Books to Die For

  S. J. Rozan, a lifelong New Yorker, is the author of thirteen novels and three dozen short stories. She’s an Edgar, Shamus, Anthony, Nero, and Macavity winner, as well as a recipient of the Japanese Falcon Award. S.J. has been guest of honor at a number of fan conventions and in 2003 was an invited speaker at the World Economic Forum in Davos. She’s served on the boards of Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime, and as president of Private Eye Writers of America. She leads writing workshops and lectures widely. Her latest book is Ghost Hero. Visit her online at www.sjrozan.net.

  A Judgement in Stone

  by Ruth Rendell (1977)

  PETER ROBINSON

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  Ruth Rendell (b. 1930) is one of the queens of the British mystery novel. Perhaps best known for her series of police procedurals featuring Chief Inspector Wexford, of which there have been over twenty published so far, she has also written over thirty other books, including a number of works of psychological suspense under the pseudonym of Barbara Vine. As Baroness Rendell of Babergh, she is a Labour Party life peer of the House of Lords.

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  “Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write” is one of the most intriguing opening sentences in crime fiction. Not satisfied with simply naming the killer and the motive, Ruth Rendell then goes on to tell the reader that Eunice gained nothing from her crime but the notoriety she had so painstakingly avoided all her life, and that while Eunice herself was not mad, her partner in crime, Joan Smith, was. Before the first chapter has ended, we also know that there were four members of the Coverdale family living in the house at the time—parents George and Jacqueline, both on their second marriage; George’s daughter, Melinda; and Jacqueline’s son, Giles—and that all were shot within the space of about fifteen minutes. While A Judgement in Stone is not the first crime novel to invert the conventional whodunit structure—Malice Aforethought by Francis Iles did something similar in 1931—it is certainly the most chilling.

  Over the next few chapters, we get to know the Coverdale family. Rendell is deft in her drawing of character and outlining of relationships, and while on one level it is clear that they are a family of upper-middle-class snobs, we quickly discover other facets of their character; we become privy to their dreams, their secret fears and fantasies. We know that we shouldn’t allow ourselves to care for them, if for no other reason than that we know they are going to meet a bloody end in the very near future, but against our better judgment, we do.

  The attitudes of the various Coverdales toward Eunice are also interesting. The daughter, Melinda, for example, is a young, idealistic university student who thinks that everyone should be equal and wants Eunice to be part of the family. Giles, the son, doesn’t even notice her existence; he is too busy reading the Bhagavad Gita, which he props against the marmalade pot at breakfast time, and harboring incestuous fantasies about Melinda, even though she is not actually a blood relative. George is merely glad that they have found someone to help his wife manage the large house, and Jacqueline herself has no interest in how or what Eunice feels so long as she carries out her duties. As for Eunice, she is puzzled by the lot of them in a blank and blinkered sort of way. Then she meets religious fanatic Joan Smith, who discovers her secret, and so begins the folie à deux that leads to the bloody denouement.

  The setting is what W. H. Auden referred to in his essay “The Guilty Vicarage” as “the Great Good Place,” a large country house about two miles from the nearest village, with stunning views of the English countryside, views that Constable painted. Into this idyllic setting comes Eunice, who has forged her references, and, we are told early on, has a history of petty blackmail. She also suffocated her own father when caring for him became too great a burden for her. To her, murder was a simple solution to a simple problem, and her greatest problem is keeping her illiteracy secret.

  The story is told from the point of view of an omniscient narrator who knows exactly what the future holds for all the characters, and is able to jump in and out of their minds at will, revealing their thoughts, hopes, and dreams, cataloging the decisions that can lead to only one end. There is a sort of matter-of-fact sense of doom and inevitability about it all. The ordinary becomes sinister. After the first lie, the first little innocent act of deception, the course is set by a mixture of chance, destiny, and choice. There is no going back, even as the possible outcomes become more and more limited, and more and more dreadful to contemplate.

