ALAN FURST. The World at Night (1996).

Twice in the span of a few dozen pages, the author refers to Eric Ambler, a novelist who specialized in World War II–era tales of ordinary men thrust into extraodinary service as spies of one type or another—tales, in other words, much like this one. Along with his excellent use of primary research, Furst draws generously from secondary sources for inspiration. Other creative touchstones, in this saga of France during the 1940s, include the novels of Georges Simenon and the films of Jean Renoir. (Each man receives a glancing, telling mention from Furst). It’s a story of Gallic wartime intrigue for readers already steeped in the ways of French culture and in the plot lines of Ambler, of Graham Greene, of John le Carré.

Jean-Claude Casson, as Furst calls his Ambleresque hero, produces films that are successful enough to earn him a life of high-bourgeois ease in the fashionable 16th Arrondissement of Paris. With a world-weary smile, Casson accepts the round of comfortable compromise that appears to be his lot. But after May 1940, when the Nazi Occupation begins to settle upon his city, he discovers that there are compromises and then there are compromises. When a chance comes to perform an undercover operation in Spain, ostensibly on behalf of British Intelligence, he takes it. But the mission goes awry, information about it falls into German hands, and the Nazis use that information to pressure Casson into becoming a double agent. Alongside such misadventures, a romance takes hold between Casson and a tragically lonely actress named Citrine, who steps into the flickering candlelight of Furst’s imagination as if she were fresh from a story by Guy de Maupassant or a song by Édith Piaf.

Mystique is everything to Furst, and mystery matters very little. The question of who betrayed Casson to the Gestapo spurs no investigation and finds no answer; it’s met, instead, with a “C’est la guerre” shrug. What Furst cares about is the intersection of a certain place, a certain moment, and a certain kind of man. While he explores that territory with real panache (or is “élan” the right term?), he also carries his romanticism a bit too far. The finale, for example—meant to strike a chord that is astonishing yet inevitable—falls short on both counts. The destiny of Casson and the destiny of France have much in common, but they are not identical.

 

HOWARD BROWNE. Thin Air (1954).

A hotshot advertising executive, with his pretty wife and darling daughter in tow, arrives at their Westchester County home after a long drive from a summer place in Maine. The wife rushes into the house—and vanishes. The young ad exec, Ames Coryell, calls the police, but they’re of no help; to them, the natural corollary of a missing wife is a guilty husband.So Coryell races into town, where he puts his glib tongue and his ad agency to work. Rather than hire a private detective, he turns his fellow admen into a team of skip tracers, using their arts of persuasion and their media connections to cast a dragnet for his wife across Greater New York. These scenes, which send up Madison Avenue and the travesty that is “agency English” (a local patois in which ideas are perpetually being “run up a flagpole”), are the highlight of the novel. They hold echoes of Kenneth Fearing’s noir masterpiece The Big Clock (1946), and so does the tale’s chase and counter-chase plot. Although it lacks the poetic depth of the classic Fearing tale, this brisk little thriller does “meet the ball on the rise,” as one of Browne’s pitchmen might say.

 

C.J. SANSOM. Dissolution (2003).

Life is cheap in the England of Henry VIII—there is widespread pestilence, there is religion-fueled mayhem, there is the unpleasant matter of Anne Boleyn, executed at the Tower in 1536—but even in that death-saturated land, it’s not every day that someone lops off the head of an emissary from the king. Nonetheless, at the Monastery of St. Donatas the Ascendant of Scarnsea, in the year 1537, a royal commissioner named Robin Singleton has found himself on the wrong side of a sword blade. Thomas Cromwell, Henry’s imperiously competent and much-feared vicar general, had dispatched Singleton to Scarnsea to negotiate terms of surrender with Abbot Fabian, the leader of the monastery. That move was part of Cromwell’s grand scheme to dismantle the country’s great religious establishments; his aim, in undertaking this “dissolution,” was both to further the cause of anti-papist Reform and to claim the wealth of the monasteries for the crown and its allies. Did one of the monks at St. Donatus decide to strike a personal blow for Counter-Reformation by murdering Singleton? To find out, Cromwell calls upon the investigative talents of Matthew Shardlake, a prosperous London lawyer and a loyal Reform man, who here appears in the first book of a series that follows his journey through the treacherous world where Tudor politics and sordid crime intermingle. Shardlake also happens to be a hunchback, and that condition arguably gives him a distinct angle of view on the rampant cruelty and suffering of his time.

