Donald Lam Reports Back for Duty

First published in 1944, this is another of Erle Stanley Gardner's Donald Lam and Bertha Cool detective novels, which Gardner wrote under the name of A. A. Fair.

At this point, of course, World War II was raging and as a virile young specimen, Donald could hardly fail to do his part. So he left the agency in the hand of his partner, Bertha, and joined the Navy. This was very convenient for the Navy, but very inconvenient for a crime fiction author whose lead character was thus unavailable for duty.

Gardner (or Fair) resolved the problem by sending Lam to the South Seas, where he was attacked not by the Japanese but by a tropical bug that left him too debilitated to continue in the service. He's been mustered out for health reasons and so returns to duty at the detective agency, where he will carry on, albeit in a weakened condition.

By the time Donald returns, the agency has fallen on hard times. He was the brains of the outfit and without him around, the clients have been few and far between. But practically the moment Donald steps through the door, a new case falls into their lap. A young woman wants the firm to investigate the background of her boss's new wife. It seems simple enough, but naturally, it won't be simple at all.

Donald discovers the target at the Rimley Rendezvous, a cocktail lounge where bored women meet men on the prowl. The target is with a man who is not her new husband, and the management, recognizing Donald, boots him out. Donald calls Bertha, describes the man the target was with and tells Bertha to tail him when he leaves the club.

The tail job will lead to an auto accident, which will be followed shortly by an axe murder. Naturally, there's a cigarette girl with great legs who's involved in this up to her eyebrows and perhaps beyond and, as is usual in one of these books, the plot gets increasingly convoluted as one page follows the next.

Reading these books, I've often wondered how Gardner ever managed to keep the plots straight in his own mind, or if he even bothered to try; God knows, it's virtually impossible for the reader to follow them. In the end, of course, Donald will tease out the solution to the whole mess as he always does and just in the nick of time. These stories often don't make a lot of sense, but it's always fun to watch Donald in action and to return, however briefly, to a much simpler day and age in the crime fiction business.

Horror in the Heartland

Sheriff's deputy Billy Lafitte sounds like a guy who might have stepped straight out of one of Jim Thompson's darker novels. (As though he had any light ones.)

Lafitte was a policeman in Gulfport, Mississippi, but because of his antics in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, he was booted off the force. His wife divorced him and took custody of their two kids, but Billy's now ex-brother-in-law, the sheriff of Yellow Medicine County in rural Minnesota, takes pity on Billy and hires him on as a deputy.

One might think that given a second chance and anxious to redeem himself in the eyes of his wife and children, Billy might straighten up and fly right. He chooses not to do so, and once in the frozen tundra, he reverts to the sort of conduct that got him kicked out of Mississippi. For example, he soon corrals the local meth cookers and dealers and, rather than shutting them down, effectively puts them under his thumb.

He also falls hard for a young girl named Drew, the lead singer of a local psychobilly band called Elvis Antichrist. Lafitte basically coerces Drew into having sex with him once but then falls hard for the girl and can't bring himself to force himself on her again; he'll only have her if she genuinely wants him.

That's not likely, since Drew is madly in love with a guy who's even a bigger loser than Lafitte. The love of her life is a small-time meth dealer and when he gets into trouble, Drew asks Billy to help the kid out. Billy agrees to do so in his own inimitable way and soon finds that he's stepped into a hornets' nest that seems to grow bigger by the moment, involving a snarky and ambitious federal agent and a group of bad-ass Malaysian terrorists who have targeted the American Heartland. Needless to say, the excrement hits the fan in a big way.

This is a very compelling book that immediately grabs the reader by the throat and then squeezes harder and harder until the climax. It's not a delicate little read; rather it's deliciously dark, nasty, brutal, gory and twisted. Just when you think Smith has reached a line that can't be crossed, he leaps over it and rushes full speed ahead.(Did I mention that the book was really gory?)

Cozy, it's not. But readers who like their crime fiction really, really dark will find that Yellow Medicine is the perfect prescription.

Dave Brandstetter on the Job for Pinnacle Life

Pinnacle insurance has issued a policy on the life of Paul Myers, a truck driver. Only a couple of months later, Myers' truck flies off a cliff and Myers is killed. As a matter of routine, Pinnacle hires crack investigator Dave Brandstetter to look into the matter.

The matter turns out to be anything but routine when investigators learn that someone had planted an explosive device under the cab of the truck and that the device was detonated just before the truck went airborne. When Dave goes to visit the widow, Angela Myers, he finds that she's been recently beaten. She claims that her husband did it just before he died, but Dave isn't buying it.

Dave also quickly learns that Paul Myers' best friend, another trucker who was hard up for cash, has also just died, apparently from a heart attack, and Dave is now convinced that something sinister is definitely going on.

Of course there is, or there would be no book. And this is a pretty good one.

