David Thayer

Wellington Leg, the 12th Ultimo: fearing scandal the cabal controlling this blog have assembled in a remote hunting lodge near the mountain village of Appalachia in the hopes of divvying up the media empire’s vast riches. Local sheriff Rico Fermi shared this insight from a duck blind a quarter mile from the lodge: “The first thing I noticed was all the limos. We only have one limo in town and it’s a Plymouth station wagon.”

The Plymouth has a flat tire according to Mechanic Mike who didn’t want to reveal his real name or Amazon Ranking. “A fat guy in a white shirt stopped for gas. He asked if I’d seen Paris Hilton. I’m like, what? Is she missing?”

Rumors to the contrary notwithstanding the gathering at the lodge includes the Boys from Philly, the Boys from Jersey, forty Lincoln Towncars and two guys from Cleveland. Some of them wore teeshirts that read “Blogger” and were observed playing bocce.

DCI Borchardt and the Flying Squad are standing by. Their late model Dodge Charger is in the shop so they may have to run to the lodge should the need arise. “I’m really backed up,” Mike the Mechanic said. “I hope Fat Joey shows up tomorrow. It’s like everybody in town is missing.”

Appalachia’s population is 456. In the summer that number rises to 457 for the Annual Cheese Hunt during which residents hide things from one another. Drew Bledsoe reporting.

The Night Gardener

Headline: God is Crying

George Pelecanos writes his stories from the ground up. Setting is more than background in THE NIGHT GARDENER, where the neighborhoods of Washington DC are as integral to the storyline as the characters. The novel covers the decades between the Reagan era and now, an informal history of powder cocaine’s progression to crack, and the violence that has destroyed a generation of black families in the process.

Pelecanos’ latest novel is a procedural with a twist. The novel opens at a crime scene in 1985, a scene that involves a veteran detective and two rookie cops. The veteran, TC Cooke, is black; the rookies white; Cooke begins to realize the murders are part of a series of killings and vows to find the man responsible.

The opening paragraph is vintage Pelecanos: The crime scene was in the low 30s around E, on the edge of Fort Dupont Park, in a neighborhood known as Greenway, in the 6^th District of Southeast DC. A girl of fourteen lay in the grass on the side of a community vegetable garden that was blind to the residents whose yards backed up to the nearby woods.

No doubt about it, you’re in Pelecanos country.

Twenty years later on those rookie cops from the opening scene works in the VCD, the violent crimes unit of the DC police. Gus Ramone is assisting the primary detective in an investigation into the death of Asa Johnson, a teenager gunned down in a community garden. The murder shares characteristics with the unsolved homicides known as the Palindrome murders.

Dan “Doc” Holiday is an ex-cop fired from the force after an investigation linked him to a prostitute. Gus Ramone led the IAD team that busted Holiday. Holiday discovers Asa Johnson’s body and reaches out to TC Cooke, the man who worked the murder case twenty years earlier. Though retired and suffering the effects of a stroke, Cooke remains determined to solve the Palindrome case, and believes he knows who did it.

The NIGHT GARDENER is a novel whose back-story is the story. The unsolved murders from the past expose the fault lines running through the DC Police, and the unresolved issues among the principal characters. Gus Ramone is wary when Dan Holiday owns up to discovering Asa’s body; the mistrust is mutual and there are plenty of active cases for Ramone to handle.

Mayhem is occurring in real time, courtesy of Romeo Brock, a young gun who sees what he wants and takes it. Romeo has robbed a drug dealer of his money and his woman. Romeo wants more. His older cousin, Conrad Gaskins, has vowed to keep an eye on Romeo. Gaskins is living on paper, parole, and he knows where Romeo is headed, to prison or the morgue. Gaskins wants to walk away, to lead a normal life. This excerpt with his cousin exposes the flaw in Romeo’s thinking:

“You shouldn’t go anymore. We got money.”

Gaskins shook his head. “You missin my point, Ro.”

“Cousin, we are rich.”

“And how you think that story’s gonna end?”

“Huh?”

“Every story’s got an ending,” Gaskins said.

Romeo Brock doesn’t how to quit while he’s ahead. His crimes keep the VCU detectives hopping, but Gus Ramone is fixated on the death of the teenager, Asa Johnson.

Asa was a friend of Gus Ramone’s son, Diego, a student in the same school. Ramone is investigating more than a murder; he’s trying to get inside the life of a teenager, his teenager, while getting through the day as a Violent Crimes detective. He’s enrolled Diego at a suburban school in the hopes of protecting him, but his good intentions have unforeseen consequences.

Gus is struck by a remark made by Terrance Johnson, the dead boy’s father. Standing in the drizzle, Johnson says, “God’s crying.”

