All in all, A Philosophical Investigation is a rich feast, and not only for (pseudo)intellectuals. Read it and blow your mind.
Paul Johnston was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, but spends much of his time in Greece. He is the author of three crime series. The first, featuring Quint Dalrymple, is set in a futuristic version of his home city (CWA John Creasey Memorial Dagger for Body Politic). The second stars half-Greek, half-Scots missing persons specialist Alex Mavros (Sherlock Award for Best Detective Novel for The Last Red Death). In the third he lost it completely and turned crime writer Matt Wells into a hard-boiled avenger (The Death List, etc.). His latest novel is The Silver Stain. Visit him online at www.paul-johnston.co.uk.
Bootlegger’s Daughter
by Margaret Maron (1992)
JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING
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Margaret Maron was born on a tobacco farm in North Carolina, and spent time in Italy and New York before returning to that same farm to live with her family. She began her writing career with a series of mysteries set against the backdrop of the art world, and featuring NYPD lieutenant Sigrid Harald, before returning to her native state with the character of District Court Judge Deborah Knott, the titular “bootlegger’s daughter” of her first book, and now the heroine of eighteen novels, the latest of which is The Buzzard Table.
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Back in 1999 I was on a mission to find out what made a good mystery. I had written half a science-fiction novel (a clichéd, derivative science-fiction novel) and had been sent home from a writing workshop with the strong suggestion that I take what worked (plot, characters) and ditch the half-assed world-building.
I did what I was told, poring over the manuscript for what was salvageable and what was junk. One thing became clear. I hadn’t written a space opera; totally unintentionally, I had written a mystery.
My problem? I didn’t really read mysteries. I had no clue as to how they worked, what I liked, what was considered good. So I took myself off to my local library, and checked out every book I could find that had been nominated for, or had won, the Edgar, the Anthony, or the Agatha Award.
That’s how Bootlegger’s Daughter first came into my hands. Margaret Maron was a veteran author when Bootlegger’s Daughter was published in 1992. She had an eight-book series built around the lone, socially awkward NYC cop Sigrid Harald. But Maron wanted to write something that reflected the reality of life in her native North Carolina, and she decided to take a new tack, with a new kind of heroine.
Deborah Knott is a lawyer in her early thirties still living in the (fictional) Colleton County, where she was born and raised. The youngest child—and only girl—of twelve, she struggles with sometimes comforting, sometimes smothering familial bonds. Her elderly, larger-than-life father is one of the major landholders in the area, as well as having a racy past as the county’s most successful bootlegger. She has to deal with the barely veiled racism and sexism of her legal colleagues, and with the push-pull between her Southern Baptist upbringing and her college-educated cynicism.
She might have been one of dozens of crime-fighting attorneys written before or since, but Deborah Knott has a more interesting destiny before her. As the story begins, she witnesses one of the judges before whom she has to appear throw the book at a black man whose primary crime was being “cocky.” Fed up with the “good old boy” system, Deborah marches over to the commissioner’s office and registers as a candidate for district court. The rest of the novel follows her as she hits the campaign trail—speaking at fried chicken suppers, shaking hands at the local churches, fending off most of the attempts of her well-meaning family to help her.
In the meantime, Deborah has been asked by a friend’s daughter to look into the unexplained death of her mother eighteen years earlier. As happens in the best crime fiction novels, the two parts of the story—1990 and 1972, the old South and the new, the black community and the white—twine together like a tangle of kudzu.
In the decade preceding the publication of Bootlegger’s Daughter, there had been an explosion of female-centered crime fiction: women cops, women PIs, women investigative reporters. They tended (like Deborah Knott’s predecessor, Sigrid Harald) to be quirky loners, professionals, tough gals. Or, conversely, there were the updated descendants of Miss Marple: working girls with traditionally feminine jobs, snooping around candlestick bludgeonings and exotic poisonings.
