by Dick Adler
The other great strength of the Mary Russell books is that King never forgets the true spirit of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, perhaps as underrated as a writer of thrilling adventures as he is overvalued (by some) as a writer of credible detective stories. “O Jerusalem,” the fifth book in the series, was a marvelous journey into Arabian politics, and “The Game” distills the essence of the decline of the British Raj into one extremely exciting volume.
COTTONWOOD, by Scott Phillips (Ballantine)
In the always interesting, often surprising online January Magazine, Bill Crider was talking about the general lack of respect paid to mysteries set in the Old West. Crider, who wrote a fine one himself (“A Time for Hanging” in 1989), will probably be as delighted as I am with this third book from Scott Phillips—whose first two novels set in 20th Century Kansas (“The Ice Harvest” and “The Walkaway”) were bleakly comic affairs connected by a brilliant link of shared history.
There’s a similar link in “Cottonwood,” but you have to wait for the epilogue to fully appreciate it. Meanwhile, you can enjoy the pleasures of Phillips’s unique and pungent prose, as well as his skill and daring at moving us through a narrative landscape which at first glance might seem to have been well covered as part of our myth and memory.
The story begins in 1872, in the frozen mud of Cottonwood, Kansas, a profoundly unpromising place where an ambitious 27-year-old man named Bill Ogden has largely abandoned his failing farm to run the local saloon and try to work at what he really likes—photography. Left to their own devices on the farm, Ogden’s young son treats him with a decided lack of interest and his wife has taken to sleeping with the hired hands. This doesn’t seem to bother Bill, who has his own sexual needs taken care of by various women in town.
“One thing I particularly valued about the prairie was the reticence of most of those living there, and the lack of interest, or overt interest anyway, in one’s neighbor’s origins,” says Bill, and you can sense in his words both the classic loner of Western literature and a man unsure of his own abilities to control himself within the bounds of society.
Temptation arrives in Cottonwood in the form of a slick Chicago operator called Marc Leval, who announces convincing plans to turn the town into a railroad hub and promises vast prosperity. Bill is more taken by the promise of Leval’s lovely wife, Maggie, but he is shrewd enough to also sign on as Leval’s partner in a new saloon. Then the book’s tone deepens and darkens, as a growing number of traveling salesmen and itinerant cowboys begin to disappear. Their deaths are traced to family of predators known as “The Bloody Benders,” based on an actual criminal clan, and it’s during the hunt for these killers that Ogden and Leval have a serious falling out.
From this point, Ogden—accompanied by Maggie Leval—begins an odyssey that reads like a modern deconstructionist version of a story by Mark Twain or Ambrose Bierce which moves from Cottonwood to San Francisco and back again, covering a sizeable slice of American history.
However, it’s not Phillips’s thoughtful, exciting plotting but rather his amazing ear for the sad sounds behind the words of his people that makes his novels so exceptional. “ ‘They said they was going to perform in a show, a traveling thing, and they wondered if I’d like to come along,’ ” says a miner, a lucky survivor of the Benders’ madness. “He looked over at the river in the direction they’d gone, the very picture of wistful regret, apparently having forgotten what we’d told him three minutes earlier about who the Benders were and what they’d done. ‘I’ve got a claim to work, though, and I’m damned if I’ll wreck one more thing in my life.’ ”
STONE CRIBS, by Kris Nelscott (St. Martin’s Minotaur)
One of the best things about Kris Nelscott’s terrific series about savvy survivor Smokey Dalton is the way it has used the normal pace of passing time to investigate the important social and moral issues of the 1960s—without becoming the least bit doctrinaire or obvious. Her fourth book about Dalton continues those high standards: it finds Smokey and Jimmy Bailey (the now 11-year-old orphan boy he rescued from Memphis when the youngster happened to witness the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and knows that the killer wasn’t James Earl Ray) still living as father and son and trying to survive in Chicago in 1969.
