The Lady in the Lake by Raymond Chandler

This is the middle one, though no one knew that at the time. The Lady in the Lake was published in 1943, the end of the first burst of Raymond Chandler's novels and the fourth of an eventual seven about private detective Philip Marlowe. After publishing those four books in five years, it would be six more before The Little Sister appeared in 1949, and four and five more years between his his last two books.

This is also the end of the war-time Chandler - again, only in retrospect. But Lady is a war-time book, with references to rationing and limited supplies and a heavily-guarded dam that is crucial at the very end of the novel.

Marlowe is hired by a businessman, Derace Kinglsey, to find his wife: she ran away, he thinks with the man (Chris Lavery) she's been having an affair with, leaving their mountain cabin on Little Fawn Lake about a month ago and telegraphing from El Paso, apparently on the way to a Mexican divorce. Kingsley would be fine with a divorce, but his wife is a bit wild and has her own money to be wild with - he wants to make sure she's not getting into anything serious while she's still married to him.

So Marlowe heads up into the mountains - one of the stories that Chandler "cannibalized" into Lady in the Lake was "No Crime in the Mountains," a title I always remember fondly - to investigate the disappearance of Crystal Kingsley. He discovers that another woman disappeared the same night: Muriel Chess, wife of the caretaker Bill. More dramatically, he and Bill discover Muriel's body in the lake - she's clearly been in there since the night she "disappeared," and the note she left for Bill might have been a suicide note.

The local police, led by the local sheriff-like constable, Jim Patton, think that note might be older than Chess says it is, and Chess is the obvious first suspect in the death of his wife. Marlowe isn't sure how this death relates to his actual case, but he still hasn't found Crystal Kingsley. He spends the rest of the novel between Los Angeles, where Kingsley lives; Bay City, where Lavery lives; and Little Fawn Lake. 

Bay City is corrupt - we saw that in Farewell, My Lovely and it's still true now - and Marlowe gets into some trouble with a detective there named Degarmo, who is also caught up somehow with a pill-pusher doctor, Almore, who coincidentally (or maybe not) lives right across the street from Lavery in a neighborhood devoid of other houses. There's also another woman, missing for a longer time - Mildred Haviland, Almore's former nurse. And another dead woman, also a longer time ago - Almore's wife, who conveniently committed suicide by car exhaust after a wild night that led Almore to bring her home and put her to sleep with a sedative.

All of that is connected, in the end. Crystal Kingsley is not as central in her own missing-persons case as she seemed to be. And there will be more bodies before it's done, as always.

I tend to clump Chandler's novels: Big Sleep and Long Goodbye are the best, with Goodbye clearly on top. The four in between them, including Lady, are all very strong, and only one small step down. I try to be polite and not mention Playback. On this re-read, I didn't see anything to shake that hierarchy: Lady is still a fine detective story, with an interestingly twisty plot, and doesn't rely too heavily on Marlowe being sapped on the head and left in danger. And Chandler's prose is as evocative and thoughtful and resonant here as his best.

(Note: I read this in the Library of America Later Novels & Other Writings. I don't think there are any textual discrepancies in editions of Chandler, but I'll always recommend LoA for American writers, particularly if you think you'll want to read more than one book.)

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

Where to start? This is a novel overshadowed by a movie, a novel that stands as the most successful piece of a stunted career, a novel that's more conventional than a reader might think, a novel that doesn't necessarily show well against later entries in the same genre.

I've been reading Hammett and Chandler recently, and as a guy with an English degree, Chandler runs rings around Hammett in every way possible - character insight, striking language, verisimilitude, atmosphere. There's nothing wrong with Hammett, but his work comes across, a hundred years later, as workmanlike and interesting rather than compelling and fresh.

The Maltese Falcon was published in 1930. The famous movie - the third adaptation, actually; Hollywood was quick in those days - came a decade later. Hammett's writing career was over by then, and his fall from grace with the public just about to come: it turns out that America wasn't fond of avowed Communists in the post-war era.

I think I need to mention the plot, though it almost seems absurd to do so. Sam Spade is a detective in San Francisco; he gets a client in a young woman who tells him and his partner (Miles Archer) a story about a runaway younger sister that neither of them believe. Archer is killed that night, following the man the girl says lured away her sister.

There is no sister, and that other man is killed later that night. The cops half-heartedly try to pin one or both murders on Spade, mostly to see if it will work, but it doesn't. Spade is hard-boiled, spitting tough dialogue at the cops and everyone else, and heads out to investigate - there's that famous speech at the end where he talks about the death of Archer. (There are four or five famous passages in Falcon; speeches you probably already know, from the book or the movie. I don't want to pooh-pooh those: they made it into the movie because they're said exactly right, because they're perfect expressions of their moments.)

Anyway, it turns out there's a fantastically valuable statue that the girl - Spade eventually learns her name is Brigid O'Shaughnessy - and several others have been chasing around the world. Spade learns more, runs around San Francisco for a few days, gets involved with one more murder, gets (basically out of nowhere) a package with the statue, has a tense meeting with all of the major players at the end, and hands over the killers to the cops so we can have an ending. The plotting is decent enough, though it does suffer from the mystery-novel issue of being all running around and talking to the same people over and over again, like a particularly unpleasant fetch quest in an CRPG.

The idea of the falcon is slightly silly, the ending is a dying fall in a way that doesn't quite strike me right, and I've never quite bought that Spade and O'Shaughnessy "loved" each other, as the dialogue at the end wants to say. Spade is a bit too much the stereotypical tough guy to really become a fully-rounded person - for me at least.

And, just saying, in the book he's tall and blonde.

All in all, for me, The Maltese Falcon is no Red Harvest. It's iconic and famous and full of moments familiar from later parodies and references, but, on its own, it's just a solid B- hard-boiled mystery novel from early in the genre, told mostly in a meat-and-potatoes style and featuring a main character without a whole lot to make him distinctive other than "hard-boiled PI."

Bad Break, Vol. 1 by Philippe Riche

Sometimes names just slow down a crime story. You've got three main characters, you can see who they are, and you know what they're doing. So why do you need names?

That may have been creator Philippe Riche's point, or maybe the laconic style he uses in Bad Break, Vol. 1 - minimal dialogue most of the time, few captions except when showing someone narrating past events, only the minimum explanations required - just meant the names never quite made their way into the book.

Bad Break opens outside a junkyard, somewhere in France. A man removes his bandages, fixes his clothes, walks towards the owner and his helper. He's our main character, though he's the most mysterious: a tall, gaunt, bald man in what was probably once a very nice suit, a dealer in antiquities, mostly of the human-remains kind.

The beefy young assistant at the junkyard helps the dealer find a specific junked car, from a wreck just the day before. The driver was killed. Well, the dealer was the driver, and he's not dead now. But, as we go further in Bad Break, we realize he was killed in the crash. He's probably been killed a number of times, but it doesn't take. The dealer retrieves a briefcase of important material from the car, and asks the assistant to help him get back to the city.

The dealer is being pursued by a gang he calls "head choppers" - large tattooed men, possibly of a different nationality. They want to kill him; they try to kill him. The assistant uses the dealer's gun to kill one of them in a confrontation at the train station.

The third is a porn actress. We see her on a poster that says "Reb X" - maybe that's her name? She has a tattoo, a very specific tattoo. The dealer has been tracing the history of similar tattoos, through an old book. We're not sure why. We don't know how the "head choppers" figure into it. But the three set off together to find out the true history of the tattoos, chasing down an old man the dealer once knew.

This is only the first half of the story; they don't find the answers by the end of these pages. They only just barely get together. We as readers know the vague shape of the mystery, understand that there's something at least mildly supernatural - how else does the dealer keep coming back from death?

