David Thayer

There are people who can be happy anywhere. I am not one of them. Cornelia Read’s opening line to her debut novel is both a shot across the reader’s bow and the opening salvo of a restless mind at work.

Madeline Dare isn’t the average crime-solving protagonist. Living the life in Syracuse New York, Madeline has a husband she loves in a town where lime Jello with shredded carrots is a perfectly acceptable alternative to endive and arugula, a place where extremes of heat and cold are observed from the pebbled contours of genuine Naugahyde.

A pair of dog tags trigger Madeline’s search for the killer of two young women years earlier. A farmer near Syracuse found the bodies; the staged crime scene had been photographed, the cops had gone through the motions but the investigation ended without an arrest. The dog tags belong to Madeline’s cousin Lapthorne. He is her favorite among a group of wealthy relatives who adorn the north shore of Long Island in graceful decay. Much of the story’s inner workings are a brilliantly drawn portrait of wealth and its effects on the generations born to it. “Really chic Manhattan women smoke their lunch,” says Madeline’s mother. Rail thin women and bizarre WASP eating rituals are integral to Madeline’s perpetual state of flux, of not being happy anywhere, to the manor born but not bred.

Guilt pushes Madeline to uncover the truth about the double homicide everyone else has forgotten. The postindustrial wasteland propelled her ancestors to great wealth and privilege leaving the Rust Belt to fend for itself. “The Rose Girls” died at the hands of persons unknown, their deaths fodder for the local newspapers. Madeline is writing fluff pieces for a Syracuse weekly and from this wobbly perch sets out to find the truth. Anchored by her husband’s relentless common sense, she risks more than she knows in her quest for resolution.

No spoilers here; A Field of Darkness follows Madeline through enough small town corruption and big time decadence to establish the plot’s logic, but the story is secondary to the sheer skill of its teller, or as Madeline puts it, “watching Fellini and Wodehouse drop acid.”

A friend of mine once veered to the side of the road when he came to the border between The Bronx and Westchester. “Do you know what that is?” he asked, pointing across the street. “That’s the Midwest.”

Cornelia Read sets the tension between Upstate and Downstate before shredding this Maginot Line with a fusillade of wit and observation. The result is a terrific read, a dark comedy of crime and deferred punishment, family dynamics and veiled menace.

A few more books have trickled in as Good Friday and Passover provide a respite from commerce if only for a few days. Stock exchanges are closed and not a single member of the military establishment has sought Don Rumsfeld’s resignation since late Thursday. Say what you will about the Bush administration, train wreck, Nixon without the laughs, it takes a lot of effort to alienate retired generals, hippies, Latinos, African-Americans, women, a handful of white guys, and Republican lawyers with shotguns. Let’s give them an A for effort. I think Scooter Libby summed it nicely when he said he wasn’t going to hide behind the president who told him to leak Valerie Plame’s name to the press after her old man failed to find Saddam’s hand in the yellowcake.
Here now the books: Days of Rage by Kris Nelscott. Black Panthers. Weathermen SDS. Trisha Nixon’s engagement. Two of these form part of the background for this novel set in Chi-town circa 1968. Smokey Dalton is underground to protect his son who witnessed the assassination of Martin Luther KIng and knows James Earl Ray didn’t pull the trigger. The Days of Rage was an event planned by the Weathermen during the Chicago Eight trial; with this charged set up Kris Nelscott writes a novel about dead bodies in a rundown Queen Anne home in Chicago. It’s intriguing and well written but the devil is in the details and there are a lot of details about architecture, building maintenance, and how to avoid riots in the Loop. I like Smokey and empathize with his dilemma but the pacing undermines the tension. The new science of forensics (1968) doesn’t feel new. Smokey is a careful man and Kris Nelscott is a careful writer and this book feels cautious and restrained.

If you’re scoring at home you might think how come so many titles from SMP Minotaur are mentioned on this blog? Is the earl some sort of paid flack? Sadly no. They send a lot of books for review; TWB, Hachette, does too. Harper Collins does in fits and starts. Because the staff here at One More Bite of the Apple is imaginary, they don’t do a lot of actual work, no matter how many memos I write. Luckily it rains a lot here.