Gus Ramone does the heavy lifting for the first half of the book. Ramone’s personality is low key, he’s a systematic detective, and Pelecanos devotes considerable time to the details of the squad’s routine. The precision with which this aspect of the story is described is both a strength and weakness in the narrative. Gus is not as interesting as Dan Holiday or Romeo Brock, and despite all the cameos by the others, this is Gus Ramone’s book.

Musical references are a Pelecanos signature. A standout in this book is Freda Payne’s BRING THE BOYS HOME. The song’s refrain is “bring them back alive,” something every mother in the District wishes whenever their child leaves for school or hits the street. The details that infuse the story, songs on the jukebox, the bars people frequent, the brand of cigarettes they smoke, are nuances that reveal the characters’ place in the scheme of things. Romeo Brock pays homage to another era by smoking Kools, while an enforcer for a dealer tips his ball cap at an angle that says he’s strapped.

Pelecanos maintains a strong narrative presence, mapping his turf with an explorer’s eye. House by house, block by block, he knows where his characters are, and wants the reader to know when eye contact will get them killed, how to read body language, the swagger, the dip and the roll.

Once Dan Holiday reenters the story, Pelecanos kicks it up a notch. The pace of the novel quickens, resembling a thriller rather than a procedural, as Pelecanos rolls out a series of scenes designed to create tension and suspense, the things you’d expect in a crime novel. Romeo Brock gets his due in one of the few violent scenes in the book; his undoing exposes a crooked cop, and a connection to the Palindrome murders.

Without spoiling the ending, it’s fair to say that THE NIGHT GARDENER takes a different path to resolution than many commercial novels would dare. The author has ambitions beyond the genre, ambition that invokes the tradition of the social novel and what it reveals about society. What we learn is more than a history lesson about the impact of crack cocaine’s arrival in DC. Contrary to what his character has to say about every story having an ending, Pelecanos shows us that the opposite is true. This is a story that has no end in sight, only fresh faces and new names, following a well-worn path to oblivion.

David Thayer is a freelance writer and author of the blog ONE MORE BITE OF THE APPLE. He’s a published poet whose work has appeared in an anthology as well as literary magazines. He has recently completed a crime novel, one of a series about cops in the NYPD’s Intelligence Division. He lives in Seattle with his wife, Diane, and can be reached for comment at: davidwthayer@msn.com.

Unless you’re writing a period piece your novel’s characters can’t devote a ritual hour in search of a pay phone. Younger readers may not know what a pay phone is unless they saw the movie with Colin Farrell, the ultimate in phone booth tyranny from which there was no escape.

The 1950s were the Golden Age of Pay Phones. In those heady days a person could wear a trenchoat and fedora, smoke a Chesterfield, and for a nickel, make a call. Doing any or all of those things today might result in arrest. Besides, your character either has a cell phone or access to one; sure the battery will fail at crunch time and then it’s possible to write the gotta find a pay phone scene.

My favorite pay phone scene would include the following elements: a rural setting, a dusty crossroads in Texas, a strong southwesterly breeze, a countdown of some kind, and thirty or forty minutes of frantic driving ( gotta…find…a pay phone.) Let’s add a bullet wound.

Happy ending: Pay phone found on a deserted crossroads in Deaf Smith Country. Call to the Governor goes through. Bullet wound heals.

Unhappy ending: Pay phone doesn’t work. A fat guy with beady eyes tips the phone booth over. You lose three quarters and a pint of blood.

Crime fiction can be stretched and pulled in many directions, toward the literary, toward the pulp. Kate Atkinson delivered CASE HISTORIES a few years back, a reluctant crime novel that introduced Jackson Brodie the thinking PI. One of the many pleasures of the book was the author’s fresh view of the baroque world of good and evil; Atkinson has a dangerous sense of humor, one that leaves the reader not quite sure which side of the great divide she stands on.

ONE GOOD TURN takes the parable of the Good Samaritan on a fast tour of Scotland where criminal enterprises are a cottage industry. Jackson Brodie is back from France, a tourist in Edinborough. His girlfriend, Julia, is appearing in a stage production, one of those fringe theater undertakings that friends and loved ones are required to attend. Jackson senses a certain detachment in Julia, an insight akin to noticing a tornado has touched down in your garden. If this were the good old days and ONE GOOD TURN was at the local drivein, patrons would be standing on the roofs of their cars begging Jackson to wake up.

Jackson’s state of mind is crucial to this narrative because we spend vast amounts of time in Jackson’s head fretting about Julia. There are other things to occupy him: mysterious Russian maids, a dead body that vanishes in a tidal pool, a deranged killer bumping off witnesses to a road rage incident, a feckless writer, and the utterly brilliant housewife, Gloria.

