Soho Press/Syndicate Brings Joseph Hansen's Dave Brandstetter PI Series Back Into Print -- All 12 Titles! (First 3 NOW)

[Originally published at New York Journal of Books]

Fadeout marks the debut of one of the twentieth century’s most memorable investigators. With this re-issue, a new generation will experience both Hansen’s rich writing and taut plotting, and a compelling view of how life may have, in many ways, changed for the better.

The Syndicate Books re-issue of Joseph Hansen’s 12 Dave Brandstetter crime novels begins with three titles at once, an excellent idea—because cracking open the first one, Fadeout, is an immediate reminder of why Hansen’s writing was startling and delectable in 1970. The Californian “death investigator” for an insurance company has much of the authority of a police officer to nose into questionable deaths, without having to focus on the law so intently. And he is, as publisher Paul Oliver says, “Tall, handsome, smart and successful.”

But author Michael Nava in his introduction to the re-issue nails the remarkable aspect of this neglected series: “Hansen is not only one of America’s best mystery writers, he is a great American writer. Period.” Nava asserts that the reason crime fiction readers don’t know Hansen’s books is their focus on the lives of gay men. Hansen’s investigator struggles with his committed relationship to another man, and all the cases he focuses on in this series involve men loving men.

They also include the brassy reality of gay nightclubs, paid sex, and vulgar drooling that objectifies both young men and older ones. But in each of the books, the motives for crime (and the pain Brandstetter feels) are always linked to love. A direction of love that was, at the time of writing, downright illegal and considered immoral and “sickening” by many.

Hansen’s writing steps away from those harsh edges through elegant description as well as page-turning plot and action. It also provides gorgeous examples of the Golden Age of American detective fiction, like this:

“In twenty years you could say and do a lot you wish you hadn’t. In twenty years you could store up a lot of regrets. And then, when it was too late, when there was no one left to say ‘I’m sorry’ to, you could stop sleeping for regret, stop eating, talking, working, for regret. You could stop wanting to live. You could want to die for regret.”

Or, of course, you could decide that killing someone else would ease your pain.

Fadeout opens with Brandstetter’s arrival in a box canyon above a California ranch town. An insured man’s car has been found in a dangerously flooded river, apparently accidentally landing there from a slick and risky wooden bridge. But no body has turned up. Should Brandstetter’s company pay out the life insurance benefit? Not if the man hasn’t died. And that’s what Dave Brandstetter must determine, through tracking down family, friends, recent activities, and yes, the course of love. All this, while he’s eye-deep in grief himself at the death (from cancer) of his 20-year partner, and blaming himself for the small things he could have done better, the added love he could have displayed, across years of tenderness and loyalty.

This kind of portrait of homosexual love turned preconceptions upside down when the books came out, of course, and for many, it still may.

When the break in the investigation arrives, it comes wrapped in the moody film ambience of the time: “A smoldering Valentino in white riding breeches ought to have been waiting in the motel office. It was a silent-movie set. Slot windows in deep white walls, guarded by grilles of black iron. Black carved beams, black chandelier. Floors of square red tiles. Tapestry-backed chairs with brass studs and gold fringe. But it wasn’t Valentino. It was Ito in a tidy white jacket.”

When this motel clerk pulls out a registration card and shares the information, Brandstetter is on his way to solving the case, although more risk and death follow. Neatly twisted and elegantly resolved, Fadeout marks the debut of one of the twentieth century’s most memorable investigators. With this re-issue, a new generation will experience both Hansen’s rich writing and taut plotting, and a compelling view of how life may have, in many ways, changed for the better.

 PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.  

NOTE:  Books 2 and 3 are also out now -- and reviewed at the New York Journal of Books: DEATH CLAIMS and TROUBLEMAKER.

Crime Fiction from Canada: RUNNING FROM THE DEAD, Mike Knowles

Other than Louise Penney's work, books by Canadian authors are often slow to reach the US. I was glad to receive (from ECW Press) a copy of the eighth book by Mike Knowles, RUNNING FROM THE DEAD, for review this season. The book came out in June, and it's well worth tracking down via bookstore order on an online retailer.

Private investigator Sam Jones has spent six years searching for an abducted 8-year-old. He's taken plenty of other cases during that time but hunting for Ruth Verne's child never left his priority list, and he regularly reports in to the grieving but ever-hopeful mom.