Deborah Knott was different, and so was the type of story in which she appeared. Neither hard-boiled nor traditionally cozy, Bootlegger’s Daughter was an early example of what I call the New Traditional. (I just coined that neologism since “medium-boiled” sounds like a bad breakfast.) Violence remains offstage, but the effects of it are harsh, and long lasting. The setting is small-town, but the crimes are caused by real, contemporary social ills. The amateur sleuth appends rather than replaces actual police work. The protagonist’s personal life, a vital part of the novel, presents an emotional and psychological sounding board for the action. This is a kind of crime fiction readers are very familiar with today, but in 1992, Bootlegger’s Daughter was something very new.
Crime fiction centering on a specific location was certainly not new then or now, but Bootlegger’s Daughter is one of the finest examples of geocentric mystery around. (Yes, I just made up another phrase.) Done badly, scene and setting can be a kind of window dressing: pretty, but irrelevant to the real business of the book. Done well, everything—the nature of the crime, the character of the protagonist, the dangers and motivations and red herrings—flow out of the setting. The history, the economy, the weather, the terrain: as in real life, all of these shape the culture, which in turn shapes the men and women inhabiting the story. In Bootlegger’s Daughter, you can hear the buzz of insects in the spring air, taste the barbeque and iced tea, smell the baked-brown scent of abandoned tobacco barns. But Maron’s real accomplishment isn’t evoking eastern North Carolina: it’s writing a story that could not take place in any other part of the world. Like the works of Tony Hillerman—arguably the mystery genre’s master at evoking a sense of place—nothing in Maron’s book can be separated from its setting.
Because the setting is intrinsic to the tale, Bootlegger’s Daughter—all of the books in the Deborah Knott series, really—highlights the problems and concerns of the New South. Race relations. Homophobia. The tobacco industry. Development. Migrant workers. Government corruption. Environmental depredation. Maron has written about all of these issues, and they give a weight and gravity to her work that is counterbalanced by the lightness of Deborah’s family and the spicy amusement of her on-again, off-again love life.
Of course, if I were handing you Bootlegger’s Daughter and urging you to read it, I wouldn’t rattle on about all this. I’d say, “It’s a terrific story,” and, “Deborah Knott is irresistible,” and, “Try it. I guarantee you’ll like it.” Then I’d serve you up a tall glass of sweet iced tea and show you to the hammock. Let you spend the long afternoon swinging gently, falling in love with Colleton County just like I did, all those years ago.
Although based in the state of Maine, Julia Spencer-Fleming is best known for her series of mystery novels set in the small upstate New York town of Millers Kill, featuring the unusual central character of Clare Fergusson, an Episcopal cleric, alongside the town’s chief of police, Russ Van Alstyne. The first novel in the series, In the Bleak Midwinter, swept most of the major mystery awards when it was published in 2002. Visit her online at www.juliaspencerfleming.com.
Clockers
by Richard Price (1992)
GAR ANTHONY HAYWOOD
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Novelist and screenwriter Richard Price (b. 1949) was born in the Bronx in New York. His first novel, The Wanderers, was published in 1974, and established his reputation for exploring the reality of the inner-city American experience in an unvarnished style. He has published eight novels in total, the most recent of which is Lush Life (2008). A prolific screenwriter, Price was nominated for an Oscar for his s
creenplay for The Color of Money (1986). More recently, Price has written for the groundbreaking TV series The Wire (2002–08). In 1999, Richard Price was honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
* * *
In the years just prior to his death in 1996, I used to be my father’s chief supplier of his favorite drug: literature. He’d always been a voracious reader of fiction—it was his vast and ever-expanding collection of paperback novels, strewn all over the house in which I grew up, that first drew me to reading, then writing—but in his later years, retired from his architectural practice, reading was just about all the Old Man did.