Nelscott’s third Dalton novel “Thin Walls,” explored the problems of keeping boys like Jimmy out of the pervasive influence of high profile gangs such as the Blackstone Rangers. “Stone Cribs” has another major social agenda—the crime of forcing women to seek out illegal abortions. Smokey puts his and Jimmy’s lives at great risk by helping a young black woman who is bleeding to death after such an operation, and then commits crimes of his own as he investigates the death of a friend who helped him in the past. Nelscott’s nuanced writing makes it all as natural and inevitable as the small urban tragedies which happened every day in the 1960s in cities like Chicago—and which are still happening, in other forms and colors, almost 40 years later.
THE GRENADILLO BOX, by Janet Gleeson (Simon & Schuster)
If you’ve ever looked at a beautifully-decorated piece of furniture made from exotic woods by an artist like Thomas Chippendale and marveled at what it said about our civilization, you’ll probably be both amazed and appalled by this exciting and brutal first mystery. Art historian Janet Gleeson, who turned a fascination with fine porcelain into a memorable non-fiction book (“The Arcanum”), manages to combine a complicated mystery about greed and paternity with a sharp-edged, often savage portrait of Chippendale himself, his wealthy, titled (and largely unprincipled) customers, and the artisans who did the actual work of producing those splendid pieces.
Nathaniel Hopson is an unusually tall, thin, physically awkward and somewhat soft-headed young man just finishing a long apprenticeship at Chippendale’s London establishment. Hopson has an excellent eye for the way complicated objects are put together, as well as a slightly harder-to-swallow talent with women—usually maids and working girls eager to accept his embraces.
When his best friend and fellow apprentice, a foundling named John Partridge, disappears, Hopson is sent to the Cambridgeshire mansion of Lord Montfort to put the finishing touches on an elaborate bookcase which Partridge has made from their master’s design. Almost immediately, Hopson (who bristles at being treated like a servant by the family) begins to stumble upon dead bodies—first of Lord Montfort, who seems to have killed himself over a giant gambling debt; then of Partridge, found mutilated in a frozen pond on the estate; and finally of a shady old Italian actress who plays an important role in the story.
Pressed into service by the wealthy neighbor to whom Montfort owed the money, and by the local magistrate, Nathaniel uses his unique talents to solve the crimes. A very interesting young woman who has taken over her father’s rare wood business helps him, even though she seems to be repulsed by Hopson’s philandering. It’s all as shiny and impressively constructed as a piece of fine furniture.
But what makes “The Grenadillo Box” really stand out is the mental pictures it leaves of the devious, angry mind of the most famous of furniture designers. “There is plenty of documentary evidence to suggest that Chippendale was far from incorruptible,” Gleeson says in an author’s note. Add to that a memory by Hopson of his master sounding off in a coffeehouse—“What unjust arbiter decreed that artists and architects, silversmiths and clockmakers and makers of porcelain pots should be the pride of monarchs, while cabinetmakers are accorded only cursory consideration?”—and you have a troubling but highly credible portrait of the gap between an artist’s work and his humanity.
CALIFORNIA GIRL, by T. Jefferson Parker (William Morrow)
These days, Orange County is just another part of the Southern California sprawl—a bit more urban and ethnic in its northern reaches, and tending to real estate pretensions down toward San Diego. But T. Jefferson Parker, who grew up there, remembers a very distinct community in the 1950s and 60s: when the American dream clashed with the national nightmare, and the poli
tical reputation of the area was an early mirror of today’s values.
The best thing about Parker’s new book is the way it captures those memories and makes them part of our own past. About a troubled family called the Vonns, a young writer named Andy Becker thinks “…the notion that these poor people had come halfway across the country to find a better life and had instead found ugliness, misery, ruined innocence and death. That we owed them respect for trying. That they had borne a specific burden so that we would not have to bear it.”
“California Girl,” the name on the label of SunBlesst, a now-abandoned orange packing plant in Tustin where a sad, touching young girl named Janelle Vonn is horribly murdered and mutilated in 1968, has serious claims on being the Great O.C. novel—the one (like “Main Street” and “East of Eden”) which stamps and validates the time and place. Young minister David Becker, not moving ahead in his career as he had hoped, in 1963 sees a vacant drive-in theater as a symbol of his life. “Something about that blank marquee got to David, more than the empty screen. It was what he saw when he considered his future as a Presbyterian.”
