On the television, the sound turned off, the Oklahoma bombing was
unfolding,
hours after the explosion. The shades were drawn, the air conditioner
on high,
I sat in a chair drinking mineral water, lost in the back streets of
Boston
while in the middle of a hot afternoon in a faceless motel pitched at
the
outskirts of Eagle Pass. Somewhere, friends of mine were getting ready
to make
a movie; we would drink fruit drinks in Mexico that afternoon, but now
I was
lost in my greatest luxury, spending the idle hours reading detective
fiction.
Locale, with the city or town almost as a character, has been central
to the
detective story since Sherlock Holmes’ London. Most of the American
detective
series that started in the early part of the century that come to mind
were set
in New York City, including Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe, S.S. Van Dine’s
Philo
Vance, Arthur Train’s saintly lawyer Ephraim Tutt, and the young Ellery
Queen
(Tutt and Queen did venture outside of NYC regularly). Other detectives
lived
elsewhere around the country: Earl Derr Bigger’s Charlie Chan was
Honolulu’s
Chief of Police, but he always seemed to be traveling. In the
hardboiled
detective fiction of the Twenties and Thirties, locale became a
defining
characteristic, especially in the work of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond
Chandler. There is such a constant evolution in genre fiction that it
is stupid
to try and claim who was first – early Black Mask writers located their
detectives in specific cities and sometimes described those cities
well.
However, Hammett and Chandler, though different writers stylistically,
wrote
stories about not just the detective but the atmosphere he breathed and
walked
through, and moral environment reflected as a physical one. Hammett’s
Spade and
unnamed Continental Op are both of San Francisco; the town and its
style
defined them.
The development over the past 30 years of tough guy/woman detective
mysteries
has as much to do with regionalism as it does with feminism, sexuality,
and
philosophy. Male or female, the detective lives in a specific place
(you could
find your way around Houston reading a David Lindsey novel; he is that
geographically specific, which makes his moral ambiguity more
haunting). A
number of the current detectives are in or have been in long-term
relationships, and there is just as likely to be a scene where sex is
turned
down because of commitment than easy conquest. The classic hardboiled
detective
has evolved into a more sensitive but still tough person whose main
drive is
still moral order in the universe. Battered and bruised, knowing more
than
anybody about the seamy underside of life by the nature of their job,
these
detectives believe, and because they believe, na�ve as that might
seem,
these are moral tales.
I first encountered this new regionalism in Robert B. Parker’s
Godwulf
Manuscript in 1974, which introduced a prototypical detective.
Spenser
lives in Boston, but he is a gourmet cook with a taste for fine wine
and good
beer. He is also very tough. Early on the series (20 or so titles now)
he
settles into a steady relationship with a psychiatrist named Susan,
introducing
a new kind of sensitivity toward and portrayal of women. I began
reading Robert
Parker while still living in Boston and followed the series when I
moved to
Austin. A new Spenser tale was like visiting an old home, where the
streets
resonated with meaning and I knew all the landmarks, always one of the
lures of
Parker’s books. But after about a dozen books, the series went a little
insane
about Spenser and Susan’s relationship, it got too weird and too
meaningful,
imploding in the pages of A Catskill Eagle, which was frequently
embarrassing to read.
Late morning in Eagle Pass I was back in Boston, reading the new
Jeremiah
Healy novel Rescue (Pocket Books, $20 hard). Healy’s John
Francis
Cuddy is another detective in the now-classic Boston mode. He is single
with a
longtime girlfriend, an attorney, to whom he is devoted. He is smart
and likes
good food and he is a knight fighting the moral fight. His job as a
detective
is not to catch philandering husbands or track down corporate spies but
to
right moral wrongs, to bring justice as much as one man can.
Last year, during a torrid detective-novel weekend, I read his
Shallow
Graves, about the murder of a Boston mobster’s granddaughter, and
Foursome, about the murder of two couples at their Maine
vacation home.
