HAROLD Q. MASUR. Bury Me Deep (1947).

Masur lacks a keen talent for plotting, but he does plenty of it. From a classic opening scene, in which a luscious and meagerly clad blonde surprises lawyer Scott Jordan in his New York apartment, to a final showdown between Jordan and a similarly provocative culprit, the author tosses his hero into a bewildering series of terse, tense encounters. The blonde turns up dead after Jordan sends her away in a taxi, whereupon he starts to tangle with various parties implicated in her death: smarmy fellow attorneys, suspicious cops, a jealous would-be lover of the blonde, a stage-struck rich dame and her gigolo vocal coach, a dipsomaniacal client, and a dope fiend with a gun (and with a vendatta against Jordan), among others. Tying these characters to the murder are a divorce case, a car crash, a poisoned bottle of brandy, a lilac-colored glove, and much, much else.

The private-eye tale, at its best, hovers artfully between gritty realism in a “Naked City” vein and improbable fantasy in a “Baghdad on the Subway” vein. It sketches a familiar-looking urban jungle populated by guys wearing cheap suits and gals wearing cheap perfume, and it sends those people on a merry, madcap chase. Masur tries hard to achieve that potent combination but falters on both sides of the equation. His hardboiled details have a glossy, put-on look to them, and his overly dense yarn unwinds in ways that appear random rather than magical. In Jordan, Masur has created a likable sleuth, and his prose sparkles throughout. His story, however, merely glitters.

[ADDENDUM: Maybe I was too tough on this book. Several years have gone by since I read it (and since I originally wrote this review), and today I might take a kinder view of it. Many other folks, to judge from mentions of the book in the detective-fiction blogosphere, seem to like it well enough. The novel is indeed fairly derivative, and its plotting is too helter-skelter for my taste, but I've developed a growing fondness for the mid-century hardboiled genre from which it derives, and I've learned to accept that a revved-up plot counts as a feature—rather than a bug—in that tradition.]

 

PHILIP KERR. March Violets (1989).

And Philip Marlowe thought that he lived in a corrupt civilization! He should have traveled to the Berlin of 1936. There, his fellow private eye Bernhard Gunther could have shown him what it’s like to go down streets that are really mean. In capital of Hitler’s Reich, the would-be knight-errant faces challenges that make Marlowe’s tribulations in greater Los Angeles seem about as vexing as a day at Santa Monica Beach. Up to a point, the imaginary realms in which these two imaginary sleuths ply their trade do have much in common. Each world is morally septic at its core. In Gunther’s Germany as in Marlowe’s Southern California, a cadre of image makers beguile the masses by offering visions of personal power and physical perfection—visions that, effect, provide cover for a class of goons who run the place down at the mean-street level. In both settings, the goons find cohorts and victims among ethically rudderless rich folk, and among a surprisingly large population of women who are emotionally lost, dangerously beautiful, and usually blonde. The goons in Nazi Germany, though, are more Teutonically efficient than their L.A. counterparts, and their brutal sway over the land gives the Bernie Gunthers in their midst very little room to operate. Gunther, the grizzled antihero of this first tale in a trilogy by Kerr (which has since grown to encompass seven volumes, and counting), fits the classic mold of a fictional private eye. He’s an ex-cop whose reasons for going it alone lie in a gray zone between ignominy and integrity. Sure, he hates the Nazis, but he’s no saint-in-a-trenchcoat; when he takes a case, his goal is not to save a soul but to earn a fair Pfennig.

