“People don’t know much about the private life of architects,” Valentine says. “We’re not like actors or politicians, but we have our feuds, our traumas… We’re in the tough position of trying to be artists and practical men at the same time.”
Valentine, born Maurizio Viglioni, has traded more than his birth name for the money and fame of being one of the design elite of Los Angeles and Las Vegas in 1956: he is married to the daughter of a wealthy and powerful Joseph Kennedy Sr. figure who is a U.S. Senator from Nevada and wants his son-in-law to be his colleague as the state’s other Senator. It’s a move approved of and probably even engineered by Valentine’s wife: “She was Daddy’s little girl and to some extent I was the invention of the two of them. Did I resent this? You bet. Was I about to let the promptings of wounded pride upset the triumph of my progress? Never. Besides, beneath my smooth manners and smooth exterior, I had my own cunning, a furtive capacity to take and hold what I wanted. Maurice Valentine was more than a match for anybody, I reckoned.”
What Maurice has not reckoned on is coming under the spell of a determined, dangerously revengeful young woman architect who now calls herself Mallory Walker. A gifted natural actress, she was born Beth Dyer to a financially struggling family in the San Fernando Valley. And because a chillingly credible sociopath gangster named Paul Mantilini is behind a large part of Valentine’s success in Las Vegas, she uses Maurice to get even with Mantilini for his involvement in the death of her jazz musician lover, Wardell Gray—a world class tenor sax player whose actual murder has never been solved.
One of Valentine’s pork barrel government jobs is designing and building the fake houses used in atomic bomb tests out in the desert. As a crowd of celebrities, power brokers and high rollers gather on the top floor lounge of his Las Vegas icon hotel, El Sheik, to watch a test, Beth makes her move on Mantilini. Wounded in the ensuing shooting, Maurice gets more involved than he should by digging into the past lives and crimes of the leading players—uncovering all sorts of ghosts.
Richard Rayner is a multi-talented writer, as adept at fiction (“The Cloud Sketcher”) as he is at memoir (“The Blue Suit.”) Oddly, his fine book about con man Oscar Hartzell, “Drake’s Fortune,” isn’t mentioned in his credits. In “The Devil’s Wind,” he doesn’t miss a trick—taking such genre cliches as a washed up private eye trying to do a decent job and standing them on their heads. He also knows how to nail a minor character in a sentence or two, like the local newspaper publisher who explains why he ignored a big drugs and murder story: “Something more important came up that week. Maybe Mickey Rooney was in town…”
There’s thankfully little of Las Vegas as a metaphor for the decline of American civilization, just a vividly captured feeling of a bygone world. Think of “Double Indemnity,” a story about another smart guy taken for a ride by a beautiful woman. (The movie, directed by Billy Wilder, starred Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck.) Wilder and novelist James M. Cain would have instantly recognized Maurice Valentine across a crowded hotel lounge.
BLACKLIST, by Sara Paretsky (G.P. Putnam’s Sons)
I can’t think of a recent thriller where a character’s sleep deprivation played such a major role as in Sara Paretsky’s latest book about Chicago’s own righter of social wrongs, V.I. Warshawski. Even in the original Swedish version of “Insomnia” (much better than the feeble American movie), the cop actually got to close his eyes every now and then. But every time a completely exhausted V.I. manages to sink into some well-earned slumber, she’s awakened abruptly by a nightmare where a giant golf cart is about to run her over.
There’s a hint in her upfront thanks that Paretsky shares her creation’s sleep problems: “All characters who actually play a role in the story, as well as events like the destruction of the Fourteenth Amendment, are solely the fabrication of a brain made frenzied by chronic insomnia.”
What “Blacklist” does best is conjur up the roots of our current crisis in the field of civil liberties, using a mix of familiar icons from the past (the Federal Theater Project, HUAC and its predecessor the Dies Committee, the golden days of the Chicago district known as Bronzeville when succcessful black artists of the 1930s congregated there) and fictional but recognizable figures from all sides of the political spectrum to show how the sins—and skins—of the fathers are always with us.
And, because she is still among the very best drivers of narrative engines in the business, Paretsky also has produced a genuinely exciting and disturbing thriller—a raging vehicle that can carry a load of baggage from 1950s blacklisting to present-day terrorist hysteria without missing a beat.