Dave's lover, Cecil, is still recovering from gunshot wounds he sustained at the end of Dave's last adventure, and in and around nursing Cecil back to health, Dave sets out to determine what was going on during the last few days of Paul Myers' life and why Angela Myers is so reluctant to discuss it. It seems pretty clear that Paul Myers was involved in something shady, and before too long, Dave can only hope to stay alive long enough himself to figure out what it was.

This is one of the better books in an excellent series. As always, Hansen creates memorable characters and vividly marks out his southern California territory, in the process showing why he's a worthy successor to the writers like Raymond Chandler who first claimed this region for their own.

Nick Stefanos Goes Down By the River

First published in 1995, this is the third and final installment of George Pelecanos's series featuring Nick Stefanos. In the opening book,A Firing Offense, Nick left his job at Nutty Nathan's electronics store and got his license as a P.I. But as this book opens, Nick, who has a major drinking problem, is supporting himself by tending bar at The Spot, a somewhat less-than-genteel establishment. Being a P.I. is still something of a sideline for Nick.

At this point, Nick is dating a woman probably better than he deserves and who is also developing a significant problem with booze herself. Needless to say, Stefanos is not the best influence in this regard. One night, Nick goes on a hellacious bender and winds up dead drunk, down by the Anacostia River. During the course of the night, a car pulls up near the spot where Nick has passed out. He awakens sufficiently to hear two men drag a third out of a car and shoot him. Nick can't raise his head high enough to see either the killers or their car, but he is alert enough to deduce from the sound of their voices that one of the killers is white, the other black.

The next morning, Nick finally awakens and stumbles down to the riverbank where he finds the body of the victim, a young black man. He makes an anonymous call to the cops, reporting the killing, and then beats feet.

The cops are convinced that it's a drug deal gone wrong or perhaps a gang killing and they don't appear to be putting a lot of effort into solving the case. But Nick knows that it's highly unlikely that a black man and a white man would be cooperating in either scenario. The killing has sobered him, at least temporarily, and he decides to investigate the crime himself.

Stefanos finds it significant that the victim's best friend is now missing and he teams up with a straight-arrow newbie P.I. named Jack LaDuke who has been hired by the missing boy's mother to find him. Together, Nick and LaDuke will be drawn into a seamy world of drugs, gay porn, violent crime and lots of other unpleasant activities as they attempt to find the missing boy and solve the killing.

As is usual in a novel by George Pelecanos, the major force in the book is the setting and atmosphere that he creates. The seedy underside of Washington, D.C., where virtually all of his books are set, comes alive and is vividly rendered. You can feel the poverty and despair, smell the cigarette smoke, and practically taste the liquor.

As always in a Pelecanos book, music plays a key role, and hardly a page goes by that does not find Stefanos listening to one musical group or another, a great many of whom no one else has ever heard of, and at times it can seem like Pelecanos is simply showing off in this regard, effectively pointing out to the reader that he is cooler and way more hip than the reader could possibly ever be.

But this is a small complaint about a very good book from a writer early in his career who would only grow more talented and produce even better books in the years to come. It should appeal to any reader of crime fiction who likes his or her action down and dirty and who understands that in real life, sometimes there are no happy endings.

A Shoplifter Gets Kinsey Millhone Into a World of Trouble

P.I. Kinsey Millhone is taking a break and reluctantly catching up on some shopping in a Nordstrom's department store, when she sees a pair of shoplifters helping themselves to the store's merchandise. Kinsey alerts a clerk who in turn calls security. One of the shoplifters, a middle-aged woman named Audrey Vance, is caught and arrested. Her younger companion escapes, but not before attempting to run over Kinsey in the parking garage.

Vance is released on bail and shortly thereafter is found under a bridge, apparently having committed suicide--perhaps because of the shame? Kinsey feels a bit guilty for her role in all of this, even though the woman was clearly wrong and deserved to be arrested. But in spite of the evidence suggesting otherwise, Vance's fiancé refuses to believe that the love of his life could have been a career criminal. He thinks the whole thing was a minor mistake that got blown way out of proportion and he hires Kinsey to investigate. As always happens in these cases, Kinsey is soon up to her neck in trouble.

Meanwhile, a wealthy society woman grows suspicious of her husband while a young man with a gambling jones foolishly borrows ten grand from a loan shark and heads off to Vegas. The loan shark has family, romantic and legal problems of his own, and all of them are on a collision course with Kinsey Millhone at the center of the impact.

The early books in this series were comparatively brief and were all narrated by Millhone in her first-person voice. This book, the twenty-second in the series, is longer and more complex than the earlier entries. Much of the story is still narrated by our intrepid heroine, but much of it is also told from the third-person POV of several other characters.

It's a fun read, but the problem with the book, at least for me, is that the other characters are a lot more interesting than Millhone. And the tone of the book suggests that, subconsciously at least, the author may feel the same way. The book really comes to life when the story focuses on the other characters. Grafton has created some very complex and interesting roles here and it's fun to watch their stories unfold.