In its beginnings, at least, the case here is one that Marlowe would recognize. Hired by a steel magnate to investigate the murder of his daughter and son-in-law, and also to recover a stolen necklace,Gunther starts out by rattling the cages of the criminal underclass, seeking clues from those who traffick in stolen goods, discounted lives, or both. In short order, though, his efforts rile the criminal overclass that runs the country. Members of the SS, the SA, and the Gestapo, and even Prime Minister Hermann Goering, take an unsettling interest in his work. Finally, after undergoing a host of beatings, a pair of seductions (one manipulative, one not), and a painful and painstakingly described stay at the Dachau concentration camp, Gunther succeeds about as well as an honest shamus in the Third Reich could ever hope to do. He finds the necklace, identifies a perpetrator for each of the many homicides that clutter his trail, and uncovers more information than he wants to have about the inner workings of the Nazi system. Still, one mystery of great personal importance to him remains open. What begins and mostly unfolds as an artful pastiche of the American detective story ends on a dark note that has a distinctly European ring to it: An echo from the world as envisioned by Kafka resounds in the distance. The detective has mastered one series of crimes, but he and the reader both sense that something unfathomably worse lies in the offing.

 

LEIGH BRACKETT. No Good From a Corpse (1944).

Hollywood private investigator Edmond Clive, fresh from a big job in San Francisco, discovers that there’s plenty of trouble for him to investigate on his home turf. First, his best gal, a torch singer at a place on the Strip called the Skyway Club, suspects that someone is watching her, and not just because she’s a knockout. Next, his boyhood best friend, Mick, wants him to figure out who has been sending nasty letters that threaten to rile up the family of rich neurotics into which Mick has recently married. Since Mick has been leaning on the torch singer’s shoulder while Clive was away, those two cases merge into a single helter-skelter crisis—and that’s before the singer gets bludgeoned to death with Mick’s blackthorn walking stick, even as Clive and Mick both slumber nearby.

Brackett wields these plot pieces to form a dead-on Raymond Chandler pastiche. Remarkably, just a few years after the first Philip Marlowe novel appeared, the classic subgenre that it inaugurated had reached full maturity. Even this book’s finishing twist, a real doozy in its own right, emerges like a half-remembered psycho-sexual nightmare straight out of The Big Sleep. The author also plays exuberantly with every other tic and trope in the Chandler repertoire, and rolls out wisecracking dialogue with high vigor, if not with originality. One archetypal device that goes unused, however, is that of first-person narration by the star detective. Brackett, a woman, presumably thought that writing in the voice of the ultra-masculine Clive might be one gesture of homage too many.

[ADDENDUM: Brackett had quite a career. She wrote a slew of science-fiction tales in the 1940s, mostly for hoary but fondly remembered pulp titles like Planet Stories and Startling Stories, and she penned a scattered few crime and mystery novels besides No Good over the course of several decades. But she's best known for her work as a screenwriter, with screenplay credits that range—improbably enough—from the Bogart and Bacall classic The Big Sleep (1946) to the modern space-opera blockbuster The Empire Strikes Back (1979).]

 

DELORES HITCHENS. Sleep with Slander (1960).

Two fine images bracket this novel about a search by Southern California private-eye Jim Sader for a missing, and possibly abused, young boy. First, in an early scene, Sader visits a Santa Monica neighborhood and meets a dead end that’s literal as well as figurative. Gutted houses—signs of a community in the throes of violent upheaval—await demolition, and nearby lies the powerful interloper for which they must make room: “Three blocks east,” Hitchens writes, “the end of the freeway from L.A. was a muddy mountainous nose thrust sniffing seaward.” Second, at a climactic moment, Sader ventures to the Laguna Hills redoubt of a sculptor and there finds a row of immense concrete heads that resemble the famous stone monuments of Easter Island. One of the statues lies broken and on its side, suggesting a fallen idol, but the whole place exudes a sense of abandonment, as if to mark the silence of gods who cannot or will not protect an innocent child from harm.

