Gorky Park uses a multitude of ingenious ideas to advance the investigation. For example, Renko has the idea of bringing the three mutilated heads of his victims to an expert in facial reconstruction (a Russian specialty) for identification. There is no question of a computer, or specialized software. The anthropologist (a dwarf) works only with wax, plaster, and old measuring instruments. The entire book is underscored by the progress on these strange sculptures.
Another outstanding idea: Arkady asks himself where the killer got rid of his gun. He must have thrown it in the river—except for one problem: everything had already been frozen at the time of the triple murder. But Renko knows a place where the water never freezes, because of the boiling discharge from a factory. He searches the area and finds the weapon . . . brilliant!
A final pleasure of Gorky Park is the ironic perspective of the author. Martin Cruz Smith does not criticize the Soviet system; he jokes blackly about it, which is much more effective, as when he notes that the “Route of Enthusiasts” is the road that took prisoners to the Gulags, or when he defines vodka as a “liquid tax that never stops rising.”
Gorky Park is not a political book: it is much more than that. This is a human book, universal and deeply moving, a tale of hunters that speaks to us about the dark impulses of man when reduced to his innermost solitude. And the novel ends where it begins: in the snow. But this time, the snow is American. It is a way of saying that, on one side or the other, man is always alone, naked.
And he is cold.
Born in Paris, Jean-Christophe Grangé was a journalist before turning to write fiction. The author of nine novels in all, he made his debut in 1994 with Le Vol des cigognes (Flight of the Storks). His most recent offering is Le passager (2011), but he is probably best known for 1999’s Les rivières pourpres (The Crimson Rivers), which he adapted with director Mathieu Kassovitz for the film Les rivières pourpres (2000), which starred Jean Reno and Vincent Cassel. Visit him online at www.jc-grange.com.
A Is for Alibi
by Sue Grafton (1982)
MEG GARDINER
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Sue Grafton (b. 1940) is the Kentucky-born author of the groundbreaking “Alphabet Series” of detective novels featuring private investigator Kinsey Millhone, some of the inspiration for which she credits to Edward Gorey’s illustrated book The Gashlycrumb Tinies, in which assorted small children meet gruesome ends in strictly alphabetical order. She once threatened to come back from the grave if her children sold the film rights to the series after she was dead. Her decision to fictionalize Santa Barbara, California, as “Santa Teresa” is a tribute to the novelist Ross Macdonald, who was the first to reimagine the city under that name.
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From the moment Kinsey Millhone walks onto the first page of A Is for Alibi, she’s a presence to be reckoned with. The first novel in Sue Grafton’s “Alphabet Series” gets rolling straight out of the gate:
My name is Kinsey Millhone. I’m a private investigator, licensed by the state of California. I’m thirty-two years old, twice divorced, no kids. The day before yesterday I killed someone and the fact weighs heavily on my mind.
With that hook, Kinsey pulls us into her investigation of a murder case that isn’t merely cold, but closed. The cops have already found the killer. The jury convicted her. They sent her to prison and declared justice done.
Then, after eight years, she’s paroled. She walks into Kinsey’s office, tells her she’s innocent, and asks Kinsey to find the real murderer.
The victim, Laurence Fife, was a ruthless divorce lawyer and a relentless philanderer, until somebody poisoned him. His young wife, Nikki, was convicted of the crime. Kinsey takes the case reluctantly; though Nikki insists that she didn’t do it, Kinsey has her doubts.
The trail is ash cold. And when Kinsey starts following it, the cops spring bad news: Laurence Fife wasn’t the only person murdered eight years earlier. Shortly after his killing, his accountant died in exactly the same way. Nobody had been arrested for that young woman’s death, but the cops think Nikki poisoned her, too, for sleeping with Fife.
Laurence Fife died painfully, poisoned by oleander crushed to a powder and substituted for his allergy pills. There were no witnesses, no confession, no forensic proof of the killer’s identity. There was only his young wife, the icy blonde who had means, motive, and opportunity.