Riche draws this in a loose, deeply assured line, with rough panel borders and grey tones. He can draw a lot of specifics: that's clear from the opening in the junkyard, with pieces of cars that experts could easily identify. But his focus is on these people, and their mysterious quest. It's not over yet: there's one more book to come. But this first half of the story is interesting, quirky, compelling, satisfying.

The Real Cool Killers by Chester Himes

Most noir tries to be cool. Maybe "cool" in the sense of wearing dark shades at night and smoking above eye level, but more often cool as in affect and mood. Cool as opposed to hot, as in jazz. Cool meaning it might come to a boil, but it's going to be a slow simmer for a while first. Cool as midnight, cool as a diner counter at 2 AM, cool as a proxy for cold - like the grave, like endless nothing, like the purpose of life.

Chester Himes, though, is not aiming for cool. (I say this having now read only two of his books, this one and A Rage in Harlem. I could be talking through my hat.) Oh, sure, The Real Cool Killers has the word "cool" right in the title. But it's a hot book, like a jazz combo following a horn riff off into the musical thickets, running quick and rat-a-tat with one damn thing after another.

This was the second novel in this loose series, published in 1959, two years after Rage. It all takes place one night in Harlem, and features Himes's series characters, the tough and violent detectives Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson. In this series, they might be the only black cops in New York, or at least in Harlem. There's no sign that any of the beat cops are other than beefy white guys from other neighborhoods, and Gravedigger and Coffin Ed operate with more than threats of violence - Himes's Harlem is an anarchic place, barely under control at the best of times, full of pimps and gang kids and slumming white folks getting fleeced (but always, always left unmolested to go back to their own part of town) and teen girls willing to do whatever to make a buck or get some kicks.

It starts with a confrontation in a bar. Ulysses Galen, a well-off white businessman who spends a lot of time in Harlem, is drinking in the Dew Drop Inn. We don't know his business there when the action starts; we will learn a lot more by the end. A black guy takes offense to Galen, pulls a knife, attacks. The attacker is disarmed (literally) and Galen runs out into the street, chased by a different black guy, who seems to be angry about the same thing for a different reason.

There's a chase, drawing a huge crowd. As one character says later: seeing a black guy chase another black guy with a weapon is an everyday occurrence; even seeing a white guy chase a black guy with murderous intent is pretty common. But when a black man threatens to kill a white man, well, that's something new and surprising.

So this guy Sonny chases Galen, threatening him with a gun. He shoots, Galen falls. The cops arrive, scuffling with the Real Cool Moslems, a gang of local black teens who dress up as "Arabs" - half joking, half to obscure their identities. The gangers rile up the cops, and one of them throws perfume at Coffin Ed - who was badly scarred about a year before by an acid-thrower, and reacts really badly when anyone tries to throw any liquid at him. So he shoots that "Moslem," and Sonny escapes - with the other Moslems, in the ensuing confusion.

The rest of the book alternates the two strands - the cops, mostly Gravedigger, looking for Sonny, and Sonny himself, in the hands of these teen gangbangers, trying to get out of the police cordon and escape the house-to-house search and also not get randomly killed by these teen lunatics.

Oh, one more thing. Sonny's gun couldn't have killed Galen, and didn't: it only shoots blanks.

As I said, this is hot rather than cool - big personalities, big actions, cops who are mostly competent and crooks who rarely reach that level. All of whom are ready for violence at any moment: that's just how Harlem is, in Himes's telling. It turns out Galen was a sadist, paying black girls quite a lot of money to let him whip them - which he did a lot harder than they expected, so they generally only did it once each.

(It strikes me that this might not have been actually illegal, despite some arrests the cops make of procurers and panderers as the night goes on. If Galen was just whipping the girls - and Himes seems to be pretty clear that he just whipped and not fucked - the fact that they were underage might not be as dispositive as they claim. On the other hand, it's also clear that these cops find "criminals" first and figure out what to charge them with later, in the best noir fashion.)

This is a short novel, full of action and dialogue and local color. As in Rage, the criminals are often idiots, which doesn't make them any less dangerous to themselves and others. The cops are tough and even more violent - I imagine much of the appeal of this series, early on, was that Coffin Ed and Gravedigger are just as tough and unyielding and competent as any white authority figures, and always come out in the end with their man. It's not quite a cartoon, but it tends in that direction: that big, that exaggerated, that quick. Himes's language keeps it all at that rolling boil, that hot jazz-combo riff, and keeps it from ever going over the top - but it's close, more than once.

The High Window by Raymond Chandler

This was the third of the eventual seven novels that Raymond Chandler wrote about his detective Philip Marlowe, published in 1942. It's the one about the Brasher Doubloon, though I tend to think of it as "one of those four in the middle." (Chandler started with The Big Sleep, and hit his peak with The Long Goodbye more than a decade later before petering out with the disappointing Playback. The four novels between Sleep and Goodbye are all strong, but I tend to mix them up, especially when I haven't read some of them in decades.)

The High Window is the only Chandler novel not to be based on previously-written material, if I can trust Wikipedia. It does show, actually: both Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely have a clear "two cases that intersect" structure, as Chandler stitched together elements from what were originally separate stories. High Window is all of a piece, without that bit of intersecting serendipity that so many later mystery writers, sometimes clumsily, picked up from Chandler.

In this case, Marlowe is hired by a rich widow, Mrs. Murdock, out in Pasadena. As usual, there's the ostensible reason - to find her despised daughter-in-law, Linda Conquest - and the underlying reason, that the widow assumes Linda took a valuable coin when she ran off, and that will provide leverage for her to force her son Leslie to divorce Linda.

That coin is the Brasher Doubloon, a colonial-era gold piece from New York State, old enough that it was pressed rather than minted...which will be important to the plot, eventually. A rare-coin dealer contacted Mrs. Murdock about it, asking if it was for sale - which, both Murdock and Marlowe agree, implies he's seen the stolen coin and knows who has it.

But first Marlowe has to poke around, looking for Linda and chasing her former roommate, who is now married to a gangster club owner, Alex Morny. Of course, Leslie, the wastrel rich son, is in debt to Morny for a large amount of money, and of course he still loves his runaway wife and wants her back.

And of course as Marlowe starts chasing clues and talking to people, some of them ending up dead soon afterward. Quite a number of them, and quite quickly, too - Marlowe stalls the police as best he can, but he keeps emphasizing, both in his internal dialogue and talking to Mrs. Murdock, that a man in his line of work can't just keep silent, that he'll need to explain and explicate and make connections his clients might not like.

Marlowe does solve the murders and retrieve the coin in the end - it's a mystery novel, that's how you know it is the end. More importantly for him, he saves Mrs. Murdock's neurotic and bullied secretary, Merle, from a complicated predicament and takes her back to her Midwestern parents, in what's probably the purest example of the white-knight impulse in this series.

And, throughout, the joys of reading Chandler are in the language and the observations - he had an amazing eye for understanding and presenting people with devastating clarity, and a facility for unique and telling descriptions of them and the places they lived and the stuff they surrounded themselves with. His plots are fine and generally inventive, but that's table-stakes in the mystery field. The writing and the insight is what makes Chandler Chandler, and it's still as true and precise eighty years later as it was in 1942.

(Note: I read this, like the first two Chandler novels, in the first of the two-volume Library of America Chandler collection, Stories and Early Novels. Given the absolutely horrible cover this book currently has in the US - you'll have to look for it yourself; I'm not posting it here - I strongly recommend not getting this book standalone right now.)

Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson

Jackson Brodie has appeared in six novels by Kate Atkinson so far; some people have called that a mystery series, since Brodie is a private investigator, of a sort. And the mystery audience has embraced those books, but they're not really mysteries. They're not really thrillers, either.

