Trouble in Paradise: A Review of Ken Mercer's "Slow Fire"

Will Magowan is an ex-cop who left the L.A.P.D. under a cloud and in the wake of an enormous personal tragedy. He’s unemployed, estranged from his wife, and reduced to living in a broken-down Airstream trailer when he receives a letter, offering him a job as the Chief of Police in Haydenville, California. Will is perplexed by the offer, especially since he hadn’t even applied for the job. But he has no other prospects and so accepts the call.

Haydenville is situated in a majestic national forest in the northern part of the state. But on arriving there, Will finds that the once-idyllic town is in the grip of a virtual plague that has plunged the community into nothing short of a death spiral. He also quickly discovers that he has very few allies, other than Thomas, his rookie deputy, who has no formal training whatsoever. Nonetheless, Will decides to stick it out, hoping that by attempting to resolve the town’s problems, he might also find some measure of personal redemption.

Will is only briefly on the job when he’s called to the scene of an apparent accident. A young woman has been found dead near a river, lying next to her overturned kayak. Will is troubled by what he finds, and refuses to agree with the conclusion that the victim died by accident.

Will fairly quickly discovers the source of the town’s difficulties and identifies his prime suspect. But in attempting to address the issue, he’s stymied at every turn. Even the mayor who hired him stubbornly refuses to cooperate and will not give any credence to Will’s well-founded suspicions.

The death of the young kayaker inaugurates a wave of horrific violence, and Magowan finds himself up against some genuinely creepy, malevolent and amoral villains. A lesser man would say the hell with it and leave Haydenville to the fate it probably deserves. But Will Magowan is not a lesser man. Against nearly insurmountable odds and in the face of grave danger to himself and the handful of people who support him, Will soldiers on, determined to redeem both himself and his newly adopted home town.

By naming his fictional town Haydenville, Mercer would appear to be paying an obvious homage to the film, High Noon, which was set in the town of Hadleyville, New Mexico. And Will Magowan’s struggle to save a small town that is threatened by grave danger and inhabited by an ungrateful and unsupportive population is, of course, strongly reminiscent of Marshall Will Kane’s efforts on behalf of his own small town.

The story of the flawed but ultimately virtuous outsider who rides into town and saves the day against overwhelming odds has long been a staple both of westerns and of crime fiction. But Ken Mercer provides a fresh take on the idea and creates strong, believable characters in a beautifully rendered setting. The plot moves swiftly. And even though the villain is identified fairly early on, the suspense builds to a great climax.

Slow Fire was another excellent First Mystery pick by the staff of The Poisoned Pen bookstore (http://www.poisonedpen.com/ ), and happily it is the first of a new series. With this book, Ken Mercer is off to a great start.

Lawrence Block/Matthew Scudder: An Appreciation

I first met Matthew Scudder sometime in the latter 1980s when I stumbled across a paperback copy of When the Sacred Ginmill Closes. I was hooked from the opening paragraph and when I finished the book, I set quickly about the task of finding every other Lawrence Block novel I could lay my hands on.

Thankfully, there were a lot of them. Beginning in the middle 1950s, Block has had a very prolific career, producing something in the neighborhood of fifty novels and a hefty collection of short stories. Through the middle 1960s, he wrote a number of stand alone pulp novels with titles like A Diet of Treacle and Grifter’s Game. Happily, some of these earlier books have now been revived and reprinted as part of the Hard Case Crime series and are thus available again for the first time in years.

In 1967, Block created his first series character, Evan Tanner, in The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep. Three years later, he produced the first of four books featuring Chip Harrison in a series that was obviously a tribute to the work of Rex Stout. And then, in 1976, Block introduced Matthew Scudder in The Sins of the Fathers.

Scudder, a divorced alcoholic ex-cop who had left the force after a tragic accident, is an unlicensed private detective who does “favors for friends” who pay him for his time and efforts. He lives in a tiny hotel room, “the size of a walk-in closet,” in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan, and through the early books in the series, he wrestles with his demons, particularly his alcoholism.

By far the darkest of Block’s series characters, Scudder spends the bulk of his time in saloons, denying—mostly to himself—that he has a drinking problem. When he does take a case, he tithes ten percent of the fee, most of which goes into the poor boxes of Catholic churches where he will often light a candle in memory of someone he’s lost. Matt is not a religious man, and he’s not entirely certain why he feels compelled to do this, but it allows him time to reflect in the quiet solitude of the churches he visits. The Catholics get most of his business simply because their churches are open more often than anyone else’s.