While his greatest love was science fiction—Asimov, Heinlein, Ellison—I eventually traded that particular genre in for mystery fiction, so when our roles became reversed and he began to look to me for secondhand reading material, he had to settle almost exclusively for the works of such authors as Robert B. Parker, Lawrence Block, Michael Connelly, and the like. For the most part, he enjoyed everything I gave him, but his standards were ridiculously high. Jack Woodward Haywood was a tough critic by nature, and what little crime fiction he’d read to that point had been written only by the most revered names in the field—people like Raymond Chandler and John D. MacDonald. It was a rare book now that got more than a three-and-a-half-star review out of him.
He read hundreds of my hand-me-downs, many by contemporary authors whom I considered—and still do consider—the best of the best: Robert Crais, T. Jefferson Parker, James Lee Burke, Sue Grafton, Elmore Leonard, Ed McBain, Martin Cruz Smith . . .
And only one book blew him completely away: Clockers by Richard Price.
“This guy’s the real deal,” he told me when I asked him what he thought. And coming from my father—a man of few words if ever there was one—this was high praise, indeed.
Curiously, I hadn’t yet read Clockers myself. I’d started it and put it down, for God only knows what reason. But now, if the Old Man said it was the “real deal”—better than anything I’d given him to read up to that point—it clearly deserved a second look. So I gave it one.
It’s a damn good thing that I did.
• • •
The story of a black New Jersey drug runner and a disillusioned white cop working a homicide case on the outskirts of the projects where the kid lives and operates, Clockers is an urban crime drama of incredible texture and depth, as perfectly pieced together as the proverbial Swiss clock. Reading it from a writer’s perspective, you’re immediately struck by the vast array of skills Price has on display: plotting that moves at optimum speed, characters that live and breathe, dialogue devoid of a single false note. And this last is no exaggeration: every word of every line Price’s people speak in Clockers rings true. Every one.
Style is every author’s Holy Grail, the identifying mark we seek to place on everything we write in order to establish it as ours and ours alone. But style is a double-edged sword; doled out in the wrong proportions, it becomes a stain instead of a mark, an intrusive impediment to the reader’s forward progress.
The style Price exhibits in Clockers is a remarkable mixture of authenticity and economy that is only ever apparent in retrospect. While you’re reading the book, Price the author is completely invisible, no more a part of the story being told than a fly on the wall. It all looks effortless, so subliminal is the power of his compact prose, but of course, it’s anything but.
Strike, the drug-running “clocker” at the center of Price’s tale, is a difficult character to like, and Rocco Klein, the burnt-out cop halfheartedly trying to solve just another senseless murder on his and Strike’s common turf, even more so. This is because Price has refused to dilute the cold, hard truths both men represent with anything artificial simply to make the reader’s task of caring for them easier.
Strike is a teenaged businessman who sees crack no differently than McDonald’s sees hamburgers; he even suffers the ulcers typical of legitimate, white-collar enterprise, hence his addiction to Yoo-hoo. Rocco, meanwhile, is an oblivious racist and unrepentant adulterer, a virtual poster boy for the motto “by any means necessary” who has seen too much to be surprised, let alone moved, by anything.
Part of the great pull of Clockers is the anxiety a reader is made to feel throughout, waiting for Strike or Rocco to prove himself more compassionate, more alive, than Price would lead us to believe he is. In the hands of a lesser writer, characters this detached and manipulative, wading through daily existences this harsh and seemingly pointless, would tax a reader’s patience. Who cares who survives a car wreck if everyone involved is already dead? But Price lends each man just enough humanity, just enough hope for his sorry future, to make writing him off impossible. This is noir without the usual built-in safety net of certain doom; Price makes no promises about how this will all turn out, yet has you hoping for a happy ending his setup would suggest is highly unlikely, at best.