But they are definitely crime fiction, that larger and more encompassing category that works the way "speculative fiction" does on the other side of one genre divide: marks out a large territory of fiction that has smaller kingdoms within it, with vague but understandable overall boundaries.

Crime fiction includes mysteries, both cozy and hardboiled, and thrillers, and noir, and other, odder things - it's the whole set of stories about people who break the law, who do horribly transgressive things (usually but not always murder), and what happens to them and the people around them. Most of the pieces of crime fiction are renormative at their core, but it's not required in the whole territory.

Atkinson's Brodie books, at least up to this fourth one Started Early, Took My Dog, are told in multiple third-person perspective, mostly take place over a short period of time - usually divided into sections, each basically one day, with major flashbacks into important moments or periods in the decades past - and center around crimes. Brodie is generally not investigating the central crime or crimes, and he's not the motivating center of the book; I tend to think he's an important viewpoint, and is changed by each case, but they're not essentially his stories.

The first three were Case Histories, One Good Turn, and When Will There Be Good News?

This is the book about kidnapping, or maybe abduction. It has three major narrators, and a few secondary ones.

Jackson is in Yorkshire, where he was born, and where he hasn't been back for a while, and where he'd planned never to return. He's trying to trace the background of Hope McMaster, a New Zealand woman who was born there and adopted, somewhat illegally or secretly, in the mid-1970s. Early in this book, he "liberates" a small dog from its thuggish, abusive owner. That's the third of the three major abductions. 

Tracy Waterhouse is a retired police detective, never married, alone and mostly resigned to it, working as the head of security for a local mall. On that same day, she sees a horrible woman mistreating a small child - she knows the woman, a prostitute, from her years on the force, and is mildly surprised that any children are still in her care, since she's had a number taken away from her. She "buys" the child, Courtney, since she had an envelope full of money on her for a home-renovation job. She never got to be a mother, but she wants to take care of this child, and her motives are about as pure and positive as they can be.

That's the second abduction. The first happened back in 1975.

The third major narrator is Tilly, an elderly actress working on the soapy Collier TV show in the region - doing badly at it as she starts to sink under the weight of impending dementia, forgetting bits and pieces of today as her mind focuses on the past. [1] She doesn't abduct anyone, but is a witness of the horrible mother abusing Courtney in the mall. She seems to be an entirely separate thread for a lot of the novel, but she will be there in the end.

I won't spoil the minor narrators, who span the present day (about 2010) and 1975.

Jackson goes various places in Yorkshire, tracing leads to his client's past, and finding more missing people and slammed doors and implied threats of violence than seems plausible. Tracy upends her entire life to keep Courtney safe and give her the life she should have, running away from her job and trying to figure out how they can get away and find a safe, stable place for the two of them. Tilly tries to do her work on Collier, while her thoughts keep circling elements of her younger life in the '60s.

And the book keeps flashing back to 1975, when a prostitute was murdered and a small child found, emaciated, in her apartment with her dead body three weeks after her death. In the end, all of the abductions, all of the major and minor narrators, are linked, and we learn who Hope McMaster was, how she came to be "Hope McMaster" in New Zealand, and what will happen to Tracy and her new child. (And to Jackson and his dog, which is the least important of the strands.)

Atkinson is inherently a literary writer: she writes brilliantly and incisively, getting right into the heart of her character's heads and laying bare their thoughts and feelings and fears. She has a fascinating mastery of tone, here as in her other novels: she can be wryly funny and then show dark horrors within the same paragraph, back and forth again and again. This is a magnificent book in a magnificent sequence by one of the best writers working today.

[1] I started reading this novel on the day of the memorial service for my mother, who had progressive dementia over her last decade. I almost put the book down, and some parts of it were really difficult to read: I say that in case I skip over anything important to do with Tilly.

The Dain Curse by Dashiell Hammett

In some other world, this was the second of a long series of novels about The Continental Op, bringing Dashiell Hammett a steady income and some manner of fame and a continuing career. In our world, this is the last time we see the Op - Hammett wrote three more novels, more and more different from each other, then moved into screenwriting, and then seemed to give up the idea of working entirely for the last twenty-five years of his life.

But when we read The Dain Curse, we might as well be back in 1929, with Hammett and his main character coming off Red Harvest the year before, that unnamed private detective for the Continental outfit back in San Francisco and caught up in a few related cases over the course of a few months.

And it really is "a few related cases." Dain presents itself as a novel, but it's really three closely-linked novellas in a trenchcoat, or maybe a three-part serial. Each time, the Op solves the particular situation - and several people end up being murdered - but he doesn't untangle it all finally until the end.

The Op is first sent in to investigate the theft of industrial diamonds from the home laboratory of a Dr. Leggett. It turns out Leggett has a dark secret past: his current wife is the sister of his first wife, and there's a supposed curse on that family, the Dains. By the end of the first section, Leggett's daughter, Gabrielle, is the focus of the curse and one of the few main characters left alive.

In the second section, Gabrielle, who believes in the curse, has been caught up in a creepy religious cult headquartered in a renovated apartment building - with all manner of unexpected gadgets to cause various weird effects. The Op, this time hired by her guardian, comes in to keep an eye on her and ends up smashing the rotten cult when, once again, murder crops up.

Then we get to the back half of the book, the longest third section, where the Op is called in by Gabrielle's new husband to come to the usual corrupt small town, where they are honeymooning, and of course he finds one body immediately on arriving. Gabrielle is missing - possibly kidnapped, possibly fled as a murderer; different local officials have different theories - and the Op needs to find her and finally work out the details of this supposed "curse" before he gets himself killed, possibly by an amateur explosive device.

It does all come together in the end, and the Op has a nearly Agatha Christie-style long speech at the end explaining everything that happened, why it happened, and how this particular fiend manipulated it all. It's a fine bit of plotting, and does tie up the whole book in a bow, but it falls on the too-neat site of the great mystery divide, particularly when hardboiled books are typically much more comfortable with the messy and contingent and confused.

So Dain is slightly disappointing, coming after Harvest - it's less stark, less focused, more of a general mystery entertainment. And, as far as I can tell, all of those things made it much more successful at the time and put Hammett's career on an upward path - which his next novel strongly solidified. (That was The Maltese Falcon, if anyone doesn't know.)

Note: I read this is the Library of America omnibus edition of Hammett's Complete Novels; they also have a companion volume with all of the stories. As I said with Harvest, if you think you might want to read more than one Hammett book, that's a good package to get.

Down There by David Goodis

I read a cluster of David Goodis novels back in the 1990s, in the striking Black Lizard editions - probably coming to him from Jim Thompson, like so many other readers for the past three generations. Looking at this blog, I don't seem to have read any Goodis over the past twenty years - that's the way a reading life can flow: you read "everything" of someone, get to the end of it, and put it down for a while.

But maybe you always come back, eventually.

Down There is probably Goodis's most famous novel, because it was adapted into Francois Truffaut's film Shoot the Piano Player - which title the novel has had, more often than the original, ever since. And it was included in the Library of America book Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s, alongside books by Thomson and Chester Himes and Charles Willeford and Patricia Highsmith. I've been going through that omnibus, and so it was Goodis time again.

Eddie is the piano player in a Philadelphia dive bar, Harriet's Hut, sometime in the mid-50s. He's quiet, withdrawn, meek - like he's given up on life, just keeping his head down and getting through each day, with no desires or dreams. But one day his brother Turley shows up after three years with no contact, on the run from two thugs, and begs for Eddie to help him, to hide him. Eddie doesn't do what Turley asks, but he does intervene when the two thugs arrive, giving Turley a little time to run away.

And that starts to make his small, constrained life start to come apart. The new waitress at the Hut, Lena, wonders about this changed Eddie. The bouncer, an ex-wrestler named Wally who has been harassing Lena despite being common-law married to Harriet, the bar owner and tender, also wonders what's going on.

