Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Vol. 128, No. 5. Whole No. 783, November 2006

The Jury Box by Jon L. Breen

According to the epigraph of O. Henry’s “A Municipal Report,” Frank Norris believed only three major American cities were “story cities”: New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco. O. Henry took the implied challenge by setting his classic story in Nashville, but few then or now would argue with the inclusion of New Orleans as a great fictional locale. Certainly the city currently coming back from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina has attracted many mystery writers, from Gwen Bristow and Bruce Manning in the 1930s, Brett Halliday in the ‘40s, and John Dickson Carr in the ‘60s to such contemporaries as James Sallis, Dick Lochte, Julie Smith, Barbara Hambly, Tony Fennelly, Chris Wiltz, and those considered below.

**** Poppy Z. Brite: Soul Kitchen, Three Rivers, $13.95. Rickey and G-Man, life partners and owner-chefs of the New Orleans restaurant Liquor (every recipe uses booze), hire a gifted cook who was convicted ten years earlier of the murder of his boss. Despite a corpse in the opening pages, the mystery plot is extremely slight, but good writing, involving characters, and a detailed culinary background, including some pointed satire on the foody avant-garde, make this my top choice of the books under review. According to an author’s note, the novel was completed the night before Katrina hit.

**** Tony Dunbar: Tubby Meets Katrina, NewSouth, $24.95. Big Easy lawyer Tubby Dubonnet’s titular opponent is not only the hurricane but also an escaped murderer who identifies with the storm. The first fully post-Katrina suspense novel is a first-rate job, crisply written and expertly paced, offering a harrowing, sometimes sardonic description of the city’s physical and psychological state before, during, and after the disaster.

*** David Fulmer: Rampart Street, Harcourt, $25. French Creole private detective Valentin St. Cyr’s third case brings to life the Crescent City of 1910, with its “jass” music and flamboyant vice, its social, racial, sexual, and political complexities. When a wealthy citizen is murdered in the wrong part of town, his daughter refuses to accept the obvious sordid explanation.

*** O’Neil De Noux: New Orleans Confidential, PointBlank/Wildside, $16.95. Private eye Lucien Caye, operating in the French Quarter of the late 1940s, takes on eleven highly varied cases, three new to print, ranging from heartfelt tributes to the World War II generation to full-out erotica. One common element, the vivid depiction of the sights, smells, and sounds of the city, is augmented by James Sallis’s beautifully written introduction.

*** James Lee Burke: Pegasus Descending, Simon and Schuster, $26. New Orleans is a secondary background in the latest case for New Iberia cop Dave Robicheaux, whose cases are steeped in Louisiana ethnic, political, and religious culture. The action is pre-Katrina, but the effects and aftermath are addressed in an optimistic epilogue. Despite Burke’s over-fondness for macho confrontation and the rambling nature of the complicated plot, there’s no denying the beauty of the writing.

*** Barbara Colley: Married to the Mop, Kensington, $22. In her fifth appearance, housecleaning entrepreneur Charlotte LaRue helps a mobster’s battered wife prepare for a Mardi Gras party. Apart from a good punning title, the book has sound writing, construction, and characterization; and a reasonably intriguing plot (though unclued in the classical sense) culminating in a moral dilemma.

** Laura Childs: Motif for Murder, Berkley, $22.95. In the early pages of this intermittently amusing, nancydrewish cozy, Carmela Bertrand alternates unbelievably between agony over the kidnapping of her worthless jerk of a husband and bright banter in the sitcom world of her French Quarter scrapbooking shop, Memory Mine. While promoters of tour-ism will applaud the depiction of a post-Katrina New Orleans restored to business as usual, others may find it somewhat insensitive toward the bulk of the displaced population.

** Jay Bonansinga: Twisted, Pinnacle, $6.99. At 347 pages, FBI profiler Ulysses Grove’s storm-tossed battle with a serial killer called The Holy Ghost is more supernatural horror than mystery and exemplifies thriller bloat. Numbing repetitiousness, soggy romance, and clichéd dialogue detract from good action writing and interesting technical detail as a hurricane devastates New Orleans. The novel was written before Katrina but revised after.

Copyright © 2006 Jon L. Breen