At its core, the tale is one of “illegitimate” maternity, and it explores the shame, regret, scorn, and confusion that can surround both a mother and her offspring when figures of authority refuse to honor her motherhood—or, indeed, to recognize it. For Sader, the story begins when a client hires him to locate a five-year-old kid whose name, he eventually discovers, is Ricky Champlain. The client, a wily old patriarch named Gibbings, is cagy about the reason for his interest in the boy, and alongside that quandary are several other puzzling questions: Who wrote the anonymous note to Gibbings that recounts the starvation and the beatings that Ricky has purportedly endured? What role did Ricky’s adoptive mother and her family play in causing his current plight? And how, if at all, does his birth mother figure into the case? There’s also a killing along the way, and Sader will need to puzzle out who committed it. Yet what drives him forward, from his errand into that derelict subdivision to his sighting of that macabre hilltop pantheon, is his quest for Ricky.

According to Bill Pronzini, this second of a pair of books that Hitchens wrote about Sader is “the best hard-boiled private-eye novel written by a woman—and one of the best written by anybody.” (And Pronzini should know. He’s married to Marcia Muller, a woman who has written a great many PI novels.) Certainly, it’s a crisply executed piece of work, reminiscent of the psychologically rich sagas of corrupted family life that Ross Macdonald wrote during the same era, when the uptight 1950s were giving way to the let-it-loose 1960s. To readers accustomed to the densely spooled plotting of Macdonald’s classic titles, Slander might appear to have a bit of slack in it. There’s a big surprise at the end, for instance, but it comes only after Hitchens has teasingly held out the promise of a bigger narrative twist, and so it comes as something of a let-down. Where Hitchens truly excels, though, is in her mastery of storytelling basics. She creates real-seeming characters, places them in expertly detailed settings and situations, and smoothly adds symbolic overtones to a style defined primarily by its sober realism. At a scene-by-scene level, moreover, she betrays no slackness at all; on the contrary, she displays (particularly in the book’s early scenes) a knack for pulling the thread of suspense tauter and tauter. Pronzini overstates his case for this unjustly neglected marvel of the private-eye form, but not by much.

 

HENRY KANE. A Halo for Nobody (1947).

“I threw the blonde a couple of come-on glances, just in case, but I made about as much of an impression as a fingerprint on an ice cube at a hot party.” So says New York private investigator Peter Chambers about three-quarters of the way into this narrative—a brief, busy, boisterous work that makes little impression on a reader’s mind beyond that of trying very hard to summon a bit of the magic that earlier writers had breathed into the private-eye genre. Kane’s approach to the genre falls short of capturing its real spirit, but goes long in conjuring up its formal elements. His “come-on glances” (and he throws more than a couple of them) assume the guise of tropes that were familiar even in 1947, when this début effort first hit bookstalls: the cocky shamus with a drone-like partner and a tart-tongued secretary; the curvy torch singer who pals around with slick underworld types, whenever she’s not palling around with the shamus instead; the wealthy client who surely know more than he lets on; the male suspects who are all either smart but weak or tough but stupid; the female characters who all want something from the detective that the men in their lives can’t give them. Scenes alternate between swank uptown joints like the Club Nevada, where the shamus and the singer and everyone else seem to converge, and seedy downtown haunts like the stoolie’s den where the shamus gets the straight dope on a crooked lawyer. Coursing through it all is a stream of wised-up wordplay, occasionally clever but often simply manic in tone.

No less manic is the plot, which spins around and around—a continuously shifting kaleidoscope of action. There’s a pattern to the pandemonium, but good luck to any reader who tries to discern it by squinting into the pinhole lens of Kane’s narrative. At its center is Chambers, who happens to be down the road apiece when a shootout erupts in front of an Upper East Side apartment house. Bullets, some of them from his gun, sail to and from a taxi parked outside the building. Left in the wake of all this gunfire are a pair of dead bodies, one of them belonging to the wife of Blair Curtis, the proprietor of a posh jewelry concern. Curtis, meanwhile, had recently received a blackmail threat, and he hires Chambers to investigate both that threat and this fresh murder. Plenty of suspicious characters orbit the case, and Chambers pursues his suspicions wherever they lead, pausing for hardly a moment when they lead him to stumble upon more dead bodies. Detection for him takes the form of gadding about town and gabbing with assorted high-hats and lowlifes until he jostles the truth loose from its hiding place, mostly by the sheer force of his activity.