  A Judgement in Stone is not only about illiteracy, but about the gulf between the classes, between people, and about how little we know even of those whom we put in positions of trust and power. The Coverdales assume that everyone reads books and enjoys some form of culture, whether art or opera, or that they at least aspire to do so; Eunice has never heard a piece of music in her life, except hymns that her father whistled, has never seen a work of art apart from reproductions of The Laughing Cavalier and Mona Lisa, and has never been able to read a book. Eunice has no imagination, and therefore she has no empathy. Her world revolves around television, domestic work, knitting, and chocolate bars.

  And preserving the secret of her illiteracy, of course. That, above all.

  For some reason, Ruth Rendell’s novels have always fared better in the movies at the hands of continental directors, and A Judgement in Stone is no exception. Claude Chabrol made a terrific film version of it in 1995. Called La Cérémonie, it stars Isabelle Huppert and Sandrine Bonnaire. Naturally, many things change in the course of a film or TV adaptation of a novel. La Cérémonie becomes an attack on that favorite of French institutions, the bourgeoisie, a Marxist comment on the class struggle, but it does so without losing its psychological edge. It keeps the spirit of the novel intact, and Chabrol is just as interested in the dark and malevolent progress of the folie à deux as Rendell is.

  Perhaps the most important difference between film and book is that Chabrol doesn’t give everything away at the beginning; instead, he unravels the whole series of events as a mystery, as a psychological thriller. We have no idea what is so strange about Eunice (Sophie, in the movie); we find out only bit by bit as the story unfolds, and her illiteracy is finally revealed. We have no idea that she is going to murder anyone, but when she meets up with Joan Smith (Jeanne), that eventuality begins to seem inevitable, too.

  Normally, when I’m writing about crime fiction, I worry about spoilers, about giving something important away, but in A Judgement in Stone, what happens at the end is exactly what the narrator has already told us will happen. Eunice Parchman and Joan Smith shoot the entire Coverdale family, people we have come to care about, despite their faults, as they are watching Don Giovanni on television.

  “But,” as the narrator tells us at the end of the first chapter, “there was much more to it than that.” One of the great strengths of A Judgement in Stone, and Ruth Rendell’s non-Wexford novels in general, is that they show us the chief interest in a crime novel need not necessarily be the identity, or even the motive, of the killer. Her strength is that she keeps us turning the pages even though we already know what is going to happen, and why.

  While it was reading Chandler, Simenon, and Sjöwall and Wahlöö that got me interested in writing crime fiction in the first place, Ruth Rendell was one of the first British crime writers whom I read as an adult, and A Judgement in Stone was one of the first books of Rendell’s that I read. It sent me in search of others, such as The Lake of Darkness, A Demon in My View, and Live Flesh, and they remain firm favorites to this day.

  Peter Robinson was born in Yorkshire, England, which provides the setting for his award-winning and best-selling series of detective novels featuring Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks. The series has been successfully adapted for television, featuring Stephen Tompkinson as Banks. He divides his time between Yorkshire and Canada. Visit him online at www.inspectorbanks.com.

  The Last Good Kiss

  by James Crumley (1978)

  DENNIS LEHANE


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  James Crumley (1939–2008) is one of the most influential crime fiction authors of the last half century. Ray Bradbury’s series detective Elmo Crumley is named for him. First published in 1969 with One to Count Cadence, and best known for creating the series characters Milo Milodragovitch and C. W. Sughrue (who appeared together in 1996’s Bordersnakes), Crumley won the 1994 Hammett Prize, awarded for best literary crime fiction, for The Mexican Tree Duck (1993).

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  Stacy: “Whadda you going to be when you grow up?”

  C.W.: “Older.”

  C. W. Sughrue, the private investigator at the heart of James Crumley’s masterpiece, The Last Good Kiss, takes on two cases at the start of the book. The first—to find the writer Abraham Trahearne and return him home from his latest alcoholic bender—is ostensibly accomplished in the first sentence of Chapter 1. Sughrue accepts the second case—to ascertain the fate of Betty Sue Flowers, a woman from Sonoma, California, who vanished ten years earlier in San Francisco—at the end of Chapter 2. From there he sets out on a path that leads him all over the American West, aided at times—if you can call it that—by his new drinking buddy, the novelist Trahearne, and sometimes by a bulldog everyone likes but never enough to hold on to properly.

