their coffins. Knowing this I might never have started the book had the author been someone other than Abbott. Even then I hesitated a tad, even still savoring her debut novel, Concrete Angel, which has lit up the crime-fiction community to rave reviews and awards. I've lived long enough to have come to terms with death—of family and friends, natural and violent--and have reached an albeit edgy peace with the inevitability of my own demise, not unreasonably distant down that road we're told we all eventually must walk alone. At the same time morbidity continues to put me off. Grateful Dead to me is the name of a band. It might mean more to some, but not me--I hear the rippling intro to Truckin'. I feel obliged to focus my attention on the potential for growth the statistically brief time left to me has in store. Better busy being born than busy dying, as Bob Dylan sagely advised.

So wouldn't you know, several chapters in, Shot in Detroit started giving me the same creepy feeling I got from the other novel, the one with the sexual fetish serial killer narrator I abandoned. And I wasn't much liking Violet Hart, who seemed a calloused young woman who put her art above all else. She has a mirror on the ceiling above her bed for added dimension to her trysts, which to her seem to have little more significance than carnal quality. But more than not liking her, I wasn't liking what she was doing, taking photos of dead bodies in coffins. It didn't help that she was taking great pains, artistic pains, to preserve these young men in images that greatly interested the owner of a gallery who wanted to feature them in a showing. I found this disturbing, and so did Hart's boyfriend, the mortician who had unintentionally sparked her obsession and, although allowing her to shoot the photos at his funeral home, was growing uneasy about her project.

Patricia Abbott

Something kept me on track, though. Abbott's skill with characters, bringing them alive with yearnings and fears, weaknesses, and strengths, has a way of winning you over, infiltrating your defenses. You start feeling friendly, no matter what they're up to. You sort of want to have their back, help them when they're in a jam. It was Father's Day when I read Shot in Detroit. My own daughter is in Los Angeles, a struggling actress. I'm in Virginia. I worry about her out there. As I read Violet Hart's unsettling narrative I began to wonder why Sarah hadn't called me yet. My paternal instincts were kicking in. They bled unto the pages I was reading.

Soon I was Violet's dad. Her own father had abandoned the family shortly after she was born. Her story was drawing me in as his surrogate. “Stop with this thing about dead bodies,” I more than once almost hollered. “Keep your mouth shut,” I snapped silently while police detectives interrogated her as a suspect in the violent deaths of a couple of young men she knew. I offered unspoken sympathy and gentle advice during her interior monologues when she worried about her decisions and the course her life was taking. “No!!” I'm afraid I might have shouted out loud when it seemed the unthinkable had just happened.

So did I finish Shot in Detroit? Would I have written this review if I hadn't? (I don't review books I've abandoned, even to pan what I've read of them.) Did I like Shot in Detroit? Yes. Speak up, I can't hear you. YES, DAMMIT, I LOVED IT!! Thanks. Oh, did my daughter call? C'mon, you want me to spoil the ending?

Click on any of the links below to buy Shot in Detroit:

Amazon

iKobo

iTunes

Nook

Google Play

IndieBound

CONCRETE ANGEL -- Patricia Abbott

THIS JUST IN: CONCRETE ANGEL WAS VOTED “BEST FIRST NOVEL” AT BOUCHERCON FRIDAY NIGHT! (6 May, New Orleans)

Perverse, it would seem, to publish this review of Concrete Angel, about a monster mother, so near the Sunday devoted annually to honor mothers everywhere flowers and greeting cards are sold or received. The timing was not on purpose. My mother died some years back, taking with her the incentive to remember such calendar events. Nor was Mother's Day likely on Patricia Abbott's mind when she decided to dedicate to debut novels this Friday's “forgotten books” feature on her widely popular blog.

