Chicago Noir
Edited by Neal Pollack
Akashic, $14.95
Any collection of stories that features one about a Cuban drag queen named Des-tiny that begins with her smoking a “short, slim and brown Romeo y Julieta” cigar and drinking a “wee cup” of espresso poured from an “hourglass-shaped coffee maker” is off to a fine start.
“Destiny Returns,” by Achy Obejas (a former Tribune staff reporter), is just one of the 18 new stories chosen by former Chicago resident, novelist (“Never Mind the Pollacks”) and one-time crime reviewer for the Chicago Reader Neal Pollack in this latest geographic outing from Akashic–the enterprising publishing house started by rock musician Johnny Temple of Girls Against Boys that has already explored the darker sides of Brooklyn and San Francisco, with other cities from Washington to Dublin in the works.
Not all the stories in “Chicago Noir” are sterling examples of the form, but at least eight of the 18 are fine. That’s an at-bat percentage that would make any Cubs or White Sox fan (like the boys in one of the winners, “Bobby Kagan Knows Everything,” by Adam Langer) glow with delight. A couple of the best stories are about boxing–Joe Meno’s “Like a Rocket With a Beat” and especially C.J. Sullivan’s “Alex Pinto Hears the Bell,” which has this lovely moment:
“His mind was busy remembering a fight from thirty years before. He stopped on the corner as the fumes from the 72 bus blasted into his face. He thought he was inhaling the smoky air of the Chicago Coliseum.”
Pollack has decided to organize his selections by locales–99th and Drexel in “Goodnight Chicago and Amen,” Luciano Guerriero’s remarkable story about a career criminal; 26th and Kedvale, the address of the Mexican nightclub where Obejas’ Destiny finds fame and fortune; Clark and Foster, where his own “Marty’s Drink or Die Club” is set. “Every intersection runs thick with meaning, and every one has its own personality,” Pollack says in his introduction –although he does stretch a point by including an amazingly powerful little story by Peter Orner about paroled murderer Nathan Leopold working at a hospital in Puerto Rico.
You might not immediately recognize the names of some of the other writers, such as Alexai Galaviz-Budziszewski, Bayo Ojikuto, Claire Zulkey, Jim Arndorfer, Andrew Ervin, M.K. Meyers, Todd Dills, Daniel Buckman and Amy Sayre-Roberts. But you’ll hear from them again–perhaps at greater length and wider landscape.
Officer Down
By Theresa Schwegel
St. Martin’s Minotaur, $23.95
Another writer with a Chicago connection is Therese Schwegel, who grew up in the Windy City but has moved to Southern California. Her impressive first mystery about a police officer named Samantha Mack–Smack to her colleagues–catches the flavor of the city in endearing ways. “It’s low-key, unadvertised, and out of the way, and it’s been around for too long to be trendy,” she says of her favorite late-night eating place, Iggy’s on Milwaukee Avenue. “I’ve never had a better steak after 10 p.m.”
Waiting for her date–a homicide detective named Mason Imes–to show up and buy her that steak, Smack gets an urgent call from her boss at the 23rd to fill in for another colleague with the flu. She joins her ex-boyfriend Fred as they go after a pervert, and many shots are fired. Smack gets hit hard on the head, and Fred winds up dead–killed by Smack’s .38. Was it an accident, as the police department badly wants to label it? Or was there really someone else in the room, who the battered and concussed Smack is virtually certain did the killing?
Of course there was, and it soon becomes evident–perhaps a bit too evident–that Smack will have to do all the digging herself. Between the slickly dismissive (and married) Imes, a particularly pesky bird from Internal Affairs, and a police Establishment that threatens to take her badge if she doesn’t behave, Smack has no real friends.
But Schwegel, who writes about police work with authority (“It’s like hide-and-seek and my .38 is a heavy toy,” she has Smack think as a bust develops), has also created a tough and original character. At 32, Smack is as honest as they come, especially about herself:
“My hair looks like it’s been pulled back all day (it has) and my makeup looks like a second coat rather than a fresh one (it is). Good thing we’re going to Iggy’s; at times like these, I live for bad lighting.”
Out of Mind
By Catherine Sampson
Mysterious, $23.95
Except as victims, children don’t often get to play important roles in crime fic-tion. But Catherine Sampson made the 1-year-old twins–Hannah and William–of television journalist Robin Ballantyne so much a part of her stunning debut thriller, “Falling Off Air,” that some of us wondered what she would do for an encore. The happy answer–visible on every page of Sampson’s intriguing and exciting second book about Ballantyne–is to make the children such an integral part of their single mother’s life (her already ex-husband, who never wanted children anyway, was murdered in the first book) that they are vivid presences even when offscreen.
“My itinerary doesn’t allow for much slippage. Hannah and William are waiting for me in London, and every day the invisible elastic band between us seems to stretch tighter,” Ballantyne says on a quick trip to Cambodia. “The twins are not impressed by professional ambition, particularly in their mother. And to them a week feels like a year, a month like a lifetime.”
Ballantyne has reluctantly left her now 3-year-olds in the capable hands of a live-in nanny to interview a former Special Forces officer turned mercenary named Mike Darling who is clearing up land mines in Cambodia. He was the last person known to have talked with a fearless fellow journalist, Melanie Jacobs, before she disappeared without a trace six months ago from the War School–a private security operation just outside of London that specializes in training journalists to survive in combat situations. Darling, who doesn’t want to talk about Jacobs despite a rumored relationship, is definitely a suspicious character, guilty of something. But injuries caused by a mine explosion send Ballantyne home before she can find out more.