Regular readers know Sara Gran is one of our favorite authors but what you don’t you is how quickly that’s come to be true. With Dope and Saturn’s Return to New York she stormed the granite face of preferences and forced open the creaky gates of my mind. I hate that. Before my mind closes for spring cleaning and Pedro and Martha seize what remains of my awareness of current events I offer this informal review of Come Closer.

Come Closer is marketed as a horror novel, a genre that I run from. As the story of Amanda and her inner demon unfolds the inadequacy of labels is revealed. Sara Gran accomplishes this feat with a low key approach to a subject matter burdened with monster movie expectations wringing tension from the depiction of an ordinary life going off the rails. This is a balance beam story in which the slips and falls are structured to appear minor if disconcerting. Central to the story is the study of how two people can live together without connecting to the inner life of either one. Ed may be an archetype, but as much as he anchors Amanda, he drags her down with his allergy infested vision of normalcy.

Come Closer is Sara’s second novel, soon to be released in paperback. Fans of her understated style will enjoy and appreciate her take on urban isolation, loneliness, the quiet battle for the soul in upmarket Brooklyn.

I’m not sure of the release date for Ken Bruen’s latest hardcover from SMP Minotaur. There was great rejoicing in the newsroom when this one landed on the desk of senior reviewer Allan Pennypincher. Allan is on maternity leave ( his wife is pregnant) so we swiped it and carried The Dramatist off while phoning a dental appointment to the temperamental Ms. Demedici whose phone skepticism was palpable. SMP is releasing The Magdalene Martyrs in paperback this month. Drop everything and read that when it comes out. Unless you’re flying a 747, natch.

SMP just released Hardscrabble Road by Jane Haddam, author of the Headmaster’s Wife. The new release is part her series of Gregor Demarkian books set in Philadelphia. I sense a little hearkening to Rush Limbaugh in the plot that involves a right wing commentator busted for prescription drugs.

Debts of Dishonor by Jill Paton Walsh is out. She is a Booker Prize nominee; this is an amateur sleuth novel featuring Imogen Quy; the setting is Cambridge University. The release date is April 12, 2006 and the publisher is SMP Minotaur. The contact person at SMP is Lauren Manzella. Lauren is also handling publicity for Penumbra by Caroline Haynes, coming out on April 10th. Penumbra is set in Mississippi in the 1950s and is billed as a literary thriller, darker than her previous novels.

There is a discussion on Sarah Weinman’s site about the PI novel. Where is the genre going? It’s hard for fans and experts to judge what constitutes a PI novel. Publishers seem convinced that gimmicks are required to attract readers; I’m convinced that readers of PI hate the gimmicks. Talking dogs? Crime solving cats? It was bad enough when men who aren’t afraid to cry became a fixture in back-stories. Enough already. Let’s dump the issue into Michael Koryta’s lap.

Sorrow’s Anthem is a traditional PI novel. Set in Cleveland it tells the story of Lincoln Perry, an ex-cop from the neighborhood where a murder and arson case leads the cops to an old friend. Lincoln wants to help Ed Gradduck clear his name. Ed is killed, run down by cops surveilling him. Lincoln has an older partner and a semi-professional relationship with a reporter named Amy. Without revealing plot points of his complex tale, the story goes where expected, into the maw of crime and law enforcement on Cleveland’s gritty streets.

Think of Sorrow’s Anthem this way: take a muscle car from the Sixties, remove the flames from the hood, take the dice from the rear view mirror. Now you’ve got a fast car that growls through traffic, draws glances from cops, frightens accountants at stop lights. A stripped down ride that will blow the doors off dad’s SUV. Go ahead, give the other guy the finger.

This is a PI novel. Michael Koryta isn’t selling it any other way. His prose is as clear as his purpose, he lays the story down without apology. His bad guys emerge the way they should; innocent people are victimized, and the heroes put things straight. Lincoln grinds through the lies and the cover-ups to discover what killed his friend, what killed his neighborhood. The story is personal; it is told in the first person, with the trade-off of limited point of view for the emotional jolt the technique delivers. Koryta keeps a tight rein on the pacing, which is slower than a thriller, more layered. The ending is over written and seems to drag once the focus shifts away from the action, but, overall, this is the kind of book that makes the tattered old PI look fresh and honest.