And then there's those two thugs, who know Eddie's connected to Turley somehow - and soon learn how. Turley and Eddie's other brother are criminals, though we don't learn the details of this particular operation until nearly the end of the novel. But we do know they have the old family home - more of a hide-out, as everyone keeps saying - out in the South Jersey barrens, and that's where the thugs want Eddie to guide them. They want to "talk" to Turley, of course.

We readers think Turley might even survive that conversation, at least early in the novel.

Eddie used to be someone else, of course - no one is born a bottom-tier barroom piano player - and we learn those details, of his upbringing in that hide-out house with two wild and criminal older brothers, how he got out, his classical-music career and marriage, what happened after that, and how he ended up at the Hut.

This is a noir novel, so Eddie's past is tragic and his future is constrained. He's broken and damaged, though it looks for a while like he might have the skills he needs to get through this and end up on the other side with Lena. But, again, it's noir. Happy endings aren't in the cards.

Goodis tells the story through Eddie's eyes, after a quick opening sequence following Turley. His thinking is contingent, complicated, twisted, all options that he can't see himself taking and memories he doesn't want to remember. He's often thinking like he wants to convince himself of something, or keep himself settled in his current life, his current way of thinking - not return to any of the men he used to be in the past. But the hero of any noir novel doesn't get to choose what happens to him, or how he reacts to it, or even whether he'll make it out the other end.

Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler

Farewell, My Lovely was Raymond Chandler's second novel, coming out in 1940, just a year after The Big Sleep. It's again a story of a couple of plotlines that seem separate but intertwine, but, more interesting to me, I found the language was even more Chandler-esque than Sleep, with a good half-dozen passages that I dog-eared to use as quotes later.

Does that mean Chandler was somewhat more confident in his novel-construction skills this time out, since he'd already done it once, and spent more time polishing his prose? Or is it purely an observer affect on my part? I don't know, and I don't know if I could know. And that's a good thought to have when discussing a mystery novel, the best of which are strongly about what you can know and what you can't, about facts and history and the motivations of other people.

(I read Farewell, like Sleep, in the first of the two-volume Library of America Chandler collection, Stories and Early Novels. I think the text is basically the same in all editions, though, so that shouldn't make any substantial difference.)

The first plot in Farewell is about Moose Malloy, a giant of a man who just got out of prison after eight years away and is looking for the girl he left behind, Velma. Philip Marlowe is in the wrong place when Malloy visits the nightclub where she used to sing - now changed entirely in ownership and clientele and side of the color line - and is interviewed by the cops after Malloy's questioning techniques prove too much for the manager of that club.

Marlowe has no paid reason to want to find Malloy, but he's not a private detective because he likes to get paid, but because it's the way he thinks and how he likes to work. And the detective officially assigned to the case is old and lazy and not planning to do much; he more or less asks Marlowe to do some free legwork for him. So Marlowe sets off to see if he can find Velma himself, hoping that will lead to the big man.

Soon afterward, he's contacted by Lindsay Marriott, to assist in paying off a ransom gang. This gang - Marlowe is familiar with how it works - hijacks someone rich with something priceless, in this case a necklace of ancient Chinese jade, which would be difficult for them to fence. So they "sell" it back to the owner, through either the insurance company or another intermediary, like Marriott, for a fraction of the price. It's potentially dangerous, and it's a red flag that Marriott only called Marlowe the day of the exchange, but it's not out of the range of reason.

Things go badly at the exchange, and Marlowe is once again questioned by police in a murder case - a different set of cops, in a different Southern California jurisdiction this time. This one he really shouldn't try to investigate himself - it's in a deeply corrupt small city, for one thing - but Marlowe has never been very good at doing what he's supposed to.

Marlowe gets put through the wringer during the course of the two investigations, getting caught up in the schemes of two different con-men-cum-medical-practitioners, plus two attractive young ladies - one rich and glamorous and the owner of the stolen necklace, and the other honest and tough and the daughter of the former local police chief. 

Without detailing the plot of the back half of the novel - never a good idea to do when discussing a mystery - Marlowe, who would appear in five more novels from Chandler, makes it out to the end mostly unscathed, and does solve the murders. And they are, as they must be, related.

I always have a vague uneasiness about the "two unrelated murders turn out to be related" plot - it happens a lot in this field, and it always feels a bit too flamboyant too me, too much like the writer is showing off. (Of course, Chandler did it here at least partially because he was taking some existing separate short stories and combining them into a novel, which is the opposite of showing off.) It works here, and it usually works, and it's just my personal prejudices, so I don't know why I mention it.

As I said up top, I found the language in Farewell even more striking than in Sleep. I've seen it claimed that this was Chandler's favorite of his novels, and that may be part of the reason - he's got a lot of great lines and paragraphs and thoughts here. The plot isn't too shabby, either.

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

You have to go back to the big books every so often. If you're a middle-aged man - and I am, these days - you may find that's what you mostly do.

So I re-read Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, his 1939 debut novel, for probably the first time since...maybe when I was a teenager? I remember reading Chandler, in whatever paperback editions were current at the time - maybe Vintage, but I think my first were mass-markets from someone like Berkley. I remember reading at least one by the side of a pool in Florida, while visiting my father for the summer in 1985 - the closest I could come to the gestalt of Chandler's LA, I suppose.

That was a long time ago. 1939 was even longer ago.

Chandler's hero, Philip Marlowe, had appeared in a number of stories before this first novel, and his character was already set: all the things that would be clichés later, the man of the mean streets but not himself mean, the tarnished angel, the rumpled knight, incorruptible because there's nothing he wants enough to be used to corrupt him with.

This is the Chandler novel with one death that's not quite solved - all of the others are clearly explained, and the mysterious one is closed by the police with a plausible story, which is better than real life and not bad for fiction. But I gather some mystery readers were snooty about it at the time, and ever afterward. You'd think they'd be mollified by the fact that the book has a butler in it, but they're never satisfied, of course.

I'm not going to detail the whole plot, at this point. Marlowe is hired by a dying millionaire to investigate a possible blackmail attempt, and absolutely not hired to investigate the mysterious disappearance of the old man's son-in-law, whom he'd quite liked. The millionaire has two daughters, both in their twenties: the older one is a bit wild, having married several times already and gambling much more than is good for her. The younger one is practically feral, vastly worse and more dangerous to herself and others.

Marlowe does what he needs to do, and what he can do, and bodies start to pile up as others react to what he does, and he sometimes hides evidence of those bodies and sometimes calls in the authorities. In the end, he does find out what happened to the missing son-in-law, which is the core of the book.

And, throughout, Chandler writes magnificently. We read Chandler for the writing - his plots were fine and thoughtful, his characters vivid and specific, but his turns of phrase and random observations were unique and striking over and over again. The best Chandler books - this one, The Long Goodbye - don't just tell a good detective story, but let us see the world in different ways, give us unexpected insights and viewpoints as they roll out a compelling story, too. We read Chandler to see the world through his eyes, and be surprised and excited by what we find there.

The Fourth Dimension Is Death by Donald Westlake writing as Samuel Holt

I didn't expect to re-read the whole "Sam Holt" series in 2024, but I guess I just did. (I am writing this the morning of December 14th, though you are reading it in the future. Hello, future!) It's a four-book series, written by Donald Westlake under a pseudonym in the mid-80s: Westlake wanted to see if he could have a successful new launch that wasn't tied to his existing career, but "Holt" was revealed to be Westlake pretty much immediately, which soured him on the project. He'd already written the first three books - Westlake was always prolific and productive - and cranked out this fourth one to finish up the contract. He'd originally hoped to write more, but the reveal put him off that idea, and so that was it.

