Review: "The Man on the Beach" by Henning Mankell

 

“The Man on the Beach” by Henning Mankell Novellix, 2019     In my waning memory, it was Henning Mankell’s stories about Inspector Kurt Wallander that started the Nordic Noir craze of the early-2000s in the United States. It seemed for a decade or more everything in bookstores centered around Scandinavian detectives working fictional cases as dark as a Norse winter. Of course when Mankell was outselling almost every other crime writer my inner snob recoiled from his work because any writer so popular with readers must be terrible. As it turns out, I was wrong. But back to Wallander—a taciturn and solitary detective working the streets of Ystad, a small city on Sweden’s southern edge, with almost as many ghosts in his head as the villains he chases. Which is a way to say, Wallander is interesting. So all these many years later I tried only my second of Mankell’s tales: the short story, “The Man on the Beach,” which was originally published in 1999 in Sweden and translated into English in 2008. When a tourist from Stockholm, Göran Alexandersson, dies in the back of a taxi, everyone assumes the cause of death was a stroke or a heart attack. Alexandersson appeared healthy when he entered the taxi, and he had no obvious wounds. But Wallander, with the help of the pathologist, quickly determines Alexandersson’s death is more sinister. The tourist’s movements while in Ystad are unusual, too. Every morning Alexandersson took a taxi to nearby Svarte where he disappeared on the windswept beach until another taxi took him back to Ystad in the afternoon.    “The Man on the Beach” is a cool take on the impossible crime: How did someone kill a healthy man in a taxi without anyone noticing until after he was dead? As the story evolves it becomes apparent the how is less important than the why because the tale’s driver is something of a sociological puzzle about what motivates one person to kill another. And it works very, very well. Now I need to get brave and tackle one of Mankell’s novels.

I read “The Man on the Beach” in an out-of-print standalone Novellix paperback edition published in 2019; however, it is included in Henning Mankell’s collection, The Pyramid: The First Wallander Cases (2008)—check out the Kindle edition here and the trade paperback here on Amazon.

Review: "The Long Goodbye" by Raymond Chandler

The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler   Reviewed by Mike Baker   “The room was so quiet you could almost hear the temperature drop.” Marlowe’s occasional drinking buddy and lost cause, Terry Lennox, shows up on Marlowe’s doorstep, gun in hand, needing a fast ride to Tijuana, which Marlowe assumes means Lennox did something very bad. He doesn’t want to know, and he says so. Later, Lennox’s wife Sylvia is found naked with her melon smashed, dead as a graveyard, with Lennox discovered in a Mexican motel room, with a self-inflicted fist-sized hole in the back of his head. Next, Marlowe gets hired to watch a dangerous blackout alcoholic named Roger Wade, who also happens to be a bestselling author of historical action novels, bodice rippers, and genre fiction. There’s a connection between Wade, his wife Eileen, and the now-deceased Mrs. Lennox. ’50s LA shenanigans ensue. It took me a solid week to read the first 40 pages of The Long Goodbye. Marlowe describes his on-again, off-again friendship with Terry Lennox, which Chandler needs for the setup and the novel’s turn, but Chandler could have done the same thing in two pages. I almost quit the book but didn’t. And I’m glad for it. Chandler was watching his own wife die as he wrote the book, and, in retrospect, it feels like he was writing the way he might have been living—a little dead inside, punctuated by moments of clarity and pain. I kept thinking it could have been pages shorter, but not being Chandler’s equal as a word mechanic, I was at a loss for exactly how and where it could have happened. “The tragedy of life isn’t that things die young. It’s that they grow old and mean.” Chandler ends certain chapters, not by advancing the plot, but by describing nature—mockingbirds, mostly, living in the bushes and trees of LA. Both as metaphor and warning, they foreshadow the book’s hard, perilous direction but also rope in ideas one might have about a man lamenting his losses. It’s as if Chandler is playing a writing game whose single rule is to see how flat he can go, taking the reader to the edge of irritation and disdain before doing something interesting, thus causing the rubes reading the book to hang in one more time—literary chicken, if you will—a hardboiled1 version of The Aristocrats! Except it isn’t, is it? Something is grinding at Chandler, and thus Marlowe, who was always Chandler’s surrogate—a man of letters becomes a man of action. Except in this book, Marlowe keeps taking beatings. He’s ineffectual as a man and as a detective, seemingly a step behind. Again, this seems right because this isn’t The Big Sleep. Like the vigilantes are fond of telling the soon-to-be-dead, “This isn’t business, it’s personal.” There is the issue of Terry Lennox and Roger Wade. I stayed away from this in my review of The Big Sleep, where Marlowe is massively homophobic, which was common for the time, but to the extent that one wonders what he’s actually uncomfortable with: gay men, or his own secret unspoken love of dick. The Long Goodbye is different in that he consistently describes Terry Lennox as you would describe a crush. Again, it was more common back then, deep male friendship, and maybe more innocent. You either buy it or you don’t. An alternative, for me, has to do with Marlowe’s fundamental loneliness. Lennox is a lost soul like Marlowe. He’s drawn to Lennox because Lennox has standards. He won’t take help from his friends. Marlowe sees himself in Lennox. Lennox is a lost knight in tarnished armor, just like Marlowe.