When Kinsey takes over the story, though, things seem to drag a bit. Perhaps this is because over the course of the earlier twenty-one books in the series, we've seen Kinsey go though her routine over and over again. A long-time reader of the series can pretty much predict every move she's going to make and the character no longer seems to contain any surprises. This is perhaps inevitable when the series has been as long and as successful as this one, but it's probably a bad sign when the reader sighs every time the main protagonist takes over the story again.

My other concern about the series as a whole is that Grafton decided early on that Kinsey Millhone would not age in any practical sense and that the stories would stay rooted in the 1980s. Kinsey does celebrate her 38th birthday in this book, but that's not bad for a character who first appeared in 1982. (This book is set in 1988.)

While this spares Grafton from having to deal with all of the changes that have occurred over the last thirty years, it does limit her as well. Kinsey Millhone is essentially stuck in a time warp. She hasn't grown or changed very much since A is for Alibi and neither has the world around her. For a long-time reader, this means that the character and her surroundings have become awfully static and predictable and thus, perhaps, somewhat less interesting.

Still, it's hard to argue with success, and Grafton has created here one of the most enduring characters and one of the most successful crime fiction franchises in this history of the genre. She still spins a fun tale but one wonders how much better these books might have been had she brought the character forward into the modern era.

A Complex Moral Dilemma in the 87th Precinct

Doug King, a wealthy industrialist, is putting together a secret deal that will effectively give him control of the company where he has been working for most of his life. To make the deal, he's had to scrape together every last dime he has and that he can borrow. Now he's got $750,000 and is ready to make his move.

Just as he's about to put his plan into motion, however, a kidnapper calls King and tells him that the kidnapper and his partner have King's young son, Bobby. If King wants his son back alive, he needs to pay $500,000. The kidnappers will phone with instructions later.

King and his wife are naturally panicked and call the cops. Steve Carella and other detectives from the 87th Precinct spring into action and are busy setting traps on King's phone lines and doing the other things that the police would normally do in such a case when Bobby walks through the door after playing outside.

It turns out that the kidnappers have made a critical mistake. Instead of grabbing Bobby, they have grabbed his playmate, the son of King's humble chauffer. The kidnappers don't care; they still want the five hundred grand. Doug King would have been willing to pony up the money for his own son, but he's not so sure about ransoming back the chauffer's kid, because if he does, he will not have the money he needs to complete his big business deal.

While Carella and the other detective try to track the kidnappers and rescue the boy, Doug King must wrestle with his conscience and decide what to do. It makes for an entertaining tale with a complex moral dilemma at its center. The result is one of the better early entries in this long-running series.

It's a bittersweet evening for Alex Delaware and his Main Squeeze, Robin. For a long time one of their favorite romantic hangs has been at the bar in the aging Fauborg Hotel in Beverly Hills. But the place is closing and on the the bar's last night, Alex and Robin go in for a farewell drink. The occasion is beyond sad and their attention is drawn to an apparent bodyguard outside the hotel and to an attractive young woman who is the only other patron inside the bar. She's dressed in white, wearing an expensive diamond watch, and is apparently waiting for someone who never shows.

Two days later, Alex is working at home when his pal, Lt. Milo Sturgis drops in. As usual, Milo cleans out the refrigerator and he shows Alex photos from his latest homicide. In an amazing coincidence, which is somewhat typical of this series, it turns out that the murder victim is none other than the young woman that Alex had seen in the bar.

Although there is absolutely no reason for a consulting psychologist to be involved in this case, Alex naturally tags along with Milo as he investigates the crime. There are some fairly seedy and kinky characters involved; some of them wealthy, others not. Simply identifying the victim becomes a major challenge.

Milo ultimately gets an anonymous tip that leads them to a website where wealthy Sugar Daddies attempt to make arrangements with Sweet Young Things. The victim was registered with the site and had made a connection with a very wealthy patron.

Alex and Milo will formulate and discard several scenarios that might have led to the crime before hitting upon the solution. It's still fun to watch them work, but after twenty-six books, the series has settled into a pattern that can be a bit frustrating for readers who have been along for the entire ride.

As an example, Milo's rude eating habits are really getting tiresome. Certainly, there ought to be a way of defining the character without having him clean out every refrigerator in sight and spilling half of his meals all over himself. But the hardest thing to come to grips with here is Delaware's role in a lot of these cases.

In the earlier books, which were much better than many of the later ones, Alex served the department as a consulting psychologist, most often dealing with the children who were involved in the homicide cases. In these instances, he had a legitimate reason for being involved. In a lot of the later books, though, he simply tags along as Milo investigates his cases. As in this instance, there's no legitimate reason for Alex to be anywhere near this case, and certainly no real homicide investigator would allow a civilian to play the role that Alex does.

During the course of this book, Alex will deal with a situation in which a child needs his help, but it has little or nothing to do with the investigation and the reader is left to wonder why Milo doesn't simply attend to his own business.

That isn't to say that this is a bad book. It is entertaining, but for those who yearn for the more compelling and sophisticated cases of Delaware's early career, it's still something of a disappointment.