The first three are One Of Us Is Wrong, I Know a Trick Worth Two of That, and What I Tell You Three Times Is False. Sam Holt himself, the character supposedly writing and narrating these mysteries, is the former star of a TV action/mystery, Packard, which I like to describe as "what if Magnum, P.I. was Quincy, M.E.?" Holt got rich from the show, which ran five years and is still syndicated now, a few years later. He has semi-palatial houses in New York and LA, with supporting casts in both places, and no worries in life...except that he'd really like to keep acting, for busyness and doing-things-with-his-life reasons, but the entertainment world has comprehensively typecast him as Packard, and he can't get any jobs to save his life. Meanwhile, in the way of the amateur sleuth, murders happen around him now and then.

The Fourth Dimension Is Death has the title least connected with the story of the entire series; perhaps Westlake was already sour at this point. (Westlake was good at souring on things; check out his kiss-off to the SF field from the late '60s for an earlier, even sourer, example - it's available in the fanzine collection The Best of Xero.) This is also the most amateur-sleuth of the four books, though it takes a while to get going.

You see, a regional supermarket chain ran a series of ads featuring a "parody" of Packard, which Holt and the owners and syndicators of the actual show took objection to, and some unpleasant litigation ensued. The actor who played the parody, Dale Wormley, was a hothead who was offended by what he saw as an attack on him and his ability to work, and ran into Holt twice in New York threatening violence but was quickly shut down by ex-cop Holt.

And then Wormley turns up dead, stuffed into a doorway down the street from Holt's New York home. Holt is an obvious suspect...except that he doesn't really have a motive, and has a decent alibi, and we the readers know he didn't do it. Soon after, there's a second, oddly related murder, which doesn't help but doesn't really put Holt in more jeopardy, either.

It all looks like the whole thing will just move to the back burner and never be actually solved - until Wormley's mother hits Holt with a civil-rights lawsuit for depriving her of her son by killing him. (I don't know the legislative or litigation history, though I am dubious about this plot: I suspect there wasn't generally a private cause of action for civil rights lawsuits - it was always something the federal government could bring on a prosecutorial level.) Anyway, the burden of proof for a civil suit is lower than that for criminal, so Holt faces the possibility he might have to settle, or could even lose the case and be tarred in the public's mind as the famous TV actor who got away with murder. (This is about fifteen years before Robert Blake, to be clear.)

So Holt decides he has to investigate the case himself, and dresses up in a goofy disguise to do so. Does he find the real killer? Is this a series mystery? Yes and yes. There's a rushed ending that leaves Holt battered but alive, and the series could have continued, but, obviously, didn't. This is also probably the least successful of the four books, for all the obvious reasons. If Westlake had stayed energized, it could have been better, and he could have written more, but those are solidly counterfactual at this point. So "Samuel Holt" is a short, mostly fun, clearly minor series by Westlake, most interesting for a look at the entertainment biz of the '80s by a writer who did a fair bit of scriptwriting in the '70s and '80s and was writing under a pseudonym to use some of his unkinder ideas and not be tied to them.

Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett

I've been reading a bunch of noir lately - the old stuff, mostly in Library of America omnibuses, because that's what I have on hand. And I figure that, if I was doing that anyway, I should really go back to the real beginning.

Well a real beginning. Nothing ever comes out of only one place, and nothing ever ends that cleanly, either.

But Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammett's first novel from 1929, is as good a signpost for "noir starts here" as any other, and better than most.

Hammett had been writing short stories and novellas for the pulps for seven years at that point, and there were hardboiled writers before him - there had to be a market to sell into - but novels feel more impressive than a collection of stories, no matter how much we try to be dispassionate about it.

This is the first of two novels about Hammett's series character The Continental Op, a nameless functionary of that nationwide detective agency - a fictionalization of the Pinkertons, mostly - who had starred in about two dozen Hammett stories before this. He's smart but not fancy, a man with - as would be said later - a particular set of skills, a man who is good at taking things apart to see what happens.

In Red Harvest, he takes apart an entire town. Personville is a corrupt town, a small mining city somewhere in the American West, under the thumb of one aging industrialist, Elihu Willsson, and the gangsters he brought in to crush a strike a few years back. The Op was hired by Willsson's son Donald, supposedly honest and given the town's one newspaper to run - in a crusading, clean-up-the-town rabble-rousing style that was not specifically against his father's corruption but would tend to conflict with the old man's interests.

The Op hits town, and plans to meet Donald that night. But Donald is murdered before that meeting can happen. And the Op, for his own reasons, more-or-less blackmails Elihu into signing a contract to "clean up the town." The rest of the novel is the Op - not as systematically or coldly or deliberately as one might expect - pitting the major gangsters of the town against each other, fomenting chaos and getting them to knock each other off (along with plenty of others) as quickly as possible.

You see, the Op's job is generally to follow the law, to support established authority - even if that is corrupt, maybe especially if that is corrupt, following the Pinkerton model - and not to crusade to get hoodlums to murder each other. He's quite clear that his superiors, particularly "the Old Man" in San Francisco, would shut down his operations very quickly if they knew what he was actually doing.

So he has a limited amount of time, and only a quick knowledge of the major players, and an entrenched power structure used to crushing any opposition. The Op exploits small cracks, drops hints, plants rumors, points hotheads at each other, and generally just acts as an agent of random chaos, trying to stir up as much trouble as quickly as he can and trusting to his skills and to blind luck to come out the other side of it. He's aided by the fact that the gangsters tend to trust him - why would they think his purpose is to destroy all their operations? - and so he gets to meet with many of them repeatedly, to plant ideas and get them thinking that they're each about to be betrayed by the others.

It all works: the Op does "clean up the town," in the sense that there's a bloodbath (about two dozen murders of specific named characters, plus a certain number of random mooks and palookas) and all of the existing gang leaders are dead when he finally leaves town. 

We all judge success in our own ways: he did what he set out to do.

Red Harvest is still cleanly readable, and the Op's psychology modern enough that a current reader will be in sympathy with him, from the intention to clean up the town to his worries that he's getting too bloodthirsty along the way. It's a short book with propulsive energy: it may be a classic of its type but it has none of the stuffiness we associate with "classic."

(Note: as I implied up top, I read this in a Library of America omnibus, the Hammett Complete Novels. If you're going to read more than one Hammett book - and why not? - I'd recommend it.)

Pick-Up by Charles Willeford

It's difficult to write about this book without giving away the sting ending. I'll do my best, but I may imply something, and you may guess. But Pick-Up was a 1955 paperback original, so you've had almost seventy years to be spoiled already.

This is a noir novel, I should say. Actually, I'd qualify that: it starts out a fairly straightforward, well-framed story of life on the bottom rung, wanders into noir as stories that like often do - particularly in mid-century, when there was a huge market for such - but then veers again, in the late chapters, to what I can only call anti-noir.

In a noir novel, everything conspires against the hero. The entire world seems to bend to hurt him, to break his will, to force him to do the unforgivable thing, to destroy him utterly in the end. There is no way out, no matter how much he struggles - whether he gleefully engages in crimes, or tries to stay honest and keep his head above water, it will come out the same way in the end: he will either die at the end of the book or be on his way to death.

Charles Willeford follows that model closely in the middle chapters here, but then - and I really can't put this any other way - turns it absolutely inside out at the end. That's the anti-noir bit, as if the universe is conspiring to clear this protagonist, to move obstacles from his way in much the same unexpected, doom-laden way as traditional noir. And that sting ending makes the anti-noir turn that much more puzzling: I don't want to overexplain or hint, but the sting is the kind of thing that would have fit much more comfortably in a traditional noir, the way the book was going already.