Somewhere in the middle of the book, he meets historical romance novelist Roger Wade who says of his own books that he writes long books because people equate the length of a book with its quality. Wade is similar—another cynical lost soul, but he’s more than that. He’s an avatar for Chandler. A good writer, critiqued for writing genre, a drunk. Marlowe claims he doesn’t understand him. Chandler claims to not understand himself. This is all armchair psychology bullshit, but it sits steady in my thinking. The fact is, Chandler is the opposite of Wade. He isn’t a hack. He writes crime because it’s what he’s about. Wade is pure whore. One last note about The Long Goodbye, and it’s a spoiler, so, if you haven’t read it or seen the movie, stop reading NOW. I prefer the movie’s ending to the book’s ending2, and not because Altman’s ending is more clever—it’s because Chandler’s ending, is James Bond implausible and pulp magazine corny. Chandler was a better writer than that. Altman’s is the ending I wish Chandler wrote. I would 100% recommend you read this before you read any of the mediocrity most of us paperback original aficionados grind through as we desperately hunt for that absolute gem—but only if you’ve read The Big Sleep first. This is not for amateurs. This is for the die-hard believers, the windmill tilters, and the white knights adrift in a world full of darkness. “Cops never say goodbye. They always hope to see you again in the lineup.”

1.    I read a review of Philip Kerr’s March Violets where the reviewer accused Kerr of trying to out hardboiled the masters. He apparently never read the 2 pages Chandler spends pontificating on the different types of blondes, tragic or otherwise, and how Mrs. Lennox was something wholly never seen before in the blonde department. Chandler regularly out hardboils himself. He spends two pages cataloging the different types of tragic blondes but only four sentences describing the different reasons people become murders. This isn’t a criticism. It’s that he understood tragic blondes were more complicated than murders. 2.    Ironically, it turns out, the book’s long wobbly plot made it perfect for Robert Altman’s wobbly narrative approach, and while I’m not throwing shade on Chandler or the book, for a novel it’s better as a movie even if you think Eliot Gould is too laconic, mumbly, and irreverent to be Marlowe—he has the same cool detachment as Marlowe but seemingly stands back from his anger trying to objectively sort through the clues.

Check out The Long Goodbye on Amazon—click  here for the paperback.

