Hell to Pay
By George P. Pelecanos
Little, Brown, $24.95
A critic once called George Pelecanos “the Zola of Washington, D.C.,” because of the way he deliberately peoples his excellent crime novels with the low and the powerless. I’d amend that description to “the Seurat of Washington, D.C.,” because like the great pointillist painter he piles on tiny details of ordinary working lives until they glow with an inner light:
“Soon the colors would change in Rock Creek Park. And then would come those weeks near Thanksgiving when the weather turned for real and the leaves were still coming down off the trees. Strange had his own name for it: deep fall. It was his favorite time of year in D.C.”
That’s Derek Strange, a black private detective in his 50s, going about his business in Pelecanos’ second book in his trenchant new series. What links Strange to the sons and grandsons of Greek and Italian immigrants who have inhabited his previous books are the same common interests and ways of making their days more bearable: work, sports, drink, sex and especially the throb of popular music that forms a kind of soundtrack for their lives. Strange has been singing along to Teddy Pendergrass’ “Wake Up Everybody” as he drives past Rock Creek Park; he’ll do the same to an old Al Green tape on his way home from coaching a peewee football team a few pages later. And a Commodores instrumental jam will be playing near the book’s end as Strange’s partner, disgraced ex-police officer Terry Quinn, fights a vicious pimp called Worldwide Wilson to avenge a girl’s death.
“Hell to Pay” is set in the decidedly non-tourist parts of Washington, neighborhoods where so many young black children die regularly from drugs and guns that selling T-shirts with their pictures printed on them at their wakes and funerals has become a part of the local economy. Introduced in last year’s “Right As Rain,” (just released as a Warner paperback), Strange is a rich and complex character, not always easy to understand but finally hard to resist. His addictions to booze and furtive sex threaten his chance at a promising relationship, not in a melodramatic way but with the natural inevitability of old habits that are hard to break.
Pelecanos’ characters have job resumes that include such unglamorous entries as short-order cook, bartender, shoe salesman, record-store employee. The cases Strange works on here are also deceptively low key: He investigates a suspiciously slick young man who wants to marry his friend’s daughter, and he searches for the three dazed and demented thugs who live on fast food and who killed his 9-year-old star quarterback for the most chillingly banal of reasons. But all around these commonplace details-and largely because of them-shines that unmistakable light of true art.
Gramercy Park
By Paula Cohen
St. Martin’s, $24.95
My mother’s original name was Clara (changed to Claire) Adler. I love opera even more than baseball and cigars, and I used to live in that Lower East Side bower of New York entitlement known as Gramer-cy Park. So you can imagine my surprise when Paula Cohen’s first novel turns out to be about a famous opera singer who rents a house in Gramercy Park and finds a strange, damaged young woman named Clara Adler camping out under the dust covers. Is this weird, or what?
Fortunately, Cohen’s debut is also an excellent piece of historical imagination and controlled writing of the Daphne du Maurier school of elegant high camp, so I can recommend it without a stretch.
In May 1894, Mario Alfieri–at 40 the world’s most renowned tenor–arrives in New York to conquer it as he has already done the capitals of Europe. (Cohen tells us that Alfieri was Verdi’s personal choice to create the title role in “Otello” at La Scala in Milan, and we’ll let her get away with that one joke, although descendants of Francesco Tamagno, who actually did sing at the world premiere, might not be quite so lenient.)
Mario discovers the waif-like, sickly Clara living precariously in the mansion of recently deceased millionaire Henry Ogden Slade, who shocked society by leaving his young ward not one penny of his fortune. Slade’s lawyer, a frosty and malevolent article named Chadwick, seems to have ulterior motives when he refuses to let Mario buy the house and make Clara a permanent resident, so Mario marries the 20-year-old woman and sweeps her away to instantly improved mental and physical health at a boarding house on the Hudson River. The dastardly Chadwick and a sad, twisted woman named Lucy do their worst to destroy the marriage and Alfieri’s career, threatening to reveal a filthy secret about why Slade disinherited Clara.
But Cohen’s talent is large enough to soak up virtually all of this Victorian hokum and leave us amazed at her ability to re-create a vital, graceful, almost elegiac world where art, privilege and love seemed to matter much more than they do today. My mother would approve.