With her journalist lover Morrell virtually out of touch for interminable stretches as he works on a book in Afghanistan, Warshawski takes advantage of her rampant insomnia to do some late-night snooping. One of her most loyal clients, a hard, humorless insurance mogul called Darraugh Graham, has hired her to placate his 91-year-old mother, Geraldine—who now lives in a luxury senior development which overlooks the grounds of her former mansion, Larchmont Hall, on a vast tract of unincorporated land west of Chicago. The old woman says she has seen lights flickering in the supposedly deserted house, but the local cops have never found anything and are becoming increasingly disinterested in answering her calls.
Wrestling with an elusive teenage girl who seems to know the house, V.I. tumbles into a decorative pond—and finds the body of a journalist named Marcus Whitby, a staff writer on a magazine called T-Square, “a kind of Vanity Fair for the African American market.” Nobody on the magazine, part of the publishing empire founded by one of V.I.’s liberal heroes, Calvin Bayard, who had survived being hounded by HUAC in 1954 and 1955, knows why Whitby was out in the boonies; he spent most of his time working on a book about a beautiful black dancer of the 1930s from a famous local company and restoring his house in Bronzeville.
As the plot of “Blacklist” opens like a night-blooming flower to involve a young Egyptian boy suspected of being a terrorist and several of Geraldine Graham and Calvin Bayard’s old neighbors, Warshawski ricochets around the city like a weary pinball—aided as much as possible by her usual crew of stalwarts (her occasionally tiresome but endlessly supportive downstairs neighbor, Mr. Contreras; her doctor friend Lotty Herschel; local restaurateur Mrs. Aguilar, who dispenses ambrosial chicken soup) and an admirable new figure, a tough former boxer turned priest called Father Lou. Without their help, Warshawski would be even more of a mess: at one point, she collapses on a bench outside the T-Square offices, one hand outstretched, only to find that a passerby has dropped a quarter into it.
Heavily stressed by trying to link the past and the present, V.I. remembers her Italian opera singer mother darning socks at 3 a.m. while they both worried about their policeman husband/father working a shift when “the West Side was an inferno of riots and looting… ‘We don’t give in to our worries, cara. That is for grand ladies, who can fancy themselves ill when their lover hasn’t written or the new dress is commonplace. We aren’t like that, self-indulgent. We do some job, like this, we do it well, we make the worries leave us alone.’ ”
As usual, Warshawski (and Paretsky) are playing both sides of the street. Of course the worries don’t leave either of them alone, no matter how hard they work at their jobs. What matters is that the work gets done just about as well as anyone can expect, despite the pain, tears and lost sleep involved.
NOBODY RUNS FOREVER, by Richard Stark (Mysterious Press)
Anyone contemplating a life of crime should first read Richard Stark’s latest misadventure featuring the career heister known as Parker. As Donald Westlake, the veteran genre genius behind the Stark persona, shows all too quickly and depressingly in this sixth volume in his revitalized Parker series, anything that can go wrong will—with uncomfortable and possibly tragic results.
The sagging economy has forced Parker to lower his standards. Trying to keep up the modest but comfortable life style he shares on a New Jersey lake with his ladyfriend, Claire, he gets involved with some seriously non-professional and dangerous would-be crooks. First, one of the participants in a scheme to steal a large amount of dental gold in Cincinnati turns out to be wearing a wire. Then a colleague suggests a heist in western Massachusetts where a merger of two banks will bring together a large amount of cash in one place for a short time. The information about which van is actually carrying the money will get to the robbers through an inside connection—the wife of one of the bankers, who wants out of her marriage and has involved her genial but rather dim lover.
Parker doesn’t like the whole deal: “The hinge of the thing is an amateur. Even a calm amateur is usually trouble, and this one is all emotion. It isn’t about money, it’s about revenge and anger and family pride. I can’t use any of those things.” But he thinks up a way to ease the danger, then goes back to the physical planning which Stark/Westlake as usual makes so convincing that we have to wonder how he really spends his non-writing hours.
Also as usual, the rest of the cast leaps to life: especially the sad and vindictive banker’s wife and a convincingly successful bounty hunter who seems to guess what’s going to happen. He’s almost—but not quite—a match for Parker, who appears not to have lost a step.