What he certainly never expected was losing his own tight control upon discovering what had happened to the child and confronting the perpetrator. As Jones starts to face his own shattering reaction, he believes he has only a short time—maybe days—before he'll have to answer for what he's done, to the police and the justice system.

So when he finds a cryptic pair of scrawls in a coffee-shop bathroom that sound like they're from a girl or young woman being held captive, his inner clock starts ticking: If he couldn't save Ruth Verne's son, can he at least rescue someone else's daughter?

Of course it's more complicated than that, and more horrifying, too, as Jones digs into the worst corners of his city on the hunt for the young victim who's asked for help. 

And he can't get away from what the young women's former foster mom says to him:

Norah wiped away her tears with the back of her hand. "You're not here for her. You're here for you."

"Yes," Jones said.

"You're here for hope."

Jones nodded.

Norah took two fists of his coat. "I don't care if you're not here for her. I don't care, because you think you can bring her back. She's still out there and you think you can bring her back. Please—please bring her back to me."

"I'll try."

"Do better than that. Promise me."

Jones gently took hold of Norah's hands and pulled her fists away from his chest. "This world hates promises. All I can do is try."

Knowles leavens the plot by including some unforgettable characters, from the barista willing to pitch in, to an aging reprobate doing his best to cast off his daughter's efforts to make him go straight. RUNNING FROM THE DEAD swerves back and forth between emotion and action, with tight twists of plot and highly satisfying surprises. 

It may have taken a while to get hold of a Mike Knowles crime novel—but now I'll be watching hard for more. And by the way, if you need a comparable to think about ... think Travis McGee, but even better.

PS: Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

Joseph Finder's #4 for PI Nick Heller: HOUSE ON FIRE

[originally published in the New York Journal of Books]

“. . . [this is] the charm of a Joseph Finder novel, tugging readers into identifying with the PI, even without ever carrying a weapon or sneaking up on a suspect themselves.”

In book 4 of his Nick Heller series, House on Fire, Joseph Finder merges the traditional private investigator role of his PI protagonist with a dangerous form of industrial espionage: prying into the family secrets of the corporation behind a powerfully addictive opioid. The enormous wealth of the Kimball family, built on their share of the drug economy, is rooted in family guilt as well. And the minute Nick starts prying, he’s a target for those willing to protect their secrets and fortunes by any means possible.

You’d think Nick would realize this and decline the case. But as Finder demonstrates so deftly, Nick’s heartstrings are vulnerable to old loyalties. In this case, the funeral of his army buddy Sean, who saved Nick’s life in the service, summons Nick to support the grieving widow and kids—and sets him up as a target:

“One woman stood out from the other mourners. She was a hippieish woman in her thirties, wearing a busily colored fringed, crochet-knit shawl over a black dress. I’d noticed her before, at the church, sitting off by herself. . . . She didn’t look like she came from here. I couldn’t figure her out. My first thought was that she was a journalist, but then I ruled that out—she was dressed too nicely. I also had the strong feeling she’d been looking at me.”

Susan Kimball, it turns out, is there to recruit Nick to infiltrate her family’s compound and extract an important file of results: ones that showed how addictive the Kimball fortune-making drug would be, well before it gained approval for the marketplace. Susan, or Sukie, wants justice for the drug-related deaths, and is willing to help Nick expose the research hanky-panky.

In the big crowd of guests at the grand estate, unexpectedly Nick finds his his former colleague and lover Maggie. The two can still trust each other, and swap some details, discovering they’ve got parallel assignments to pursue. Good thing to have some companionship, because nothing among the Kimball crowd is as direct or honest as it may look, and by a third of the way through this investigation, Nick and Maggie are dodging murderous plots right and left. Even Sukie might not be playing straight, despite what she’s got to gain from Nick’s potential success.

Finder provides a straightforward suspense thriller in House on Fire, turning up the action and tension with each scene. When Nick tracks down the original whistle-blower for the pharmaceutical scam, the tension goes global, too, with connections to Eastern Europe. Soon one of the other Kimball family members suggests that Nick will need to tackle a necessary murder in order to get through the case: “‘Every document of civilization in also a document of barbarism. The son wants to redeem the sins of the father but at the same time he’s necessarily implicated in them, right?’”

Talk high philosophy to Nick, and you provoke him into questioning everything else he’s getting told—which is the charm of a Joseph Finder novel, tugging readers into identifying with the PI, even without ever carrying a weapon or sneaking up on a suspect themselves.