Dissolution owes more than a little to the model of The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco. Like that best-selling tome, which opened the way for countless medieval mysteries that have followed, Sansom’s novel offers a minutely observed look inside a cloistered realm that typifies its era in many respects but also stands apart as a world unto itself. In each case, the rivalries and resentments that inevitably arise within an (almost) all-male population—a population marked by an imperfect commitment to celibacy and a sometimes warped commitment to the Christian faith—serve up lots of raw material for intrigue, secrecy, and misunderstanding. Shardlake and his protégé, Mark Poer, also resemble Eco’s heroes, John of Baskerville and Adso of Melk, in seeming just modern enough to bridge the gap between the mind of the Middle Ages and the sensibility of readers today. Sansom even includes a throwaway reference to one of the main plot points in Eco’s opus. (Brother Gabriel, the monk in charge of the library at St. Donatus, takes a book from the library’s collection and says to Shardlake: “Reputedly a copy of Aristotle’s lost work On Comedy. A fake, of course, thirteenth-century Italian, but beautiful nonetheless.”)

But Sansom‘s work is a superbly crafted whodunit with special qualities of its own. In a departure from the standard pattern, Shardlake rather that Poer narrates these proceedings, and he comes across less as a “great detective” than as a Watson-like figure: His voice, like his personality, is smart and stolid, yet oddly ingenuous. His response to the events that he witnesses is earnest and occasionally naïve—an attitude that plays an integral part in the story that Sansom aims to tell. Shardlake isn’t just a creature of his time; he’s a man formed by his time. Unlike many period mysteries, this one doesn’t treat the past as a static backdrop. Instead, readers gain a visceral sense that the English Reformation was a fluid process whose ultimate meaning and impact were far from certain. For Shardlake, a deepening of insight into that historical moment comes in tandem with an epiphany that lets him solve the murder puzzle. “This new world was no Christian commonwealth; it never would be,” he notes.

It was in truth no better than the old, no less ruled by powers and vanity. … And then I realized that blinkered thinking of another sort had blinded me to the truth of what happened at Scarnsea. I had bound myself to a web of assumptions about how the world worked, but remove one of those and it was as though a mirror of clear glass were substituted for a distorting one. My jaw dropped open. I realized who had killed Singleton and why and, that step taken, all fell into place.

 

HILDA LAWRENCE. Blood Upon the Snow (1944).

Nowhere in the mystery writer’s manual does it say that the protagonist of a gothic-suspense yarn must be a woman, or must be an amateur. Nowhere does it say that an author can’t take a tough-guy private eye—the sort of hero who feels most at home in a snappy tale about gangsters and gun molls—and install him in a big old country house where secrets rattle around like rats behind the wainscoting. That, in fact, is what Lawrence does here, in the first installment of what became a three-book series that centers on Manhattan-based P.I. Mark East.

In the dead of winter, East ventures to the remote outpost of Crestwood (presumably located somewhere in Upstate New York), where the wealthy Morey family has rented the old Davenport place. It’s a rather small household, consisting of hearty Jim Morey and his troubled wife, Laura, who spends much of her time alone; their two daughters, 10-year-old Anne and 2-year-old Ivy; and Joseph Stoneman, a grizzled, cranky archeologist who claims Jim as a patron. Stoneman, as it turns out, is the client who has lured East away from his urban habitat. Animated by vague premonitions of danger, the archeologist hires the sleuth to act as his bodyguard (while posing as his secretary). Before long, though, East has reason to believe that it’s not Stoneman’s life that needs guarding. Violence, when it comes, is literally domestic: It strikes a cook and housekeeper named Mrs. Lacey, and then it strikes a maid named Florrie Simmons. No one can say why anybody would want to kill those salt-of-the-earth local women, and that fact only intensifies the aura of fear that now hangs over the Morey ménage.

Lawrence knows how to sketch a character into being and how to etch a scene with varieties of shading that are alternately light and dark. She peoples the world around Crestwood with affectionately drawn comic supporting players, including a pair of spinsters, Miss Beulah Pond and Miss Betsy Petty, who befriend East and emerge as his cohorts in crime-solving. The mood that she creates, meanwhile, shifts quickly and credibly from frothy amusement to icy dread. What she doesn’t know, it seems, is how to make the gears of her tale—not just the overt narrative, but also the covert story of what’s really taking place over at the Davenport house—mesh together convincingly. Of course you expect a gothic novel to be, well, gothic. You expect it to test your willingness to suspend disbelief. But Lawrence serves up an epically convoluted plot that’s hard to understand and, therefore, hard to believe. The story-behind-the-story that East reveals in the denouement has the potential to pack a real punch, and it certainly comes as a surprise. Yet it isn’t a surprise that Lawrence has prepared readers for, either through sound clueing or through careful psychological foreshadowing.

 

ROBERT CRAIS. Stalking the Angel (1989).

