Off Topic, New and Noteworthy Detective Fiction-- Phillip Kerr's Prayer

Prayer, Philip Kerr, Putnam Publications, 409 pages, $26.95.

Philip Kerr, well known for his nine volume series featuring pre-war, World War 2 and Cold War detective Bernie Gunther, a German, often tackles ethical and spiritual issues in his detective novels and other works.  Prayer offers a Scotland born and U.S. raised Gil Martins working on the domestic terrorism cases for the FBI. Beginning with his Scottish first communion, Martins becomes an angry and skeptical Roman Catholic. Marrying an American evangelical and working in Texas, he encounters an assortment of churches and responds to them with a declaration of atheism. Yet, his closest friend is a Roman Catholic bishop who points him to the possibility of a conspiracy relating to the suspicious deaths of outspoken atheists.

The possibility of a conspiracy is somewhat confirmed by Martins during his independent investigation and then the FBI, to a very small degree, becomes involved because the deaths occur in several time zones. The stakes are raised because the deaths are not murders but suicides and there is no trace of a killer at the scene of the deaths. Martins' marriage dissolves, his atheism is tested, and Martins comes to grips with the possibility that the evidence is leading him to Old Testament declarations and the possibility that there may be one angel, reserved by God, who carries out judgement.

Kerr holds Martins' investigations, Christian faiths, atheism in balance in Prayer and the conclusion is sound and satisfying.  The close of novel allows this reader to hope that Gil Martins is heard from again.

Off Topic---All Hallows' Eve and All Saints Day and Stories That Go Bump In The Night

Carrie (1974), Mile 81 and The Dune (2012), Joyland (2013), Stephen King; In The Tall Grass, Stephen King and Joe Hill (2012), A Face In The Crowd, Stephen King and Stewart O'Nan (2012).

Well, the leaves and turning and a fresh crop of zombies are rising from their graves. In the twilight, atop ivory candles are small white flames with amber and honey colored edges that honor and remember the saints who continue to intercede in behalf of humanity. All Hallows Eve and All Saints' Day are upon us.

Halloween is a contraction of All Hallows' Evening (October 31), a day in the liturgical annual calendar dedicated to remembering dead saints and martyrs, and all departed, faithful believers in the resurrection of the dead.  All Saints' Day [also known as All Hallows, Solemnity of All Saints, The Feast of All Saints] is celebrated on 1 November.  As for myself, I use the liturgical calendar and the Hagerstown Farmers' Almanac. My first 18 years included planting and harvesting crops, birthing and slaughtering cattle, and even, after one heavy but brief July rain storm, listening to two acres of corn grow. I respect the saints, mother nature, and those who have been committed to the earth and continue to await their resurrection.

Carrie is  Stephen King's first published novel; it was released on April 5, 1974   Set future year of 1979, the novel's focus is on Carietta White, a much bullied female who lives with her mother, a sociopath who uses small portions of The Bible to justify her abuse of Carrie. During a incident in high school, Carrie becomes aware of her latent telekinetic powers. By the end of the novel, the body count is above 500 and most of Chamberlain, Maine is ashes.

Carrie is an epistolary novel that offers a limited omniscient narrator and portions of documents that include fictional letters, commission reports, and imaginary non-fiction books. The novel's several main and secondary characters are compelling; the pace of the novel is neither too slow nor too fast.
If there is a problem, it is in the denouement. Carrie's path of destruction is too wide and the body count too large. It appears that King may wanted to use fictive documents to help him plot his first published novel and needed a castrophe to be investigated in order to justify their use.  Carrie appeared after the novels Rosemary's Baby (1967) and The Exorcist (1971) and the films (1968, 1973) respectively. Both novels and films broaded the territory which King could explore, such as a bullied child with delayed menstruation.