 

Booked (and Printed): March 2025

 

Booked (and Printed) March 2025   Ah, Spring is in the air—wait, it’s snowing? Right now? March’s weather was topsy-turvy with a handful of warm days sprinkled like so many chocolate chips in a mostly chilly month. It was also a month that found my review writing for the blog woefully inadequate to my reading. Of the seven books and two shorts I read during March, I only wrote three reviews—one is for SKIN AND BONES AND OTHER MIKE BOWDITCH STORIES, by Paul Doiron, scheduled for release on May 13. In a phrase, Skin and Bones is great, but you’ll have to wait until May 12, a Monday, to read what I really think about it. Another is for the forthcoming true crime title, THE CLEVELAND JOHN DOE CASE, by Thibault Raisse, about a 2003 suicide that turned into an enigma when it was discovered the dead man had lived under an alias for decades. Scheduled for a Tax Day release, April 15, you’ll find my review on this same bandwidth on Monday, April 14. The final review, and the only one to actually appear at the blog in March, was for Henry Slesar’s terrific mystery story, “THE TIN MAN,” which appeared in the June 1984 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine—read the review here. Now for the other seven titles I neglected to mention even though, for the most part, they were damn good. PALMS, PARADISE, POISON, by John Keyse-Walker (2021), is the third (of four) Constable Teddy Creque mysteries. Set on the tiny Caribbean Island of Anegada, which is part of the Royal Virgin Islands, Teddy is battening down for an approaching hurricane when he receives a message from headquarters about an escaped prisoner named Marianna Orro, or as she calls herself, Queen Ya-Ya. A practitioner of Santeria, Queen Ya-Ya is not only scary, but she is dangerous, too. Teddy is sure Ya-Ya will run for a bigger island, but of course, she ends up on Anegada as the first ever prisoner in the island’s one cell jail. At least until she engineers an escape with what appears to the witnesses as mind control. Teddy chases Ya-Ya from Anegada to rural Cuba. Palms, Paradise, Poison, is as good as Keyse-Walker’s first two Teddy Creque novels; which is saying something because those earlier books were marvelous. The setting, while shifting from Anegada to Cuba, is as vibrant as ever—I could almost feel the sand between my toes—and makes for a nice respite from these cold Northeastern winters. The Santeria infused in the narrative made for some interesting reading, but the real treat is kicking around with Teddy for a few hours.

One of my reading goals for 2025 was to add more variety to my leisure reading. With that purpose in mind, I read Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch’s WW2 young adult novel, THE WAR BELOW (2014). The teenage Luka, a Ukrainian, escaped from a Nazi labor camp and is torn between returning to the camp for his friend Lida or making his way across the Carpathian Mountains to Kyiv where, he hopes, his father will still be alive. Going back to the camp for Lida is hopeless since it will put him back in the hands of the Nazis and so he decides his only choice is to find his father. Luka makes scant progress moving through the mountains in winter, but he does make a new friend and stumbles upon the Ukrainian Insurgent Army fighting the Nazis and then the Soviets as they push in from the east. There are some interesting discussions about Ukraine’s abuse by both the Soviets (both pre- and post-war) and the Nazis, but it was obviously written for younger teenagers because it lacked much of the nastiness of the conflict. The War Below is a good book for your teenage readers, but be ready to help them put it in context with the happenings of the 1930s and 1940s, both Nazi and Communist, because the narrative never goes much beyond Luka’s own story. My quasi-reading challenge with Minotaur Books led me to ONE MAN’S PARADISE, by Douglas Corleone (2010). Paradise won the St. Martin’s Press/MWA First Crime Novel Award and while it is obviously a first novel—the pacing isn’t perfect and the protagonist makes more than a couple wildly immature decisions—it is also a readable distraction. Kevin Corvelli, a New York criminal lawyer, comes to Honolulu to make a fresh start after failing to win an acquittal for an innocent client that was murdered in prison. Covelli vowed he would never work a felony case again, but when his office landlord, also a lawyer, drops a high-dollar murder case in his lap, all Corvelli sees are the dollars. The case is murky with at least three solid suspects, all with motive and opportunity, but what Kevin can’t see shapes the court case. Paradise’s setting is sharp and while the climactic ending is frayed with a where did that come from? feeling, it’s a solid debut and I’ll likely read more of Corleone’s work. I came to Joyce Carol Oates’s marvelous writing late in the game, back in 2015 when I took over Mystery Scene’s “Short and Sweet: Short Stories Considered” column and started seeing her stories in magazines and collections. But since then, I’ve been an advocate for Oates’s often surreal and always meaningful tales. Her 1992 novel, BLACK WATER, is a brilliant fictional retelling of the Chappaquiddick Incident where Senator Ted Kennedy crashed his car into a pond and his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, drowned. The names have been changed—Kopechne is “Kelly Kelleher” and Kennedy is, mostly, referred to as “The Senator”—and it is told from the perspective of the drowned woman. The effect of Oates’s evocative prose, the images of Kelleher’s life in flashback form, and the claustrophobic blackness of her drowning are powerful. Everyone should read Black Water because it is a literary powerhouse and it illuminates the feminine experience in America during the second half of the 20th Century. March also saw me return to Jack M. Bickham’s Brad Smith series, which has become something of a literary comfort food for me. DROPSHOT (1990), the second book in the series, is set on the Caribbean Island of St. Maarten and I enjoyed jumping into Smith’s world as much this time as I had the prior five or six readings I’ve made of Dropshot. Read my old gangster review here. And finally, the other short story I read, “ANYWHERE OUT OF THE WORLD,” by Swedish crime writer, Karin Tidbeck (2018), is a brilliant tale asking if the past ever dies. Four teenagers venture into the woods on a dark Swedish night looking for a mythical supernatural phenomenon, but only two of them return. Years later, the survivors find themselves back at the scene hoping to find something that will relieve their grief and guilt. But as everyone knows, personal tragedy has a long shelf life. Whew. Fin— Now on to next month…

