Mystery?
This weekend I decided to read A Drink Before the War, the first book in Dennis Lehane’s Kenzie/Gennaro mystery series, and I admit my feelings about it are mixed. On the one hand, the guy can write—I knew this about him from reading a couple of his stand-alones, and in this one he really paints a vivid picture of both characters and environs, with an atmosphere that has all the gritty feel of the streets of Southie in Boston that we have seen in the movies.
On the other hand, the mystery wasn’t much, it was resolved a little too easily, and everybody in this book was so dark and dour that it was hard to fight against the mood seeping into my daily life. It may account for why I haven’t done much of anything during the past couple of days—a depressed mood makes for lethargic behavior.
I don’t want to jump too quickly to the conclusion, however, that this series (and this writer) are not for me; if I had stopped, for instance, with Still Life, the first book in Louise Penny’s Armand Gamache tales, I would have missed out on a lot, but that first volume was among the worst three in the entire series of 19 and counting.
I liked the main characters of Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro quite a lot—enough to want to know what happens to them next. But the story of corrupt politicians, depraved drug lords and their street gangs, and the misery and death that both sides bring to almost everyone around them was a little too much for me. You couldn’t call this noir, since that subgenre’s protagonists have nothing of the hero about them, which isn’t true of Kenzie and Gennaro. But the protagonists of noir are victims, suspects, or perpetrators, and the two private detectives featured here also share those aspects in the course of this story. They are gloomy, they are pessimistic, and there isn’t much that’s pretty about their lives. Still, there is definitely a good-guy/bad-guy divide here that has the pair on the right side, mostly.
To compound my mood, the next book on my list (just arrived on my Kindle from the library) is California Bear, the brand-new book from Duane Swierczynski, who is known for his noirish way with a plotline. I do, however, have an upbeat, kind of funny story that goes with that book (I’ll tell you all about it when I write the review), so that may salvage my attitude going into that one.
Another old faithful
I first discovered the books of Robert Crais when I picked up one of his stand-alones at a library sale, and that one—Demolition Angel—remains a favorite; I think I have read it three or four times over the years. I found and read his other stand-alone novels, and liked them all quite a lot (my next favorite being The Two Minute Rule), so then I went on to his series, based on a private detective named Elvis Cole and (after book #10) his enigmatic pal, Joe Pike. The first Elvis Cole book is The Monkey’s Raincoat, and he’s pretty much on his own until The Watchman, which is Cole’s 11th outing and Pike’s debut.
I have an up-and-down relationship with these, because I find them to be somewhat uneven. Elvis is kind of a goofy guy, always joking around (although he takes his work seriously), and sometimes there’s just too much tongue-in-cheek banter. Joe Pike is the ultimate wordless action hero, and sometimes there’s too little personality there to make you care. And the mysteries are sometimes compelling, sometimes weird, and occasionally implausible. So although I think I have read most of the series (which is long—10 books for Cole, nine with Cole and Pike, and another seven with just Pike), I never know whether I will finish up the current book with a sense of satisfaction or feel vaguely let down.
In general, however, this is a reliable series and, like Michael Connelly’s Bosch, Elvis lives in the Hollywood Hills, so all the terrain is familiar to this Los Angeles resident, which is always a bonus. Who doesn’t like to be able to know exactly where the characters are and what things look, feel, smell, and taste like while reading a book? Or maybe that’s just me? Crais is particularly adept at both scene-setting and dialogue, having been (before his career as a novelist) a screenwriter for the TV shows Hill Street Blues, Cagney & Lacey, and Miami Vice. These, coupled with his love for such writers as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, gave him the basis for his mysteries.
Anyway, I just finished the latest offering in the Cole+Pike batch, called Racing the Light, and it definitely didn’t disappoint. Although it starts out with everyone (i.e., the reader and Elvis himself) thinking that Adele Schumacher may be paranoid and possibly crazy when she asks Elvis to find her son, plunks down a bag full of cash, and starts talking about aliens and government conspiracies, it soon becomes clear that there is something going on with “Josh Shoe,” a controversial though small-time podcaster.
It seems that Elvis isn’t the only person looking for him, and the others are a few steps ahead in their search. Elvis needs to figure things out fast, before these guys with their sophisticated resources and extra knowledge do something permanent to keep Josh from telling what he knows. What starts out as humoring a mother about her maybe-missing adult son (who could just be ducking her calls because he’s trying to live his life) turns into a deadly race to save him from himself before he gets caught and dealt with by some people with a lot to lose if he exposes them.
Joe Pike is enlisted in the search and he, in turn, calls on Jon Stone, a former government “spook” with both connections and equipment a private eye can’t access, but this one will strain all their resources to figure out the magnitude and complexity of the government corruption over which Josh has stumbled.
Elvis’s private life also expands a bit in this one, with the return of his sometime girlfriend Lucy Chenier, who retreated to Baton Rouge a few books back after it became clear to her that the lifestyle of a private eye was too precarious for her to want it affecting her young son, Ben. But it’s been a few years; things have changed. Ben has grown up into a self-reliant teenager, and Lucy has realized that her overprotectiveness may have masked personal doubts, so she’s back to explore options, to Elvis’s simultaneous delight and dismay.
This was a solid offering, and I read it with quite a bit of breathless anticipation, particularly in the second half when the action starts to heat up and the players begin to come into focus. I don’t want to downplay the series too much; Crais won the Anthony and Macavity Awards for The Monkey’s Raincoat, and was nominated for the Edgar Award; and a later title, L.A. Requiem, was a New York Times and Los Angeles Times bestseller. So if you’re looking for a “new” series that has been around for a while and will therefore give you many hours of reading pleasure as you catch up, then check out the first Elvis Cole book, and also look into his non-series novels. (One of them, Hostage, is also a Bruce Willis movie….)
The Book Adept 