  The Last Good Kiss is about castoffs and a search for belonging. It’s also about the thrills of wanderlust, drinking, and the American road. It’s about writing and whoring and evil so bland and commonplace that it pulls up the barstool next to you and smiles as it buys you a drink. It begins with arguably the finest sentence to ever open a crime novel—“When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.” It ends with one of the most original acts of vengeance a hero ever perpetrated on a villain. In between, it reveals itself as an astute examination of America in the 1970s, a trenchant observation of the ways in which men habitually fail to understand women, an homage to both Chandler’s The Long Goodbye and Kerouac’s On the Road (and yet just as singularly its own proud beast), and both a hymn to and a condemnation of the artistic temperament. It’s a book about loss and the black ash left in the wake of 1960s idealism. But above all else, it’s about the hunger for home. Not home as a physical place—though that’s in there, too—but as an ideal we reach for but rarely touch.

  “Only fools have heroes.”

  The plot, on the surface, seems as ramshackle as the joint in Sonoma where C.W. catches up with Abraham Trahearne. (Seems; trust me, not one line or incident in this book is there by accident.) C.W. is a smalltime private investigator in Meriwether, Montana. He’s a functioning alcoholic, a hopeless romantic (though it would be news to him), and a brokenhearted casualty of the ’60s. Blundering his way through the late ’70s, with the “flower children . . . gone sour and commercial or middle-class,” C.W. knows “you can’t go home again even if you stay there, and now that everyplace is the same, there’s no place to run.”

  But he tries. By the time he tracks down Trahearne, at the request of the novelist’s chilly, sexy ex-wife, Catherine, C.W. has cut a swath from Montana to Wyoming to Oregon, northern Utah, southern Idaho, the Nevada desert, Reno, San Francisco, and finally Sonoma. There, his attempts to remove Trahearne lead to a level of bar violence that would be wholly comic if one character didn’t get shot in the foot. After that violence, C.W. is hired by Rosie Flowers, the owner of the bar, to find her daughter, Betty Sue, who’s been missing for ten years, ever since she stepped out of her boyfriend’s car at a red light in San Francisco and never looked back. C.W. agrees to help Rosie, mostly because she gives him no choice, even going so far as to saddle him with a companion for his journey—the redoubtable Fireball Roberts.

  “When you go home, take that worthless bulldog with you.”

  C.W. never sees it, but Fireball Roberts is his doppelgänger—fiercely loyal, plodding yet determined, with a heart as big as the West. One of the ironies of the book is that its best person is a dog that everyone passes off to the next person like a bad penny or a chain letter.

  C.W.’s search for Betty Sue—aided at times by Trahearne, his drinking buddy and erstwhile boon companion—leads him into the world of basement pornography, drug addiction, the mafia, and the human detritus flushed down the hills of San Francisco when the bottom dropped out on the peace and love generation and the hopes of Woodstock gave way to the horrors of Manson and the acrid despair of Watergate.

  C.W., loyal and bighearted and endlessly hopeful in his own broken way, is passed around as much as Fireball Roberts. As is Trahearne’s current wife, Melinda. All the decent souls in the book are too decent to survive the self-serving pragmatists and self-pitying monsters with whom they eventually find themselves swimming. The villains in this book are, for the most part, under the impression that they themselves are largely blameless. Their acts of carnage are collateral and reactionary, not premeditated. They don’t want to do bad; they’d just prefer it over being inconvenienced. They are, like Fitzgerald’s monsters in The Great Gatsby, “careless people.” When C.W. refuses a bribe, one character warns him, “Everything would be so simple if you could and it will be so awful if you don’t.” That pretty much sums it up—do what we want or we’ll be forced to fill your life to the brim with regret.