Review: "Bitterfrost" by Bryan Gruley

 

Bitterfrost by Bryan Gruley Severn House, 2025   Bitterfrost, the first in a new mystery series by Edgar Award winner Bryan Gruley, is an uneven but memorable legal thriller set in Michigan’s harsh north country—about as far north as one can go before crossing to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Jimmy Baker—Bakes when he’s on the ice playing hockey—is a local legend. As a kid Jimmy played for the local hockey team, the Ice Kings, and later went on to play in the minors. As a professional hockey player Jimmy was a team enforcer, or a “goon,” tasked with intimidating opposing players with his fists. A role he did well, until he walked away from the game after sending an opponent to the hospital. Now Jimmy works at Bitterfrost’s ice rink, where the Ice Kings play, driving the Zamboni, nicknamed Zelda, and trying to piece his life back together after a divorce. Everything changes for Jimmy when two strangers from down state—read that as Detroit—are beaten to death. One was found near Jimmy’s house and the other outside the ice rink where he works. Jimmy is the logical suspect since he had a run-in with the men at a local bar the night they were killed and everyone knows Jimmy is violent. Jimmy’s friend, Devyn Payne—whose mother owns the ice rink and the hockey team—takes Jimmy’s case. What she finds is a labyrinth of crime wreathing just beneath Bitterfrost’s placid looking surface. Bitterfrost’s opening chapter is as close to brilliant as any you’ll read in popular fiction. It is atmospheric and claustrophobic as Jimmy awakens on his kitchen linoleum with no memory of the previous night. His knuckles are scraped, a bruise on his head, and a text on his phone he doesn’t remember sending. The narrative falters as additional characters are introduced, including the heroine, Devyn Payne, but recovers in the novel’s second half as all the pieces begin clicking into place. The small-town politics, especially the rivalry between the Paynes and a duplicitous bunch called the Dulaneys, are well crafted and impact the story just right. The bitter cold Michigan winter adds flavor, too. Bitterfrost is a tale you need to be patient with—there are a few contrived oh my God moments for the characters that are never shared with the reader—but the ultimate payoff is worth wading through the flaws.

Check out Bitterfrost on Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the hardcover.