Kane musters a few sharp clues, but he conceals them from readers all too well, largely as a consequence of his pell-mell way of telling a story. When Chambers at last unveils what all of the clues mean, the reader’s likely response is not a frisson of recognition, but a wrinkled brow of confusion—not “Aha!” but “Huh?” The star sleuth, at that point, might as well be lifting prints from the ice in his drink.

[ADDENDUM: For the edition of Halo for Nobody that I read, a mid-1950s paperback reprint, some publishing genius decided to change the book’s title to “Martinis and Murder.” It’s a random change of the sort that was typical of that period, when a little alliteration was thought to go a long way—and when the hard-boiled detective story was thought to be a mere box of tropes that one could mix and match, and then market. People in the novel, including Chambers, do a lot of drinking, but they don’t imbibe martinis in particular. (In fact, there are probably more murders committed in the book than there are martinis consumed.) The phrase in the original title has some poetry to it, and Kane actually uses it in the story. All the same, that original title isn’t all that original: Howard Browne came out with Halo in Blood in 1946, one year earlier than Halo for Nobody.]

 

ROSS MACDONALD. The Zebra-Striped Hearse (1962).

Lew Archer travels far and wide to chart the many past sins and many present ills of the Blackwell family. He logs untold air miles on trips from his base in Los Angeles to Malibu, up the coast; to San Francisco and elsewhere in California; to Lake Tahoe, in Nevada; and to Guadalajara, in Mexico. But, as usually happens during his investigative journeys, he finds that the distance between past and present—between where folks come from and where they get into trouble—is alarmingly short.

Harriet Blackwell, a few months shy of her 25th birthday, when she will inherit a fortune and attain a sort of independence, runs off with a struggling artist and apparent ne’er-do-well named Burke Damis. Her father, Colonel Mark Blackwell, hires Archer to investigate the mysterious interloper, and Archer (more shrink than sleuth) right away intuits that the colonel has given Harriet too much possessive attention and too little genuine love. Not that Damis doesn’t warrant scrutiny; Archer, on his intra-state and cross-border peregrination, connects that man to at least two killings. Intersecting the detective’s path at multiple points, meanwhile, is an old hearse painted with white and black stripes. The vehicle, operated by a crew of vagabond surfers, turns out to contain a major clue in the murder puzzle, and it does double-duty as an image of a civilization that’s gone out-of-kilter—a civilization in which people of every stripe have lost their sense of organic order. (When a funeral wagon so easily becomes a beach-cruising fun-in-the-sun car, can anything be sacred?) In modern America, and in Southern California especially, no one seems able to map the eternal verities of life, love, and death to a meaningful set of coordinates. Which may be why Archer, in the end, must venture to Mexico a second time in order to achieve resolution.

Macdonald, as if acting out a repetition-compulsion, circles back the same theme again and again throughout his work. In the world that he maps out in the Archer saga, murder is always a close-knit family affair, and truth invariably lies buried on the family compound, waiting for a sensitive, weary shamus to come along who knows where to dig. Practice makes perfect, though, and in this mid-career masterpiece Macdonald enacts his chosen theme brilliantly.

 

JOHN D. MACDONALD. Dead Low Tide (1953).

