HELEN McCLOY. Do Not Disturb (1943).

For her first novel that doesn’t feature the series detective Basil Willing, McCloy relies heavily on tropes used in various movie thrillers of the prewar and wartime eras. It recalls, in particular, the ur-plot of several Alfred Hitchcock films: An innocent hero, whom fateful circumstances have cast in the role of a guilty fugitive, scurries across urban and pastoral landscapes as unfamiliar threats lurk around every apparently familiar corner. Do Not Disturb also calls to mind the work of Cornell Woolrich, along with the cycle of noir-inflected novels and films that followed the angst-filled trail that Woolrich blazed. These works conjure up a world marked by freakish coincidences (or, rather, by events that seem to be coincidental). They reflect a vision of modern life in which a faceless crowd can suddenly become a swarm of people who are all “out to get you”—“you,” in this case, being a beleaguered protagonist who stands in for the everyman (or every-woman) reader.

Narrated in the cultivated but slightly neurotic voice of its heroine, a divorcée named Edith Talbot, this standalone tale begins with Talbot’s desperate nighttime search for lodging in a Manhattan where the U.S. Army has commandeered many of the local hotels for the quartering of troops. That opening sequence sets the tone for a story in which the war-skewed city becomes a strange and menacing place—a place where nothing is predictable and no one is worthy of trust. At the Hotel Majestic, where she eventually lands a room, Talbot encounters circumstances that most certainly do disturb her: She hears a man crying in the room next to hers. She meets a man in that room who identifies himself as a member of New York’s Finest. She comes back to her own room one night and stumbles upon a corpse. This sequence of inhospitable occurrences leads her to flee the hotel. But where can she go? She dare not go to the police, because the cop whom she met next-door appeared to be giving the “third degree” to the very man who later turned up dead in her room. Her frantic quest for both truth and safety propels her to rural Pennsylvania and then back to the urban jungle and finally to a (literal) cliffhanger scene in which she confronts the main villain, a fascist sympathizer whose motive for various crimes gives this thriller a contemporary political twist.

McCloy brings her usual verve to this topsy-turvy adventure, but ultimately it isn’t the kind of story that suits her talents or her sensibility. Like Willing, she possesses a confidently rational mind; she lacks the paranoid spirit that enables a writer like Woolrich to create a febrile, dreamlike atmosphere in which improbable events take on an air of inevitability. A later novel by McCloy that centers on a fearful, besieged heroine—Through a Glass, Darkly (1950)—unfolds more convincingly, partly because of Willing’s calm presence and partly because it doesn’t rely on first-person narration. McCloy has clearly put much of herself in Talbot. Both women are well bred and well educated, and each of them occupies a social position in the upper reaches of the American class system. But in reading Talbot’s account of her ordeal, one can’t shake the sense that her creator would never deign to get caught in such a predicament.

 

LESLIE FORBES. Bombay Ice (1998).

India, confined to a mere subcontinent of space, famously contains enough life to fill several continents with an ample supply of beauty, sordor, and intrigue. The temptation to duplicate that quality of excess in literary form has afflicted countless writers from the West, including the author of this hyper-intelligent thriller. Here are some of the elements that swirl about in Forbes’s veritable monsoon of a novel: the history of alchemy, sibling rivalry, the cinematic achievements and social vicissitudes of Bollywood (India’s answer to Hollywood), colonialism, the culture of the hijra (the pre- and post-op eunuch prostitutes who haunt and enliven the streets of Bombay), suicide, the practice and lore of gilding, Indian nationalist politics, biracial mating and its offspring, the films of Alfred Hitchcock, the smuggling of antiquities, the craft of art forgery, meteorology, high technology, the deadly allure of water, the dispensability of wives, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest (which one character, an Indian version of Orson Welles, has worked for decades to bring to the Bollywood screen).

Rosalind Benegal—sired by a polymathic philanderer from Kerala, borne of a self-destructive Scottish mother, named after a hearty Shakespearean heroine—returns to the India of her anguished youth. There, she soon discovers, signs and rumors abound to suggest that someone intends to kill her estranged half-sister. A journalist by trade and a seeker of truth by neurotic inclination, Rosalind delves further and further into a maelstrom of human desperation and omnipresent deceit. Bombay, through her eyes, becomes a landscape of cheapened lives and richly imagined schemes. Yet the abundance of mirrors and baubles that grace the surface of this narrative keeps the story from functioning well at a deep level. Bombay Ice features superb writing and generous erudition, but it culminates in a confusing, inconsequential finale. Rosalind, who narrates the book, notes at one point that Indian music has nothing like the self-contained structure of Western music. Forbes errs in giving this novel a similar quality: What works in a raga fails to serve the needs of a detective tale.

 

 

DENNIS LEHANE. Darkness, Take My Hand (1996).