Mile 81 and The Dune (2012), Joyland (2013), In The Tall Grass, (2012), A Face In The Crowd, (2012) are better paced, more subdued and more creepy than Carrie.  The novella Mile 81 offers a malevolent, supernatural, shape shifting force stymied by a vulgar but clever adolescent. The short story The Dune is set, for the most part in a single with an older gentlemen reporting a prophecy of eminent death to his listener. Joyland is a short (for King) novel set in the early 1970s set in a North Carolina amusement park where a ghost prompts an investigation into the possibility of a serial killer travelling between amusement parks. In The Tall Grass and A Face In The Crowd are longer short stories which are reminiscent of Peter Mathieson's work and the television series The Twilight Zone. Mile 81, In The Tall Grass and A Face In The Crowd are offered only as audio and Kindle products.

With a twice a day 45 minute commute, audio books are nearly always sliding around my passenger seat. In autumn, on purpose I avoid the interstates and take two lane highways.  I pass small churches and their neighboring cemeteries, forests preparing for winter, pumpkin vendors and harvested fields. I slow down. I listen to stories and ponder mother nature, the departed, and the liturgy .

Off Topic Fiction---Rogue Island, Rhode Island and Relationships Between Lawyers and News Writers

Rouge Island: A Novel, Bruce DeSilva, Forge/Tom Doherty Associates Publishing, 2010,  302 pp., $24.99 hardcover, $14.99 trade paper cover.

 

From The Publisher: Liam Mulligan is as old school as a newspaper man gets. His beat is Providence, Rhode Island, and he knows every street and alley. He knows the priests and prostitutes, the cops and street thugs. He knows the mobsters and politicians--who are pretty much one and the same. Someone is systematically burning down the neighborhood Mulligan grew up in, people he knows and loves are perishing in the flames, and the public is on the verge of panic. With the police looking for answers in all the wrong places, and with the whole city of Providence on his back, Mulligan must find the hand that strikes the match.

From Publisher's Weekly:  DeSilva's lengthy career as a reporter for the Providence (R.I.) Journal has provided him with the writing skill and the in-depth knowledge of city room and cityscape so well displayed in this strong debut crime novel. It's also allowed him to create a totally believable protagonist in Liam Mulligan, a beleaguered journalist seeing his old neighborhood being destroyed by arson and his newspaper by reader disaffection. Mulligan's first-person narration is filled with emotion, not the least of which is his love-hate relationship with his city and state. And there are suspenseful moments of high tension.

From Book List: *Starred Review* Born and raised in the Mount Hope section of Providence, Rhode Island, journalist Liam Mulligan won’t simply report on the rash of arsons killing lifelong friends and loved ones in his old neighborhood. He wants to know more and launches an investigation, discovering a heavy-handed plot to own Mount Hope in order to redevelop it. Along the way, he’s threatened, beaten, arrested on suspicion of arson and murder, suspended from his newspaper, and targeted with a Mob contract on his life. Mulligan must turn to some unlikely allies to save his tired old neighborhood and secure justice. Rogue Island has everything a crime fan could want: a stubborn, street-smart hero with a snarky sense of humor; more than a baker’s dozen of engaging characters; a fast-paced plot; a noirish style; a realistic postmillennium newspaper setting; mean, pot-holed streets; and, best of all, a knowing portrait of a small city and a tiny state famous for inept government, jiggery-pokery, and corruption. Debut novelist DeSilva began a four-decade career in journalism as a reporter for the Providence Journal, and his take on the city and state is harsh but also affectionate, as when he describes graft as Rhode Island’s “leading service industry,” noting that “it comes in two varieties, good and bad, just like cholesterol.” This tremendously entertaining crime novel is definitely one of the best of the year. --Thomas Gaughan 
 

CWL:  DeSilva's writing style is short, quick and to the point, with lots of dialog and very few descriptive paragraphs.  The author develops characters in their conversations. The settings are a newspaper's offices, bars, grocery stores, fire engine houses, cars, police interrogation rooms and bedrooms.  Rogue Island accurately describes the slow demise of a metropolitan newspaper and a mill town. The main characters are interesting and somewhat unique.  Rogue Island is detective fiction in which the detection is performed by a print news writer.  Overall, a second novel with the same characters would be welcomed.