Pick-Up is the story of two alcoholics, who meet in the first chapter. Harry Jordan is the first-person narrator, a former painter and currently working at random odd low-level restaurant jobs in San Francisco. He would say he's not an alcoholic, and maybe he's right, technically. But he spends most of his time drinking or waiting to get to the next drink. Helen Meredith is an heiress, who spent her whole life under the thumb of a domineering mother and had a brief, horrible marriage. She's much worse than Harry, needing to drink vast quantities every day.

They meet, they fall in with each other, and Helen moves into Harry's flat in a roominghouse. They're happy, more or less. Harry paints a full-length nude portrait of Helen; we think this could potentially be the spark that puts him back on a good path, doing something more productive with his life.

But they're alcoholics. Helen much much worse than Harry: the kind of mid-century woman drunk who wanders off with any man (or three Marines, in one scene) willing to buy her drinks. Harry can't leave her alone, even to go to work for the day, and they're dirt-poor.

They're both also mildly suicidal: they have one shared attempt early in the book, which leads to a stay in a local mental hospital that doesn't help either of them. And this is noir, so things keep getting worse, more constricting. Until there only seems to be one way out.

It doesn't go the way they hope: things get worse for Harry. And then there's the turn at the end.

I suspect Willeford wrote Pick-Up to deliberately tweak the standards of its genre. I don't know how consistent he was in that. And I'm not a major scholar of his work: I read his late PI novels, and a bunch of his early noir, in the 90s when he had a revival soon after his death, but nothing since then, and I didn't make a particular study of him at the time.

This is a quirky, gnarly noir novel that does interesting things with the form. It has a weird ending, which readers sometimes react strongly to, one way or the other. And it's short, told quickly in the first person, in that traditional noir style. So it's a book that you might as well just read, if any of the above sounds intriguing. I knocked it off in two or three hours: it's worth at least that much time.

(I read this in the Library of America omnibus Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s. As far as I know, the text is the text, no matter what edition. The cover above is what it looked like the last time I read it, in the Black Lizard/Vintage Crime edition in the '90s. I suspect it doesn't look like that these days; books don't keep covers that long.)

Snow by John Banville

Snow is officially a mystery novel, by a literary writer. To add a wrinkle, author John Banville has written mysteries before - has written mysteries in what I think is this exact same milieu - under the name Benjamin Black. But I think this is the first novel to both be called "a mystery" and published as by Banville.

I suspect that means this was an offshoot of the Black series - about a pathologist in 1950s Dublin called Quirke, who is mentioned but never appears in Snow - and that Banville, or his agent, or his publisher, decided somewhere along the lines that it was different enough that it would be a Banville book rather than a Black book, but that they would also call it a "mystery."

The main character is a detective, as is tradition for the form: St. John Strafford. (Pronounced "Sinjin," as he has to repeatedly note. With an "r" in the last name, ditto.) We are mostly in his head, in a limited third person narration, with a few literary-novel eruptions into other viewpoints that work but made me wonder if they were necessary. (Literary novelists sometimes err in the direction of expansiveness, trying to show all the world and make clear all the issues. And sometimes they err in the direction of hermeticism, leaving only clues and breadcrumbs to be as pure to their concept of the story as possible. Banville leans towards the former pole here.)

Strafford has been sent to a big manor house in the Irish countryside - Ballyglass House, in County Wexford (Banville's own birthplace). A priest, Father Tom Lawless, has been murdered there in the night. It is a few days before Christmas. (To the title: it has been snowing, and it continues to snow, off and on, throughout the novel. As Strafford literarily puts it "Snow was general all over Ireland.")

There are two kinds of mystery novel: the ones in which a good person was murdered, and ones in which a bad person was murdered. Tom Lawless was a priest in Ireland in 1957, and is the murder victim in a novel that came out in 2020. I'd say I'll let you guess what kind of victim he was, but a Catholic priest in a 2020 novel is 99% certain to be a villain. And he was, as we eventually learn.

Banville's deviations from his focus on Strafford - an opening two pages, detailing the murder, and a coda about three-quarters of the way through the novel, flashing back to Lawless a decade earlier (though, somewhat inconsistently, pretending to be a document he wrote sometime soon before his death) - are largely to make that villainy more obvious, especially that heavy-handed coda.

So we the readers start off with one question: why was Lawless murdered? If we are as cynical as I am, we quickly figure he was diddling someone, and then move on to the next obvious question: boys or girls?

Fairly early on, we learn that Lawless spent some years at a "school," and I'll avoid giving details to leave the previous question somewhat open. But Lawless, we eventually learn, was a piece of work, the kind of murder victim we are happy to see put in his grave.

But Strafford still has the job of finding out who and why, which he pursues through the aristocratic Catholic Osbourne family, Father Tom's hosts the night before, and through the local town. Neither group is particularly forthcoming, as is to be expected of a small town and an aristocratic family in a mystery novel. And Strafford declares himself not to be all that good at this detecting thing, as well - perhaps false modesty, since he does figure it all out by the end of this short novel.

Banville is a fine writer as always, but Snow has some deeply obvious things at its core that are somewhat unfortunate. His style keeps it from being the kind of thumping dullness that another writer might inflict, and the question of who actually killed Father Tom - in best mystery-novel fashion, nearly every character has a decent reason to have wanted to - is solidly mysterious until Banville reveals all at the end. But I thought Banville was trickier than this: the story of the murder of a sexually deviant Catholic priest in 1950s Ireland is the kind of thing I thought he'd leave to the more sensationalist crew.

What I Tell You Three Times Is False by Donald Westlake writing as Samuel Holt

I'll try to keep this short: I covered this book the first time I read it, in 2008, and I've recently written at length about the first two books in this series, One Of Us Is Wrong and I Know a Trick Worth Two of That. 

In the mid-80s, Donald E. Westlake, a bestseller of humorous mysteries under his own name and a respected writer of dark thrillers as Richard Stark and an occasional screenwriter and a writer doing other mystery-adjacent books of varying levels of seriousness, like Kahawa and High Adventure, decided he wanted to see if he could be yet another successful writer. (His Wikipedia page has a long list of his pseudonyms - admittedly, a lot of them are because he came up in the soft-porn world of the late '50s and early '60s, where fake names ran like water, but Westlake had more pseudonyms in his mature career than any other three writers.)

So he invented "Samuel Holt" - the credited author and first-person narrator of what turned into a four-book series. Holt was a former cop turned TV detective, made rich enough not to have to work by five years as Jack Packard and completely typecast so that he can't get any other acting work afterward. Holt stumbles into various mysteries, and, of course, solves them. The series was supposed to be completely separate from Westlake, but, of course, his publisher's salesforce used the Westlake connection to get bookstores to buy the books, which ended up souring Westlake on the whole project.

This time around, I'm noticing that Westlake set up each book to be a somewhat different sub-genre in the larger mystery/thriller area. The first book was an thriller of international intrigue, the second a hardboiled mystery, and this third one is a locked-room cozy. Westlake was always an inventive and quirky writer, but I wonder if he really thought he'd be able to keep that up, and keep finding new sub-genres, if he'd kept it going.

What I Tell You Three Times Is False sees Holt travel to a remote Latin American island, to film a short film for the American Cancer Society, alongside other typecast actors playing Sherlock Holmes, Charlie Chan, and Miss Marple. They arrive as a major storm is blowing up, and the roughly dozen people on the island - hosts/producers, the director, a few staffers, the actors and their significant others - are thrown into a panic when the deaths start.

The four "detectives" try to solve the case, more or less - one of them more than the others at first, and, no, it's not our hero - and it does all lead up to a scene with the surviving characters in a drawing room, as the dramatically-revealed evidence j'accuses the guilty party.