Lehane, in this second book to feature the sleuthing duo Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennarro, has put the Dorchester section of Boston on the map of places that have a presence in myth that no region could ever attain in mere space. In his Dorchester, killer clowns rule the night, cruising Savin Hill Avenue in an ominous-looking white van and laying the groundwork for a vengeful murder spree that will occur twenty years later. In his Dorchester, the sins of fathers and mothers, born of the vigilante passions that roiled white working-class Boston during the school-busing crisis of the 1970s, linger as a curse upon their progeny.

Through artful storytelling, Lehane makes us want to believe in that Dorchester—and makes us need to believe in his two homegrown heroes, who winningly demonstrate their ability to transcend the violence that marks their neighborhood. He does less well in other respects. An air of Hollywood-inspired banality clings to much of the dialogue and to some of the characterization. The byplay between Kenzie and Gennaro, which swerves from the fraternal to the sexual and back, is cutesy and obvious rather than clever. (One critic shrewdly hears in it an uninspired echo from the TV show Moonlighting.) And the plot, though powerful as a whole, does not work as smoothly as it might; it has a couple of hard-to-ignore holes, and its final sequence goes on too long. But for a novelist, it’s no small thing to transfigure a humdrum patch of earth into an arena of epic adventure. In creating a fit place for Kenzie and others to confront their demons, internal as well as external, Lehane has achieved that feat.

 

ARNALDUR INDRIDASON. Jar City (2000).

“He thought about mothers and daughters and fathers and sons and mothers and sons and fathers and daughters and children that were born and no-one wanted and children who died in that little community, Iceland, where everyone seemed related or connected in some way.” The agent of these musings on the vagaries of paternity and maternity, and on the intricacies of the Icelandic “family,” is Erlendur Sveinsson, detective inspector on the Reykjavik police force.

Following the now-standard format for gritty procedurals, Erlendur functions less as a traditional protagonist than as a prism through which his creator can refract multiple rays of investigative, personal, and social drama. (An introductory note explains that Icelanders generally go by their first name; they don’t have surnames in the usual sense of that term.) Indradason surrounds the inspector with a cast of supporting players who function as a work family—Sigurdur Oli, an up-and-coming fellow with a degree in criminology; Elinborg, a female junior officer; Marion Briem, a crusty senior officer; and so on. On the home front, meanwhile, Erlendur faces challenges that are typical of put-upon fictional cops everywhere: He has a troubled daughter, Eva Lind, and his stumbling efforts to maintain a connection with her form a major subplot in the novel.

Erlendur is also keenly aware of his membership in a distinctive national family. Iceland has a population no bigger than that of a mid-size American city, and its people can trace their ancestry back many centuries. Consequently, the country has been able to create a database that combines information on the health and family histories of virtually all of its citizens. Affiliated with this vast genealogical undertaking is a laboratory that retains specimens of biological material from a vast assortment of Icelanders; the book’s title is a mordant reference to that facility. The scientific value of these projects derives largely from the country’s genetic homogeneity. Even so, Indradason manages to suggest that there are an infinite number of stories to be found in Jar City.

There is, for instance, the story of Holberg, a 69-year-old truck driver whose penchant for sexual vice appears to have been the only notable element of an otherwise drab existence. Acting on a neighbor’s tip, Erlundur and his team enter a seedy basement apartment in the Nordurmyri neighborhood of Reykjavik and discover that someone has bludgeoned Holberg to death. What follows is an engrossing tour through the seemingly ordinary lives of people whose fates had intersected with that of the murdered man. Attention turns before long to a set of women who were, or may have been, raped by Holberg—and to people who have familial connections with these victims. (That’s where the revelations of Jar City come into play.) Within this group, presumably, Erlendur will locate a culprit whose yearning for vengeance found an outlet in the savage murder of a sad, dirty old man.

Although Indradason suffuses the tale with an ample portion of Nordic dourness, he avoids the plodding exposition that mars some works of Scandinavian noir. Indeed, the most compelling element of this novel—the third in the Erlendur series—is the author’s careful management of suspense. From chapter to chapter, Indradason switches between one investigative lead and another, and he further varies the mix with chapters about Erlendur and Eva Lind. By braiding his narrative strands in this way, he creates a sequence of cliffhangers that are small in scale but cumulatively large in impact.

 

ROBERT SILVERBERG. Blood on the Mink (1962).

“Vic Lowney,” the wise-guy hero of this trim thriller, is about as real as the counterfeit $5 and $10 bills that his nemesis, a Philadelphia crime boss named Henry Klaus, has begun to put into circulation. To be sure, the man himself is real enough: He’s an agent of an unspecified federal department, charged with bringing Klaus to justice and with securing the engraving plates used to print Klaus’s funny money. But for nearly the entire tale, the agent remains incognito. (We learn his first name, but only that, in the final pages of the book.) The real Vic Lowney is a high-ranking operative in an LA crime syndicate. In the opening scene, the feds kidnap this thug during a cross-country flight to the City of Brotherly Love, so that their agent can take his place in a planned negotiation to distribute Klaus’s home-made cash on the West Coast. The agent, who narrates his adventure in the snappy manner that typifies mid-century crime fiction, dons the “Vic Lowney” guise and proceeds to improvise his way into a dark corner of the Philly underworld. He tangles violently with Klaus’s right-hand man; he tangles romantically with the Klaus’s kept woman; he tangles conspiratorially with other mobsters who want a piece of Klaus’s counterfeiting operation. The risk that someone will blow the Lowney cover looms over every scene, but the agent maintains his subterfuge just long enough to complete his mission. From start to finish, he conducts his exploits in the ersatz currency of tough talk and brute action.