Off-Topic Novel---True Grit, An American Masterpiece

True Grit, Charles Portis, 1968, Overlook Press edition with and afterward by Donna Tartt, 2004, 235pp, $14.95.

A bestseller when it was published in 1968, and the source document for two films, True Grit by Charles Portis is a masterpiece of short fiction and easily rests side by side with other first person monologue novels such as Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Catcher in the Rye.

True Grit, a version of which was serially published in The Saturday Evening Post, was very popular during the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1969 Hollywood produced a film staring John Wayne and spun off a sequel in 1975 also staring John Wayne. A third 'further adventures of' film was made for television in 1975. The novel began to drift off the required reading lists of college freshmen. Joel and Ethan Coen filmed True Grit that stayed very close to the novel which moved back on to the bestseller lists during late 2010 and early 2011.

The narrator is Maddie Ross, who in her 70s during the late 1920s, recounts her quest to seek vengance on the outlaw who killed her father, Frank Ross, when she was 14 years old in the 1870s. Tom Chaney murderer of a Texas senator, flees to Arkansas and murders Maddie's father there, then flees on Frank Ross' horse to the Indian country where he joins a band of bank robbers led by Lucky Ned Pepper.

Familiar with the Bible when she is both young and old, Maddie Ross is a literate, strong-willed, and a quick to speak woman. Maddie Ross finds a deputy U.S. Marshall who, in the words of the local sheriff,is the meanest, most pitliless, double tough man who knows no fear and loves to pull a cork. Overweight and blind in one eye, Rooster Cogburn has a small arsenal of weapons strapped to himself and his horse. He has developed his law enforcement tactics under the tutelage of Quantrill, the notorious Confederate partisan. In Maddie's eyes, Cogburn possesses true grit.

Maddie hires Cogburn Texas Ranger to capture Chaney. Cogburn is forced to accept the aid of Texas Ranger LaBoeuf, who is in pursuit of Chaney for his Texas murder. Maddie forces herself into the company of Cogburn andLeBoeuf. Each with very different motivations, the three ride into the Indian country to confront Ned Pepper's gang. By the end of the novel Ross, Cogburn and LaBoeuf have shared adventures, sustained injuries, and killed and desperados.

In recent remarks in his History News Network column Jim Cullen quotes the opening line in the novel which is Maddie's remark that " 'People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father's blood but it did not seem so strange then, although it did not happen every day,' . The magic of this novel is the way its compellingly strange language and narrator come to seem palpably real. It is the great achievement of True Grit that it evokes a moment in U.S. history in all its ordinary, extraordinary wonder.' "

Cullen's remark about 'the magic of this novel' may also be true of Shaara's Killer Angels. The compelling language of Shaara's novel, Shelby Foote's Shiloh, and Howard Bahr's Black Flower do evoke incidents in America's Civil War history which are both ordinary and extraordinary moments in warfare.

Donna Tartt, author of The Secret History and reader on the True Grit audiobook, notes in her afterword in the 2004 edition of Portis' novel, that the story exists in an era when chivalry and the frontier coexist. Maddie's adventure occurs during a time when the Confederacy is past, Reconstruction is ending, and is narrated when Wild West shows are popular amusements are almost over, Woodrow Wilson has died and Al Smith is running from president. Maddie tell readers what she said in the 1870s and what she still holds true in the 1920s: "Men will live like billy goats if they are left alone" and "I would not put a thief in my mouth" when she refuses whiskey.

Sources: Jim Cullen's Review of True Grit at the History News Network website.

Donna Tartt's afterword is in the 2004 edition of the novel. An edited version of her afterword is found at the Language is A Virus website.

The top image is of the 1968 hardcover edition; the bottom image is of the 2010 paperback edition in which is Donna Tartt's afterword.

Off Topic---Detective Fiction: The Quiet Flame of Memory

A Quiet Flame: A Bernie Gunther Novel, Philip Kerr, Putnam Publishing, 389 pp., 2009, $26.95.