Holmes on the Range is Steve Hockensmith’s debut novel, published by St. Martin’s Minotaur imprint. It tells the story of two brothers, Gustav and Otto Amlingmeyer, a pair of cowhands in Montana. Gustav, aka Old Red, is a fan of Sherlock Holmes while Otto, Big Red, does duty as narrator and sidekick in the Watson tradition. A family of British royals owns a ranch called Bar VR, where an unfriendly foreman and his brother are up to no good. After Gustav and Otto sign on as ranch hands, Gustav hones his powers of deduction after the Duke, his daughter, and assorted minions arrive at the ranch.

Murder and mayhem ensue in this western with a mystery twist. Hockensmith knows his terrain, offering enough period detail and cowboy lore to keep things moving. The Amlingmeyer boys are enjoyable characters, providing the narrative charm rather than force. The plot is a bit confusing and the resolution low key; to appreciate the work, a love of westerns is required. Gustav’s adaptation of Holmesian deducifyin‘ will either grate on your nerves or give you a chuckle, depending on your predisposition.

This is not the kind of book that will have you wake up screaming; the tension level fluctuates from low to mid-range. The western is one of the toughest genres for writers to work in these days, and to the author’s credit, he steps right up and takes his shot. The dialogue is witty while maintaining the flavor of the era; dialect is Steve Hockensmith’s strength and he sticks with it throughout the book.

Bloggers like Ed Champion and Mark Sarvas sink their teeth into Sunday book review sections and Sarah Weinman does her weekend roundup. Tod Goldberg reads Parade. Miss Snark catches up on her industrial strength efforts to educate us with a well deserved rest. The Earl enjoys waxing the Bentley even if the heavy lifting is done by Depew. Sundays have a cadence, even Super Bowl Sunday.

Marilyn Stasio opens her review of Dope by calling it a historical mystery. Read until first anachronism. Toss. Hey, Marilyn, there’s coffee all over my keyboard. She admits to becoming intrigued with the story which is little like having second thoughts after dropping Solly the Shiek into Sheepshead Bay with concrete loafers on his feet. He was a nice guy. Good old Solly. Toss.

I fear Ms. Stasio is adhering to the decimation principle, you know, kill every tenth soldier in the formation as an object lesson to the others. While she smokes historical mysteries, certainly innocent bystanders here, she never quite gets her shoulders squared to the plate for a real at bat. Dope is a historical mystery, Truman Capote was a chubby bald guy, New York is a really big city, and this review of hers manages to be superficial, condescending, misleading, and banal. Here is how I approach reviews in the NYT: read about reviewer. Read opening line. Toss.

Today is the official release date of Sara Gran’s novel Dope. Sarah Weinman posted a link to an article by Bruce De Silva who says that the novel “is the first great noir novel from the mind of a woman.” Raymond Chandler and Jim Thompson are mentioned as points of comparison; Sarah’s post generated a heated debate in the backlogs with comments from Laura Lippman, Cornelia Read, David Montgomery and Tribe lighting the scoreboard. Jump over to Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind for the community take on the article.

I don’t compare authors in my written reviews, but it doesn’t mean I don’t think of them, I just don’t write them down. Comparisons in book reviews make me crazy although that’s a personal quirk, not a mission statement. When I read Dope and Saturn’s Return to New York, Sara Gran’s first novel, I enjoyed her spare style and linear stories; in the back of my mind lurked names like DeLillo, Lethem, and holy cow, Vonnegut. I wondered if satire isn’t her first love despite the absolute absence of overt satire in Dope, it lurked around the edges of Saturn’s Return. I can’t defend this thesis, but I believe that Dope is a literary work with elements of noir imbedded in the subject matter. In the interest of full disclosure I should tell you that The Big Lebowski is one of my favorite moives so much so that I wish for eight or nine sequels. So, consider the source.
Dope is an antidote to postmodernist horseshit so you’re wondering what Dom DeLillo is doing in my head while reading Sara Gran. Setting. East Village, places like that. It’s a weird association. See the note above. Regards, The Dude.