What is intentional is my review of Concrete Angel for this feature. Concrete Angel happens to be Abbott's own debut novel, published nearly a year ago. I read it then, and re-read it yesterday. The first time was a jaw-dropping experience. Yesterday was the same jaw-wise, but from a different vantage. This time the characters revealed much of themselves I'd missed before, before I knew how it all would end. This time they pulled me so deep into their lives I'm afraid I might have given voice to my fears, muttered warnings, trying to get my fictional friends out of jams, to see the dangers ahead. I should probably wait another couple of years before reading it again, give my imagination a rest, or I might end up inside Concrete Angel for good with no way out.

Yet another cosmic convergence of timing brought me back to Concrete Angel to sound this unintended discord amid the harmony decreed for mama's special day. Last week I brought several of John le Carré's novels home from the library's used-book sale, and immediately read A Perfect Spy. Unbeknownst to me as I started reading, the primary supporting character was the eponymous spy's monster father.

Villainous parents, of course, have played prominent roles in our fictional dramas since the days of Sophocles, and no doubt earlier. What keener way to engage the inner adolescent in anyone than to tickle memories of that tug-of-war between love and independence that arrives inevitably with awakening from innocence? In Concrete Angel twelve-year-old Christine's travail with this filial rope enters a lethal arena when her divorced mother shoots a man to death in their apartment while her daughter's asleep in the next room. Mother persuades daughter to take the rap, claiming daughter, awakened by noise, mistakenly thought the man mother had invited to the apartment only hours earlier, had entertained and then taken to bed, was attacking her.

Patricia Abbott

The ruse works. The authorities buy it, and the only legal consequence is court-ordered counseling for the girl. Even Christine, bewitched by her mother's powerful, manipulative personality, almost comes to believe the imaginary version of what happened. In fact, Christine's mother had emptied her revolver into the man as he tried to call the police after catching her going through his wallet.

Occurring only weeks after Christine's parents' divorce, the murder caps what up to then had been an abnormally tight relationship between mother and daughter. Christine, from her earliest memories, had assumed the role of confidante, passive accomplice, and protector to an obsessive/compulsive, thieving con-artist mother. The shooting punctures Christine's albeit uneasy comfort zone in this bond. It arouses her survival instincts, allowing her to see her life more objectively and to recognize, by increments, the intimate toxicity of her mother's presence.

Christine bides her time. She's inherited, if not the pathology, her mother's toughness and cunning, traits similar to those of le Carré's spies. And Christine does become a spy, but her only target is her mother. It takes six more years before the girl, now eighteen, knows it's time to make the break. Her incentive is to save her younger step-brother from succeeding her as their mother's unwitting partner in crime. She sees it already happening, their mother taking the cutely dressed boy with her as a diversion while she shoplifts and buys merchandise with fake identification and bad checks. It comes to a head when the gun is turned on Christine after she confronts her mother with documentary evidence of her lifelong crimes.

Obviously Christine survives, at least long enough to narrate much of Concrete Angel. And hers is a surprisingly upbeat, wryly amused voice. Her mother amazes her in retrospect, the daughter admiring in a detached way the beauty and charm of this agile, quick-witted, thoroughly self-absorbed woman. It's as if she's describing some wild jungle cat, some force of nature, the way her mother sees herself.

“No one can cure me because there’s nothing to cure. I just like my junk,” she says when confronted with her obsessive need for things. On another occasion, when her husband suggests another in a succession of professional treatments, she offers this snarky observation: “Acquisitive women must rank at the top of the list of faddish psychiatric disorders.” She blinked her eyes twice. “You only have to think of how many synonyms there are for greedy to get the gist.”

Despite Christine's general tone of savvy insouciance, her loneliness and mounting despair appear with sharp poignancy in this reflection as she struggles internally with the separation she's coming to accept as inevitable: Whole sections of my life— our lives— were forbidden topics. No, more than forbidden. They’d virtually disappeared... There was no one in my current life who wanted to hear about my past. There was no past; we lived in the moment. Mother had reinvented us time and again. And would forever, I feared.

Patricia Abbott's next novel, Shot in Detroit, is due out in June. It should come as no surprise I've pre-ordered it for my Kindle.

