The Blade Itself
By Marcus Sakey
St. Martin’s Minotaur, $22.95
Big City, Bad Blood
By Sean Chercover
William Morrow, $23.95
Probable Cause
By Theresa Schwegel
St. Martin’s Minotaur, $23.95
The Song Is You
By Megan Abbott
Simon & Schuster, $23
A Case of Two Cities
By Qiu Xiaolong
St. Martin’s Minotaur, $24.95
In This Rain
By S.J. Rozan
Delacorte, $24
The Deadly Bride
Edited by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg
Carroll & Graf, $16.95
Marcus Sakey and Sean Chercover are two impressively talented Chicago crime novelists making their debuts this month. Both are founding members of the crime-fiction-oriented blogs The Outfit (www.theoutfitcollective.com) and the aptly named Killer Year (killeryear.wordpress.com), which already makes 2007 look extremely interesting, crime fictionwise. So here’s a reviewer’s happy dilemma: which book to start a column with? Heads it’s Sakey, tails it’s Chercover. The coin says Sakey and his “The Blade Itself.”
“The blade itself incites to violence,” is Sakey’s title quote from Homer , and it sets the book’s tone perfectly: a subtle mixture of art and violent action.
The book begins with Danny and his boyhood friend Evan involved in a pawnshop robbery gone very bad. Evan explodes with murderous rage, then does seven years in prison in Joliet while Danny goes into the construction business like his father. When Evan gets out, their friendship burns up in jealousy and anger, which Sakey exploits for every drop of tension available.
Jacket quotes from writers George Pelecanos, T. Jefferson Parker and Lee Child sing Sakey’s praises. His book is even better than they say.
In many ways, Sean Chercover, who used to be a Chicago private investigator, sets himself a tougher task: trying to inject some serious new life into a genre that is all too easy to parody.
In “Big City, Bad Blood,” Ray Dudgeon is a former newspaper reporter who became a private eye when the last of his illusions about the press being able to change things disappeared. Now he and his best friend, a working reporter named Terry (they jokingly call themselves “Woodward” and “Bernstein”), share information and a sense of growing frustration about exploding government corruption.
When Dudgeon is hired to protect a visiting Hollywood location manager who is threatened by mobsters after witnessing a meeting that should never have taken place, it gives Chercover the chance to take on two vicious and deadly industries: the Chicago Outfit and the Hollywood film business. He satirizes and savages both, while also finding time to capture Chicago neighborhoods with a cold, often hilarious eye.
Theresa Schwegel won an Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America for “Officer Down,” whose main character was a Chicago police officer named Samantha “Smack” Mack.
In “Probable Cause” she follows it up with a male lead named Ray Weiss, a Chicago officer who sees women mostly as sex objects. Weiss is told by his fellow officers that he has to rob a jewelry store as part of his initiation–it’s part of the game. But Weissfinds the owner of the shop dead of bullet wounds on the floor, and from then on Schwegel takes him on a complicated, deadly, definitely exciting descent into crime hell, where absolutely nothing is what it seems to be.
Megan Abbott also had some Edgar action last year: Her “Die a Little” was a finalist for Best Novel. Top critics favorably invoked the talented noir ghosts of Dorothy B. Hughes, James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler in their praise.
Now Abbott moves briskly and poignantly into James Ellroy territory with “The Song Is You.” Where Ellroy used the infamous Black Dahlia true-crime case for his fictional purposes last year, Abbott goes back to the never-solved 1949 disappearance of a minor actress named Jean Spangler to create a novel about a journalist-turned-studio-publicist who was with Spangler the night she disappeared, and who risks his life trying to find out why she vanished.
It’s no secret to readers of this column that Qiu Xiaolong’s series about top Shanghai Police Inspector Chen Cao is one of my favorites, for the way it tells exciting stories while revealing fascinating details of Chinese life–everything from food and poetry to politics. Qiu, who now lives in St. Louis and was lucky enough to leave China in 1988 (the year before the Tiananmen Square debacle), either slips back into China from time to time, or has excellent sources there who keep him up to date.
In “A Case of Two Cities,” his fourth outing, Chen is dispatched by his party leaders to the province of Fujian, where a leading local police detective has been found dead of suspicious causes in a karaoke center called Inebriating Money and Intoxicating Gold, and known for its corrupt sexual sidelines. (Chen hears the news while dining on dim sum at a giant, Las Vegas-style Shanghai bathhouse called Birds Flying, Fishes Jumping–a quote from an ancient proverb symbolizing “infinite possibilities.”)
In Fujian, Chen quickly learns that the dead officer had been investigating a wealthy businessman and smuggler who has fled to America with his family. Chen goes to America at the urging of his party bosses, where he is reunited with a female U.S. marshal from an earlier book.
But the truth is that nobody really wants him to carry out his mission, and all he has going for him is his built-in determination to see justice done.
Qiu Xiaolong gives thanks in his acknowledgements to S.J. Rozan–the Edgar-winning author of the groundbreaking Lydia Chin/Bill Smith series set in New York’s Chinatown–for “her generous friendship.” Rozan ventured out with the stand-alone crime novel “Absent Friends,” a tremendous story of the effects of 9/11 on a group of people on Staten Island.
Now, with “In This Rain,” she continues her non-series adventures with a beautifully constructed story set in Manhattan’s booming construction industry.
Rozan, an architect in her other life, starts her story with a suspicious murder at a building site and quickly expands it into a painful and occasionally baffling tale of political corruption. As usual, her ability to create believable human beings is amazingly sharp–from a newly paroled former private investigator and his female former partner through a New York City mayor up to his neck in financial trouble.
But the best news of all is Rozan’s promise that her next book will mark the most welcome return of Chin and Smith.
I can’t think of another annual anthology of crime stories that supplies as much sheer reading pleasure plus as much important information as the one editors Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg lay upon us like a golden egg at the end of every year.
Their 2006 door-stopper with 576 pages includes surveys on all aspects of crime fiction by such experts as Jon L. Breen, Edward D. Hoch and ace blogger Sarah Weinman (who analyzes and chooses the best of online crime, but sadly doesn’t have one of her own sharp print offerings in the book).
What stories are here are topnotch, from Sharan Newman’s “The Deadly Bride” (which lends the book its title) through excellent offerings by James Hall, Nancy Pickard, David Morrell, Rick Morfina, Robert S. Levinson, Jeremiah Healy, Anne Perry–the list is endlessly readable.
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Dick Adler reviews mysteries and thrillers for the Tribune
