A Kiss Gone Bad
By Jeff Abbott
Onyx, $6.99 paper
Like many other good writers, Jeff Abbott has gone about the business of getting better rather quietly. One of his previous mysteries, “Do Unto Others,” did win an Agatha Award and a Macavity Award, but that probably helped his publisher’s blurb writers more than its sales department. Abbott’s latest effort, however, is so exciting, shrewd and beautifully crafted that it’s hard to see how it can fail to move him up several noise levels, into Crais, Lehane, Pelecanos and even Connelly territory.
” `I’m highlighting the appropriate tough guy phrases for you so you know what to say the next time. . . . You’re a little too Larry McMurtry for that crowd,’ ” jokes a friend of Judge Whit Mosley’s as he thumbs through an old Mickey Spillane paperback after an encounter with some low-level hoodlums on the Gulf Coast of Texas. It’s true that at first glance the boyish Mosley seems to be no match for the bad guys he comes up against: The 32-year-old son of a wealthy local businessman used his father’s influence six months before to get appointed justice of the peace in the gulf town of Port Leo. Now he faces his first election, and his experience–photography, running an ice-cream parlor and a failed messenger service–plus his habit of wearing shorts and sandals under his judicial robes don’t exactly fill local voters with confidence.
But Mosley has more than just his youthful charm to win us over. As the youngest of six brothers whose mother walked out when he was 4, he has developed a quiet toughness and a passion for justice. Both will be sorely tested when a slightly older local hero named Pete Hubble, whose mother is a powerful Texas politician, comes home and apparently kills himself. Although Pete was a porn star and producer in Los Angeles and was living on a boat owned by a drug family, he seemed to be trying to redeem himself by making a film about the disappearance of his younger brother Corey 15 years before.
Mosley delays ruling Hubble’s death a suicide long enough to stir up several deep and dark pools of anger and revenge. His enemies soon include the local sheriff, the drug family, the politician and the dead man’s wife, with whom Mosley has been cohabiting.
But Mosley’s allies in his increasingly dangerous search for the truth are equally tenacious and sharply drawn: a tough and brave female deputy, a somewhat mysterious fisherman named Gooch and a young woman who calls herself Velvet Mojo–porno star, director, potential serial murder victim and instantly credible human being. Add to that a sad subtext about old people in rest homes (” `You live your life for all these years and then you got to worry about roommates,’ ” says one old man. ” `Roommates, like you’re in college. And me with a Purple Heart’ “) and you have a book worth including on any year’s best list.
Smuggler’s Moon
By Bruce Alexander
Putnam, $24.95
Some of the country’s top mystery critics have already tossed around such names as Dickens and Conan Doyle in praising Bruce Alexander’s excellent series about Sir John Fielding, a blind, 18th Century London magistrate. For his latest, they’re certain to add comparisons to Robert Louis Stevenson. My own modest contribution is J. Meade Falkner, author of “Moonfleet,” a wonderful book about pirates and smugglers that almost overcame my queasy stomach and made me run away to sea.
Alexander’s books are always full of the elemental smack and tang of London life in the 1770s, and this one is especially rich in such details, from the smell of pitch and varnish on a sloop called the Indian Princess being refitted at the dock in Wapping, to the way a badly cooked stew looks and tastes in the hands of an amateur cook. But Alexander’s main focus this time is the seaside town of Deal, where Fielding and his young assistant, 17-year-old Jeremy Proctor, go to delve into mysteries and murders caused by the “owling trade,” as smuggling is locally labeled.
There’s lots of action and adventure, and the Indian Princess gets to shoot off the 13 cannons that were supposed to have been melted down but we’ve been tipped off are still ready for action. And, as we’ve come to expect in a book about Fielding, there’s a solid foundation of history and respect for the law that makes me think of another literary ancestor: the Thomas More of Robert Bolt’s “A Man for All Seasons,” who has a fine speech about the law being a forest of trees, and the wind that would blow across the land if those trees were cut down.
Murphy’s Law
By Rhys Bowen
St. Martin’s Minotaur, $22.95
Rhys Bowen has a gently amusing series about Welsh constable Evan Evans going strong, but her newest book seems to be the start of a darker and more-ambitious chronicle, the story of a young woman who gets into trouble in Ireland in 1901, flees to New York and finds herself in almost as much trouble there. While Annette and Martin Meyers, the couple who write as Maan Meyers, have staked out a claim to a large part of New York’s criminal past with their superlative “Dutchman” series, there is still plenty of room for the kind of perceptive and poignant writing and well-used research that mark “Murphy’s Law.”
