Gar Anthony Haywood says he started reading mysteries when he was 8 years old.
Like so many other people, he fell in love early on with the works of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, who wrote about Los Angeles as if they owned it. Even then, however, he found it difficult to reconcile their visions of the city with his own experiences growing up there as an African-American.
Haywood eventually would discover other important novelists, but he was constantly aware of the dearth of black characters throughout the genre–and what he considered to be a one-dimensional image of his hometown. Verisimilitude, he felt, was the first thing jettisoned when storylines lingered too long among the palms.
His South-Central-based P.I., Aaron Gunner, returns to action after a three-year hiatus in It’s Not a Pretty Sight (Putnam, $22.95), another nifty thriller that goes a long way toward leveling the killing field. In it, the sun-baked urban landscape of the ‘hood is graphically rendered, and its denizens are drawn with respect, love and some amount of fear.
Plagued by guilt, Gunner seeks the truth behind the brutal death of his former fiance, a long-time victim of spousal abuse. The obvious explanation offered by her family and police doesn’t satisfy the private eye, but his investigation, which begins in a shelter for battered women, proves to be mostly frustrating.
Haywood fills Gunner’s quest for answers with smash-mouth action, fascinating characters and places not visited by tourists, unless they get lost on the way to the airport:
“The South-Central bar was ice cold in the winter and a steam bath in the summer, as inviting to strangers as a lumpy mattress in a cheap motel room. Its mirrors were cracked and its chairs all listed to one side or another, and there wasn’t a red vinyl booth in the entire house that wasn’t coughing up balls of foam padding somewhere. But it felt like home. Everything about the Deuce was as dirt poor and bone tired as the people it shared the neighborhood with, so walking through its doors into the stifling despondency of its ambiance had a certain comfort to it.”
Besides being terrifically entertaining on their own, the four novels in the Aaron Gunner series can serve as valuable companions to the works of Walter Mosley, who describes a more historically distant South-Central. Likewise, Haywood’s wonderfully comic Loudermilk mysteries provide a refreshing counterpoint to the trials faced by Gunner and his pals.
Find them all, if you haven’t already.
Sue Cameron’s Beverly Hills, as described in Love, Sex and Murder (Warner, $23.95), might as well be on another planet from the environment visited by Haywood, only a few miles away on La Cienega Boulevard. A well-connected columnist for glitzy Beverly Hills 213 magazine, Cameron frequently raids her Rolodex to spice up this gossipy whodunit with celebrity names and fashionable addresses.
Her protagonist, Nikki Laverty, is the daughter of a famous movie star who was slain some 20 years ago in her bedroom amid rumpled satin sheets. Drop-dead gorgeous, of course, Nikki grows up to become a computer-savvy lawyer in a high-powered Los Angeles firm, where she is handed a pro bono case that too conveniently leads to the clues needed to piece together the puzzle of her mother’s death.
While never threatening to become literature, “Love, Sex and Murder” is a zippy, occasionally amusing read that will appeal to folks who get their news from “Entertainment Tonight.”
A continent away, in Greenwich Village, Kinky Friedman isn’t afraid to drop some names of his own–or his own name, for that matter. In The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover (Simon & Schuster, $23), the glib gumshoe from the heart of Texas–with whom the author shares a name and musical past–is enlisted to find the missing husband of a tall, leggy blond.
As invariably happens, Kinky’s search for truth and justice threatens the security of several of his friends and relatives, while also carrying his faithful fans along on a nothing-is-sacred romp. This time, his reporter pal McGovern is seeing aliens–or well-disguised FBI agents–who are searching for something hidden deep in his booze-clouded memory.
Kinky, borrowing several pages from the Sherlock Holmes canon, follows his nose to Washington and then to Chicago’s South Side and the dusty residue of Al Capone’s legacy (hint: he finds more than Geraldo Rivera did). Followers of the popular nine-book series will want to make the trip with the cigar-chomping private eye, while newcomers–especially those allergic to crime-fighting cats–are encouraged to start at the beginning.
Lincolnshire’s John Wessel has hit pay dirt with his tantalizing debut novel, This Far, No Further (Simon & Schuster, $23), which introduces a hard-boiled ex-con sleuth known only as Harding. The unlicensed P.I., who lives above a Greek restaurant in Lakeview, is called upon to assist in what appears to be a simple domestic case, in which a plastic surgeon is stepping out on his sensuous wife and hiding money in a Swiss account.
Nothing is ever quite that simple, though, and Harding quickly becomes trapped in an intricate web of betrayal, murder and kinky sex that’s spun from Schaumburg to the University of Chicago. Clannish Hyde Park is the setting for much of the mayhem, but the author also has a pretty good fix on Lincoln Park, Maywood and the back roads of northwest Indiana.
The storyline gets bogged down some in the later stages, as Wessel also tries to sort out Harding’s troubled past, but the former journalist clearly is a writer to be reckoned with and anticipated. His compelling cast of characters is immediately credible; the dialogue is at once tough and funny; and he describes a Chicago that’s highly recognizable and as diverse in print as it is in reality.
In Dick Francis’ To the Hilt (Putnam, $24.95), the estimable chronicler of all things equine seems less concerned with horses than he is with golf and antique treasures. Artist Alexander Kinloch, the black-sheep son of a deceased earl, is minding his own business in a deserted shepherd’s hut in the Scottish Highlands when he becomes violently engaged in a family feud ignited in faraway London.
Kinloch’s mother and desperately ill stepfather want him to save the family’s brewery from bankruptcy and scandal, while a nasty stepsister wants him to butt out. To the painter’s consternation, several people also believe he’s hiding valuable family heirlooms–and a racehorse–so he becomes a lightning rod for trouble.
This meaty novel is dense with plots and counterplots, but typically enjoyable. Francis keeps the action bouncing from heather to hearth, painting a delightful portrait of his own of luscious British countryside and a doddering aristocracy.
In Nowhere to Run (Warner, $24), Robert Daley–author of “Prince of the City” and “Tainted Evidence”–has created a far-flung police drama that combines the forensic talents of a Manhattan detective nearly killed in an ill-conceived drug buy and a French cop disgraced when she overstepped her bounds in a political scandal. The retired New Yorker finds he can’t escape his enemies when he moves to Nice, but finds a soul mate and partner in the attractive investigator.
The story is farfetched–as it also combines Colombian drug lords, Corsican mobsters and corrupt art dealers–but Daley knows his way around a squad room and keeps the pot boiling throughout the novel.