The postwar building boom along the Gulf Coast of Florida created a ticky-tacky fly-by-night environment and brought to the area both strivers and slackers. It was a place where, in MacDonald’s rendering, great moral contests could unfold amid the marshy keys that man was wresting from the sea. Andrew Hale McClintock, a Syracuse University graduate who has come south to find his fortune, represents the striving class. He works for a hard-as-nails contractor, writing up bids and chasing down construction matériel. After the contractor’s wife embroils McClintock in her adultery-driven antics, he struggles to preserve his autonomy as well as his sanity. Then, after the contractor becomes a victim of murder, he fights to prove that he’s innocent of the crime. As MacDonald’s alter-ego, meanwhile, he carries the burden of narrating this taut adventure yarn, and he does so with the author’s patented blend with smart-aleck wit and florid lyricism. All in all, he comes across as a worthy protagonist—as a man equal to the villain of the piece, a blandly handsome slacker-psychopath named Roy. There are surprises in store for McClintock, and there is some sharp detective work for him to do, but there isn’t much mystery as to the locus of good and evil in the brave, balmy new world that he inhabits. An amusing sidelight to an otherwise naturalistic tale is the way that villain and hero alike resort to using rather outlandish weapons to achieve their violent ends: an underwater fishing gun in one case, a rod-and-reel in the other. (“There is never any doubt when you set a hook,” McClintock notes after landing a “big one” that definitely won’t get away.)

 

BILL PRONZINI. The Snatch (1969).

By the late 1960s, the private-eye genre was a well-spent force, and the great names in its pantheon of heroes had either hung up their fedoras for good (Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe) or would be collecting their tarnished gold watch soon enough (Lew Archer). Within a few years, new heroes would start to revive the genre, including one who would go by the single, potent moniker of Spenser. In the meantime, though, it might well have seemed to a fledgling writer that the best way to introduce a new fictional private investigator was to give him no name at all. Certainly, in launching the “Nameless” detective with this début novel, Pronzini could point to the precedent of the Continental Op, an earlier legend of the PI genre who had no name to call his own.

In other ways, too, Pronzini nods at the dated and potentially obsolete status of his hero. First, he places Nameless on the far side of youth, rendering the sleuth as a 47-year-old former cop with a deep back story that features service as an MP during the Second World War. Erika, the sometime girlfriend of Nameless, refers to him as “old bear,” and the detective himself—who narrates his own exploits—draws attention to his silver-gray hair and his creaking bones. Since the Nameless series would roll on for another four decades (the latest entry, The Betrayers, came out this year), its protagonist eventually had to become not just nameless, but ageless. Second, and more intriguingly, Pronzini casts his private eye as a collector and enthusiast of the pulp magazines that flourished from the 1920s to the 1940s, and especially of those titles (Black Mask, Dime Detective) that featured “private dicks” and other solo crime-fighters. Nameless thus hails from a tradition that he knows to be practically defunct, its memory preserved only in the brittle, fraying pages of hard-to-find, out-of-print periodicals. Erika makes that connection explicit in a highly charged confrontation with him:

“You want to know the real reason you quit the police force to open up that agency of yours, the real deep-down reason? I’ll tell you: it was and is an obsession to be just like those pulp-magazine detectives and you never would have been satisfied until you’d tried it. Well, now you’ve tried it, for ten years you’ve tried it, and you just don’t want to let go, you can’t let go. You’re living in a world that doesn’t exist and never did, in an era that’s twenty-five years dead. You’re a kid dreaming about being a hero.”

(The Nameless franchise is eminently modern in the extent to which it focuses on the personal travails of its protagonist. He might lack a name, but he doesn’t lack for an amply fleshed-out identity. Between his heartfelt relationship talks with Erika and his struggles to quit smoking, Nameless comes across more as Spenser’s cousin than he does as the son of Spade or Marlowe.)

In this first chronicled adventure, Nameless hires on to handle the ransom payoff in a kidnapping case. Venturing from his home base in San Francisco, he enters the luxe realm of the Martinettis, who reside down the Peninsula in the sylvan paradise of Hillsborough. Financier Louis Martinetti doesn’t trust the police to deal with the man who snatched his 9-year-old son, Gary, from a military prep school. Nor is it clear that he trusts, or should trust, the members of his own household—including his much younger wife, Karyn, and his secretary, an oily fellow named Proxmire. Nameless, on the appointed evening, takes a briefcase that contains $300,000 in cash to a secluded location chosen by the kidnapper. Then all hell breaks loose. An unknown party descends upon the scene, kills the man who abducted Gary, grabs the briefcase, and leaves the detective with a knife wound in his gut. Was the whole thing an inside job? That seems likely, given that no one had discussed the dropoff plan outside the confines of the Martinetti house.