The cases he takes are always interesting and Scudder almost always resolves them, not by making great intuitive leaps, but rather by doing the hard, plodding work of the determined detective. You enjoy watching him do it, but mostly you read these books because of the great cast of characters that Block has assembled in this series, beginning with Scudder himself. As the series progresses, Block introduces a small supporting cast and then makes you care a great deal about each of their lives and their respective fates.

Block allows these people to age in real time so that by the time we see them in the sixteenth book, All The Flowers Are Dying, the survivors have all grown and changed, in some cases dramatically, from the characters that we first met as long as thirty years earlier. Most important, Scudder himself comes to a major transformational moment at the conclusion of the fourth book, Eight Million Ways To Die, and in the wake of that moment becomes a richer, fuller, and even more interesting protagonist.

I’ve read this series from first book to last any number of times now, and my own personal favorite is the eleventh, The Devil Knows You’re Dead. Matt is asked to investigate the murder of a young attorney, Glenn Holtzmann. The case appears to be open and shut: Holtzmann was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time and was shot and killed by a mentally unbalanced street person. But the brother of the man the police have arrested asks Scudder to look into the case, and Matt discovers that, while the police have apparently arrested the right man, the victim was a man of many unexplained secrets. Once captured by the case, Scudder will not give it up until he has unraveled all of those secrets.

The mystery itself is fine, but what I love about this book is that it comes at a very important point in Matthew Scudder’s life, probably the most significant since the closing pages of Eight Million Ways To Die. The times are changing, and so are the people that surround Matt. Scudder is personally conflicted in a variety of ways that will resonate deeply with a lot of readers. And the way he reacts to those changes and conflicts is what makes him one of the most intriguing characters ever to inhabit the pages of crime fiction.

The sixteenth book in this series appeared in 2005, and Block has suggested that he may not write another. I hate to think that might be true. I’ve spent scores of hours in the company of these characters and the thought that they might not appear again is enormously sad. I understand that, ultimately, there will have to be a final Matthew Scudder novel; I just don’t want to have to face the prospect for a good long time.

Block would go on to create two additional series characters, Bernie Rhodenbarr who is a bookseller by day and a burglar by night, and Keller, a stamp-collecting hit man who would appear in a series of short stories and in one full-length novel. Bernie and Keller are much lighter and funnier characters, and they are both enjoyable reads. But Matthew Scudder remains Block’s greatest achievement.

Standing firmly in the company of the all-time greats, Lawrence Block’s Matthew Scudder will endure for as long as people read detective fiction. Every reader has his or her own favorite author and protagonist; these guys will always be mine.

D.C. Noir

George Pelecanos owns Washington, D .C. in the same way that Raymond Chandler once owned Los Angeles. In a series of books, many of them featuring his protagonist, Derek Strange, Pelecanos has mined the city's dark side for riveting stories that often also highlight the pathologies that afflict it.

Shoedog is an early (1994) stand-alone that features a young drifter named Constantine, who's traveled the world and now finds himself hitchhiking outside of his native Washington, D.C. He accepts a ride from an older man named Polk, who is heading to Florida and encourages Constantine to go along. Polk just has to make one quick stop and then they'll be on their way.

Any reader of noir fiction will immediately understand, that "the one quick stop" will inevitably lead to trouble, and as a consequence, the young drifter finds himself recruited into a gang of minor thugs who are planning a couple of armed robberies. Constantine goes along for the ride, in part because he feels some sympathy for Polk, in part because he has nothing better to do, and in part because he has fallen for the attractive young woman who belongs to the gang's boss.

The situation immediately becomes combustible and explodes into violence, leading to a shattering conclusion. As in all of Pelecanos's work, the writing is crisp; the characters and the D.C. settings are perfectly drawn, and the music is evocative. For those who have enjoyed his later work, the reissue of Shoedog offers a glimpse of a younger Pelecanos just hitting his stride.

Worth Looking For: California Fire and Life

Browsing the shelves of the Poisoned Pen, my favorite mystery bookstore, I recently found a reprint of Don Winslow's 1999 novel, California Fire and Life. Winslow's The Power of the Dog is one of my favorite books of all time, and I've thoroughly enjoyed everything else of his that I've read. This is an earlier book, but it's an excellent read that will also teach you everything you ever wanted to know about arson investigation.