SKELETON MAN, by Tony Hillerman (HarperCollins)
I can’t think of any series of mysteries that makes such good use of the passage of time as Tony Hillerman’s books about Navajo policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. Not only are the stories deeply rooted in the legends of the tribes who live in and around Four Corners; the realities of the daily lives of their characters are also an important part of each story.
Lt. Leaphorn, now reluctantly retired and waiting to be asked for help by his younger colleagues, hears that an old desert rat called Shorty McGinnis has died. McGinnis had helped Leaphorn on cases over the years, and so after a lonely lunch in Tuba City, “he paused…looking for friends he’d made there a lifetime ago as a green rookie cop. It would be good, he thought, to catch them before they cashed in and went off on that Last Great Adventure with the Holy People. He found three, one too busy to do much visiting, one nursing a bad gout with arthritis, and his former Tuba City district sergeant, who was all too happy to remind him of the mistakes he used to make…” Then, with time on his hands because his anthropology professor wife is away collecting data, Leaphorn decides to drive to the late McGinnis’s old trading post. The place looks deserted; an already tattered “For Sale” sign decorates the door. But inside the shabby premises sits the ancient trader himself, the reports of his death exaggerated. “If you thought I was dead, what the devil brought you way out here?” asks McGinnis, remembering being milked for information over the decades. “What are you after? You don’t come here not wanting something.”
What Leaphorn is after, of course, is what has kept him alive and strong through Hillerman’s splendidly-realized series—the need to find out why things happen. In this case, how did a diamond in a pouch decorated with a kachina called Skeleton Man—Guardian of the Underworld—turn up almost 50 years after a terrible collision of two passenger planes which killed more than 100 people over the Grand Canyon? All the bodies were shattered and burned, including the man who had this particular diamond in a case chained to his wrist. Now, a gentle but slow-witted young Hopi named Billy Tuve is arrested after he tries to pawn the diamond.
Sgt. Jim Chee, about to marry a delightful Border Patrol officer, also gets involved in the case when his lawman colleague Cowboy Dashee enlists his aid in clearing his cousin Tuve’s name. There are two very well-observed villains, a mysterious woman who wants the DNA of the dead diamond dealer to prove he was her father, and descriptions of the land which prove that Hillerman captures the desert scene better than any painter.
But above it all is the sense of nature’s clock ticking, having its way with the local people who seem basically content—except for occasional bursts of anger and frustration—to play the hands they were dealt.
THE TEARS OF AUTUMN, by Charles McCarry (Overlook; $24.95)
Is “The Tears of Autumn” the best political thriller ever written? When it first came out, in 1975, writers like Richard Condon—who had already staked his own claim with “The Manchurian Candidate”—swore that it was. Now the enterprising Overlook Press is giving readers the chance to make their own decision with this new hardcover edition. Charles McCarry has since written nine excellent thrillers (most recently “Old Boys”), but those of us who remember how stunned we were by “The Tears of Autumn” on its original publication still find it hard to forget its absolutely right, achingly credible explanation of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Even in a period dominated by such memorable secret agents as George Smiley and Len Deighton’s Harry Palmer, McCarry’s high level CIA operative Paul Christopher stands out as a beacon of directed justice. He does what he does to improve the world—an extension of his own poetry, a probably futile attempt at moral honesty in a twisted world. “He saw what his poems had become,” McCarry writes after Christopher burns some of his poetry in a young woman’s bedroom. “Another part of his cover, a way of beautifying what he did.”
This tension between heart and brain keep Christopher going, running agents who try to pierce North Vietnamese intelligence and who will almost all certainly wind up dead for their efforts. Then Christopher learns the facts behind the JFK killing—as inevitable as they are shocking. Almost immediately, he is removed from the case; he resigns from the Agency to continue his investigation.
“She turned off the light and turned her back,” McCarry writes of a woman who puts her faith in Paul. “Christopher saw that not even a lie would change her mind. In Molly, love was a force as ruthless as the one that ruled him. To respond in kind was beyond him. He had been dyed, heart and memory, by the life he had lived…” Now we can all reenter that life, older and presumably wiser about the world, but still able to appreciate his courage and beauty.