Still, Kinsey presses the investigation. Her hunt for the truth leads her to a slew of colorful suspects, starting with Fife’s ex-wife, Gwen, whom he betrayed, dumped, and reduced to running a dog grooming salon. It leads to Fife’s incompetent legal secretary, a woman with “a mouth built for unnatural acts” who now deals blackjack in Las Vegas. It leads to the parents of the murdered young accountant, who have never recovered from their daughter’s death. And it leads to Fife’s legal partner, Charlie Scorsoni, who’s steadfastly loyal to his dead colleague and overwhelmingly attractive to Kinsey. Eventually the trail leads Kinsey into danger, and into a fatal confrontation with a killer.
A Is for Alibi is a classic whodunit freshened up, given depth, and infused with humor. It’s humane, warm, and self-aware. And it not only cleared the bar for high-quality mysteries, it raised the standard, permanently.
Deftly plotted, vivid, and convincing, the story has twists, multiple murders, and some well-intentioned B&E by the heroine. It has sex. It has regret, and gunplay. It has a cast of motley neighborhood characters that, over the course of the series, becomes beloved. And in the center of the action it has Kinsey, digging and messing up and saving the day and nearly getting killed because she’s after the truth, for the sake of her client and for all those damaged by the crime.
Kinsey doesn’t gather the suspects in the library and point at the killer—aha!—before wiping her hands clean of the affair and walking away unaffected. Instead, she dives in. For good or ill, she gets involved. Right off the bat, Kinsey tells us that she’s in this case up to her ears. And the suspense grows as she realizes that a murderer is on the loose, somebody who’s becoming desperate to erase his or her tracks.
The novel has a gritty authenticity that’s grounded in the savvy, compelling voice of its protagonist. But the story isn’t hard-boiled. At times, it’s poignant. Laurence Fife’s children from his first marriage have suffered terribly from losing their father. Nikki’s imprisonment has essentially orphaned her little boy. Born deaf, he was shunted off to boarding school when Nikki was convicted of killing his dad. Though he gets a second chance to connect with his mother, he has grown up isolated and without a home. As Kinsey comes to believe that Nikki was framed for the murder, the injustice of what has been done to the entire family feels increasingly keen. It drives Kinsey ever harder to discover the truth.
The writing is taut. The book’s 214 paperback pages are packed—not only with death, sex, and treachery, but with brightly drawn pictures of Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and the Salton Sea. Plus there’s Kinsey’s sharp and loving portrayal of Santa Teresa (a fictionalized version of Grafton’s hometown, Santa Barbara), the picturesque Southern California city “artfully arranged between the Sierra Madres and the Pacific—a haven for the abject rich.”
The story fits solidly in the gumshoe canon. At the same time, it takes the private eye novel into unmarked territory. Kinsey represents the standard PI model, but bent and twisted in original ways. She lives in a tiny one-room apartment because trailers were “getting too elaborate for my taste.” She runs three miles a day and hates every minute of it. Her observations are wry and self-deprecating. She’s funny, and we love her.
And while the book is a foursquare mystery, it helped break open the crime fiction world to a whole new line of investigators: the women.
Today we read novels and watch movies and television shows with kick-ass heroines, and don’t bat an eye. Angelina Jolie in Salt is a jacked-up version of a character we know and accept. Kick-Ass is about a girl superhero. But until recently, this wasn’t so. A Is for Alibi helped make it possible.
When the novel was published in 1982, Kinsey Millhone—feisty, sharp, resourceful, and vulnerable—was an entirely fresh character. Completely professional, she was also stubborn, human, and artlessly open about her quirks. She cut her own hair with a pair of fingernail scissors. She owned one dress, an indestructible black thing that could be crushed, drenched, possibly even burned, without harm, and that she wore to parties, funerals, and weddings. And she fit so perfectly into the private eye genre that she seemed like she’d always been there.