Every fictional private eye reflects a private fantasy—that of the writer, who projects onto his intrepid gumshoe all of the attributes and attitudes that he prizes in himself, along with a slew of heroic qualities that he can only wish upon himself. Which is fine, as far as it goes: All writing is part therapy. But before taking his fantasy public, a private-eye writer does well to armor it with a keen, compelling voice and with a commitment to storytelling that’s equal to his hero’s commitment to crime-fighting. Crais falters on both counts. He gives to his sleuth and narrator, Elvis Cole, a coyly sarcastic voice that charms briefly but soon wears thin, and then throws Cole into a series of actions that never quite gathers itself into a well-crafted plot.

The building blocks of this tale are straight out of Chandler and Macdonald: a detective hired to recover a stolen rare object (in this case, an ancient Japanese tome called the Hagakure ); a troubled daughter in flight from an affluent, emotionally warped family; a beautiful ice queen who eventually melts in the face of the hero’s charisma; a climactic shift from the sin- and sun-drenched streets of Los Angeles to the false idyll of a mountain hideaway. Crais adds a couple of pieces that have a contemporary feel to them—the specter of child sexual abuse, a threat from Japan (in the form of Yakuza gangsters)—but the structure as a whole remains underdeveloped. Elvis Cole is a smart-ass with a heart of gold, and it’s hard to dislike him. Likability, however, does not always translate into readability.

[ADDENDUM: I'm repeating myself. I felt about this book pretty much the same as I felt about Robert B. Parker's Looking for Rachel Wallace, and here I express the same kind of disappointment as I did just a few weeks ago about that earlier private-eye tale. Too often, I think, these latter-day exponents of the PI tradition conjure up the attitude of Philip Marlowe, but they lack the wit of Raymond Chandler; they fashion bleak plots that recall the work of Ross Macdonald, but the heroes that they create lack the humanity of Lew Archer. Is it just the case that PI tales that take place more or less in our own time don't appeal to me? Not quite. I've read a few recent books of this kind that are also very good books. I'll try, before long, to post a review of one such tale.]

 

PATRICK QUENTIN. Black Widow (1952).

It’s a classic noir set-up. A happily married man gets to feeling a bit lonely in his swank Sutton Place apartment after his wife leaves town for an extended trip. He wanders upstairs to a party thrown by his friends, and there he meets Nanny Ordway, a drab but plucky sprite who strikes a vaguely paternal chord in him. A friendship, wholly nonsexual, gels between them. And then it all goes very wrong, very fast. His wife comes home, and in their bedroom the couple find Nanny’s dead body swinging from a chandelier. To Lieutenant Trant of the NYPD, to nosy neighbors and prying reporters, and perhaps even to the man’s wife, the scene suggests a suicide for which he’s morally to blame—the tragic upshot of a love affair gone sour. Which would be bad enough, but worse is his plight once Trant determines that someone strangled the girl; she didn’t kill herself, after all. A web of incriminating circumstance tightens around the man, a theatrical producer named Peter Duluth, and as he learns more and more about poor, demure Nanny, he comes to believe that she has woven that web, as if from the grave: “Nanny-spider,” he calls her. Duluth appeared in several earlier tales that cast him as a solver of urbane whodunits. But here he finds himself in Cornell Woolrich territory, a nightmare Manhattan where the routine amenities of big-city life (an all-night hamburger joint, a Bohemian bar in the Village, the tiny Murray Hill bachelor pad of an over-the-hill actor) take on a sickly sheen of doom and desperation. Quentin lacks Woolrich’s ability to construct an atmosphere of pure, frenzied claustrophobia. Yet he makes up for that flaw with a slick plot that delivers one, two, three twists of the narrative knife—really, it’s hard to count them—before freeing Duluth from the last dark strands of a spider’s handiwork.

 

THOMAS H. COOK. Places in the Dark (2000).

Cook specializes in exploring the spaces that exist within one particular kind of “dark”—the darkness of the human heart, a metaphysical region where desire and memory go into hiding, and where dangerous schemes of deliverance are born. Exactly what Dora March may be hiding from is the secret that hangs longest and most provocatively over this novel, an unapologetically gothic affair set in a Maine town called Port Alma during the Great Depression. Coming seemingly out of nowhere and bringing little more than her cryptic beauty, Dora enters and eventually turns upside-down the lives of Cal and Billy Chase, scions of a prominent local family. The contest that Cook shrewdly limns between Cal, a gloomy soul of classical temper, and Billy, a true-blue romantic, provides a powerful narrative substructure. Sibling love and sibling rivalry drive the story, which opens in the aftermath of Billy’s violent death and starts with a quest by Cal (who serves as the tale’s first-person narrator) to find Dora, who fled town immediately after the murder. As usual in a novel of this type, the key to understanding the recent past lies in a more distant past, and Cook puts forth several possible keys that might unlock the mystery that is Dora March. Cook’s failure to make the most of those possibilities is the only flaw in an otherwise elegant plot. In the end, we discover where Dora came from, but not what compelled her to travel across a continent to the storm-battered, love-forsaken world of Port Alma.