Somewhat disappointingly, Silverberg doesn’t do much with the rich theme of fakery. A writer with grander ambitions for this work might have leveraged its core plot to explore the metaphysics of imposture—to evoke the quandary of a good guy who must act in bad faith, or to probe the ironies that surround a counterfeit crook who pursues counterfeit money. Instead, Silverberg plays it straight, generating a story that functions almost wholly at the level of action. According to an afterword that Silverberg penned in 2011, he wrote the novel back in 1959 for a magazine publisher that went bust before the story could appear in print. A few years later, he yanked it out of his files to meet the needs of another publication, a magazine called Trapped. “Too Much Blood on the Mink” (as that magazine titled it) was an object of mass production, pure and simple. That fact is particularly evident in Silverberg’s prose, which is awkward in some places and flat or clichéd in others. Nonetheless, the style here is equal to the substance of the narrative. Blood on the Mink (as Hard Case Crime titled its soft-cover version of the book) offers a worthy sample of the wares that a fictioneer like Silverberg could churn out during his prime, and it embodies a casual professionalism that would do “Vic Lowney” proud.

 

HELEN EUSTIS. The Horizontal Man (1946).

In the 1940s, at the moment when the classic whodunit reached unmatched heights of intricacy and sophistication, another kind of mystery tale started to overshadow that once-popular form: the novel of psychological suspense. Mysteries of the mind, in short, began to usurp mysteries of fact and circumstance. Stories that feature clues perceptible to the five senses and decipherable by rational thought gave way to stories that draw generously on psychoanalysis, a mode of thought and practice that attained its peak of public awareness during this era. This novel illustrates and embodies that transition.

Set within the confines of a New England women’s college, The Horizontal Man begins and moves through its early stages in the usual Golden Age manner. An instructor of English who had served extramurally as the campus Lothario is bludgeoned to death, and an assortment of jealous women and envious men loom as worthy suspects in his killing. But no detective emerges to sift through the clues, which in any case are fairly cursory. Instead, a loose-knit trio of amateurs—a love-struck reporter, the brainy co-ed on whom he has a crush, and a stereotypically wise psychiatrist—worry over the problem until a solution practically erupts in their faces. Although Eustis foreshadows the psychosexual nature of the crime, it’s unlikely that any reader, or indeed any plausible fictional sleuth, could have detected it. The handling of the pivotal trick reflects a shrewd and confidant authorship, but it falls short of what others have accomplished in this vein (see, for instance, Beast in View, by Margaret Millar), and from a 21st-century vantage point, it seems almost naive: So often and with such deftness have others turned this kind of trick over the past half-century that it now takes more to shock us than Eustis delivers.

 

L.R. WRIGHT. Prized Possessions (1993).

Where does one draw the line between the mystery novel and the work of serious fiction? In some instances, that line blurs to the point of nonexistence. Those who write about crime often work to attain—and often do attain—the depths of psychological insight and the lofty reaches of social observation that great novelists have traditionally claimed as their exclusive literary domain. Mainstream writers, meanwhile, often descend into the precincts of genre fiction, if only because a work presented as “A Mystery” will sometimes garner more readers than one marketed as “A Novel.”

Somewhere between those publishing trends falls this tale. Issued as a “crime” novel, it has a good deal in common with a straight novel that came out in roughly the same era: Paris Trout, by Pete Dexter. Like that work, it traces the process by which a handful of characters converge—slowly, tortuously, inexorably—upon acts of horrific violence. At no point is there any doubt as to “who” or even as to “what.” In the fictive world that Wright has built, only the question of “how” appears to matter. How will the perpetrators find their victims (or vice versa)? How will the murderous impulses foreshadowed in the novel’s earliest scenes finally be unleashed? Nothing beyond the presence of a professional detective, one Karl Alberg of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, signals that we are reading a genre piece rather than a “literary” product.

Alberg, in fact, performs no detection. He merely goes about his business, most of it personal, while just over the horizon of his life in staid, orderly Vancouver, two stories of conflict between the sexes unfold—stories of desire thwarted and transposed into hate. In one, a drugstore clerk of subnormal intelligence, believing that a haughty college girl has snubbed him, sets forth to demand an apology from her. Not really knowing why, he takes a gun along with him. In the other, a woman has invested every resource at her disposal into being the perfect wife, only to discover that she has failed. When she goes in search of the husband who has left her, she too carries a gun. The two dramas proceed separately, in parallel fashion, for most of the novel. Then they intersect with one another, and with Alberg, in a concluding sequence that is none the less explosive for being perfectly predictable.