But for this reader, she was breathtaking. In Kinsey I discovered a young woman doing a job that had previously been restricted to male private investigators, and doing so in a thoroughly grown-up way, inhabiting her life and her story with confidence and uncertainty and charming, flawed honesty. She’s a winsome orphan who carries a .22. She’s tough and independent, though at some point in the book readers will want to hug her and hand her a cup of cocoa. She holds her own.
Best of all: Kinsey would never think of herself as kick-ass. She’d rather snark than fight. But if forced into a corner, she’ll punch her way out.
And the book just swings. It rolls. It barrels down the highway. We’re along for the ride, right beside Kinsey, gawping at the drunken, unfaithful socialite who has sharp teeth and a gossip’s claws. We ache for Kinsey, motherless, fatherless, living in paradise but alone. We cheer for her because she’s an ordinary gal, well trained, smart, one of us.
This is one of those books that slyly, without fanfare, grabs the genre by the heart and carries it off in a new direction. Sue Grafton may not have meant to do so, but she succeeded, wildly. And when I finished it, I thought: Yes. This is possible. This is what I want to read. This is what I want to write. There’s room: Grafton has just created it. Kinsey Millhone is showing us the way. So punch through. Make your own territory. The mystery novel and our imaginations are big enough to embrace it.
Kinsey is a pioneer, because she has to be. But she’s not out there to make a point. She’s doing her job, both accepting and battling the world as she finds it. It’s 1982, and she’s on her own, an American woman facing up to herself and to all the possibilities that people would still deny her. She fights through it for herself and for her clients. For those of us reading her story, she’s a friend and a hero.
Meg Gardiner is the author of ten novels, including the Evan Delaney series, the Jo Beckett novels, and the stand-alone thriller Ransom River. Her novel China Lake won the 2009 Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original. The Dirty Secrets Club won the RT Reviewers’ Choice Award for best procedural novel of the year and was chosen as one of Amazon’s top ten thrillers of 2008. Gardiner practiced law in Los Angeles and taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She lives near London. Visit her online at www.meggardiner.com.
Different Seasons
by Stephen King (1982)
PAUL CLEAVE
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Stephen Edwin King (b. 1947) is, quite simply, one of the most successful authors in the world. Born in Portland, Maine, he was raised by his mother following his parents’ separation while King was still a toddler, and later graduated with a BA in English from the University of Maine at Orono. He sold his first short story in 1967, and published his first novel, Carrie, in 1974. Since then, he has published over seventy books, including short-story collections and nonfiction, and has been acclaimed across numerous genres, winning mystery, horror, and fantasy awards, as well as a National Book Award for his distinguished contribution to American letters. He still lives in Maine.
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The thing about Stephen King is this: he’s a horror author. That’s everybody’s first thought. It used to be my first thought. But the other thing about Stephen King is this: many of his books have a mystery or a crime element to them. You could argue that Misery is more a crime novel than a horror story—there’s no supernatural component there, just a lady with an ax and a brain that’s been wired up all wrong. You could argue that Needful Things is a crime novel about a man making a town turn on itself; horror certainly drives the story, but these are actual crimes that the residents of this town are committing. Bag of Bones, Thinner, Firestarter: crime and mystery everywhere. Even The Green Mile, a fantastic story about an innocent man going to prison, is set around the murders of two young girls. One thing you can’t argue is that King’s books are full of nice people doing what they can to hide a whole lot of crazy.
I always wanted to be a horror writer. King does that to a lot of people. Yet weirdly, it was Stephen King who introduced me to crime fiction. I just didn’t know it at the time. His books were all I read when I was in my late teens. The first was Pet Sematary, then Needful Things, then ’Salem’s Lot, then The Stand. I had started in a great place. I was maybe seven or eight books into King’s work when I bought Different Seasons. It’s made up of four novellas featuring four different worlds (or seasons), and in each of these seasons you don’t really have any idea where King is taking you (though do you ever with his books?).
