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![]() By Jesse Sublett APRIL 26, 1999: Believe it or not, mystery musketeers, there are people in the world who maintain a certain snotty conceit that all genre fiction is somehow inferior to so-called "literary" fiction, that Hammett was a hack, that the MacDonalds (John D. & Ross) were mediocre. Indeed, it's a mystery to me how true book lovers could develop such nasty prejudices. In my book, one of the most awful consequences of ghettoizing crime lit is missing out on the rarefied pleasures of books like Michael Connelly's Angels Flight(Little, Brown & Co., $25 hard), the most recent outing for the brooding LAPD homicide detective Harry Bosch, a lone wolf in the same class as Spade, Marlowe, and McGee. Howard Elias, a controversial civil rights lawyer, is murdered on the eve of another one of those L.A. trials that threatens to blow the city sky-high. The convoluted, paranoia-laced plot ricochets across a landscape made up of specters and symbols overloaded with meaning: the fabulous Bradbury building, Frank Sinatra's star on the Walk of Fame, the corner of Florence and Normandy (where L.A.'s chickens of infamy come home to roost once again), and that wonderful noir monument and metaphor, the Angels Flight railway, whose rumbling steel "X" links together the different planes and crazy counterbalances of downtown L.A. Like the corrupt and smoldering city around him, Bosch's private life once again implodes as his wife abandons him to the oddest kind of brooding solitude to be found in that place at the far western end of the American rainbow -- an island called conscience.
The Crook Factory (Avon, $24 hard) might sound like the title to the next Parker caper, but in fact it's a novel by genre-jumping author Dan Simmons, who has won various kudos for his previous novels. In The Crook Factory, Simmons reimagines the espionage activities conducted by a spy ring led by Ernest Hemingway (actually called "The Crook Factory") in Cuba during World War II. Not only is this intriguing premise fact-based, but Simmons' story, Hemingway's escapades as a spycatcher, submarine-chaser, and all-around wartime spy-guy, are "95% true," says the author's note at the end of the book. It takes more than a true story to make a riveting novel, however; what Simmons does in the way of exceeding expectations is something like taking a flamethrower to a recently issued stack of the two dozen next-best historical novels. The Cuban setting is deliciously portrayed with all the throbbing pulse and color one might hope for, and the big man himself makes his first loud, blustery, smelly (I mean that in only the best sense) appearance on page 48, a larger-than-life force of nature, a self-imploding human whirlwind that stayed with me long after the end, almost 400 pages later. Cleverly underplaying his hand, Simmons uses a Hispanic FBI agent named Joe Lucas (assigned to keep tabs on Hemingway's operation) to reveal Hemingway to us. It's a good device. Before going to Cuba, Lucas has little previous knowledge of the famous author; as he explains to his boss, J. Edgar Hoover (drawn with appropriate sliminess), he doesn't read "make-believe books." Thank goodness for this make-believe book. In the fine tradition of what "Papa" once opined was the best kind of writing, it seems "truer than true."
Vietnam also haunts the protagonist of another uniquely different crime series set in the Pacific Northwest in the late Seventies. Although the tone of Steve Oliver's novels isn't quite as dark as Kent Anderson's, it certainly is noirish, highly personal, and intoxicatingly surreal. Moody Forever (St. Martin's, $22.95 hard) is the second novel in Oliver's series about Scott Moody, a recovering schizophrenic who moonlights as a cabbie; he's also a divorced Vietnam vet with a four-year-old daughter. While barely hanging onto the margins of the world the rest of us take for granted, Moody manages to stumble into the kind of off-center criminal scenarios that often leave him wondering whether he should believe his own eyes or chalk it up to hallucinations. This time, Moody investigates the murder of his rich girlfriend's father, and doggedly pursues a shaky trail of leads all the way to a mysterious sanitarium in the desert that seems to be running cruel and highly lucrative con games on people who'd like to live forever. Ironically, while unraveling the shenanigans of a gang of crooks peddling the dream of eternal life, Moody is battling his own obsessive preoccupation with death and dying. Oliver's writing is loaded with irony and an off-center soulfulness that is addictive. I find myself rooting for this seriously dysfunctional hero, with his slippery grip on reality and permanent outsider status. With his pathetic efforts to prevail against evil while trying to hold on to a job and a girlfriend and an apartment, Moody knows full well that the stakes are not only his life but his mind. I look forward to his next adventure.
Guys and gals alike who know noir will be familiar with the name of Leigh Brackett, who either wrote or co-wrote great films like The Big Sleep, Niagara, and The Long Goodbye. Brackett also wrote the cordite classic Rio Bravo as well as The Empire Strikes Back (which is dedicated to Brackett in the film's credits), almost two dozen novels, lots of short stories, and lots of teleplays. Many years ago, after constantly seeing Brackett credited with so much work that I admired, I started wondering just who this Brackett character was. Another person who became curious about Brackett was the great director Howard Hawks. After reading Brackett's powerhouse hard-boiled novel, No Good From a Corpse, in 1944, Hawks told his secretary to call "this guy Brackett -- he'd be good to write the screenplay of The Big Sleep with Bill Faulkner." As it turns out, Hawks made a great decision. However, the director was wrong about one thing: This guy Brackett was a woman. One helluva writer, Brackett enjoyed a long, prolific career in film, television, and print that proved that she could not only write in almost any genre but strike gold wherever she dipped her pen. Now the novel No Good From a Corpse, a hard-hitting, atmospheric mystery in the vein of Raymond Chandler, has been reprinted in a collectors-edition quality volume (Dennis McMillan, $35 hard) that also includes eight of her crime fiction short stories, an introduction by Ray Bradbury (Brackett mentored Bradbury in the Forties back when he was a struggling nobody), an afterword by Michael Connelly (whose decision to write crime fiction was sparked by her adaptation of Chandler's The Long Goodbye), and a bibliography and filmography. In case you, too, have been wondering "who this guy Brackett is," or you just want to plop down into 557 pages of top-notch storytelling, No Good From a Corpse gives a lot of bang for the buck. It'd be a crime to pass it up.
Readers who are unable to find the Dennis McMillan titles reviewed above can access http://www.dennismcmillan.com or call 520-760-8642.
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