Shorts: "Keep Out" by Fredric Brown

 

Keep Out by Fredric Brown   *     *     *     *   DAPTINE IS THE SECRET OF IT. ADAPTINE, they called it first; then it got shortened to daptine. It let us adapt. They explained it all to us when we were ten years old; I guess they thought we were too young to understand before then, although we knew a lot of it already. They told us just after we landed on Mars. “You’re home, children,” the Head Teacher told us after we had gone into the glassite dome they’d built for us there. And he told us there’d be a special lecture for us that evening, an important one that we must all attend. And that evening he told us the whole story and the whys and wherefores. He stood up before us. He had to wear a heated space suit and helmet, of course, because the temperature in the dome was comfortable for us but already freezing cold for him and the air was already too thin for him to breathe. His voice came to us by radio from inside his helmet. “Children,” he said, “you are home. This is Mars, the planet on which you will spend the rest of your lives. You are Martians, the first Martians. You have lived five years on Earth and another five in space. Now you will spend ten years, until you are adults, in this dome, although toward the end of that time you will be allowed to spend increasingly long periods outdoors. “Then you will go forth and make your own homes, live your own lives, as Martians. You will intermarry and your children will breed true. They too will be Martians. “It is time you were told the history of this great experiment of which each of you is a part.” Then he told us. Man, he said, had first reached Mars in 1985. It had been uninhabited by intelligent life (there is plenty of plant life and a few varieties of non-flying insects) and he had found it by terrestrial standards uninhabitable. Man could survive on Mars only by living inside glassite domes and wearing space suits when he went outside of them. Except by day in the warmer seasons it was too cold for him. The air was too thin for him to breathe and long exposure to sunlight—less filtered of rays harmful to him than on Earth because of the lesser atmosphere—could kill him. The plants were chemically alien to him and he could not eat them; he had to bring all his food from Earth or grow it in hydroponic tanks. For fifty years he had tried to colonize Mars and all his efforts had failed. Besides this dome which had been built for us there was only one other outpost, another glassite dome much smaller and less than a mile away. It had looked as though mankind could never spread to the other planets of the solar system besides Earth for of all of them Mars was the least inhospitable; if he couldn’t live here there was no use even trying to colonize the others. And then, in 2034, thirty years ago, a brilliant biochemist named Waymoth had discovered daptine. A miracle drug that worked not on the animal or person to whom it was given, but on the progeny he conceived during a limited period of time after inoculation. It gave his progeny almost limitless adaptability to changing conditions, provided the changes were made gradually. Dr. Waymoth had inoculated and then mated a pair of guinea pigs; they had borne a litter of five and by placing each member of the litter under different and gradually changing conditions, he had obtained amazing results. When they attained maturity one of those guinea pigs was living comfortably at a temperature of forty below zero Fahrenheit, another was quite happy at a hundred and fifty above. A third was thriving on a diet that would have been deadly poison for an ordinary animal and a fourth was contented under a constant X-ray bombardment that would have killed one of its parents within minutes. Subsequent experiments with many litters showed that animals who had been adapted to similar conditions bred true and their progeny was conditioned from birth to live under those conditions. “Ten years later, ten years ago,” the Head Teacher told us, “you children were born. Born of parents carefully selected from those who volunteered for the experiment. And from birth you have been brought up under carefully controlled and gradually changing conditions. “From the time you were born the air you have breathed has been very gradually thinned and its oxygen content reduced. Your lungs have compensated by becoming much greater in capacity, which is why your chests are so much larger than those of your teachers and attendants; when you are fully mature and are breathing air like that of Mars, the difference will be even greater. “Your bodies are growing fur to enable you to stand the increasing cold. You are comfortable now under conditions which would kill ordinary people quickly. Since you were four years old your nurses and teachers have had to wear special protection to survive conditions that seem normal to you. “In another ten years, at maturity, you will be completely acclimated to Mars. Its air will be your air; its food plants your food. Its extremes of temperature will be easy for you to endure and its median temperatures pleasant to you. Already, because of the five years we spent in space under gradually decreased gravitational pull, the gravity of Mars seems normal to you. “It will be your planet, to live on and to populate. You are the children of Earth but you are the first Martians.” Of course we had known a lot of those things already. The last year was the best. By then the air inside the dome—except for the pressurized parts where our teachers and attendants live—was almost like that outside, and we were allowed out for increasingly long periods. It is good to be in the open. The last few months they relaxed segregation of the sexes so we could begin choosing mates, although they told us there is to be no marriage until after the final day, after our full clearance. Choosing was not difficult in my case. I had made my choice long since and I’d felt sure that she felt the same way; I was right. Tomorrow is the day of our freedom. Tomorrow we will be Martians, the Martians. Tomorrow we shall take over the planet. Some among us are impatient, have been impatient for weeks now, but wiser counsel prevailed and we are waiting. We have waited twenty years and we can wait until the final day. And tomorrow is the final day. Tomorrow, at a signal, we will kill the teachers and the other Earthmen among us before we go forth. They do not suspect, so it will be easy. We have dissimulated for years now, and they do not know how we hate them. They do not know how disgusting and hideous we find them, with their ugly misshapen bodies, so narrow-shouldered and tiny-chested, their weak sibilant voices that need amplification to carry in our Martian air, and above all their white pasty hairless skins. We shall kill them and then we shall go and smash the other dome so all the Earthmen there will die too. If more Earthmen ever come to punish us, we can live and hide in the hills where they’ll never find us. And if they try to build more domes here we’ll smash them. We want no more to do with Earth. This is our planet and we want no aliens. Keep off!