With the help of a family friend—Roger Stoltz, an adviser to Richard Nixon—David buys the decaying business and turns it into the area’s first drive-in church. While his brother Nick moves ahead in the sheriff’s department and Andy uses journalism to validate his intelligence, another brother—Clay—goes to Vietnam as an adviser. Their father joins the John Birch Society, believing that communism is a real threat to American freedom.
The murder of Janelle Vonn is the backbone of Parker’s novel: it changes the lives of every other character. But the dead girl is more than the center of a first-rate mystery. She had enjoyed some fame:
“Got her picture taken a lot. Tustin people thought she looked like the old SunBlesst girl, so they did up a poster of her with oranges, an old-fashioned kind of picture that made her look really pretty and made it seem like Tustin still had orange groves…”
CITIZEN VINCE, by Jess Walter (Regan/HarperCollins)
I can see the headlines now: “LOCAL DONUT MAN’S LIFE CHANGED BY VOTING.” The fact that the man in question is Vince Camden, a 36-year-old credit card scammer, expert poker player, small-time drug dealer and indeed a maker of excellent maple bars, and that his voting choice is between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter in 1980, gives Jess Walter’s combination of immensely entertaining crime thriller and wry social commentary a decidedly different series of twists, and mark it as a sure candidate for one of the best books in recent genre memory.
Camden, not the name he was born with in New York City, now lives as a protected government witness in Spokane, Washington—a town (Walter’s home) described with a totally understandable mixture of love and contempt. A smart and touching hooker named Beth, studying for her real estate license, shares his affections with Kelly, a sleek blonde who wants him to work for the election of her lawyer boss, a rising Republican. In the three years since he accepted a Federal offer and blew the whistle on same made guys in New York, Vince has managed to put aside lots of cash by selling pot and stolen credit cards. And then there’s the donut job—which gives him more pleasure than he could have imagined going in.
Still, Vince feels something missing in his life—a purpose. As Carter and Reagan prepare to debate the country’s future, Camden begins to see the election as a symbol of his becoming a part of society. His vote takes on a mythic quality and heroic dimensions. Unfortunately, the other parts of his life start to come apart when a stone-cold hired killer called Ray Sticks turns up in Spokane like a beetle-browed avenging angel.
There are some perfect gems of Waugh-like humor in Walter’s story—like the woman who wants him to endorse the luckless third party candidate John Anderson, or the way Kelly’s boss uses his hunting skills to defend Vince. But what it all really adds up to is what a person thinks is important—to himself, the people around him, the place where they live.
To the question asked by Ronald Reagan during the 1980 campaign—“Are you better off than you were four years ago?”—Vince finally comes up with an answer that works for him. “…I think a guy could move across country, change his name, job his friends—change everything… And not really change at all.”
6
Mysteries Under Fire
Mysteries set in times of war have an unusual role—proving that the “dreams of justice” which crime solving tries to accomplish can take place while apparently more unjust amounts of death continue. Memorable series have centered around the American Civil War, World War I and World War II. Of special note is a remarkable work called “The Berlin Trilogy” by Philip Kerr—three linked stories set in Germany just before, during and just after World War II.
The American Civil War still eats at our public and private hearts—a national obsession that has produced such fine novels as “The Killer Angels” and “The Black Flower.” Mysteries set in that era have also been impressive: Miriam Grace Monfredo’s bracing books about an upstate New York librarian; “The Lucifer Contract,” part of the wonderful early New York City “Dutchman” series by Maan Meyers; Donald Honig’s two robust and thoughtful books (“The Sword of General Englund” and “The Ghost of Major Pryor”) set in the Montana territories just after the war; a vivid five-part series by James D. Brewer (“No Bottom,” “No Escape,” “No Justice,” “No Remorse” and “No Virtue”) about an ex-Confederate cavalryman, an ex-Union gunboat captain and a former prostitute; and Kirk Mitchell’s memorable “Shadow on the Valley,” about a one-armed Union Army doctor asked by Gen. Philip Sheridan to investigate the killing of an Amish farmer during the Shenandoah campaign are all prime examples.
