JITTERBUG
By Loren D. Estleman
Forge, $22.95
When Loren Estleman isn’t turning out new installments in his excellent Amos Walker P.I. series, the prolific writer often turns back the calendar in well-researched westerns and historical novels set during various key periods in Detroit’s industrial, cultural and, especially, criminal development. The Motor City melting pot he describes in such novels as “Stress,” “Edsel” and “Whiskey River” is based less on ethnicity than an ability to blend gangsters, corrupt cops, bigots of all stripes, great musicians, magnates and everyday mopes into a tangy stew of sin and salvation.
Set during World War II, “Jitterbug” draws a vivid portrait of life on the homefront, with assembly lines busily turning out planes and tanks, mobsters profiting from a thriving black market, hard drugs starting to invade the inner city and race relations between newly arrived Southern blacks and whites threatening to explode. This overheated environment sorely tests the war-depleted ranks of the Detroit Police Department, which is forced, as well, to contend with a 4-F serial killer who resembles Robert Taylor and considers murdering ration-stamp hoarders a patriotic act.
Estleman’s great strength is in being able to weave a colorful tapestry, using crackling dialogue, smash-mouth action and wonderfully three-dimensional characters, several of whom (Henry Ford, Walter Chrysler, Henry Kaiser) are drawn from real life. Like the best historical fiction, we are engaged by the story told in “Jitterbug” and come away from it with an understanding of what it must have been like to live through this tumultuous period in a great American city’s growth.
CROSSROAD BLUES
By Ace Atkins
St. Martin’s, $21.95
The idea of invoking the spirit of blues icon Robert Johnson to inform a work of fiction is hardly new–Walter Mosley did it in “RL’s Dream,” as did the movie “Crossroads” in 1986–so it wasn’t surprising to discover that the master’s ghost was haunting the storyline of Ace Atkins’ debut novel, “Crossroad Blues.” Whose better? After all, Johnson’s legend–however much of it can be believed–reads like a page-turning novel, with a whodunit ending.
Atkins, a reporter for the Tampa Tribune, incorporates much of the mythology surrounding the bluesman’s mysterious death into a tale that imagines what would happen if, in 1998, long-lost recordings suddenly were to be discovered in a remote corner of the Mississippi Delta. In what basically boils down to a hyperviolent clash between archivists, a few old men and a sleazy New Orleans nightclub owner, the book’s hard-bitten sleuth–Nick Travers, a former football player turned musician and historian–uncovers a conspiracy of silence that extends all the way back to the ’30s.
Travers is an appealing new addition to the P.I. pantheon, if only because he knows his way around the Crescent City so well and can introduce us to such fascinating denizens of the music scene there. While the chief villain bears an uncanny resemblence to the real-life founder of the House of Blues chain, the rest of the characters are folks one might actually meet on a humid night on the fringes of the French Quarter.
Atkins writes with journalistic spareness and a keen eye for detail. The sex and violence is pretty standard stuff for the genre today, which is to say it is only slightly more believable than your average comic book. But Atkins’ research into blues history adds depth and context to the always entertaining story, which whizzes by like a old, familiar song heard on the car radio late at night.
THE CHARLES DICKENS MURDERS
By Edith Skom
Delacorte, $21.95
Who knew the stodgy old University of Chicago could be the kind of place to inspire a mystery, in which a group of women are complicit in two murders spaced 40 years and 1,000 miles apart? In “The Charles Dickens Murders,” English professor and sometime sleuth Beth Austin takes it upon herself to find out who in her mother’s clique might have been responsible for the questionable deaths, which no one in law enforcement seems in a great hurry to investigate.
Author Edith Skom, a Northwestern University lecturer and author of two previous literary-themed novels, bounces nimbly between the past and present, effortlessly evoking a neo-Victorian era of campus life, before men and women mixed freely in dorms and before blue jeans, T-shirts and work boots became the unisex uniform of college students everywhere. The often-too-chatty young women mostly are consumed with men and their studies, until a series of petty crimes and, more seriously, a death, disturb the tranquility and otherworldliness of campus life.
When Austin, a professor at Midwestern University, visits the University of Chicago to investigate the shocking death from the 1950s, she’s able to uncover clues that have laid hidden since the Eisenhower administration. At the same time, she stirs up the concern of the person responsible for the more-current crime in a New York hospital–someone who might be linked closely to her mother and some close friends. After some scary moments, Austin arranges a drawing-room reunion of old pals, at which time the truth is revealed.
This is a pleasantly nostalgic Chicago-based whodunit with just enough crust to keep things interesting.
A TICKET TO DIE FOR
By David J. Walker
St. Martin’s, $22.95
We meet the husband-and-wife team of Dugan and Kirsten just after they pull into a strip mall in an unincorporated area southwest of Chicago, where they briefly confront two thugs coming out of an adult bookstore. The shop was managed by a witness (now inconveniently deceased) in an investigation the two are conducting, and the sleuths quickly are led to believe that their lives, too, are in danger–and, of course, they are.
David J. Walker, a priest-turned-lawyer, takes time off from his Mal Foley series to try his hand at creating a Chicago-based Nick and Nora, with a nod, as well, to Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd in “Moonlighting.” For the most part, he succeeds in convincing us that Dugan–a lawyer specializing in personal-injury cases–and his P.I. wife can maintain their senses of humor while taking on a particularly nasty ring of smut peddlers and violent feminists.
Walker has a nice touch when it comes to describing how things work in Chicago courtrooms and police stations, and the repartee between his protagonists is appealing. If the villainy is a bit too far over the top to be believed, at least we can enjoy the scenery as the action moves swiftly from downtown to the neighborhoods and into the suburbs.
KISS ME, JUDAS
By Will Christopher Baer
Viking, $21.95
Fans of James Ellroy’s more elliptical writing should enjoy this stylish exercise in neo-noir paranoia, wall-to-wall deceit and sexual obsession. Will Christopher Baer exploits one of the great urban legends (customer of beautiful prostitute wakes up from drug-induced stupor to find one of his vital organs missing) to embark on a tale that takes the victim–ex-cop and mental patient Phineas Poe–from Denver to Las Vegas to El Paso, Texas, in search of revenge, redemption and the man who paid for his harvested kidney.
The brackish underworld the reader wades into is populated by the kind of hipper-than-thou characters who, instead of shaking hands, compare tattoos and pierced body parts. Poe, in the noir tradition, appears to have fallen off the same truck that carried sleepy-eyed Robert Mitchum into Hollywood a half-century ago, although he’s a rather pathetic piece of work.
Once you get into the rhythm of Baer’s smoky poetics (he eschews quotation marks in dialogue), “Kiss Me, Judas” makes for a pretty interesting read. Of course, it helps if you’re half-sloshed when you’re reading it.