In an effort to protect a witness from certain death, Orange County Sheriff's Department arson investigator Jack Wade fabricated evidence and then lied under oath. Betrayed by a fellow deputy, "Accidently" Bently, Jack is convicted of perjury and bounced from the department.


Twelve years later, Jack is a claims investigator for California Fire and Life. A multi-million dollar home and furniture collection belonging to a Russian immigrant, Nicky Vale, goes up in smoke. Sadly, Nicky's beautiful young wife goes up along with it. Jack's old nemisis, "Accidently" spends about fifteen minutes investigating and rules the fire accidental.

Jack's investigation quickly points to a lot of problelms with Bently's verdict, including the fact that the victim had no smoke in her lungs. Beyond that, Jack finds the family dog locked outside of the house, and Jack knows full well that, while an arsonist might burn up his wife, he will never burn his dog along with her.


It's clear to Jack that the fire was deliberately set. Nicky Vale claims to have a solid alibi--he was home with Mama all night. But Jack quickly breaks the alibi and discovers that Nicky had the means, motive and opportunity to set the blaze. Jack denies the claim, only to discover that this sets him in conflict not only with Nicky Vale but with his own employer as well.


From that point on, the book is a wild ride with Jack battling Russian mobsters, Vietnamese hoods, insurance scammers, and the executives of California Fire and Life. Don't expect to get any sleep until you've finished the book.

Dick Francis, R.I.P.

Not even a month after the death of Robert B. Parker, the world of crime fiction loses another giant with the death Sunday of Dick Francis. The retired jockey, who turned to writing thrillers in his middle thirties, produced a steady stream of books over the next forty-plus years that never failed to entertain.

Most of the books were set in the world of British horse racing that Francis knew and obviously loved so well. Though he only rarely featured the same protagonist from one book to another, virtually all of his heroes shared the same characteristics. Typically they were in their mid-to-late thirties, as Francis was when injuries forced his retirement from racing. Often, like their creator, they were in the midst of some career change that had been forced upon them. They were quiet, modest, but extremely clever and capable men; almost always they were single, and inevitably the right women found them attractive and compelling.

Lurking in the background, and usually exposed only near the end of the book, was a deliciously malevolent villain, pulling strings from behind the curtain in pursuit of some grand scheme that often threatened to inflict gruesome damage on any number of victims and upon the world of horse racing as a whole.

In the end, of course, Francis's hero always exposed and thwarted the evildoer, albeit usually at great personal cost. While Francis's sex scenes were always fairly tame, he wrote great scenes of gut-wrenching violence that could give a reader nightmares for weeks after.

Best of all, Francis's work has stood the test of time, unlike the work of some other writers of his generation that already seems dated and uninteresting. Even now, nearly fifty years after its initial publication, one can pick up his first novel,DEAD CERT, or any of the many that followed and it will seem as fresh and new as it did on the weekend that you first read it.

Dick Francis leaves behind a body of work that will entertain readers for years to come. He will be sorely missed.

Joining the Game

Since creating this blog in August, I’ve been caught up in all of the activities essential to the launch of my new book, No Place To Die, while at the same time working on the book that will follow. (Perhaps) needless to say, this has left me no time at all to attend to this blog.

Happily, the release date for NPTD for is set for July 27, and my website is now live at www.jameslthane.com. I am still caught up in the effort to prepare for marketing the book, and, of course, I still need to be working on the next one, which is tentatively titled, Until Death. That said, I now feel like I have a little more breathing room, and I hope that I will now have time to blog, at least occasionally.

This is, I think, a very interesting time in which to be appearing with a debut novel. The state of the general economy is obviously not good, and in consequence one worries that potential readers who, in better times, might have been willing to gamble on a new author, will now stick to buying the books of better-known writers or, even worse, might stop buying any books at all.

Additionally, the publishing industry is in a fair amount of turmoil, battered by the recession and roiled by the growing competition between the smaller independent booksellers and the larger chains, between these more traditional bookstores and the giant discounters like Costco and Wal-Mart, and between “brick and mortar” bookstores and the online retailers led by Amazon.com.

Beyond that, of course, publishers who have, since the days of Johannes Gutenberg, built an industry based on paper and ink and on a business model that has been essentially unchanged for years, are now confronted with an entirely new paradigm in a digital world of Kindles and iPads.