For those who follow the latest scandals of real-life pharma companies, some of the revelations in House on Fire will seem straight from the news. But fear not, Finder always has another twist ready, and the best of them involve loyalty, friendship, and compassion. Buckle up for a good read.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

California Noir in Fresh Memes, from Jonathan Lethem, THE FERAL DETECTIVE

[Originally published in the New York Journal of Books]

When Arabella, an Oregon college student, vanishes into a Southern California desert cult, it’s Phoebe Siegler’s call to action—because Arabella is the daughter of her best friend and somebody needs to do something, right? A referral near a mountain retreat connected with both Buddhist monks and Leonard Cohen leads Phoebe to a highly eccentric local detective who may be able to help. So The Feral Detective, one of the strangest and deepest mysteries of this year, begins as a missing-teenager case, only to morph into looking at what’s missing in Phoebe herself.

Of course, she doesn’t see herself as having issues, other than her tremendous rage and grief surrounding the 2016 presidential elections. (Somebody needs to do something!) Obviously, private eye Charles Heist, with a live opossum in his desk drawer and a wild young woman burrowing into the blankets on the office couch, is a prime candidate for Phoebe’s judging and labeling. In fact, she tags him as “the feral detective,” using a term that most of us only attach to starving and flea-bitten cats that won’t accept affection. Is it the investigator who fits the term? Or is it Phoebe herself, with her abrupt sexual approach and immediate aggression toward the people she meets?

To get a hint at where the missing Arabella may be, PI Charles Heist opts first to assist a group of “homeless” people (really quite at home in their scrap of vulnerable land) to evacuate from a massive gully—a “wash”—before the oncoming rain sweeps them away. They may already know Arabella. Phoebe accepts the role of sidekick for the effort, doing something that’s more productive than her usual routine of watching and hating the politics of the moment. Then suddenly Heist leaves her at her hotel and takes off with some of the rescued outdoor folks:

Then came a strange time. In the hours before Charles Heist reappeared and took me away in his truck again, I entered a kind of spell or pall as if the small hotel room were a kind of tunnel too, and I’d been left behind instead of rescued. I stripped off my soaked clothes and took a hot shower, and while one part of my mind urgently wished to scrub off the mud of the Wash, the rank smell of the tunnel and of my homeless companions in the cab of Heist’s pickup, another part mourned some loss I couldn’t specify. I felt I’d been allowed to taste Heist’s world, teamed with him in pursuit of abjectly hopeless tasks in a pit in the rain. And then I’d been expelled.

But Heist does return, with a hint of where to look for Arabella: amid the often dangerous vagabonds, hippies, and outcasts who make up a pair of opposing cults out in the desert east of Los Angeles. Is Arabella caught up unwillingly in a massive feud between two groups known as the Rabbits and the Bears, or is she about to take part in a ceremony that will turn her into a desert queen? If Phoebe and Charles do extract her, will Arabella consent to go home with them?

Jonathan Lethem’s writing weaves together the surreal and the heart-wrenching, and Phoebe’s strong dark voice speaks with the same alcohol-soaked despair as in the earlier Los Angeles noir. At times, she sounds like one of the PIs of the 1930s, harsh, unlovable, able only to attack the world that refuses to accommodate her.

Readers of classic noir will recognize and bond to Phoebe’s gruff assessments of her case and her life (post-election trauma, anyone?); imagine Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain crushed in the latter-day typewriters of Lisa Brackmann and Taylor Stevens, then dried out under a desert sun. Complex, tragic and comic at once, and utterly memorable, Phoebe and her “hired gun” become memes for all of us trapped in political quagmire and questions.

But going deep isn’t the only way to read The Feral Detective: It’s also one of the most unusual, unlikely, and un-put-downable PI novels ever.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

Mystery Writers of America 2016 Grand Master: Max Allan Collins

As Dave and I reflect on the past year's adventures among mysteries and their authors, we're especially pleased at the announcement that arrived on November 29 from Mystery Writers of America: naming Max Allan Collins and Ellen Hart as the 2017 Grand Masters.

Today's my day to write a bit about Max Allan Collins and his books. With more than 100 titles, Collins has carved out more mystery, detective, and thriller terrain than any five ordinary authors put together. His most noted series may be the Quarry books, which feature a US marine sniper who returns from the Vietnam War and becomes a professional assassin. It began in 1976 with Quarry and continues, as Quarry in the Black was issued this year.