ONE GOOD TURN never quite finds a unity of purpose with social satire competing for the lead followed by a crime story wrapped in the doom of failed relationships. The top of Jackson’s emotional range is confusion. He’s a man lost in an array of choices presented by financial independence but isolation is his default position.
There are excellent character studies to be found here although Martin Canning, himself a crime writer, is too much of a caricature, victimized so often and so freely that his presence on the page wears thin. Events offstage embroil point of view characters in criminal conspiracies. Thus the innocent Gloria meets the wily Tatiana while Gloria’s husband, Graham, beeps toward oblivion in ICU. Graham’s misdeeds have set off much of the story’s action catalogued by the author through witty observation.

Kate Atkinson loves misdirection, ensnaring the reader in set pieces that seemed disjointed but have a purpose. Great swathes of this novel are fun to read, others are frustrating. ONE GOOD TURN is to crime novels what Doris Day movies were to comedy if Doris stepped out of character to launder money rather than iron shirts.

Dateline: The Corner of Wall and Broad, Wellington Leg. Financial reporter Stanley Morgan, who lost his shirt on the Tigers-Yankees ( why oh why didn’t the Yanks sign the Earl? Or the Duchess with her career numbers against Kenny Rogers?) reports that Google may be interested in buying Earltube a service available only to Ostrogoths at the moment.

Earltube employs the technology of the paper towel cylinder: after squinting into one end of the tube you see the face of someone else, a sibling perhaps, on the other end. “Ostrogoths have been playing earltube for a long time,” noted Professor Moriarity. “They’re known for 20-20 vision.”

Stanley is flying to Mountain View and then to Seattle. “We’re trying to get Voltaire’s Miasma into Starbucks,” he said.

Dateline The Piltdown Exchange: Traders in the blurb pit went wild this morning after the Blurb Report was released by the Department of Agriculture, Popculture, and Miscellaneous Culture. “A record number of bushels hit the market,” said Pit Boss Kramer V. Kramer. “Blurbs are flourishing, despite the cold snap in Magna Graecia.” Magna Graecia is known as the “blurb basket of civilization,” according to former Navy Seal Edna Millay. “We’re seeing plenty of scrambling and short covering,” she said.

Traders cite several factors in the amazing harvest: the earl’s imprisonment, Mitch Albom at Starbucks, the early withdrawal of Roman legions to winter quarters and the new Blurb Channel on Wellington Leg Tonight. The new satellite has enabled viewers in Goth and Henley Hornbrook to tune in for the first time since Green Acres went off the air. The “blurbathon” was a big hit with viewers; contest losers were given a tour of HRH J Mansfield Prison and a bouquet of zucchini squash.

A Mr. Darcy of 24 Heiligemackerel Strasse was presented a copy of Voltaire’s Miasma for growing the largest blurb. “Utterlyunputdownable” was his glowing summation of the earl’s masterwork. “I can’t get the crazy glue off my fingers,” he complained. Crazy glue makes the earl’s work “unputdownable,” added Professor Moriiarity. A basket of Euro futures was contributed by Hedgehog Fund Manager Edwina Angst. “Very decorative,” she said.

Lars Kierkegaard, Publicist of Gloom, Volvo master mechanic, has given up trying to promote books. His startling decision is outlined in an essay entitled: It’s Not Raining, But it Will Be wherein Lars notes the absence of moving parts in modern literature: “When novels are brought in for service we often cannot identify what is wrong,” he lamented. “The owner leaves the shop disappointed.”

Lars and his team at Ballard Volvo have diagnostic equipment geared for all sorts of popular fiction. “I have factory specs for chick lit, romantic fantasy, cozy crime, hardboiled, fantasy, and books Rick Moody will nominate for awards,” Lars said. “All of my technicians are certified by the International Critics and Mechanics Association,” he added.

Lars pointed to his largest bay devoted to variations on the theme: “Ja, here is where we focus on the derivative stuff; very difficult to repair.” A stretch of sunny weather has complicated matters for everyone in Ballard. “It’s October, is it not?”

A wave of crime novels from Scandinavia has cheered Lars. “Winter in Sweden…murder in Norway. This is the stuff we need or else we’re all living in California.” Lars is reconditioning his 1982 Volvo 240D. “Head gaskets,” he said. “Always head gaskets.”

Dateline Wellington Leg: With signs of Autumn everywhere and antimaccassar not as appealing as it once was ( even the accidental attachment of lace to one’s sleeve can have serious career implications. Look at Derek Jeter) citizens are forming book clubs in record numbers according to Raoul Duke of the Census Bureau. “We’re still counting them,” Mr. Duke said, “we’re using a big computer.”