Fredric Brown authored more than 200 short stories in the mystery and science fiction genres between the late-1930s and the 1960s. He was especially adroit at crafting tales of less than 1,500 words with humor and ironic twist endings. Mr. Brown died in 1972 at the age of 65.

© 1954 Ziff-Davis Publishing Co.

Review: "The Tin Man" by Henry Slesar

 

“The Tin Man” by Henry Slesar Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine June 1984   Henry Slesar is best remembered for his television writing. He wrote episodes for Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, The Man From U.N.C.L.E, and a bunch of other programs from the late-1950s to the 1980s. He was a maestro of the ironic twist ending so popular in 20th century television anthology series, and short stories from every generation. Speaking of short stories, Slesar’s output numbered in the hundreds. He primarily wrote science fiction and mystery for, in the beginning, pulps like Manhunt and Amazing Stories, before moving into digests like Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, and Galaxy. His 1984 tale, “The Tin Man,” which I read recently, is an unabashed example of Henry Slesar at his best. The henpecked Harry Budnar is a clothing salesman by necessity—his wealthy wife, Jasmine, insists he keep working—and a technology junkie by aspiration. When the unhappy couple arrive at their friends’ home, Tom and Fleur Polanski, Harry is astounded with the robot that answers the door. Rex, which is the robot’s name, can speak—it responds to Harry’s greeting with, “Hello, Dummy!”—it can traverse the Polanski’s cluttered house, and, once Tom has attached the arm, it will be able to grasp and lift objects. Harry is instantly smitten with the idea of building his own robot. A robot he is certain would be far superior to Rex. But, of course, the domineering Jasmine steps in with her demands and threats, which leaves Harry looking for a solution to his problem. It’s possible the well-read mystery reader may see where, “The Tin Man,” is going early in the narrative (or maybe not since there is a bastard of an ironic twist ending), but it is told so well—with humor, suspense, and an almost tongue-in-cheek style—that it doesn’t matter a whit. Harry as the downtrodden spouse is played perfectly and the reader, by increments, finds himself rooting for the less than perfect husband. The old school technology of the 1980s is fun, too. Did I mention the ending? It may or may not surprise you, but I guarantee it will make you smile.