Pronzini sets forth these events in a manner that’s occasionally clumsy or ponderous; he hasn’t yet developed, as he later would, the firm hand of a professional storyteller. But the story that he tells is a decent one. The plot, deceptive in its overt simplicity, has a neat and convincing arc to it, and Nameless discerns its trajectory in a cleverly framed moment of discovery. Just when hope—and, he fears, Erika—have all but abandoned him, he experiences a jolt of insight that turns the case around. It comes as he stares at an issue of the pulp magazine Detective Fiction Weekly, on display in a bookstore window in Burlingame. By following that lead to its violent end point, he proves that there’s more than a little of the pulp-style hero in his fading, dog-eared soul, after all.

 

MARK COGGINS. The Immortal Game (1999).

Just how good can a work of pastiche be? How captivating can a novel be that hews tightly to a course that another writer has well and famously charted? On the evidence of this squat, solid volume—published handsomely by a small California-based press, complete with chapter-opening photographs by the author—the answer to that question would seem to be “pretty darn captivating.” The novel, whose archetype is one part Hammett and two parts Chandler, has a narrative verve and a literary polish that similar works of homage often lack. Hero and narrator August Riordan lives and works in the very same locales where Hammett’s Sam Spade (and Hammett himself) lived and worked, and he exhibits a blend of smark-aleck patter and romantic alienation that closely mimics the persona of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. Like those literary forerunners, moreover, he inhabits a world that plausibly combines sordid realism with the free-floating unreality of a fairy tale. Coggins even uses chess, Marlowe’s favorite pastime, as a central plot device. But the author also uses software piracy, the S&M club scene, and other aspects of late-modern San Francisco to update his familiar story of dangerous women and deceitful men. Most appealingly, he uses the city itself to great effect, moving his sad, jazz-playing knight-errant like a chess piece across the fog-hemmed streets of North Beach, Nob Hill, and the Tenderloin.

[ADDENDUM: Just about a month ago, I relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area. Long before moving there, though, I harbored a fascination with that region and especially with the magical city at its center, and therefore I sought out works of detective fiction set in those precincts. To mark this move, I will devote my next several posts here to reviews of novels that fall into that category. Some of these works use their Bay Area setting more effectively or more evocatively than others. On that score, this début effort by Coggins (who also maintains a great blog, where he often writes about mystery-related goings-on in and around San Francisco) hits "the top of the mark," so to speak.]

 

DAVID DODGE. Plunder of the Sun (1949).

The quest for Incan treasure and the skullduggery to which the promise of ancient gold will drive a man (or several men) are the twin themes of this vehicle for South-of-the-Border private eye Al Colby. A nortéamericano, and a typical fictional tough guy of his time, Colby roams the Andean region in search of cases that add a bit of spice to his hard-boiled life. Here, a shady old collector named Alfredo Berrien hires him to guard a small package during an ocean voyage from Chile to Peru. The package, he discovers after Berrien dies of mysterious causes aboard their ship, contains part of an old manuscript, and the manuscript provides directions to sites where the last Incans concealed their fabled cache of gold from Spanish conquerors.

There’s very little mystery in the routine chase plot that follows, and there isn’t much detection, either. The identity of the villains—the chief one being an all-American thug named Jefferson (“Jeff,” to friends and enemies alike)—quickly becomes apparent. Suspense therefore hinges on exactly how Colby will keep the wrong people from grabbing the lost gold before he does. Dodge’s prose is crisp, though, and the level of his wit and characterization rises above the norm for this kind of story. Like the preceding Colby yarn, The Long Escape, this adventure concludes not with an action sequence but with an offbeat romantic coda. The hero, otherwise a very tough customer, proves to be a soft touch for a vivacious criatura (an indentured servant woman) who desires her freedom more than she does either him or any amount of buried treasure.