Do the names Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M.Cain, and Ross MacDonald ring a bell? How about Steven Saylor, John Maddox Roberts, Max Allan Collins? James Crumley? All writers of detective fiction whose entire series are on CWL's personal bookshelf. Hammett, Chandler, Cain, and MacDonald founded and extended the 'hard boiled/noir' genre of detective fiction. Saylor and Roberts have set this genre in the Roman Empire. Collins offers Prohibition/Depression/WWII and post WWII era Chicago, Crumley has set his his hard boiled/noir detective in Montana and Texas. They are masters of their trade.

Philip Kerr's detective, Bernie Gunther, fought as a late teen in the WWI trenches, joined the Berlin police force during the Wiemar Republic era and made some very difficult choices during the early 1930s as cop who did not kowtow to the Nazi regime. Kerr does not 'grind out' a Bernie Gunther novel every year. March Violets (1989), A Pale Criminal (1990), A German Requiem (1991), The One From The Other (2006), A Quiet Flame(2009), If The Dead Be Not Raised (2010).

The political violence and crimes as well as the sexual cabaret of Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s is the environment of Bernie Gunther. The cast includes historic and fiction characters. A Quiet Flame combines two stories, one set in the early 1930s Germany and one set in the late 1940s Argentina. Josef Mengele, Adolf Eichmann, Otto Skorzeny, and Hans Kammler have crucial parts in the plot but Kerr does not make it about them on every page. One of Kerr's many strengths is that he shows these Nazi in small glimpses that are crucial to the plot.

Bernie Gunther is not a high minded copper weighted down by dogmas. His notions of justice, fairness, love, duty and honor develop through the course of his lifetime and in the context of the society and culture of his era. Gunther relies on what he has learned from his father, his police mentors and the women in his life. Gunter's search for criminals is also a search for a 'usable past' (to borrow a phrase from American historian Carl Becker who coined the phrase in his 1935 essay Every Man His Own Historian). It is an immediate past of the victim, the recent past of the perpetrator and personal life history of the detective.

Readers of Kerr's 'Berlin Noir' series enjoy a fine detective story, an immersion in German social history and the complexity of very subtle evil.

Off Topic Novel---Old School Detective Story: Rizzo's War

Rizzo's War: A Novel, Lou Manfredo, Minotaur/St. Martin's Press, 290 pp., 2009, $24.99.

After 27 years on the force, Joe Rizzo becomes wise, nurturing uncle to recently promoted street cop Mike McQueen. A young, handsome, skilled and lucky, McQueen replaces Rizzo's long time partner Morelli, an alcoholic and gambler. Rizzo and McQueen tackle assaults and the occasional homicide. They are called a upon to find a missing teenager whose father is a Brooklyn councilman. Nothing is simple or obvious. Realistic urban settings in the courthouse and on the beat help pace the novel. Husband and dad Rizzo plays master to McQueen the student.

Lou Manfredo, the author, brings 25 years of experience in Brooklyn's criminal-justice system to the novel. A uniformed court officer and a court clerk, Manfredo conveys the ethical and moral situations of police work; Joe Rizzo's deals with such situations with the philosophy that "There is no right, there is no wrong, there just is." The reader wonders how often those words echo through the halls of NYC justice systmem. McQueen develops a crush on a woman who has been sexually assaulted in the subway. Vowing to capture the man who abused her, McQueen and Rizzo locate the man, who he is a junkie but has overdosed about a half an hour before their discovery. Rizzo explains to McQueen what must be done. A report is written that the man confessed to the assault before he died and they get credit for the detective work and the capture. The case is officially closed. Rizzo's art of trimming corners includes a free meal from an Italian restaurant and the performance guard duty late at night as the restaurant's staff later takes the day's profits to the bank. There are many day-to-day details like this that ring true. Rizzo's War is much like the Ed McBain's paramont 87th Precinct series of novels. CWL met McBain once and asked him what part of the writing effort was the most enjoyable. McBain said that it was living and riding with the cops that he enjoyed the most. CWL believes that Manfredo would probably answer the question in the same manner.