But for noir fans, the top series is the one with Nathan Heller, where this Chicago "pulps style" private investigator tangles with noted personalities of the 1930s and 1940s. This series is also still running -- this year's title was Better Dead.

The moment I knew that the writing by "M.A.C." had permanently marked my own life and thinking was the evening I finally watched the film version of his 1998 graphic novel  Road to Perdition. Tapping into the American experience of the Great Depression, the story reminded me of what's unique about both our history and our choice of narrative in American crime fiction.

I'm a fan of Collins's blog, where his back stories take on fresh life, at http://www.maxallancollins.com/blog. His reflections on life events, like his prolonged climb to survival of several health events in the past years, as well as the Grand Master award, are told clearly and with some power and a lot of thought -- here's a recent snippet:

I’ve been reflecting on the Grand Master this past week, the only troubling aspect of which is that it’s a reminder that a long career preceded it, and that the remainder of that career will be much shorter. Life achievement awards are something people try to give you while you’re not dead. So that part of it is sobering.

Though it takes years to amass a writing career that brings the Grand Master title your way, Collins is only 68, and with luck and care, we'll have many more of his books ahead. In addition to the ones I've mentioned (see the lists at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Allan_Collins), he's written film novelizations, and co-wrote with others, including his wife Barbara; one of his acknowledged mentors, Mickey Spillane; and Matthew Clemens.

Another aspect that I appreciate is his filmmaking side, which leads him to provide intriguing critiques of others' films as he sees them (an entertaining wrap-up of his 2016 viewing can be found here). And then there's his work on Eliot Ness of The Untouchables. Wow!

Dave and I could barely catch our breath when we finally met this writing legend, at a Bouchercon a few years ago. I see we still have a few of the books for sale that he signed for us then (click here), and he was generous enough to keep signing for a long, long time, as Dave brought many titles, some quite scarce. (The photo here shows Collins at foreground, and Matt Clemens at center.)

Last but not least, Collins's writing and warm friendships bring him lifelong fans. For an enthusiastic and knowledgeable sample of what comes from those friendships, enjoy the write-up from Kevin Burton Smith.

Yes, we'll provide material on Ellen Hart later; the Grand Master awards are presented in April, so there's time to keep reading and thinking about what these authors mean to the mysteries field.

Just a reminder: We're still ready to give away a stack of Ed Gorman paperbacks -- Gorman, like Max Allan Collins, was an Iowa resident. Details here.

PS:  Looking for mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

Great New PI Mystery from D.P. Lyle, DEEP SIX, an Alabama Case

With a publisher name like Oceanview, it's easy to suspect the new detective title from D.P. Lyle might be set in Florida -- but no, even better, it's on Alabama's Gulf Coast and it's a lively investigation laced with both humor and danger.

And expertise! D.P. Lyle isn't just an award-winning author of crime fiction. He's also a forensics expert consulting for the top TV crime shows and is the expert I'd most like to know was coming to a crime-novel dinner party, because he's quick to correct the scenes and the reasoning. In other words, his firearms and 'tec services make sense. Thank goodness!

But who knew (from that background) that he could also be so entertaining? Well, the truth is, although I take note of his forensic pointers regularly, this is the first time I've read one of his crime novels ... and I'm going to have to gather up some of the others soon. There are already three series (see Lyle's website) and DEEP SIX launches the fourth.

Jake Longly is a former pro baseball player, and the last thing he wants to do is work in the family business, private investigations, for his dad Ray. But he's not above taking an occasional surveillance job for a bit of cash flow. Unfortunately, checking on a possible womanizer for his father's caseload puts Jake into the neighborhood of his suspicious and assaultive ex, who's good with a baseball bat. Escape from the situation takes Jake and his classic car directly into the circle of a gorgeous beach bunny, Nicole, who turns out to also be a very smart script writer -- and eager to assist in "surveilling" while also, umm, taking part in adult activities with Jake.

Add a Ukrainian mobster, a high-money land grab, and some deft legal and risk-taking twists, and it looks like Jake Longly could get hooked on the adventurous side of his dad's PI business, after all. That is, if he and Nicole can survive!

With a quick pace, great scenes, and "murder and mayhem" right and left, DEEP SIX promises a lively new series ahead for D.P. Lyle and Oceanview. Add it to the summer reading stack, for sure!