FADED COAT OF BLUE by Owen Parry (Avon)
At 33, Capt. Abel Jones, the somewhat dour, pragmatic and thoroughly believable hero of “Faded Coat of Blue,” Owen Parry’s exciting, heartbreaking debut novel, has apparently already fought all his battles—first for the British Army in India and then at Bull Run, after he left his childhood Welsh sweetheart, Mary Myfanwy, and their baby son in their Pennsylvania coal-mining hometown of Pottsville and took command of some raw volunteers because he knew they’d be slaughtered without expert instruction. Badly wounded in the leg, he works for the War Department in Washington, trying to keep the Union Army supplied with trousers and arms while hordes of corrupt businessmen conspire otherwise. When Capt. Anthony Fowler, a highborn Union officer of great beauty and liberal promise, is discovered shot to death in a camp near Rebel lines, Jones—through a series of tenuous and eventually suspect connection—is called upon by the new Union Army head, Gen. George McClellan, to quietly investigate.
Jones eliminates Rebel snipers from the picture when a cynical doctor informs him that Fowler was killed with a pistol and his body moved from somewhere else, and then quickly zeroes in on Philadelphia industrialist Matthew Cawber. This richly detailed villain had several reasons for wanting Fowler dead: a romantic link with Cawber’s beautiful wife, and an investigation by Fowler into some exploding cannons supplied by Cawber. Also on the list of suspects are some of Fowler’s fellow officers from the same Philadelphia social circle, not all of whom shared the murdered man’s strong abolitionist stand.
The scope of Jones’ investigation lets Parry bring to life Washington (“Now I am an old bayonet and a veteran of John Company’s fusses, and my nose has not been stuffed with violets from the cradle up. But I tell you I have never smelled a great stink like that of Washington in the summer.”), Philadelphia (“There was a prosperity in the city, and I marked one building of eight stories, but the greatest surprise to me came from the number of Negroes shuffling about the streets with an aimlessness that said, ‘No work.’ It was an odd business, for this was the North and a free place for all, yet here the African seemed a superfluous man. In Washington, he was a busy fellow, though hardly free.”), and no less than a dozen memorable characters. His McClellan looks and sounds especially right, based (as Parry notes in an epilogue) on the general
’s own papers, “with their misapprehensions and stunning vanity.” Jones, his shrewdly supportive wife and his motley crew of colleagues (that dyspeptic but dedicated doctor, another former soldier turned con man, a radical landlady, a long-winded telegrapher) are like remembered figures from old family photographs, brilliantly reanimated to help us understand the worst hurt of our own history.
ANGEL TRUMPET, by Ann McMillan (Viking)
Perhaps because of “Gone With the Wind” and its images of swirling ball gowns and fainting females, Ann McMillan’s two books (“Dead March” and now “Angel Trumpet”) about Narcissa Powers, a young widow of Richmond, Va., at first seem more romantic and less realistic than other Civil War mysteries. But don’t be deceived: There’s plenty of true grit here, as Powers and her friend Judah Daniel—a free black woman working as a herbalist—look into what appears to be a slave uprising on a Virginia plantation.
The “angel trumpet” of the title is both another name for the jimson weed used to drug a group of servants before the massacre of the white family who owned them and the heavenly call expected to be heard summoning slaves to a final battle for freedom. Although her late husband was an ardent foe of slavery and probably would have fought for the North if he had lived, Powers—who spends her days nursing the terrible wounds of Confederate soldiers—can’t bring herself to speak out against it. “Slavery may be immoral, as you believe,” she tells her sister-in-law, “but we are fighting now for our country. If we are not for our own country, we are traitors. If we lose this war, crowded hospitals will give place to crowded prisons—and scaffolds!”
Daniel is equally conflicted: She conspires with Powers, a white doctor and a British journalist to help solve the murders, but she also finds herself being drawn into the circle of a powerful and charismatic rebel slave called King.
