Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Vol. 131, No. 1. Whole No. 797, January 2008

The Jury Box by Jon L. Breen

Black Mask, greatest of the twentieth-century crime-fiction pulps, published over half the fifty-plus stories in Otto Penzler’s huge trade paperback anthology The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps (Vintage, $25), an admirable collection of mostly unfamiliar material. Covering the 1920s through ‘40s, its three sections — crimefighters, introduced by Penzler; villains, introduced by Harlan Ellison; and dames, introduced by Laura Lippman — were published separately in Britain. Three selections each by Dashiell Hammett (including the powerful and previously unpublished “Faith”), Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Cornell Woolrich join novel-length works by Carroll John Daly and Frederick Nebel and stories by Horace McCoy, Thomas Walsh, Richard Sale, George Harmon Coxe, Frank Gruber, and James M. Cain. Among the more obscure items are a pair of enjoyable (if implausibly plotted) stories about D.B. McCandless’s Sarah Watson, a tough, chubby, and middle-aged female private eye, who antedated Gardner’s Bertha Cool.

Black Mask’s most significant innovation was the hardboiled private eye. Joining Hammett and Chandler in the P.I. pantheon, and believed by iconic critic Anthony Boucher the greatest of the three, Ross Macdonald came on the scene after the great days of the pulps had passed. His reputation has been kept alive through the efforts of Tom Nolan, first with his 1999 biography and most recently with The Archer Files (Crippen & Landru, $45 hardcover, $25 trade paper), which gathers all the previously published short stories about Lew Archer. Nolan’s excellent introduction gathers the surprising range of biographical details on the Southern California shamus scattered through the novels and stories. A selection of tantalizing openings to unfinished Archer cases are not throw-away false starts but scenes as polished and memorable as the author’s finished work.

Among the Archer novels in reprint from Vintage/Black Lizard is the 1951 case The Way Some People Die ($12.95) — although not as fine as the work Macdonald would do in the ‘60s and ‘70s, it was deemed by Boucher the best of its kind since Farewell, My Lovely or even The Maltese Falcon.

As the following examples show, the condition of the private eye today remains healthy.

**** Richard Aleas: Songs of Innocence, Hard Case Crime, $6.99. Three years after quitting detective work for the Columbia University writing program, John Blake tries to prove the apparent suicide of a girlfriend and fellow student, who had a secret life in the Manhattan sex industry, was really murder. Aleas (pseudonym of Charles Ardai) tops his Edgar-nominated debut Little Girl Lost in this man-on-the-run thriller, expertly crafted in every way and ending with one of the most shocking and chilling conclusions in recent memory.

**** Anne Argula: Walla Walla Suite, Ballantine, $12.95. Spokane policewoman Quinn’s debut in Homicide My Own was a unique police procedural, and her return as Seattle private eye, working mostly for a mitigation investigator whose job it is to save convicted murderers from hanging, is nearly as unconventional, though lacking the earlier book’s supernatural overtones. Quinn’s Pennsylvania coal-country slang takes getting used to, but her voice is among the most original on the current scene.

**** Walter Mosley: Blonde Faith, Little, Brown, $25.95. In late 1960s L.A., a Vietnam veteran disappears, leaving his young daughter in the care of his friend Easy Rawlins, troubled following the break-up of his long-term relationship. Centered on the shifting tides of American race relations and the psychological journey of its protagonist, this is one of the most remarkable series in contemporary crime fiction.

**** Bill Pronzini: Savages, Forge, $24.95. Of current private eye series, San Francisco’s Nameless Detective (known by third-person necessity as Bill) is certainly the longest running and arguably the best. Now virtually semi-retired and concerned about his wife’s breast-cancer scare, Bill reluctantly takes on a previously dissatisfied client, who wishes to prove her sister’s supposedly accidental death was really murder. His case and operative Jake Runyon’s, unrelated but sharing a thematic unity, are both satisfactorily and surprisingly solved, with fairly laid clues, and one of them features a chilling murder motive that may be unique in fictional annals.

*** Parnell Hall: Hitman, Pegasus, $24. New Yorker Stanley Hastings, whose usual bread and butter is documenting slip-and-fall cases for a personal injury lawyer, takes on one of the strangest job assignments since “The Red-Headed League”: stopping a hired killer who wants to quit the trade from completing his latest assignment. As usual, Hall delivers smart dialogue, humorous observations, semi-farcical complications leading to a logical conclusion, and fidelity to the rules of fair play.

*** Mark Coggins: Runoff, Bleak House, $24.95 hardcover, $14.95 trade paper. Part-time jazz bassist August Riordan stumbles over bodies, has the Dragon Lady of San Francisco’s Chinatown for a client, and even encounters Chandler’s favorite scene saver, the sudden appearance of a guy with a gun, but the easy, humorous style, details on computerized election fraud, and sharply observed Bay Area background make it all most enjoyable. Riordan’s main associate is not the muscled sociopath of some series but a tech-savvy standards-singing drag queen.

*** Loren D. Estleman: American Detective, Forge, $24.95. Detroit’s Amos Walker, solidly in the loner tradition and a conscious anachronism in the twenty-first century, participates in much physical action, including the traditional blow to the head, all described in one of the most dazzling prose styles extant. The initial job, soon complicated by murder, is to discourage the daughter of a retired Tiger pitcher from marrying an apparent fortune hunter. The case includes another Asian-American Dragon Lady.

*** Peter Spiegelman: Red Cat, Knopf, $22.95. New York sleuth John March takes on as client his unpleasant brother, who is being stalked by a woman he met online for casual sex. The inventive plot is solidly contemporary, the characters and background strongly conveyed, the style reminiscent of the masters.

** Marcia Muller: The Ever-Running Man, Warner, $24.99. San Francisco’s Sharon McCone, one of the best and longest running examples of the new-style non-loner, family-oriented P.I., goes to work for husband Hy Ripinsky, whose worldwide industrial security firm has been the target of bombings by the odd-gaited jogging miscreant of the title. An outlandish plot and soap opera excesses won’t deter regular readers, but newcomers should try earlier novels. (Muller, even better at short stories, gathers nineteen of her best in Somewhere in the City [Pegasus, $15.95]. Most have been previously collected; some involve McCone or her associates.)

** Michael Harvey: The Chicago Way, Knopf, $23.95. The Windy City’s Michael Kelly unofficially reopens an old case that got his former police partner killed. Making this Renaissance sleuth a jogging Cubs fan who reads TheIliad in the original Greek seems more parodic than believable; stock characters and plot clichés stack up relentlessly. There’s enough narrative impetus and stylistic flair to sustain reader interest, but disregard the outrageous hype.

(c)2007 by Jon L. Breen