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 political 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.”
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.
A FEARSOME DOUBT, by Charles Todd (Bantam)
Who would have thought that Charles Todd’s brilliant concept for a mystery—a Scotland Yard detective suffering from shell shock who goes back to work after taking part in some of the worst horrors of World War I—would not only continue but grow stronger from book to book? In his sixth outing, Inspector Ian Rutledge has begun to come to terms with the voice of Hamish MacLeod, the Scottish soldier he executed for cowardice, which he hears in his head at times of stress. (Rutledge knows that he must leave a seat empty for Hamish in the back of an automobile, for example—or risk the ghostly voice’s wrath.) But as the first anniversary of the armistice of 1918 approaches, Todd actually ups the ante, by questioning the quality of Rutledge’s police work before the war.
Was he in fact part of a police conspiracy to railroad a man hung for the murders of several elderly women? The man’s widow seems to have proof that he was—and the doubts come rushing in to shake his wounded psyche. There’s also the weirdly familiar figure Rutledge glimpses in a Kent village: could it possibly be the German officer who saved his life on the last day of the war, and was killed for his kindness?
“He had been another man then,” Todd writes of Rutledge as a bright young policeman. “…A stranger to the hollow shell who had come back from the war and for months struggled to rebuild his peacetime skills. He had more in common with the voice of Hamish MacLeod than he did with his prewar self.”
MAISIE DOBBS, by Jacqueline Winspear (Soho)
It’s good to see an approving quote from Charles Todd on the back jacket of this extremely competent first novel by Jacqueline Winspear, because her book resonates with the same sense of sadness and waste about England’s role in World War I as Todd’s superb series about shell shocked Scotland Yard detective Ian Rutledge.
It’s 1929 when we meet Maisie, just setting up a modest detective agency of her own in London after working for several years as an apprentice to Dr. Maurice Blanche, an impressive mentor whose combination of talents and abilities (Sherlock Holmes meets Sigmund Freud) might be a touch too good to be true. In fact, Maisie has been very lucky in her mentors: the daughter of a greengrocer, she went into service as a maid for the wealthy, liberal Lady Rowan Compton—who, along with her friend Dr. Blanche, sent her to Girton College, Cambridge when they realized how smart the child was. But it was her years as a nurse at the front during some of World War I’s worst battles that gave a final polish to Maisie’s compassionate but pragmatic soul.
The first client to finally walk up the stairs to “M. Dobbs, Trade and Personal Investigations” is a stiff but sincere businessman who wants to know why his wife disappears on a long, mysterious errand twice a week. Maisie takes the case only after getting the man to agree not to make any rash judgements based on what she discovers. “My job is rather more complex than you might have imagined,” she tells him. “I am responsible for the safety of all parties.”
What Maisie finds out rather quickly is that the wife is indeed visiting a former lover—or at least the grave of one, a severely disfigured soldier who died under mysterious circumstances at a country home where badly wounded veterans have gathered to avoid the stares and pity of their families and the public. A full-fledged investigation into the man who runs this group home takes up most of Maisie’s time, but not before we learn in perhaps a bit too much detail, through flashbacks, all about Maisie’s formative years. A more experienced writer might have slipped this material in more subtly, but Winspear more than makes up for occasional lumpy moments by catching the sorrow of a lost generation in the character of one exceptional woman.
KALEIDOSCOPE, by J. Robert Janes (Soho)
If you’re trying to read J. Robert Janes’s tremendous series about World War II France in order, this one comes immediately after “Carousel.” On the last page of that book, Inspector Jean-Louis St.-Cyr of the Surete is asked about his partner, Hermann Kohler of the Gestapo, by St.-Cyr’s lover (a prostitute working for the Resistance), “‘Will you have to choose between him and France some day?’ ” St.-Cyr replies: “ ‘He’ll have to choose between me and the Third Reich. I could never shoot him, not after what the two of us have been through.’ ”
The bond between these two men is what gives Janes’s series its heart: Despite the bleakness of their environment and the horrors of the small crimes they investigate inside the larger crime of war and occupation, despite the fact that they spend a great deal of their time evading the treachery of their French and German superiors, St.-Cyr and Kohler have become brothers.
It is because of a vicious, vindictive French police official that the two are dispatched from the relative comforts of Paris to an isolated village in Provence a week before Christmas 1942. A woman in her 50s, dressed in worn but expensive clothing, has been murdered with a crossbow, the only hunting implement the Nazis still allow. St.-Cyr and Kohler discover links to the black market and to the local Resistance; their own lives are soon in peril.
When it’s over, before they can return to whatever passes for family life in Paris (St.-Cyr has just lost a wife and young son; Kohler has two boys fighting in Russia), they must stop in Lyon to investigate a terrible fire in a movie house that is the next book in the series, the already-published “Salamander.” Not a perfect publishing plan, but being allowed to read one of the most important mystery series in recent memory makes the small annoyance worth suffering.
RED GOLD, by Alan Furst (Random House)
We first met the enigmatic film producer and reluctant Resistance hero Jean Casson in Alan Furst’s “The World at Night,” a romantic, even glamorous story set in Paris in the days immediately after the Nazi occupation. Casson returns in fascinating form in “Red Gold,” washing up broke and depressed in his home city, which by now has been totally ground down by its German occupiers. The glitter of nightclubs and expensive restaurants has been replaced at the center of Casson’s life by a grim municipal pawnshop, where selling his overcoat allows him to eat for a few more days and also where he meets a thief who recruits him into a desperate robbery. Survival is now the once-idealistic Casson’s only aim—although he does make a few feeble attempts to help a lover escape to Algeria.
Then, recruited by a sympathetic cop, Casson joins a group of army officers working undercover inside the Vichy government to help Charles de Gaulle’s Free French movement. Casson’s job is to persuade a group of hard-core French communists who have no reason to trust him to risk their lives; to do so he must organize a complicated, dangerous transfer of weapons. There’s nothing glamorous or romantic about the work or its result, and death becomes an everyday occurrence. But Furst is so persuasive a writer that we come to realize just how much a victory it is for Casson to remain alive until the end of the book, when he hears “a light knock at the door.”