  You think you’re in love with me, don’t you? . . . You don’t even know me . . . It’s very kind of you to care, but you don’t even know me at all.

  Things turn awful in this novel in part because C.W. consistently can’t see the women in his life for who they are. Melinda Trahearne, for example, looks different to him every time he sees her; he fails to recognize her on at least two occasions, and late in the novel is surprised to discover that she’s beautiful. Betty Sue Flowers, a woman he comes to think he knows through pictures and, unfortunately, pornographic film stock, is constantly changing shape in front of him. Catherine Trahearne morphs in front of his eyes, depending on the light, depending on the day. In a genre known for—hell, quite often defined by—its adherence to mothball ideals of male virility and female dependency on the same, The Last Good Kiss is a ballsy, subversive attack on the male psyche and its fuel tank full of self-aggrandizement and self-pity. The dehumanizing world of pornography that C.W. encounters is but an outgrowth of the male’s hopelessly conflicted need to love what he fucks but fuck what he loves. This leads to sentimentalizing, objectifying, and sometimes punishing the woman you feel these things for, or as C.W. puts it, “Like too many men, Trahearne and I didn’t know how to deal with a woman like (her), caught as we were between our own random lusts and a desire for faithful women so primitive and fierce it must have been innate, atavistic, as uncontrollable as a bodily function . . . As we shared the whiskey, I wondered how long men had been forgiving each other over strong drink for being fools.”

  The novel wonders as well. By the final pages—as the final two victims are found floating in a nocturnal pool, a scene as ethereal and haunting as any death scene in literature, and most of the characters have realized that their last good kiss was years ago, as the poet lamented, and the careless villains have retreated to their vast carelessness, while the good men and women have been marginalized—there is still room for forgiveness. Because even in the beaten men and women who form the novel’s heroic core, the light remains. The hope. The beating heart. The distant promise of home.

  Dennis Lehane is the author of a bunch of books, some of which he likes, including Mystic River, The Given Day, and Live by Night, a gangster novel to be published in October 2012 by William Morrow in the United States and Little, Brown in the U.K. and Ireland. He’s wanted to write a gangster novel since he was eight years old; now that the box is checked, he has no idea what to do next to keep people from realizing how completely full of shite he is. Maybe he’ll take up origami. While hang gliding. Until then, he lives in Boston and St. Petersburg, Florida, with
one wife, two daughters, a vicious beagle, and a sweet but excessively flatulent English bulldog named Marlon Brando. Visit him online at www.dennislehanebooks.com.

  Southern Seas (Los mares del sur)

  by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (1979)

  LEONARDO PADURA

  (essay translated from the Spanish by Ellen Clair Lamb)

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  Pepe Carvalho, the Barcelona-based gastronome hero of the crime novels of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (1939–2003), first appeared in Yo maté a Kennedy (I Killed Kennedy) in 1972. To date nine of Montalbán’s novels have been translated into English, the most recent being The Man of My Life (2000). Commemorated in his native Catalonia by the Colegio de Periodistas de Cataluña’s Manuel Vázquez Montalbán International Journalism Award, Montalbán is also celebrated in the work of Italian writer Andrea Camilleri, whose series hero is called Salvo Montalbano.

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  Dear reader, if you are making your first acquaintance with the books of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, you have the distinct advantage of entering this master of crime’s work through the best possible door. I say this from personal knowledge, as my own first encounter with the work of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán was both a shock and a trauma.

  It was 1987, and I had just returned to Cuba after an endless one-year stay in Angola, where I had gone to work as an editor for the weekly newspaper of the Cuban expatriate community. During that year—away from my country, almost beyond the boundaries of time, and mostly living in fear—I had to read whatever I could get or was given, haphazardly and with the melancholy of living abroad in a country at war. When I returned to Cuba, it was a pleasure to find that the research and study center for the promotion of the work of Alejo Carpentier and Cuban literature had opened an attractive lending library, stocked entirely with books published outside of Cuba. The new library had been funded (so they said) by Gabriel García Márquez, with contributions from Spanish publishers with whom he had connections.