Review: "Madman on a Drum" by David Housewright

 

Madman on a Drum by David Housewright Minotaur Books, 2008     David Housewright’s fifth Rushmore McKenzie mystery, Madman on a Drum, is a hardboiled tour-de-force private eye novel about justice and revenge. In the Acknowledgements, Housewright recognizes Carrol John Daly and Mickey Spillane’s influence on Madman on a Drum, which is easy to see. It has the same violence and anger—an anger at an out-of-control world—coupled with the desire for an old-school, almost Old Testament-style, dark vengeance. McKenzie’s world crumbles when he is called to his lifelong buddy, Bobby Dunston’s house, and told Bobby’s preteen daughter, Victoria, was kidnapped on her way home from school: “They kidnapped Bobby Dunston’s daughter in the middle of a bright September afternoon off a city street I had traveled safely maybe a thousand times when I was a kid.” When McKenzie arrives, the F.B.I. is already on scene and Bobby, a St. Paul, Minnesota, homicide detective, has a steely mask of professional self-control. A mask McKenzie hopes his friend can keep in place until Victoria is recovered. In short order, the kidnappers demand $1,000,000 of McKenzie’s money in exchange for the girl’s life. An amount McKenzie is glad to provide, but his plans don’t include letting the kidnappers slip away into the night. And it has nothing to do with getting his money back. Madman on a Drum received a starred review from Publishers Weekly—“Hate, revenge and old-fashioned greed propel… Housewright’s stellar fifth mystery”—which parallels my own thoughts about the tale. It is damn good. The St. Paul setting is rich and vibrant; from outlaw biker bars to McKenzie’s reminiscences about the old St. Paul: “The city was originally called Pig’s Eye Landing after its founder, Pierre ‘Pig’s Eye’ Parrant, a notorious and thoroughly likable fur trader turned moonshiner, until a French priest came along and decided it wasn’t PC enough.” McKenzie’s humorous commentary is muted in this one, although it is still there in smaller doses, and replaced by a seething anger. In a way, Madman on a Drum is a morality play with McKenzie dangling as both witness and defendant in a shadowy tribunal. The plotting is concise, twisty—in all the right ways—and surprising in a perfectly sensible manner. Madman on a Drum is the best of McKenzie’s early tales and it announces both McKenzie and Housewright as serious players in the mystery and private eye genres.

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