Back in London, surrounded by her own unusual family (her mother, a lawyer for the poor and downtrodden, also raised three daughters without a father) and being watched closely by the Orwellian TV operation known by its employees as the Corporation where she is supposed to be working on a series about missing people, Ballantyne accepts limited help in her search for Jacobs from a police detective who loves her and is learning to deal with her twins. Other children also play important parts: especially Mike Darling’s baby daughter, whose abduction Ballantyne thinks is somehow linked to Jacobs’ disappearance.
Sampson, a former TV and print journalist who lives in Beijing with her husband and three children, has the ability to bring all sorts of settings–the spooky War School, the defensive but usefully inefficient Corporation–to instant life. What she also has learned, probably from watching her own, is how real children react and behave.
Body Scissors
By Michael Simon
Viking, $23.95
Texas locations have gotten lots of play in recent years–from Rick Riordan’s Tres Navarre books set in San Antonio and Allana Martin’s Texana Jones mysteries about the border country along the Pecos River to Bill Crider’s Blacklin County Sheriff Dan Rhodes books and Susan Wittig Albert’s China Bayles adventures set in Pecan Springs–but the university city of Austin, the state’s capital, didn’t really have an embedded series potential until Michael Simon introduced Dan Reles in last year’s “Dirty Sally.” Now Reles–a tough cookie who prides himself on being the only Jew on the Austin homicide squad–is back for a second outing, and things are looking brighter on the banks of the Red River (a sadly disappointing trickle on my last visit).
If you remember 1991, the time of “Body Scissors,” Operation Desert Storm, a.k.a. the first Persian Gulf War, was causing some frowns (and a few hopeful grins from economically depressed Texans), but racial and social activists worried more about a sudden influx of drugs and the way minorities were being treated. Reles is living with Rachel Velez, the widow of his killed-in-action partner, when he and his new partner–James Torbett, an angry black man and another “only” for Austin Homicide–are asked to investigate an assassination attempt on a black activist that left one of the activist’s children dead.
Meanwhile, over at the University of Texas, some mysterious drug is causing youngsters–including the offspring of many Texas bigwigs–to fall into comas. Reles and Torbett find a link between the two investigations: a crazed drug kingpin who is kept from becoming a genre cliche by Simon’s admirable eye for detail and his sharp ear for the way people on all sides of the crime line talk.
Panic
By Jeff Abbott
Dutton, $23.95
Some smart reviewer said Jeff Abbott’s paperback original “A Kiss Gone Bad” was “a book worth including on any year’s best list,” and now Abbott–a writer who lives in Austin but hasn’t launched a series as yet–has moved up a step on the publishing ladder. His latest thriller is being released as a hardcover, which means high corporate expectations will probably be more than satisfied by this exciting and beautifully constructed nothing-is-what-it-seems story about an ordinary man suddenly in over his head in a very frightening world.
Evan Casher is a young documentary film-maker (which seems to be a currently popular occupation for crime solvers)–a quiet, unassuming fellow you’d be happy to have as a neighbor or son-in-law. When his mother is murdered, probably by a group of former spooks called The Deeps, Evan quickly discovers that what he thought of as his extremely normal past life growing up in Austin has been a lie, and that both his parents lived in another, much more dangerous environment. Searching for his missing father, trying to decide which side his girlfriend Carrie is on, pursued by The Deeps, who think he knows more about them than he should, Casher–thanks to Abbott’s many skills–manages to stay credible under a veritable typhoon of pressure.
In a Teapot
By Terence Faherty
Mystery Co., $18
Jim Huang, the mystery lover who edits the interesting magazine The Drood Review of Mystery, also publishes unusual books. His latest is a short, tasty lemon meringue by Terence Faherty, a writer whose unique gifts are decidedly undersung despite several major awards. Faherty, best known for his series about Owen Keane, a failed seminarian turned mystic detective, obviously loves movies: His “Kill Me Again” takes full advantage of the possibilities built into the making of a sequel to “Casablanca.” And “In a Teapot” has much of the same ingredients: wit, humor, characters just a little larger than life.
In 1948, as Faherty makes us believe, a major Hollywood movie studio plans a production of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” starring the best of the famed British Colony of transplanted actors. But the project is derailed when nasty rumors lead to murder, and it’s up to a tougher kind of detective, studio security boss Scott Elliott, to solve a mystery that has a lot to do with Shakespeare’s play.
In memoriam: Dennis Lynds–a true master of mystery and part of the literary crime circle that gathered for monthly lunches in Santa Barbara, Calif.–died last month at 81. I never got to one of those lunches, but Lynds’ wonderful books–many of them written as Michael Collins–nourished me in all sorts of ways. His long-running series about Dan Fortune, the one-armed detective who used his brain and his heart to make himself a match for any villain or inequity, won him an Edgar for his first, “Act of Fear” in 1967, and continued in fine form through 2000’s “Fortune’s World.”
Altogether, he published 80 novels and hundreds of short stories, one of which, “The Kidnapping of Xiang Fei,” was a high point of an anthology edited by Michael Connelly, “Murder in Vegas,” published in March. Another famous Santa Barbara mystery writer, Ross Macdonald, once called Lynds, “a novelist of power and quality. . . . His [work] hums with life and feeling. . . . [O]ne of the major imaginative creations in the crime field.”
So long, Dennis. And thanks for all the brain food.
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Dick Adler reviews mysteries and thrillers for the Tribune. A collection of his reviews and essays is due out this fall from Poisoned Pen.