Dope is Sara Gran’s third novel, published by GP Putnam. Set in New York in 1950 it tells the story of Josephine Flannigan. She goes by Joe; she ‘s a Hells Kitchen girl, daughter of a hooker, sister to a fashion model who dumped the life for a shot at the big time. Joe is paid a thousand dollars to locate the daughter of a Westchester couple who fear their college coed, Nadine, has vanished into the maw of the big town’s nasty drug scene.

Nadine is hanging around with Jerry McFall, tough guy, pimp, and general bad ass. Joe starts asking around, hitting the junkie hot spots from the Lower East Side to Bryant Park to Harlem. Joe’s been clean for two years so this is no picnic for her; her search for Nadine brings her close to the places she doesn’t want to be, to the railroad flats where people shoot, nod, drift and die with what remains of their humanity. Joe knows this world which is why the nice people from the suburbs hired her in the first place.

Sara Gran lets the reader run with her setup until the hook is in deep. Joe makes progress after talking to the taxi dancers at the Royale a run down theater off Times Square where rundown theaters go to die. Jerry McFall punched Nadine around leaving her bruised and bloodied, unable to work. If you grew up in any kind of neighborhood you knew guys like Jerry; the best you could hope for is a piano falls from the sky when Jerry steps out to light a cigarette. Yeah, that never happens.

What does happen turns the story around, making Joe the pursued rather than pursuer. Sara Gran makes artistry appear simple with straight forward prose that blends the grit of the story with an elegant economy of style. Few things are as complex and difficult to render as simplicity; a novel can be a labyrinth with many false starts and scenic byways. This one stays on course making the restrictions of the first person point of view work to advantage. When Joe sees a familiar face wearing a grimy suit and filthy shirt she can throw the knockout punch with the line he is my husband.

Joe is a loner; her friends and allies are broken beyond repair yet she understands their limitations because she shares them; Dope presents a world fractured by a common need, of youth and promise lost. Wolves are always at the door and that door is wide open. Cops, pimps, hustlers, and junkies push Joe around secure in the knowledge that she is powerless. No spoilers about the story’s resolution; suffice to say that the ending does justice to what preceded it, that the climax flows from the narrative with logic and impact.

The story falters once or twice in scenes where Joe steps out of character for what feel like forced moments of doubt. Doubt is fine, but it might have been distributed rather than compressed into the narrative in large doses. I’m talking about a handful of paragraphs in the entire book, which is an indicator of how well Dope is written. This is like pointing out how a pitcher throws a perfect game, but has a few three ball counts along the way. If Sara Gran wasn’t so damned skilled a writer, and Dope so good a book, there would nothing left to say except Sara, get busy with your next one. I’m looking forward to it.

Sara Gran is one of those rare authors capable of being funny and poignant without falling back on familiar cues of melodrama. Saturn’s Return to New York came out from SoHo Press in the gloomy year 2001. It tells the story of Mary Forrest, a young woman whose life of quiet desperation is the byproduct of childhood trauma. Her father died when she was a girl; her mother, Evelyn, is a star of the New York literary world, a relentless fabricator of alternate histories coming undone before the advance of a devastating disease. Evelyn’s ability to confound Mary with bombshells of family history provide the story’s major moments of confrontation, moments that dissolve into resentful confusion for Mary, dismissive claims of veracity from Evelyn.

This is not a New York story, but a Greenwich Village one, framed by an astrologer’s warning to Mary that her twenty ninth year coincides with Saturn’s return to its position at Mary’s birth. It’s a make or break sort of year, it won’t occur again for twenty nine years. Mary is back in the Village, despite the fact she lives in Inwood, following Evelyn’s bizarre trail of mental disarray. Lots of landmarks have vanished over the years: Balducci’s, Jefferson Market, The Peacock Cafe, and, if you know the neighborhood, you can appreciate all the blank spaces first hand through Evelyn.

I love stories where astrologers quote Raymond Chandler and people go to Italian restaurants on MacDougal Street for guidance as much as food. Since this novel has both I was hooked.