Healy is not a great plotter, but his books are especially rich in
character
and in setting. Healy takes you deep inside the
story and its
people,
sweeping you along with detail and character. In Foursome, we
get to
know the couples who died, various family members, business associates,
and
local townspeople near the vacation home. Healey progresses his plot by
character. The basically dumb story in Foursome and the
contrived plot
in Shallow Graves are not considerations until after you’re done
reading.
Rescue goes unimaginably further than either of those two
earlier
books. The conclusion is so disturbing that any plot flaws fade. Good
Samaritan
Cuddy pulls over to help a young girl and boy whose clunker has broken
down by
the side of the road. The boy says, “If I ever get lost or anything
will you
come get me?” The next day, Cuddy sees a photo of the car in the paper.
The
young girl has been found dead, the boy has disappeared. Cuddy sets out
to find
him, because he promised he would. The trip leads him from his hometown
of
Boston to New Hampshire, and then to the Florida Keys and a dangerous,
secretive cult lead by a charismatic preacher. The story is often
unusually
brutal and the ending twisted. But you go along with Cuddy through most
absurdities because his voice is so reasonable.
Linda Barnes’ voice is her greatest charm; the six foot-plus Carlotta
Carlyle,
cab driver/detective whose boyfriend is a Mafia don’s son and her house
tenant
a crazed punker, comes across as one of the more humorous and
reasonable people
around. I only picked up Steel Guitar (Dell, $4.99 paper) because
I love the Danny O’Keefe song she quotes in the title. Barnes quotes
most of
the song at one point, and it’s hard to resist repeating:
…Carole once told me
She dreamed she was pretty
And lived in a very cool part of the city
With a man who came home
every evening at six
and begged her to play
his favorite licks
on a steel guitar
(on a real guitar)…
The song is appropriate to the story of Dee Willis, an old friend and
ultimately a romantic rival (she ran off with Carlyle’s husband), a
one-time
back-up singer finally making it big on her own. One night, she
coincidentally
steps into Carlyle’s cab and soon the detective is involved in tracking
down an
old friend who seems to be mysteriously blackmailing Willis, claiming
authorship of her songs. The story gave a good sense of the music
scene, with
some terrific club scenes in blues and folk venues, and neatly captures
Boston.
Steel Guitar is the third Carlyle book and there is at least one
more.
The following night, before I left the next morning, I stayed up too
late
reading Robert Parker’s Double Deuce (Berkley, $5.99
paper) as a
chaser to this long visit to Boston. After I quit Parker for a number
of years,
a backlog of new unread Spenser novels accumulated. Somewhere in there,
he
recovered from his relationship obsession and more or less returned to
form. I
now dip into them randomly, not really following any chronological
order,
though with most detective series, the closer you stick to their proper
order
the better.
Spenser is Die Hard for the paperback set, as Spenser and
his pal,
the super-human Hawk, tackle the world in an ongoing buddy movie that
as often
as not uses violence to settle everything. Double Deuce involves
trying
to solve a drive-by shooting in the Boston slums at the same time
Spenser
experiments with living with Susan. The action rips along, and though
it
presents no long-term solutions or even hints, Spenser’s confidence in
a
seemingly collapsing world is its own reward. Early on, Parker aimed
for art,
but now he’s content with entertainment, which may be art after all.
This piece started out as reviews of new books, but unintentionally
I found
myself spending hours back in Boston. I hadn’t realized the Barnes book
was set
there, and hadn’t really planned on reading the Parker (I had a stack
of Craig
Rice, but that’s another story), but after Cuddy and Barnes, he was a
natural.
And there I was in different Bostons – yet the same Boston, a real
Boston –
during those two days in Eagle Pass. Outside, the sun beat down and a
small
army prepared to make a movie. Inside, I sat secluded in
air-conditioning,
reading detective novels, visiting Boston.
This article appears in May 5 • 1995 and May 5 • 1995 (Cover).