What's New, Pussycat?: March 2025

Since my last What’s New Pussycat? post, all the way back on February 19th, five orphaned books have found sanctuary in my book loving home. Every solitary title fits squarely within my usual suspects—crime and mystery. The books came from a trio of sources in my home state of Vermont: 1) a HOPE Resale store in Middlebury; 2) Monroe Street Books, an excellent used shop with a bunch of mystery hardcovers from the 1980s and 1990s, also in Middlebury; and 3) Rutland City Free Library’s Friends of the Library book sale held March 14 and 15. I’m pleased with the take because these books (all of them) will be read much sooner than later. So, for your approval, here are my latest house-cluttering treasures…
BINO, by A. W. Gray (© 1988). This first edition from E. P. Dutton came from Monroe Street Books. While I’ve never read any of Gray’s work, I do have fond memories of seeing his novels on bookstore shelves in the 1990s. This one is about a hard charging and (perhaps) unethical criminal lawyer chasing justice from shadowy streets to the halls of Congress. My favorite line from the dust jacket reads: “Bino rubs everybody the wrong way, an ever-present thorn in the side of people who don’t like answering questions.” Which works for me. I’ll let you know more after it’s been read.
DEAD POINT, by Peter Temple (© 2000). This is the third (of four) books in Temple’s marvelous Jack Irish series. Irish is a former high-flying lawyer living on his wits since his wife was killed a few years earlier. Now he does low-level legal work, odd jobs, which are usually unscrupulous, for a horse gambler. In Dead Point, Jack is hired to find part-time barman, Robbie Colburne, but his investigation puts him eyeball to eyeball with some very bad dudes. The first three Jack Irish novels, including Dead Point, were translated into excellent Australian television movies starring Guy Pearce. After those movies aired between 2012 and 2014 it transitioned into an even better television series that ran for four seasons. The copy of Dead Point I picked up from HOPE is a tie-in edition published by Australian publisher, Text, in 2014.
DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS, by Walter Mosley (© 1990). This is the 30th anniversary edition published by Washington Square Press in…wait for it—2020! It, like the last book, came from HOPE. I’m ashamed and saddened to admit I’ve never read any of Mosley’s sixteen (so far) Easy Rawlins books, which Devil in a Blue Dress is the first. But I’m planning to make amends in the next few months. If you don’t know, the series is set in post-WW2 Los Angeles. Easy is a war veteran just fired from his defense factory job when he is hired to find a missing white woman, Daphne Monet, with a habit of frequenting black jazz clubs. Devil in a Blue Dress was made into a watchable (but not great) film starring Denzel Washington as Easy released in 1995. It’s worth a viewing if you haven’t seen it, but I’m betting the book is far better.
KILLER GORGEOUS, by Jane Holleman (© 1997). Holleman is a new writer for me and I let this 2004 mass market reprint from Pocket Books sit on the Friends of the Library bookshelves for a few months. But I should tell you, I looked at it, read the blurbs, and even read the first few paragraphs during every sale from the first time I saw it to this last time when I stole away with it. It's about an abused socialite wife, Allison Robbins, looking for a way out of her nightmarish marriage. But—as one would surmise, things go sideways and…well, that’s all I know. A quick search for Jane Holleman netted only three books—Killer Gorgeous, Hell’s Belle and Holy Terror—published between 1997 and 1999.
THAT LEFT TURN AT ALBUQUERQUE, by Scott Phillips (© 2020). This is one of those early days of COVID releases that flew below my radar. When I saw the first edition from Soho Crime in the HOPE store it was a no brainer to rescue its beautiful self and take it home. Phillips is an old hand at writing stylish crime—his most famous is, perhaps, Ice Harvest (2000)—and from what I gather, That Left Turn at Albuquerque is pretty damn good. What I know, a bankrupt lawyer named Douglas Rigby hatches an art forgery scheme that depends on precision and a large cast of players with their own agendas. What could go wrong, right? What I don’t know—if any of the narrative actually takes place in Albuquerque. I’ll let you know.