Dreams of Justice (4 page)

Ironically, the financial success that began to trickle and then swell after “Miami Blues” came too late. “(The money means nothing to me now,” he wrote his old Army buddy in 1987. “20—even 10—years ago it would have, but not now. I have my three small pensions [from the Army, teaching jobs and Social Security], and savings, and like you, I don’t have to worry about living a petty bourgeoisie [life] for the few years we have remaining.”

In fact, he had just about a year left. Willeford died March 27, 1988, after a series of strokes and other illnesses. A few months before came what Herron labels “the definitive moment in Willeford’s long career.” Reluctantly agreeing to continue the Hoke Moseley books (after first trying to end them by writing “Grimhaven”—the one in which Hoke murders his teenage daughters—then being talked out of it by his publishers), Willeford had turned in an excellent draft of “The Way We Die Now.” But the publisher wanted more—a new first chapter. “Sick, only months away from his death, with a masterly new novel just completed, and asked to go that extra step,” Herron writes. “He could have refused, with legitimate artistic and personal reasons. He could have made some feeble attempt at building suspense—like what you read near the beginnings of most crime novels. Instead, he created the first chapter you read in the novel. Read that chapter, and try to remain relaxed when you learn Hoke is being sent in without I.D., without his gun, with no backup. It is the ultimate peril Willeford ever set before his hero.”

Luckily, that last Hoke Moseley and the other three books in the series, plus “Pick-up” and “The Burnt Orange Heresy” and “The Shark-Infested Custard” are all still in print in paperback editions. Treat the young noir fans in your circle to copies, and let them have the pleasure of discovering an American original. You might also take the opportunity to renew your own acquaintance.

ROSS MACDONALD: A Biography, by Tom Nolan (Scribner)

History has a way of biting us in the backside. When he died in 1959, Raymond Chandler was in eclipse, and one of the main contenders to take over his crown was Ken Millar, who wrote as Ross Macdonald. Millar had a long, good ride, especially after a claque of New York reviewers conspired to boost his fortune, but his own success seems to have peaked a few years after his death in 1983—just about the time a new wave of Chandler enthusiasm broke. Now, Chandler’s much slimmer output (seven novels) appears to be outselling even the most popular of Macdonald’s 20-plus books (“Black Money,” “The Chill,” “The Wycherly Woman”) by about 2-1, if figures posted by on-line booksellers are correct.

Maybe this radiant, resonant and ultimately heart-breaking book by Tom Nolan (the first full-length biography of Macdonald) will help shift the balance back to where many of us think it belongs—away from the mean-spirited Chandler, the pseudo-Englishman who always seemed to be slumming when he went down those mean streets, and toward the gentler, wiser, more compassionate and basically more talented Macdonald.

Here is just some of what Nolan has managed to do in the model biography he worked on for more than 10 years:

Ken Millar was born near San Francisco in 1915, but his rambling Canadian parents soon took him back across the border to Vancouver and then points east. John Macdonald Millar was a journalist and poet who had trouble making a living; his son would later write about him, “ ‘The best of his talents were wasted on bad verse… atheism, the company of masculine friends who loved him truly but stupidly…(He) was a futile Ulysses, a Jack London with more heart and less brains. His son has spent his life trying to forgive him his bad luck.’ ” The parents split when Ken was 4, and the boy lived with his moody, demanding mother or a succession of relatives, torn by the twin lures of street crime and his growing delight with literature.

At Ontario’s Kitchener-Waterloo Collegiate Institute in 1931, 16-year-old Ken met Margaret Sturm, 17, “the brightest girl in school.” Six years later, both having been through serious psychological events, they jumped into a stormy, oddly structured but ultimately solid marriage that linked their lives and writing careers for almost 50 years. It was Margaret who first achieved success as a mystery writer, keeping the family afloat while Ken struggled to find a voice, and it was money she earned in Hollywood while Ken was serving as a communications officer in the Navy that bought their first house in Santa Barbara—the city that would become what he later called “ ‘the objective correlative of my mental life.’ ”

One of the many pleasures in Nolan’s book of wonders is that even someone who thought he knew all about Ross Macdonald (I was one of the early interviewers he treated so graciously) can learn many things. How and why Ken Millar became first John R. Macdonald, then Ross Macdonald, for one thing (not because Margaret had already taken the Millar name, and only partly because of the protests of Travis McGee creator John D. McDonald). Or the fact that Ken always pronounced his surname the way his Scottish ancestors had-“MILL-er”- while Margaret stuck with “mill-AR”-“the mispronunciation she’d gotten used to” while a screenwriter at Warner Bros. studio in Hollywood.

Nolan is particularly perceptive about the books themselves, showing how Macdonald’s talent expanded almost until the end, constantly enriching the mystery form and opening the door to so many of today’s superstars.

No thousand-word review can do justice to the depth of information and emotion in Nolan’s epic biography, which explores the full range of Ken and Margaret Millar’s life (Margaret, who died in 1994, is definitely the book’s co-star). Nolan handles the long-suppressed details of the sad life and early death of their daughter, Linda, with courage and tact, and his description of Ken’s descent into Alzheimer’s disease would bring tears, I suspect, even to the dyspeptic heart of Raymond Chandler, who wished Macdonald ill all his life.