As Strike’s struggle to climb the crack trade’s corporate ladder and Rocco’s homicide investigation inexorably converge, we are introduced to people in their lives no less fascinating than the two men themselves. Strike’s employer and mentor Rodney is as schooled and complex as any Wall Street CEO, though to the world at large he looks like little more than the two-bit entrepreneur behind a neighborhood candy store. In any other book, the subordinate clockers under Strike’s supervision might have been one-dimensional throw-ins with cute names—Futon, The Word, Peanut—but Price has invested each with distinctive motives and characteristics of his own. Similarly, Rocco’s circle of fellow cops and associates—Mazilli, his partner; Sean Touhey, the self-important actor Rocco’s coaching up for a possible film role; Rocco’s wife, Patty—are all far more than the usual character sketches that populate novels of this kind.
A skeptical reader’s initial reaction to a book like this—a tale, for the most part, of black people living and dying in the cesspool of a contemporary American slum, as told by a middle-aged white man—is: What the hell would he know about it? This is a literary trick that’s been tried many times before, and usually without much success. But ten pages into Clockers, it becomes glaringly obvious that what Price knows about his subject matter is nothing short of everything.
Every goddamn thing.
He knows his characters and the world they inhabit so well, in fact, that one wonders what his research process looked like. Did he take residence in a New Jersey crack house for six months? Spend another six sitting in the bullpen of a Newark police station recording every word he overheard? From the everyday intricacies of the drug trade in which Strike operates to the morass of legal and moral compromises a cop like Rocco must make on an hourly basis just to get by, Price seems to understand it not from second- or thirdhand, but from firsthand experience.
Clockers reads like Pulitzer Prize–worthy journalism, not fiction. It’s the novel we are all trying to write: big, sprawling, and unforgettable.
The Old Man was right. Richard Price is the real deal.
Gar Anthony Haywood is the Shamus and Anthony award–winning author of twelve crime novels and numerous short stories. He has written six mysteries featuring African American private investigator Aaron Gunner; two starring amateur sleuths Joe and Dottie Loudermilk; and four stand-alone thrillers. Visit him online at www.garanthonyhaywood.com.
The Long-Legged Fly
by James Sallis (1992)
SARA GRAN
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James Sallis (b. 1944) is perhaps best known for the Lew Griffin mysteries, set in New Orleans, and the novel Drive, which became an acclaimed film directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. He has published fourteen novels, more than a hundred stories, a number of collections of poetry, a translation of Raymond Queneau’s novel Saint Glinglin, three books on music, and reams of criticism on literature of every sort. Once editor of the landmark SF magazine New Worlds in London (“Way, way back in the day,” as Sallis puts it himself), he contributes a regular books column to the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
* * *
James Sallis’s The Long-Legged Fly, the first of his “Insect” series of detective novels, is a deconstruction of the detective novel in the best sense of the word. In this series of fables and vignettes from the life of New Orleans PI Lew Griffin, ranging from 1964 to 1990, Sallis reverse-engineers the detective novel down to its elementary parts, an act of magic and alchemy that shows both what the detective novel could be in the future, and what it was all along.
Lew Griffin, Sallis’s PI, embodies the hard-boiled dick: he is tough, he drinks, he is oddly attractive to women; he’s clever, he’s wise, and he has a hole in his heart that goes on for days. He is both one with his clients and the people he investigates, and always, eternally alone. And yet Griffin also deals with the heavy matter of real life.
His father dies. His romantic relationships bloom and then wilt. Time passes. He is African American in a city, New Orleans, that does not give us easy answers about race. Griffin is both the archetypal detective and a real, breathing person. Lew’s life is complex and rich, full of mysteries without easy solutions. He both embodies the genre and expands it.
Just as Lew himself is both familiar and new, the mysteries Sallis gives him to solve—or not solve—both fit squarely into the genre and tell us something new about what exactly this genre is. One missing girl case becomes a meditation on personality and identity. The girl is found, but the case is never exactly solved. A middle-of-the-night phone call warns Lew off the case, film noir–style, but Lew admits never knowing who that call came from, or why it was made. Another missing girl case (missing girls being both the great MacGuffin and the great living, breathing, symbolic prize of detective fiction) turns into an inquiry about love.