[for more Friday's Forgotten Books see the listing on Patti Abbott's unforgettable blog]

WHAT'S WRONG WITH DORFMAN? - John Blumenthal

I put off reading What's Wrong with Dorfman? as long as I could. Not because I was afraid it wouldn't be good. I knew it would be terrific, which is why I finally gave in and read it. I read it despite knowing that whatever was wrong with Dorfman would soon be wrong with me. I was right, of course. This is precisely what happened.

Dorfman wakes up disoriented, dizzy, nauseous, depressed, and has diarrhea. As I followed his symptoms in the book it became grotesquely clear to me I had them, too—except for the depression. The saving grace is John Blumenthal's devious comic sensibility. Every time I started feeling depressed along with Dorfman, I came to something that made me laugh. If only poor Dorfman could have read What's Wrong with Dorfman? whenever he started sliding into depression maybe he would have laughed like I did, and felt better. But let's get real.

Dorfman's dad is a doctor, a medical doctor. He is such a conscientious doctor he takes the blood pressures of Dorfman, Dorfman's sister and their mother several times a day. He admonishes the three of them repeatedly, whenever they are in his presence, even as adults, before meals and, in fact, whenever it occurs to him, to wash their hands and to make sure they work up a good lather with the soap. This reminded me of my own father, who constantly harped about washing hands. The only difference was my father never mentioned the lather part. But then my father wasn't a physician. He never took our blood pressure.

It seemed fairly evident to me, as it's probably seeming evident to you, that Dorfman's father--who does other nutty things, as well, such as following everyone around in his house turning out the lights behind them—that Dorfman's father is the reason for Dorfman's symptoms. That he is neurotic, just as my father was neurotic.

Living with such nuttiness it would be expected of Dorfman to be neurotic, too. Unless the experts have re-defined neurosis, or if in fact there even is such a disorder anymore. For the sake of coherence here, let us say there is indeed such a thing as neurosis. Let us say further it's pretty damned clear Dorfman and his doctor dad are both neurotic nightmares.

I'm not going to give anything away here and confirm or deny that what is wrong with Dorfman is caused by neuroses caused by his nutty father. That would be too easy. Dorfman himself would—and did--scoff at such a suggestion. He spends tens of thousands of dollars seeing specialists and undergoing every test known to medical science. He seeks treatments not recognized by medical science, such as a Chinese “herbal treatment” that might well have been based on dried “cow turds,” and torture prescribed by a chiropractic allergist.

John Blumenthal

It should come as no huge surprise that Dorfman is a hypochondriac. This means he is ambivalent with test results that turn up nothing frightening, such as cancer or an aneurysm that could kill instantly without a wisp of warning. He's relieved as well as disappointed. His recreational reading consists of “The Big Red Book” of diseases. He commiserates and talks of suicide with a down-on-her-luck actress named Delilah, whom he meets in his doctor's waiting room and who suffers symptoms identical to his.

Dorfman, by the way, is a down-on-his-luck screenwriter. While he suffers with the uncertainty of his intermittent symptoms—that's another thing, they come and go unpredictably—his screenplay, a comic cop story, is undergoing the horrendous Hollywood sausage grinder committee process that could ruin him for good if it fails, or save his career if it ever becomes a movie.

Yikes, my own neuroses (yes, me too), which I've pretty much maneuvered into dormancy over the years, are giving me flashback pains in the abdomen by my merely recounting what's wrong with Dorfman's life. I must go now before I contract sympathetic diarrhea.

Okay, I can tell you this: What's Wrong with Dorfman? has what I would call a happy ending. If it didn't I would not be sitting here writing this report. I'd be reading an outdated magazine in the waiting room at my doctor's office. In other words no matter what is wrong with you, you will find What's Wrong with Dorfman? not only safe to read but rather a hoot—so long as you read the whole thing straight through to the end.

An added benefit for me is that I now diligently work up a good lather with the soap when washing my hands. You should, too.