Mrs. Dalloway of 13 Prerafaelite Road has formed a club to read the earl’s masterwork Voltaire’s Miasma. “It’s perfectly hideous,” she said, referring to the Roman soldiers harvesting pumpkins from her garden. Calls to the police have gone unanswered she said. “I’m not sure that they, the Romans, have the slightest idea what a pumpkin is for,” she added.

Private Investigator Scooter confirms the report. “I found the battle standard of the Tenth Cohort of the Valeria Victrix Legion in Mrs. Dalloway’s garden.” DCI Borchardt, who arrived at the scene dressed as Desdemona ( we can only speculate as to why) reported that the “vestigial remains of a pumpkin…with seeds…was discovered near Hizzoner’s reserved parking space at the Prince of Denmark Shopping Center.”

A lace doilie discovered at the scene “probably dates from the Ninth Century,” a police official said. “It’s difficult to read with all this chaos,” admitted Mr. Duke. The really big computer used by the Census Bureau threw a rod shortly before the afternoon rush. “We’re still counting things,” he said. “One lace doilie, one pumpkin. Quad erat demonstratum.”

I’m sure by now our corner of the blogosphere is bursting with articles about the literary-genre divide which, for the average person, is an invisible crack in the sidewalk. I’m sure you recall avoiding sidewalk cracks, I certainly do, but the invisible variant was created by Billy, the only kid I knew equipped with 3D glasses. Billy called you out for stepping on invisible cracks. I had no idea he would go on to a career in marketing, or that he would wear his special 3D glasses many stories above the pavement in Midtown as a guru hired by industry so that Billy could tell them what it was they did for a living. This is how hedge funds were created. The Shopping Network. Billy did away with tokens to create the Metro Card; tokens were fun because you could stack them on your night table and feel prepared for the week.

Right after he dropped acid, Billy became a publishing guru. Believing  the stop lights on 57th Street to be the Aurora Borealis, he set out to bring clarity to the book world. He saw four thousand pin holes in his ceiling tiles and knew that if bookstores were divided into four thousand sections, he could spend the rest of his days drawing helpful diagrams, maps really, to navigate his burgeoning creation with the help of teenagers hired to direct traffic. Thus the wandering customer would be directed to the subcategory their interest demanded, or be told “we don’t carry that,” if the whim struck.

It has occurred to Billy that his device may be confusing to some and that many a weary customer, most of them middle-aged, lack the pioneer spirit to comb through the sections in search of that elusive book. Some are discouraged and leave without buying anything other than water to combat dehydration. Under fire, Billy created a New Releases Table heaped with all sorts of books with only their newness in common. New is the best genre of all. New: it even sounds good.

Dateline: Publishers Row. Publishing executives in New York are concerned that their fall releases will overwhelm the stalwart handful of readers lurking in these United States. Due to the nature of licensing agreements they are not worried about readers beyond these shores even though they add up to about one billion people. One third of the readers of this blog reside outside the US; this is an international operation.

Simon & Schuster reached out to bloggers to garner reviews for Imperium: A Novel of Ancient Rome. They did not to reach out to this reporter despite the fact this blog contains three Roman legions, albeit sporadically, that is, whenever they attack Wellington Leg. What in the name of viral marketing does that imply?

Daniel Menaker, President of Random House, compared the Web to a teenager’s bedroom. Abandon all hope ye who enter here. He goes on to say that the Web cannot be ignored which I think means that a teenager’s bedroom can be. Random House is sending Charles Frazier on the road by means of the automobile, a relatively new technology still prone to mechanical breakdown.

Jerome Kramer of Kirkus Reviews says “publishing is caught up in the blockbuster mentality,” not a new observation, but apt perhaps in this backend loaded flood of holiday time releases. Many believe the publishing industry is looking to Hollywood to explain the business model of crisis management. Hollywood produces bad products with quick turnaround times. My thought on the subject is this: have confidence in what you publish and develop a modern distribution system. Bookstores offer a Depression era model of terms of trade, By that I mean thier policy of retuning unsold books. So the anxiety in New York really isn’t about the books, but the way they are bought and sold.

I think this awkward relationship has been left by the side of the road, not by design, but through the brutal efficiency of technology. The angst approaches the existential when book people contemplate the obvious question, who is the consumer? How will the need to connect with readers play against the fearsome power of a handful of buyers? If you’re placing too much product into too small a funnel, do you fix the product, produce fewer books, or get a new funnel? That’s the business problem facing Publishers Row.