5

History As Mystery

It sometimes seems that every period in history has its own resident mystery series—from Robert Van Gulik’s Judge Dee series set in ancient China through Kris Nelscott’s Smokey Dalton books which begin in Chicago in 1968. The Romans have Lindsey Davis and Steven Saylor; the British can boast such period specialists as Ellis Peters and Peter Tremayne; and Japanese historical series by the likes of Laura Joh Rowland, Dale Furitani and Sujata Massey are a growing subgenre. And then of course there are the Americans, especially women, who open our eyes and hearts with every book.

SILVER LIES, by Ann Parker (Poisoned Pen)

Is there anything better than a smart, tough woman solving crimes while moving through a freshly-researched portion of our own history? Margaret Lawrence’s books about post-Revolutionary War Maine midwife Hannah Trevor (“Hearts and Bones,” “Blood Red Roses”) come to mind, as do Dianne Day’s stories (“Emperor Norton’s Ghost,” “Beacon Street Mourning”) of Fremont Jones, a young woman from Boston who arrives in San Francisco just before the 1905 earthquake and begins a career as a detective. Miriam Grace Monfredo, who writes a splendid series about librarian Glynis Tryon (“Through A Gold Eagle,”) which begins just before the Civil War in upstate New York, is another prime example.

It’s no stretch at all to place Ann Parker’s Inez Stannert on this list. Like the other women in the group, she is both of her time—a handsome, obviously educated wife supporting and playing second fiddle to a flashier gambler husband in 1879 Colorado—and a link to the future. When her husband disappears, Inez proves she can overcome that and other tragedies to triumph in a male world by taking over the running of their saloon and helping to clear up several murders, scams and distressing puzzles.

Parker is a science writer with a degree in literature and the ability to sum up in a few sharp sentences the tawdry power of a frontier boomtown like Leadville, where a sudden surge in silver could burnish everyone’s dreams. Like the wonderful black and white photograph of historic Leadville on its cover (the credit for which admits “Image altered”), her first novel, which won a regional writing contest, combines a kind of gritty grandeur with a knowing wisdom about the way the present shapes our perceptions of the past.

JUSTICE HALL, by Laurie R. King (Bantam)

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who championed many social causes in his life if not in his popular fiction (where the villains were the usual 19th Century suspects—evil people greedy for wealth and power), would probably have wholeheartedly approved of the way Laurie R. King has managed to modernize Sherlock Holmes by grafting on a social conscience in the form of a young American wife. The creation of Mary Russell has allowed King to turn her two detectives’ formidable intelligence loose on topics which Conan Doyle would never have attempted—everything from women’s rights to the mistreatment of Palestinian Arabs—without dulling the fine edge of excitement.

Mary is 24 in this sixth volume of King’s consistently smart and poignant series, and Holmes is 60. It is 1923; they have just returned to their home on the Sussex Downs (where Holmes keeps bees and Mary writes and studies obscure texts) from the Dartmoor adventure detailed in Book Four, “The Moor.” But it is the two major characters from Book Five, “O Jerusalem,” which takes place in 1919—two Bedouin rogues named Ali and Mahmoud Hazr—who suddenly reappear four years later to excellent dramatic advantage as “Justice Hall” quickly explodes into what may well be the best book in the series.

Like T. E. Lawrence, Ali and his cousin Mahmoud are really English Arabists—men who have literally reinvented themselves in the desert, letting the sun and sand burn away all traces of their Englishness. Unfortunately, both are also Hughenforts—Alistair and Marsh—part of “a thin handful of the nation’s families that had actually stepped onto England’s shores at the side of William the Conqueror.” Much against his will and nature, Marsh has returned to England upon the death of his brother to take over as head of the family and run its vast estate called Justice Hall in Berkshire.

What Holmes and Russell have to discover is whether the logical heir to the family fortune, a brave and gentle young man named Gabriel, was really shot as a traitor during World War One. These battlefield executions are at the social heart of King’s new book. She also finds time to condemn with brisk irony the shooting of hapless birds by a hunting party of upperclass boobies and the abuse and neglect of female nurses and ambulance drivers.

That bird-hunting scene is a tremendous set piece, starring Russell (who can throw a stone and knock a bird out of the sky, to the amazement of her snooty hosts) and Iris, Marsh’s lesbian wife—a wonderful character who should become a series regular. There’s also a whirlwind trip to Canada, with moving results, and even the odd flash of humor. “ ‘Russell,’ he said. At the first touch of that gentle, affectionate voice, I nearly leapt to my feet and planted my back against the nearest wall: When Holmes stoops to wheedle, God help us all…”

AN EXPERIMENT IN TREASON, by Bruce Alexander (Putnam)

The fascinating enigma of Benjamin Franklin—poseur, philanderer, putative scientist, politician and patriot—is the fuel which drives Bruce Alexander’s formidable narrative engine in this ninth story about blind London magistrate Sir John Fielding and his admirable young assistant, Jeremy Proctor.