I'm not normally a reader of locked-room mysteries or cozies; they've always seemed artificial to me - or maybe I prefer different flavors of artificiality, I should say, since I do like funny-Westlake, which has nothing natural about it at all. This seems to be a solid example of the form, mostly played straight, by a deeply professional and always-entertaining writer - but it's also buried in a mostly-forgotten, very secondary series under an assumed name. So I think it's mostly for fanatic Westlake fans at this point, or maybe people who really like locked-room stories.

Two Dead by Van Jensen and Nate Powell

I'll probably be short here - my time is limited this morning and my old instincts in writing about mysteries (from doing reader's reports for a decade and a half for bookclubs) is to explain everything in order, using every character's name prominently. And that is, frankly, a lousy model for writing about mystery stories, as anyone can see.

Two Dead is a mystery, or maybe a thriller, since we know most of the details from the beginning. It was written by Van Jensen and drawn by Nate Powell, telling a story of cops and criminals in 1946 Little Rock - a city they both know well, though maybe not in that era. (They're both somewhat too young to have been around then - frankly, nearly everyone in the world at this point is too young to have been around eighty years ago.) It's a graphic novel, in an oversized format, which presents Powell's characteristic ominous chiaroscuro art well.

Like many stories about crime and criminals, it's a book of dualities - there are four main characters, in groups of two. Gideon Kemp is a young WWII veteran, who just joined the police force as a detective and is secretly working for the mayor to root out the organized crime that at least partially runs this city. He's mentored by Abraham Bailey, the haunted middle-aged Chief of Detectives, who is teetering on the edge of some kind of mental breakdown. (He sees visions of his original, long-dead partner all the time, for the most obvious manifestation.)

On the other side of one line in town - the color barrier - are brothers Jacob and Esau Davis. (Jensen may be just a bit too obvious with the names here.) Jacob is another WWII veteran, and head of the unpaid, volunteer Black police force that patrols their neighborhoods: it's a bit more than a neighborhood watch, since there's some backing from the government, but they are not cops and they are not equal to the White population and they seem to mostly try to keep things from exploding. Esau works for the criminal gangs that run Little Rock, and, as the book begins, has just attracted the attention of one of the leaders, Big Mike.

The story of Two Dead is what those four characters do - how Gideon and Abe try to stop organized crime, in their own ways (and what they find along the way, how that crime has infiltrated local government), and how Jacob and Esau are caught in the middle of it, pulled to one side or the other. And how Big Mike and his compatriots fight back, in the typically violent ways of organized criminals in an era when they could do nearly anything.

It's not a happy story: both Gideon and Abe are suffering PTSD for different reasons, the Davis brothers are Black in a deeply racist town a decade before the Civil Rights era could give them any serious hope. And the title is Two Dead. It's not quite noir, but it's in the same broad territory - crime fiction set in a world with only shades of grey, where everyone has an agenda and most of them are at least slightly unbalanced.

An afterword explains that it's all based on a true story - how closely isn't clear, but it sounds fairly close. So the ending was baked in from the beginning: this all happened, more or less, eighty years ago. Jensen and Powell turn it into fiction - into a story, with structure and weight and solidity, not just a series of things that happen - and do it compellingly.

Spy Superb by Matt Kindt

Matt Kindt has been making stories about spies since the beginning of his career - but he's found a new take this time.

Spy Superb has a title that echoes his early success Super Spy (and its loose Lost Dossiers follow-up), and that is definitely intentional - but Kindt is substantially less serious this time out than he was in his previous stories of spycraft.

This, instead, is a take on the James Bond idea: the suave, omnicompetent operative who can go anywhere, do anything, and always wins out for his side. (Which is, as it must be, our side, the side of freedom and democracy and English-speaking peoples.) Like so many other people doing James Bond takes over the past few decades - most obviously Austin Powers - Kindt makes that idea an obvious fake: no human being could actually do that, so what's the real story?

In Kindt's version - and this is explained in the first pages; no major spoilers here - the "spy superb" was constructed from the beginning in WWII as the perfect operative, by the fictional Half-Huit organization (co-run by the US OSS and their French equivalent). There was an original Spy Superb, but he died, stupidly, in his first mission, an immediate failure.

No matter: the organization realized they didn't need a Spy Superb: they needed the idea of a Spy Superb, and a series of patsies to do the actual work - each one handled by career spies, generally given one small task to do, usually not even aware they were doing spycraft, and often liquidated afterward for maximum secrecy. Then all of the successes of Half-Huit would be attributed to their immortal, unstoppable premier agent.

Fast forward several decades. The most recent Spy Superb has been killed by someone unknown. And a disk he had, containing details of all the previous Spies Superb and other damaging details of the program, is on the loose. So all of those other spy agencies could learn the secret: it was all a trick.

To respond, the masters of Half-Huit activate the most delusional patsy possible: Jay, a wannabe novelist who is the guy on the cover. And their adversaries, sensing something big, send their best operatives: a Russian codenamed "Roche Chambeaux" and a Chinese woman who turns out to be a double (triple? quadruple?) agent, to kill what they still assume is a deadly super-agent.

Jay, of course, believes he is the best at whatever he does: he's the kind of guy who mansplains absolutely anything at the drop of a hat, even though (no: entirely because) he knows nothing about it. He wanders through assassination attempts and globe-hopping adventure, surviving due to luck and his unassailable belief that he's actually good at all these things.

There's a good fight scene early where Jay accidentally kills three highly-trained Russian agents in his kitchen, just by trying to talk to them. After that, the random luck quiets down: I would have liked to see more of that, more of the clearly ludicrous silliness. Kindt instead mostly plays the action scenes straight, having Jay accompanied by a competent agent who wants him alive for most of the rest of the book, and so Jay mostly survives because of someone else's ability rather than his own stupid incompetence.

That's my overall take on Spy Superb: it's fun, but doesn't go quite as big or silly as it could. Jay is an idiot: that's very clear. But we only see his idiocy save him once or twice - it could have been a lot funnier if it happened more often, more obviously, more blatantly.

There's no reason there can't be a sequel, though: even if Kindt doesn't want to use Jay again, the concept means there will always be more Spies Superb, someone else even dumber and less connected to reality. And what we have here is funny - and having it in the same scratchy, rough art style that Kindt uses for his serious spy stories makes it that much funnier.

The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson

Vintage Crime/Black Lizard reprinted all of Jim Thompson's novels - that's my memory; they may have missed an oddball or two along the way - in the '90s, in a stylish series that changed design just enough over the years to annoy completists like me. I read all of them in those days, and had a big Thompson shelf that went beneath the waves in my 2011 flood.

But I haven't read him in at least twenty years. So I thought I might as well get back to his most famous book, The Killer Inside Me - not least because I happened to already have it in a Library of America omnibus, Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s - and see what I thought this time.

First is that I'd completely misremembered the ending. To be somewhat elliptical, my general rule of thumb is that noir books end fatally for the protagonist, usually because he is a murderer but occasionally because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. (The latter kind of protagonist sometimes makes it out alive, but that's an iffy thing.) I thought this one, about a corrupt and murderous sheriff's deputy in a small Texas town in the '50s, was an exception to that rule, because the hero was a cop and corrupt and able to cover for himself.

Reader, that is not how Killer Inside Me ends. I'll leave it at that.

The main character and narrator is Lou Ford, that deputy I just mentioned. He pretends to be dull, always spouting clichés, but is actually very smart - almost as smart as he thinks he is. He's also a sadistic, sociopathic murderer who was sexually abused by a babysitter in his childhood and (consequently? everything is a consequence in a noir) his relationships with women are the usual pseudo-S&M of the era.