As we follow 23-year-old Molly Murphy from her joyless home in Ballykillin to the Liverpool docks where she manages to get aboard the Majestic by one of those amazing coincidences that fill the pages of our own ancestors’ history, we pick up piercing small details that just couldn’t be invented: The old woman at the dock who presses pieces of paper with her son’s name on passengers with “kind faces,” in hopes of getting a letter from the boy who disappeared across the ocean three years before. The fact that Ellis Island stops processing immigrants from steerage at 5 p.m., although first- and second-class passengers get to go into the city all night. What a person’s first ride in an elevator might be like.
Moments like these frame Bowen’s solid plot about a murder on Ellis Island that quickly takes on overtones of New York and Irish politics, and make us look forward to Molly’s return.
The Best American Mystery Stories 2001
Edited by Lawrence Block and Otto Penzler
Houghton Mifflin, $27.50, $13 paper
Here’s a short-story collection with a better won-lost average than the Seattle Mariners. Virtually all of the 20 tales of crime and mystery published in 2000 and collected by the hard-working Lawrence Block and Otto Penzler for this fifth annual celebration are splendid examples of the form.
In “Family,” by Dan Leone, which first appeared in the magazine Literal Latte, a man shows up at his brother’s house after a long absence with a van full of old wedding dresses. In “Prison Food,” Michael Downs gives a new meaning to the phrase “last meal.” While we’re talking about eating, there’s “Lobster Night,” by Russell Banks, whose first line–“Stacy didn’t mean to tell Noonan that when she was seventeen she was struck by lightning”–will certainly keep you reading. Nathan Walpow makes wrestling a natural murder metaphor in “Push Comes to Shove.”
William Gay’s “The Paperhanger” is a John Dahl movie ready to be shot, and “Her Hollywood,” by Michael Hyde, also has frightening, filmic overtones. There are cop stories (“Erie’s Last Day,” by Steve Hockensmith, and “Under Suspicion,” by Clark Howard); private-eye stories (Jeremiah Healy’s “A Book of Kells,” and “The Big Bite,” by Bill Pronzini); and even an FBI story (“Easy Street,” by T. Jefferson Parker.) Most of all, there’s the pervasive feeling that the American mystery short story is alive and out dancing all night.
Past Tense
By William G. Tapply
St. Martin’s Minotaur, $24.95
Even if fishing is not high on your list of obsessions, I dare you to read the following few sentences from William G. Tapply’s latest Brady Coyne mystery and not be tempted:
“A freshwater pond around sunset at the end of a summer’s day offers endessly fascinating entertainment. Swallows and purple martins swooped and darted barely over the surface, chasing insects. . . . A blue heron stood knee-deep in the water, still as a stump with its neck arched like a half-drawn bow, poised to strike a hapless bluegill. Bullfrogs grumped and grumbled in the lily pads, and now and then a bass or a pickerel swirled in the shallows trying to catch one.” Tapply has been doing his books about Boston lawyer and tireless outdoorsman Coyne for so long that he, too, has tended to become a part of the landscape. If you haven’t made a pilgrimage lately, “Past Tense” is a fine place to plunge back in. There’s a wonderfully sexy and occasionally annoying woman named Evie, with a past that would make Ross Macdonald drool; a Cape Cod setting so richly evoked that you can taste the shepherd’s pie in the local diner; and above all Tapply’s always wise but never snide or cynical hero, a man still capable of being pleasantly surprised at what life has on tap.
Paperbacks in brief: I wonder where Peter Lovesey keeps his daggers: the Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement he just got from the British Crime Writers Association, and the Golden Dagger he received for the year’s best mystery in 1982 for “The False Inspector Dew,” which Soho has now reprinted as one of its classy $12 trade paperbacks. It’s a wonderful blend of mystery and humor, as a somewhat-pompous London dentist poses as a famous police officer to pull off the perfect murder on board the Mauretania in 1921. As Ruth Rendell says on the back cover, “I defy anyone to forsee the outcome.”
“Mystery Street,” edited by Robert J. Randisi (Signet, $6.50 paper), started with an intriguing challenge to 14 members of the Private Eye Writers of America: Write a short story in which the location is as important as the detective. Among the best stories, Martin and Annette Meyers, already lauded above, come up with a terrific look at New York’s Riverside Drive in 1900 and a tough detective named Jack West who has a bouncing, blond daughter named Mae; Max Allan Collins drops his much-traveled Nathan Heller into an encounter with gangster Mickey Cohen on Los Angeles’ Sunset Boulevard in 1949; and the always amazing S.J. Rozan lets her Lydia Chin stand on her own on New York’s Delancey Street, double-crossing the double-crossers who try to take advantage of newly arrived Chinese immigrants.
