Well, the 2007 batch was a slow process, even though I read ten books in less than a month. This batch seems to be running more quickly, which is unfortunate. There are six more on the shelf, and maybe two or three others I missed, and it would be nice to read them, and even nicer to want to read them.
I see that I noted, during the 2007 batch, that this was a solidly old-fashioned series, that series hero Amos Walker sometimes tends to the random hard-boiled comment mostly out of context, that women are people rather than plot tokens only intermittently, and that the plots tend to devolve into action sequences rather than detecting more often than I liked. All of that is still true. The thing about women, maybe even more so.
I might need to be bit elliptical here, since giving away the solution to a mystery is Not Done. But there's a major Misguided Liberal Lady in Left-Handed Dollar, and then the underlying villain of Infernal Angels was an EEEvil Dragon Lady who I don't really remember but had been a character in earlier books.
Burning Midnight, which was the new book back in 2012, features not only the surprising return (very late in the book) of that EEEvil Dragon Lady, but also another major Misguided Liberal Lady.
I had been worried that the series would have descended into some kind of racism in these Obama-era books - PI novels are inherently conservative in the small-c sense, and often in the big-C sense, too - but I didn't expect that much...I don't want to bluntly call it misogyny, but don't have a better word...on my bingo card so quickly. I don't know if author Loren D. Estleman did that on purpose, or if he or his editor even noticed it, but three books in a row with very similar shocking surprise endings - and the next book also seems, in its description, to strongly hint the EEEvil Dragon Lady will be the Big Bad - is a bit much.
And I'm deeply aware than, if I'm seeing some creping Tea Party influence now, in books written around 2010, that things could get much worse as I reach the books written in the later teens and afterward. I have a mostly positive opinion of Estleman that I would like to keep if at all possible, even as I keep repeating the mantra "the book is not the author."
(I was worried about racism, but, oddly, these three books feature very few Black people - other than one top-level cop friend of Walker's who's in every book - for a city like Detroit that is 78% Black. This one does have a bunch of Mexicans, though, he said brightly.)
Anyway, this book sees Walker hired by Inspector John Alderdyce - the aforementioned Black cop buddy - to investigate his estranged son's brother-in-law. The son, Jerry, changed his last name - I'm not sure we ever get what he changed it to - and married a Mexican-American woman, Conchata "Chata." Chata has a sixteen-year-old brother, Ernesto "Nesto" Pasada, who lives with them in a close-in Detroit suburb, but has been spending a lot of time recently in what I gather Detroiters actually call "Mexicantown."
So much time, that he's gotten a tattoo on his hand indicating he's joined the Maldado gang. And so much that he's not coming home as regularly as his sister would like.
Nesto has not quite disappeared as Walker takes the case, but he's in the middle of a slow fade. Alderdyce wants Walker to talk to Chata, find Nesto, and convince him to give up the gang stuff and go back to a relatively normal teen life.
This is a Walker novel, so it's not that simple. As Walker pokes around the barrio, he finds there are two feuding gangs in the neighborhood, the Maldados and Zapatistas - both new, and tentative, and offshoots of much more dangerous and violent Mexican border gangs, but possibly rapidly getting more serious and dangerous.
Walker talks with two major community figures there, the reformed gangbanger-turned-businessman Zorborón and the gringa who runs the local non-profit, Sister Delia, both of whom say they've had minor violence recently, seemingly to warn them away from Maldado affairs. And then, of course, the murders and arson starts.
Walker does solve it all - I hinted at the solution above, and won't do more than hint - and eventually finds Nesto and drags him home. In the very last chapter, the EEEvil Dragon Lady from previous books calls him and basically says "if I ever run into you again, I'm going to have you killed," with the usual "of course, I can't have you killed now, even though I really want to and know plenty of people who would do it, because this novel is over and I'm actually just setting up a plot hook for another novel" caveat.
I've said many times I prefer mysteries to thrillers. I don't know if mysteries, as I mean them, actually still exist - I read the NYTimes Top 100 books of the year list today, by chance, which had a section for Thrillers and even one for Horror but no Mysteries (or SF) - but this series has solidly moved towards thrillerdom in ways that annoy me, even aside from the lazy EEEvil Dragon Lady-isms and the "whiteys should keep out of Mexicantown and let the locals do whatever the hell they want - except cops, of course, who are pure and honest and wonderful" mindset here.
I still like Walker as a character, especially after his voice settled down from the early books. I like having PI novels in the hardboiled style to read, even if they're more thriller-y than mystery-esque. I don't think Estleman is actually grinding any specific ideological axes in this series; I think it's more the natural flow of hardboiled fiction and the pull of the renormative ending. But my patience for the same thing over and over again is getting thinner. I may read another one or two of these, but I'm beginning to wonder if I will be able to get through the six more on the shelf.
No comments:
Post a Comment