A Game of Spies
By John Altman
Putnam, $25.95
In a short scene toward the end of John Altman’s snappy but also refreshingly literate new book, a young British pilot about to take off on a vital intelligence mission in 1940 is brought to Neville Chamberlain’s home in Sussex. The old and weary prime minister is being bulldogged by his first lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, about not taking firm enough action against Hitler. Chamberlain suddenly says he must have a nap; Churchill snorts, ” ‘If you are not up to the demands of leading our nation in this most desperate hour-‘ “
It’s probably a fictional moment, but it’s also a wonderfully cinematic one, crying out for Anthony Hopkins as Churchill and Ian McKellen as Chamberlain, and it proves that World War II will continue to be a breeding shed for superior thrillers as long as the genre exists.
Continuing the casting news, Kenneth Branagh would be perfect for Hobbs, the fleshy, flashy but finally heroic Hobbs, a British agent working in France and Germany. For Eva Bernhardt, the young woman he seduces into the espionage game, perhaps a fresh face from the European film scene, like Audrey Tautou, the star of “Amelie.” And as Frick, the steely Nazi agent who implodes into insanity, the Academy Award for best supporting actor already has Ed Harris’ name on it.
None of this frippery is meant to detract from Altman’s impressive achievement: a book full of stunning action set pieces that also manages to maintain a distinctly believable human presence.
Deadly to the Sight
By Edward Sklepowich
Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s, $23.95
Unlike Donna Leon, who uses her excellent series of Venetian mysteries to uncover large-scale crimes and scandals, Edward Sklepowich’s books about Italian-American writer Urbino Macintyre tend to probe smaller, more personal crimes involving sex, greed and social position. What’s best about them–and especially this latest, which concerns the killing of an evil old lacemaker–is the way Macintyre can walk that thin, dangerous line between being a tourist in Venice and being a long-term resident.
Just back after a year in Morocco, Macintyre gazes out on the Grand Canal, “a long, straight sweep down to the Ca’ Foscari, where there was a bend in the waterway. The impression of a flooded city, with the water lapping at the building foundations only a short distance from the lighted windows, was nowhere stronger than from his present position.” Anyone who has visited Venice will appreciate that image; those who haven’t will at least begin to understand the city’s magnetic aura.
And when Macintyre takes his young Moroccan painter-protege Habib to the lacemaking island of Burano, where brightly painted walls hide dark secrets involving Macintyre’s best friend, the Contessa da Capo-Zendrini, it makes us realize that a great deal of the daily life of this floating city is still ruled by art and fantasy.
Tropical Heat
By John A. Miller
Forge, $23.95
Sheriff A.G. Farrell learns to appreciate a good cup of coffee, and other worldly pleasures, in this pitch-perfect story set in a small Virginia town during summer 1954. Farrell, too smart and prissy for his job, has nevertheless been solving Hopewell’s crimes and tending to its citizens’ welfare since he became sheriff almost by accident 12 years before, when he was just 22. Now he dates (but doesn’t sleep with) the town librarian and takes chicken-salad sandwiches to old black ladies who used to work for his late mother. A murder at the local Army base changes Farrell’s life, as the dead captain’s widow introduces him to the pleasures of freshly ground java and takes him into her bed for another kind of wake-up call.
It’s all good, dirty fun on that stretch of turf where James M. Cain meets John Grisham; and John A. Miller, who has earned prizes and strong reviews for three previous books, knows exactly how his people think, speak, eat and drink.
In brief: Ian Rankin’s parting gift to, or from, St. Martin’s Press (he moves to Little, Brown for his next big John Rebus novel, “Resurrection Men,” just out to fine reviews in London) is a collection of 12 Rebus stories that appeared in England in 1992. “A Good Hanging” ($24.95) reminds us that a well-constructed short story can explode with the same art and energy as a successful novel, and can linger in the memory with equal tenacity.
On the paperback scene, Sarah Dunant’s “Mapping the Edge” (Random House, $12.95) is a welcome reprint of her 1999 novel about a woman’s war between her sexual side and her mothering instincts, and it will serve as a fine introduction to her five other crime novels (including “Transgressions” and “Fatlands”) that haven’t been as fully appreciated in America as they have in her native England. And “Sally’s in the Alley,” by Norbert Davis ($14) is yet another of the worthy period pieces being handsomely reprinted by the sharp bunch at Rue Morgue Press. Despite my lack of zest for mysteries in which pets play a prominent role, this story about a chubby detective called Doan and his immense Great Dane named Carstairs, first published in 1943, is a comedic delight and a well-crafted crime novel, full of social details of Hollywood in the 1940s.