How book publishing will work in this brave new world is very much in question. Certainly no one expects that the traditional book will disappear anytime soon. Still, it is also apparent that growing numbers of readers are migrating to e-books, for at least some of their reading, and one can only assume that this trend will continue, especially as more e-readers come to the market and as the price for these devices falls.

But while the technology for delivering e-books is evolving almost at warp speed, the business model for their sale and distribution is still very much up in the air, and a number of issues are being debated heatedly out here in the blogosphere and elsewhere.

For example, should e-books be released simultaneously with the first edition of the printed book, or should their release be delayed, and if so, for how long?

How should e-books be priced when the cost of producing and distributing them is virtually nothing compared to the cost of printing and distributing a traditional book?

Are readers paying principally for the content of the book (which would suggest that the price for an e-book should not be that much different than that of a printed book), or are they paying for the physical object that constitutes the book (which would suggest that the price of an e-book might be significantly less than that of a printed book)?

Who will set the price of e-books, the publishers or the retailers?

As demonstrated by last week’s brawl between Macmillan and Amazon.com, opinions are strongly held on all sides of these questions, and I certainly would not pretend to have definitive answers to any of them. But I confess that I am concerned by those people who argue that even $9.99 is too much to pay for an e-book that consists of nothing more than a few lines of digital code that can be conveyed from the seller to the buyer for virtually nothing.

The problem with this argument, I think, is that it fails to acknowledge the fact that the price of a traditional book includes much more than just the cost of the paper, the ink and the diesel fuel required to truck the book from the printing plant to your local bookstore.

Long before the book even got to the publisher, a literary agent had to wade through perhaps several hundred query letters and submissions to discover the book in the first place. He or she then had to invest a considerable amount of time, energy and money, first working with the author to polish the book and then submitting it to publishers.

At the publishing company, someone had to review lord-knows how many manuscripts before selecting the book for publication, and in the wake of that decision, an editor had to work with the author to further refine the book and shepherd it through the publication process. The art department had to create and produce cover art that would make the book attractive to readers; the marketing department had to develop a strategy for selling the book; and the sales force had to get out and sell it. And all along the way, these people had to pay rent, salaries, utilities, insurance, and all the other costs necessary to keep their staffs employed and the lights on long enough to get the book out into the world.

Leaving aside the whole issue of what the author should be paid for conceiving the book in the first place, then spending perhaps a year of his or her life writing the book, only to suffer through the daunting and often discouraging process of trying to find an agent and a publisher, certainly the rest of the people involved in this process deserve to be fairly compensated for their efforts. And, certainly, the owners of and shareholders in these companies should be able to expect at least some minimal return on the money they’ve invested.

There are those who suggest that, in the new digital world, all of these “middle men” are now superfluous, and that we no longer need literary agents and traditional publishers standing as gatekeepers between authors and their potential audiences. The assumption is that anyone with a computer can now pound out a book, offer it for sale as an e-book for $1.99, or whatever other price he or she might choose, and thus launch a literary career.

Certainly this will happen, and indeed it is already happening. And I imagine that for some authors, being “published” in this fashion will be sufficiently rewarding, psychologically and perhaps even financially. But this trend will almost certainly result in waves of e-books coming into the market place. Some of these books may well be treasures that otherwise might never have found an audience. But I suspect that many more of them may not live up to that description, and as a reader, even more than a writer, I think it’s critically important that someone continues to sort through the “slush” pile to discover and produce books that are deserving of a wide audience. Agents and publishers have performed that function for a good many years, and for the most part, I think, they have done it very well.

Whether one prefers to read a book in a hardcover edition, a mass market paperback or on his or her e-reader, is ultimately of little consequence to the larger debate. Irrespective of the format, we all want to read great books that are well edited and attractively produced, and this almost certainly cannot be accomplished in an environment where the books are virtually given away (no pun intended).

Obviously, everyone involved—authors, agents, and publishers—will have to adapt to the realities of this new age, but I believe that all of them still have very important roles to play. And in spite of the daunting challenges presented by the current environment, I’m very happy to be joining the game.

Welcome

At the moment this blog and my website are still under development. I'm busy finishing my new book and haven't the time yet to blog here as well. I hope you'll agree that my time is better spent on the book, and while you are breathlessly waiting for updates about what's going on in my corner of the world, you can reach me at jim@jameslthane.com.