[for more Friday's Forgotten Books see the listing on Patti Abbott's unforgettable blog]

THE COLD WAR SWAP – Ross Thomas

Ross Thomas in death continues to serve a dessert too rich for the ego, but so good you can't get enough of it. His writing enters the blood with an uncanny ease, and changes you. What he did when alive was as close to real magic as a mortal being can conjure. And his power lives on.

As for the ego thing, most of us who read think we can write. I mean, it can't be that hard, right? You can read, so you must be able to write. That's what Thomas thought when, at age 40, he wrote his first novel, The Cold War Swap. It took him less than two months. The first publisher he sent it to, William Morrow, bought it. Published in 1966, it won the Edgar Award for best first novel.

YeahYeahYeah, you might feel like saying, like I did before I read further. He had an ace up his sleeve, I figured. The publisher was an old poker buddy, they sang in the same choir. Had to be something, right? Master of fine arts degree? Well...nuh uh. He did have a varied background, the kind some writers have turned to profit: World War II infantryman, public relations specialist, correspondent with the Armed Forces Network, union spokesman, and political strategist—the latter in the U.S., Germany, and Nigeria. Probably picked up a few tricks writing jingles, memos and strategy papers. But...but is that enough by itself to produce an award-winning novel first time out? C'mon, I'm dying here!

Concrete Angel [book report]

I haven't read any other reviews of Patricia Abbott's fine debut noir novel, Concrete Angel, but I can't imagine any of them—up to and including the likes of Michiko Kakutani, the dragon queen of New York literary reviewers—starting out any other way than something like this: Concrete Angel begins with a bang, quite literally. Six of them in fact.

There. I didn't put it in quotes because for all I know I'm the first, and I intend to post this without checking for others.

So the chief villain in this story, a gorgeous, highly talented woman the narrator calls Mother, pumps six bullets into a soda-pop salesman in her apartment. She had picked him up at a shoe-repair shop only hours earlier and enjoyed a romp with him in her bed before dispatching him with a revolver. He'd caught her taking bills from his wallet and had grabbed the phone to call the police. “Mother” couldn't allow this, as she already had something of a record and had an aversion to jail. Thus, relying on the time-tested felon's credo that dead men tell no tales, she silenced him before he could make the call.

On second thought, it occurred to her the killing might cause her more trouble than the theft of a few dollars. She needed an alibi, a fall guy...something. Mother was not about to take the rap for murder. Maybe, just maybe, she could pin it on...why, this story's narrator, of course! Twelve-year-old Christine, her daughter, asleep in the next room.

Christine had slept through the murder, all six bangs of it. But her mother shook her awake and the two had a tearful chat. The girl was smart for her age but would do anything for her mother's approval. She went along with a concocted version of how the killing went down. She pled guilty to shooting the salesman after she saw him “trying to strangle” her mother. The court gave her probation and ordered counseling.

Concrete Angel is Christine's story, but she keeps the spotlight throughout on Mother, who comes across as a sort of amalgam of the Joan Crawford of Mommie Dearest and Mame of Auntie Mame. I should note I've read neither of the aforementioned accounts by relatives of the title characters. The stars in each are larger-than-life dominant women, and the sense I have of them from popular accounts seems to fit Mother quite well: a narcissistic, compulsively acquisitive sociopath brilliantly adept at manipulating others.

We follow Christine's incremental awakening to the reality of her mother and their relationship, which, while seeming at first to Christine an enviable mother-daughter intimacy gradually shows itself to be a dangerous illusion. Ultimately Christine has serious urges to kill her mother in order to rescue her much younger brother from falling into the same trap that threatened to smother her.

Christine's voice is chillingly authentic as she reveals to us her growing awareness of a nightmare from which escape begins to look impossible. The climax of Concrete Angel matches the stunning opening in gaping suspense.

While Concrete Angel is Patricia Abbott's first published novel, she's an award-winning crime fiction writer with more than 100 published stories including two ebooks: Monkey Justice and Home Invasion. Um, yeah, I guess you could say I'm a fan.