About twice a year I go through a flurry of reading new mysteries. I'm searching for fresh blood, new (to me at least) writers who might quicken my pulse as Elizabeth George, Laurie R. King, Michael Connelly and others did so well perhaps a decade back. All writers, I think, even the masters, run out of steam after awhile. This is no slur on their talents: to every thing there is a season.
Marilyn Stasio is the New York Times' watcher of crime fiction and a week or so back she reviewed approvingly a number of books, including this trio, each a maiden effort. All three show promise, especially in the page-turning part of the week. Alas, each has some weaknesses in plotting that keeps them from getting my recommendation.
Mark Mills, author of"Amagansett", is the most accomplished writer. Mills is a screenwriter ("The Reckoning," based on Barry Unsworth's "Morality Play") and his training shows. Mills understands drama. The story is set on rural Long Island in 1948. The protagonist is mild-mannered fisherman psychicly scarred by the deaths he saw and caused in World War II. The milieu, with its rich interlopers from New York versus the poor year-'rounders, evokes more than a whiff of Gatsby.
The fisherman's rich, secretive girlfriend is murdered, clumsily, and what ensues will not be surprising to those who've read Raymond Chandler. This isn't a particularly nuanced story. "Amagansett" was several notches above average and kept me moving right along until the hokey denouement. The climax tries very hard to be clever, but the result is too melodramatic by half. I could be generous and call the ending "cinematic," which means that it would make an unsurprising TV movie.
I wish Mills had re-written those last couple of chapters and trusted more in his readers' ability to handle a non-Hollywood ending. Still, Mills CAN write and I'll be anxious to see his next outing. If he can stifle those Hollywood-isms he could produce some excellent work.
Oklahoma librarian Will Thomas is a student of late-Victorian London, especially the East End. He's also a Conan Doyle fan and he's set "Some Danger Involved" there, in the pre-Ripper year of 1884. His first-person protagonist is an apprentice assistant "enquiry agent." It's akin to Holmes and Watson, but with much of the action centered around our younger, more virile Watson, who is both Oxford-educated and a recently-released felon.
There's a plot: an East End Jew has been crucified. Is it the work on an anti-Semitic league, out to incite a pogrom against the immigrant Jews crowding the East End? There's some pretty good plotting here and better characterization. But the concoction falters a bit with another too-Hollywood ending and an implausible villain. The writing isn't as crisp as Mills' but there's promise here too.
On occasion my wife or I will ask the other about the new mystery we've just picked up. We often have a one-word answer: "maize" or "wheat" or "barley" or "quinoa." It's our own acerbic shorthand (one could, I guess, call it wry) for Oh No, Another Serial Killer Tale.
There was a time in detective fiction when a single murder was sufficient, or a few murders by the sad but sane villain in the furtherance of a theft, fraud or some such. But those were in the balmy days before all killers were required to be psychopathic and driven by some hidden logic to keep selecting victims -- a pattern which, of course, only Our Hero can decipher.
That's what we have in advertising man Jack Kerley's "The Hundredth Man".
The location is Mobile, Alabama, evidently the until now only remaining U.S. metropolis without its own psychologically-astute detective, demanding woman medical examiner, and full-blown psycho serial killer. Yes, Our Hero does indeed live in a shack above the water, drinks prodigiously, revives himself with long death-defying swims in the bay. He also has a black partner. For motivation he's also a saviour, bringing back an assistant medical examiner from near-terminal alcoholism. Oh yes, and he is assisted in his psychological insights by his brother, an abused kid who became himself a serial killer and is now incarcerated, perhaps in an adjoining cell to an aging Hannibal Lecter. I'll omit mentioning that Our Hero's superiors are out to get him.
Kerley is capable of writing snappy sentences and paragraphs and he injects a bit of believable cop-like humor. The pages turn readily enough but we have, one again a movie-ready action-packed ending that plain blew up my implausability meter.
It's possible, I suppose, that I'm being too rough on these three books (and the half-dozen others I rejected to get to these three). After all, these are indeed first works; presumably each will improve in future outings. All show promise -- Mills and Thomas the most; Kerley's preposterous plotting is a bigger mountain to climb.
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