Different Seasons is certainly not what I was expecting. I went into the bookstore on my lunch break and parted with a small chunk of my hard-earned money like I always did, thinking I was buying a horror novel like I always had, only I ended up buying a mix of stories that weren’t horror at all. But I’d parted with my money for a book that has stuck with me for a long time, and I still think about some of the stories inside it nearly twenty years after reading it.
Different Seasons begins with “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption.” Most people know this story—if you go to the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), you’ll see that The Shawshank Redemption is rated as the #1 movie of all time, alongside The Godfather. I think some people keep forgetting this: that the #1 movie voted by the public is a Stephen King story. I read “Shawshank” back in 1993, well before the movie appeared. It’s a story about a guy who goes to prison. He’s an innocent man found guilty of shooting his wife. Things don’t get any better for him, and though bad things happened to land him in prison, even worse things happen once he’s inside. And so, over many years, he plans his escape . . .
Halfway through the story I was still waiting for vampires or ghosts to show up. They didn’t. They don’t show up at all. The story was too good to leave me disappointed by the fact that dead people weren’t roaming the streets. I got to the end of “Shawshank” and started the second story, “Apt Pupil.” It’s the tale of a teenager who learns that his elderly neighbor is a Nazi war criminal. Instead of going to the police, he keeps visiting the old man to learn about his past, and pretty soon the teenager starts going off the rails and doing plenty of dark stuff. Again, no vampires, no ghosts, no aliens—horrible things, sure, but not a horror story.
The third story is “The Body” (which plenty of people will recognize as Stand by Me, the movie from 1986), which tells of four kids who, through rumor, hear of the location of the body of a young boy who has gone missing. It’s a fairly dark story that shows off King’s writing but, once again, there are no werewolves or leprechauns, and the body doesn’t come back to life.
“The Breathing Method” is the last novella in the book. I wasn’t expecting a horror story by this point, yet that was what I got. A woman is about to give birth, but on the way to the hospital she is involved in an accident, and is decapitated. So focused is she on having the baby, though, that she somehow still manages to stay alive even though her head is a few meters away from her body.
Different Seasons comes with a different effect for each story. “Breathing Method” is quite moving—a woman keeping her body functioning long enough after death to deliver her baby. “The Body” is dark yet tender, a story of four boys growing up, a story of which we all feel we could have been a part. “Apt Pupil” is captivating; it draws you in and makes you wonder just who could be living on your street. And “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” is all of these things—tender, captivating, moving—but powerful, too. Very powerful. It’s perhaps my favorite
story of King’s. It’s a story that will stay with you forever. It’s a story that makes you want to climb into the pages and help this guy out, help him to prove his innocence, help to free him from jail. It’s an incredible tale in an incredible book.
So Different Seasons ends with horror, yet it’s the crime and mystery stories in the collection that I most enjoyed. King had slipped in crime under the radar—and I loved it. He convinced me to widen my reading tastes (okay, so now it’s horror and crime fiction), and as much as I wanted to be a horror writer, it was the king (no pun intended) of horror writing who steered me off that path and onto the one of writing crime.
Paul Cleave was born in New Zealand, and wanted to be a novelist for as long as he could remember. His first book, The Cleaner, was published in 2006, a mere six years after it was written, and became one of the biggest-selling books ever to come out of New Zealand. He has since followed it with five more novels, the latest of which is The Laughterhouse. He currently lives in London, at least until the immigration people discover that he’s there. Visit him online at www.paulcleave.co.nz.
Indemnity Only
by Sara Paretsky (1982)
DREDA SAY MITCHELL
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Sara Paretsky (b. 1947) is a pioneering figure in modern mystery fiction. She is responsible for taking the traditional male archetype of the hardboiled novel and transforming and reimagining it to create one of the earliest, and most iconic, of female investigators, V. I. Warshawski, the heroine of most of Paretsky’s books. Her novels combine thriller conventions with astute social commentary, and this year marks the thirtieth anniversary of Warshawski’s first appearance in print.