jdcorley's Reviews (191)

Two of the best Wolfe stories of all time, followed by a B-.  In particular, the synergy between Archie and Wolfe is on target, their arguments all leading somewhere.

One of the funniest and most charming of the Wolfes, two little novellas, uncharacteristically set in a very specific time (World War II).  Archie's sparring with Wolfe in the first book is top tier flummery and the tangle of Army and civilian life in the second gives Wolfe wonderful heartburn. It really is one of the best of the best.

It's a bit slow going at first as the characters go round and round and the clues seem aimless and the crime seems anodyne. But then everyone you've met begins to display something else about them, including our hero Harry. Soon he's paranoid, or all along, perhaps he's been seeing the things we didn't.  A fine entry in the troubled-detective genre.

It's an accident of history that this grody, grimy, lurid exploitation book materialized at a time when film and TV was going through a self-imposed stylistic minimization. This kind of book needs a De Palma adaptation circa 1983, where the emotions grow and corruption is in every corner until finally the agonizing endings cascade insanity in escalating wildness, then drops the curtain in a couple hundred words of a curtsey to the audience. Plenty of "troubled lady with modern haircut returns to small home town with secrets" books before and after this one , but this one relentlessly, wildly, screams in your ear that she shouldn't have done that. It's frankly great, a bravura debut.

Just in case you thought there was nothing left to say after the first book, Freemantle returns with a follow on revenge plot from the stuffed shirt victims in the first book. Their plan only makes sense in the context of their overweening self regard and carelessness; Charlie M, for his part, berates himself for carelessness but never displays it. No, he displays tenderness at times, and we want to see more of it. So does his wife. See you in book 3.

A lovely little thumbtack of a spy thriller - you think you're reading one thing, but it's another entirely. We think we should be listening to Charlie, because he's the main character. But you have to really listen to him.

Chabon understands both what a lot of Holmes fan-writers don't understand, and what a lot of literary giants slumming in genre spaces don't understand, which is that even if the emotional reality of our pulp (or in this case, our classic) heroes are simplistic, they are genuine, they are sincerely felt.  If anyone is cynical you need to make it skin deep. And here, in the English countryside of 1944, the old beekeeper and the young Jewish refugee tend to the Old Hive of 1926, and you won't forget it, not ever.  When he switches to the point of view of the parrot, Chabon is teasing us, but he told us not thirty pages ago that animals have capacities beyond the obvious, and so, when the parrot decides what to do, we both laugh, and feel the simple reality of it.  It's a marvel. It's better than the worst four Conan Doyle Holmes stories, that's for sure.

Among the many failures to meld the pulp action mystery to the classic amateur sleuth mystery; only Rex Stout ever managed it consistently. Dewey just can't pull it off. Singer Batts isn't any too smart, isn't eccentric enough to rise above "boring" and our narrator isnt much to talk about. The reefer madness subplot also doesn't add up to anything at all. Not a great debut novel, for certain.

What makes Dewey's pulp mysteries so readable and compelling is the hero is, truly a good guy. Compare to the Continental Op, who has no trouble arranging murders, Marlowe, who is too cynical to believe in anything, or Sam Spade, a real POS.  They might have a heart of gold but you really have to dig to get a look at it. Mac, by contrast, is a decent guy - and we know, because he's not the only decent guy in Dewey's world. That means when he steps up to protect someone we feel something about it, and want him to succeed.  Here, Mac is spiralling around a murder, making mistakes, getting tangled deeper and deeper, but ultimately he does it because he sees there's integrity in the world in danger of being brought low. It's a real pleasure.  Dewey is the undiscovered master of American noir.

Sorry man. Wolfe giving his view of race relations halfway into the book can't erase Archie's casual slurs and the honestly deranged racial landscape of this book. A pity too because the environment for the murder is not half bad. "Skip it," as Archie often says.