Ford has an official girlfriend, the local schoolteacher Amy Stanton - who sneaks into his bed at night and pesters him to marry her - but has also been carrying on with the local prostitute Joyce Lakeland. Joyce has also been seeing Elmer Conway, the feckless son of the local hard-bitten building magnate Chester Conway. Lou wants to hurt Chester: Lou's older stepbrother Mike, who went to prison to protect him in childhood, died under mysterious circumstances a few years back in a way that Lou is sure Chester caused.

Lou tells this story, in the way of post-war noir. The town is lightly corrupt, run mostly by Chester. The people are upright, officially, and conversation sometimes is elliptical - there's quite a bit of "shut your mouth! we don't say things like that out loud" here - to keep officially quiet about the things everyone knows and won't admit. (Such as: the corruption, the local prostitute, the fact that men and women have sex with each other on occasion, various other minor criminal enterprises, and so on.)

Lou has a plan: to get rid of Joyce, hurt Chester, get a bunch of money and, he thinks, get out of town and away to the real life as a smart person he thinks he's due. It starts out working reasonably well; the first few deaths go mostly as planned. But - again, this is a noir, the kind of story in which things go wrong and fate destroys wrong-doers - it gets worse from there.

This is Thompson's most famous novel because of its psychological complexity and depth: Lou Ford is a vivid, real character, and a reader will sympathize with him much more of the time than that reader is comfortable with. Thompson has enough psychology - I think it's all hugely superseded now, but it was roughly current in 1952 - to make his people plausible. Ford is a mesmerizing narrator, and Thompson does a great job of keeping the reader invested in him while clearly showing how much of a monster he is - and, at the same time, hinting in that noir way, that it was never his fault, that he was doomed from the start.

When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson

I'm still amused and fascinated at the ways that the Jackson Brodie books aren't a mystery series, but function as one well enough for a large chunk of the mystery audience to grab onto them. I don't think anything similar would ever happen in SFF; we're too insular, too fond of our shibboleths, too ready to denounce outsiders and shun them.

But mystery readers - or thriller readers, or crime-fiction readers, however you want to characterize them - aren't a community the same way the SFF readership is. They haven't been patronized by the literary world (more than in a minor, barely-noticeable way) for two or three generations - you have to stretch back to the 1920s to get anything really juicy and nasty - and sometimes I think the self-image of the field is "regular novels, only with a death or two in them to keep from being boring."

I'm reading these books slowly and tardily - 2004's Case Histories in 2012, 2006's One Good Turn in 2013, and now, a whole decade later, 2008's When Will There Be Good News? There are three more already; one just came out this year. I'm getting further behind.

Jackson Brodie is a central character in all of the books, but they're - so far, at least - multi-viewpoint novels (Good News has four) in which Brodie is just one of the viewpoints, and not the most important or central one. He's ex-army, ex-police, working, at this point, intermittently as a private detective. The first three books are all set in and around Edinburgh; the second and third both take place in a short, compressed period of time - three to four days.

Brodie is nothing like the cliché of a fictional detective. He's not trying to solve murders, and he generally doesn't. He's neither the coldly ratiocinative expert who connects strands unexpectedly or the bull-headed wrecking machine who forces his way through events to shape them the way he wants them. He's just a guy, stuck in his own head like all Atkinson's characters, trying to do what he can where he is and unsure of what he should be doing a lot of the time.

One of the other viewpoints of Good News also returns from previous books, and looks like the kind of person you'd find in a genre mystery, if you squint enough: Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe, of the local police, who almost had a relationship with Brodie in the previous book. (But both of them have since married quickly - and we know what happens afterwards at leisure when you do something in haste.)

The other two viewpoints are a doctor with a nearly year-old baby and her "mother's helper" - Dr. Joanna Hunter and Regina "Reggie" Chase. Hunter was the sole survivor of a shocking crime in her childhood; Reggie is a smart, inquisitive teen burdened with a criminal older brother and a life full of tragic deaths.

Central to this book are two events: a disappearance and a train crash. Dr. Hunter is the one that disappears; Brodie is one of the victims of the train crash, and his life is saved afterward by Reggie. But both of those things happen a solid third of the way into the book - Good News, again, is not structured at all like a standard mystery. It's a literary novel about people's lives, in a moment of tension and danger and destruction, and it starts by setting the scenes for all four, including a lot of background and details - psychological and environmental - that I don't have the space or time (or, frankly, ability) to detail clearly here.

It is brilliant and gripping and amazing. I read it much faster than I expected, dog-earing nearly half-a-dozen pages with particularly incisive bits of writing. (I could have done that a dozen more times: Atkinson is a wondrous writer, both in her specific sentences and her larger construction.) 

The best thing I can say to recommend this book is that it made me look at my shelves (where I have three other unread Atkinson books) and then look at Atkinson's website, to add everything else she's written to my "look for these books" list. I haven't done that for any author for ages. But Atkinson is fantastic, and I'm ready to read anything she writes - everything, I hope, if I can.

I Know a Trick Worth Two of That by Donald Westlake writing as Samuel Holt

This is the second book in a series Donald Westlake wrote in the '80s - it appeared under the pseudonym "Samuel Holt," also the first-person narrator and the amateur sleuth hero - that was supposed to be a test-case to see if he could be successful a second time under a different name. As it happened - as it always happens, since publishing sales forces want to sell books, and asking them to avoid talking about a book's biggest selling point is irrational - his name leaked out, and Westlake considered the experiment spoiled.

The first one was One Of Us Is Wrong, which I read recently. The second one is I Know a Trick Worth Two of That. There were two more following immediately, and then it stopped. If the series had continued and flourished, perhaps Janet Evanovich would have had to find a different gimmick, which probably only amuses me.

This second time out, the book is a little flabbier, with a somewhat flat ending. The stakes are lower - though there's still international intrigue lurking behind the plot. It's strengths are, like the first, Westlake's always-smooth prose, the voice of Holt, and the mildly jaundiced sidebar comments on Hollywood gleaned from Westlake's time as a screenwriter. (He notes in his foreword that he would have never used "that material" under his own name, but it seems incredibly tame - maybe some of the characters were drawn more closely from life than I realize, but there are no hatchet jobs here.)

Sam Holt was a cop on Long Island when he got hired as an extra for a movie, decided he liked the work, and eventually found himself starring as Packard, which seems to be the answer to the question "What if Quincy, M.E. was played by Magnum, P.I.?" The show ran five years, making Holt successful and rich enough for the rest of his life, while also making him both want to do more acting and utterly typecast as the one role he doesn't want to do anymore. So he has money and free time, friends and lovers on both coasts, and an English butler.

In this book, his old partner from the Mineola PD gets in touch: Doug Walford moved into private security and stumbled into a gigantic criminal enterprise. Doug doesn't know all the details - and can't prove any of it - but it involves the mob, international trade, major drug companies, and at least a few highly-placed US government officials (and probably electeds, as well). Doug has been targeted - an "accident" took out his girlfriend and child already, which he barely survived.

Sam agrees to hide Doug in his New York townhouse, for at least a little while, and to try to help him get to a point he can blow the whistle on the conspiracy. Sam also has a big annual party coming up at his house, and goes to some effort to conceal Doug's identity from his guests.

But Doug is killed at the party, in a way that looks like suicide and hints at a semi-locked-room mystery. Sam is sure it was murder, and has to investigate his friends to find out which one of them did it.

There is a big gathering of the suspects at the end, and Sam does the j'accuse thing. It works OK, but it's not as flashy as the action sequence that ended the first book, and it's a bit of a dying fall. The murder is solved, but the conspiracy is as strong as even - though a subplot did put some official investigative folks onto it, so we readers can assume it will be fixed by someone, eventually.

I still don't think you really want to have a book with a global conspiracy that potentially goes high up in your nation's government and just let it drop at the end of a book, though. It feels like an unfired Chekhov Gun. But this is a forty-year-old book from a writer now ten years dead, so it is what it is.