A scene at the opening night of Oliver Goldsmith’s “She Stoops To Conquer” is worth the price of admission on its own. After laughing at “quite the funniest comedy we had ever seen or ever read,” Jeremy and Clarissa (another of Sir John’s wise and touching young wards) join another friend and Goldsmith himself for dinner—John Twigg’s famous turtle soup—at a tavern called Shakespeare’s Head in Covent Garden. The soup isn’t the only attraction: the place is a haven for high-end prostitutes. And indeed one of the guests that night, very drunk and being attended to by a pair of “broad and brawny” professionals, seems familiar. “His square spectacles had dropped down his nose and were attached only to his left ear…”

It isn’t Franklin’s sex life that warrants the attention of Sir John and Jeremy so much as his involvement in a plot to smuggle to America some purloined letters concerning the treasonous political activities of various Colonial leaders. Sam Johnson, who played a major part in a previous book in the series, returns to lend his shrewd mind to this one, and Alexander’s perfect sense of pitch and proportion for the period makes every page glow with a most welcome blend of trust and amazement.

IN THE KINGDOM OF MISTS, by Jane Jakeman (Berkley Prime Crime)

Writing viable, interesting thrillers with noted artists as characters is never easy: the most successful practioners (Iain Pears, Jonathan Gash, John Malcolm, Nicholas Kilmer, among others) have to walk a very careful line between the fame and value of the art objects and the actual physical process of making them. Jane Jakeman does this so well as she describes Claude Monet painting his famous series of pictures of a mist-shrouded London in 1900 that you might not notice what else there is in her engrossing book: a richly-detailed story involving several major characters; easily-swallowed history lessons about the Boer War and how disruptive it was to Anglo-French relations (shades of the Iraq conflict); even a logical resolution of one of my least favorite crime staples—the identity of Jack the Ripper.

Jakeman’s overworked and socially stigmatized police officer, Inspector Will Garrety, might make some readers think about Anne Perry’s William Monk, and her idea of a private floor at the Savoy Hotel where mutilated veterans of the Boer War are hidden from public view could be an earlier version of devices used in various World War I mysteries—most memorably and recently, Jacqueline Winspear’s “Maisie Dobbs.”

But it’s the paintings which finally take center stage and give “In the Kingdom of Mists” its unique flavor. A young English diplomat, Oliver Craston, wanders into Monet’s room at the Savoy: “On the easel stood a picture that threatened to overwhelm him. As he looked, his mouth seemed to fill with the taste of the fog that hung above the river. He could recognize the grey-brown structure of Waterloo Bridge, the dark colors of coke and carbon… Oliver drew back, frightened at the implications of the picture, at the littleness of humanity and the darkness of the river.”

INTERRUPTED ARIA, by Beverle Graves Myers (Poisoned Pen)

On a chilly day in 1731, two young men arrive in the Italian city of Venice—as besieged then by nature and human frailties as the present-day version so well chronicled by such mystery writers as Edward Sklepowich and Donna Leon. Both of the men are castrati—singers who paid the terrible price of sexual mutilation in order to maintain their perfect child soprano voices. One of them, Tito Amato, returning to his native city after many years in Naples at the famed Conservatorio San Remo where he perfected his art, is about to become a star. The other, his best friend Felice Ravello, is a much sadder figure: despite the operation, his voice has cracked and thickened, and he must develop other musical skills to survive.

“Castrati are famous for having the small, delicately formed larynx of a woman and the prodigious lung capacity of a man,” says Tito—who is both proud of his art and resentful at the price he has paid for it. “…I had once witnessed a virtuoso performance by the great Farnelli in Naples. During his arias, all eyes were glued to his face and gestures… Some of the women, and even a few of the men, seemed transported by sensation… they appeared nothing short of enraptured.”

The best thing about Beverle Graves Myers’s rivetting first mystery—which involves the poisoning of a beautiful, aging opera star and the charging of Felice with the crime—is how quickly we slip into the world she has so expertly recreated, despite its distance and initial oddness. It’s a world where castrati-bashing by gangs of louts on the street (and verbal insults by solid citizens behind closed doors) is a fact of life; where a government would rather have fast justice than slow truth; where a powerful businessman buys and sells people along with his other trade goods. Sound like any place you know?

THE GAME, by Laurie R. King (Bantam Hardcover)

Laurie R. King has done some excellent work in her crime novels about contemporary female cops, but I’d venture to guess that her series about Mary Russell—the young American woman who marries Sherlock Holmes in his later years—will earn her the most honors. King has managed to capture in Mary all the smart, angry, overqualified women who came boiling out of the world’s cities and colleges in the early 1900s, willing to risk everything from scorn to physical violence to be given a chance of proving their worth.

Mary’s scholarship—her knowledge of language, history and literature—play a large part in the adventurous investigations she conducts with Holmes, and King cleverly uses her own erudition to set up the action. In this seventh outing, a plea from Sherlock’s ailing older brother Mycroft sends them off to India in search of a British intelligence agent called Kimball O’Hara—who it turns out was the model for Rudyard Kipling’s “Kim” when he was a boy.

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.