A Leak In The Safe

Hello, America and all my pals around the world!

Recently, Marilyn Stasio, the doyenne of mystery fiction who writes a very influential column in the New York Times Book Review mentioned a volume called THEY DIED IN VAIN: Overlooked, Underappreciated and Forgotten Mystery Novels (Crum creek Press, paper, $13) describing it as "a little volume of short essays, written by booksellers, librarians and reviewers, and edited by Jim Huang, extolling the virtues of more than 100 crime novels. The choices are idiosyncratic, which makes them fun, but every title is advanced with an intelligent argument and touching affection."

Well, dear reader, UBU was one of those who contributed a essay to said volume, so you could say I’ve finally been reviewed in the NYT book review. (I know that’s a pitiable straw to grasp at, but we all need our little pipe dreams, don’t we Mr. Iceman.)

Anyway I thought I’d do you all the vast service of posting said piece here:

As I reread The Dogs of Winter for this review I had to ask myself – is this really a mystery? True, it does feature several violent deaths, a kidnapping, drug trafficking and a murderer whose guilt isn’t established until the final pages, but it is also so unlike the typical novel in the mystery section as to suggest an altogether different realm. Although non-series books regularly win the Edgar award and climb the bestseller lists, ever since Sherlock Holmes the lion’s share of recognition in the genre has gone to the authors who write numerous installments detailing the ongoing adventures of a single protagonist. As the book world becomes more and more ruthlessly businesslike, both chain retailers and conglomerate publishers have pushed the "genrefication" of literature in order to facilitate tidy marketing , and it seems to me that writers like Kem Nunn have been among their victims. If a book called Crime and Punishment or The Secret Agent came out today who can say what shelf the computer operator would route it to?

Not that it matters – no matter where you stick it The Dogs of Winter is a masterpiece and I’m glad to have the opportunity to say it. The book begins with a drugged and dazed Jack Fletcher being awakened by a phone call. A former star surf photographer now on the cusp of middle age, Fletcher’s devotion to the endless summer lifestyle has reduced him to shooting suburban weddings and popping pain pills when he is offered an improbable second chance. Drew Harmon, the reclusive legend of surfing, has insisted that Jack be the photographer when he reveals the secret of the legendary Heart Attacks, "California’s premier mysto wave, the last secret spot."

Jack’s halting progress toward Heart Attacks in the company of Drew and a couple of callow modern surfers is interspersed with the stories of the residents of Sweet Home, the imprecisely named Indian village where Travis McCade of the Northern California Indian Development Council tries to keep the peace, and Kendra Harmon, Drew’s wife, struggles to maintain her delicate mental equilibrium in the face of the growing certainty that her husband is guilty of murder.

Soon enough Jack’s bumbling and Drew’s arrogance cause the death of a young Indian boy, and his criminal kin, the "crankster gangsters," arrive to seek vengeance, first against Kendra and then the surfers. The plot threads all meet in the classic American setting of the wilderness, "the end of things" where nature is both beautiful and deadly and human nature both heroic and vicious beyond measure, a place where both extinction and rebirth are possible.

Nunn’s prose is beautiful, and he shows himself to be the rare master stylist who has the ability to maintain page turning suspense while still engaging higher themes. When this book first came out I wrote that "The Dogs of Winter is his triumph and our treasure, a mature, ambitious, highly readable masterpiece," and since I get the same chills up my spine at the conclusion every time I read it, I can only say that time has more than confirmed my opinion.

Not bad, huh? A little too much editorializing in the beginning, but I was really on my soap box about the evils of book chains in those days. I still know them to be satanic but have since realized that nobody cares.

Except me, yr pal,

UBU

Skin River Steven Sidor (St. Martin’s Minotaur paperback $6.99)

When Steve Hamilton talks, people listen. He always goes out of his way to support other worthy writers and after his signings there’s always a rush to pick up the books he’s mentioned. He usually likes authors like Denise Mina whose work is a little darker than his (though, believe me, I’ve read the forthcoming Alex McKnight and it is plenty dark), but I’m no different than the crowd – when he touted a guy named Steven Sidor in a recent interview I had to seek Sidor out, and I’m glad I did.

Skin River, Sidor’s first book, features Buddy Bayes, a protagonist who, like many created by the new wave of guy writers like Hamilton, Jon King and Craig Johnson, is a middle aged man with a problematic past who, mostly by choice, finds himself isolated and alone in the middle of nowhere, in Buddy’s case the past being criminal and the nowhere rural Wisconsin. When he discovers a severed hand in the Skin River he is drawn into the horrors surrounding a local serial killer who calls himself the Goatskinner. It becomes even more personal when the Goatskinner goes after one of the few people close to Buddy and the clueless sheriff becomes convinced Buddy is the culprit.

It’s not a perfect effort – there’s too much focus on the not quite credible and very icky villain (Hannibal Lecter has a lot to answer for) and Sidor, though his prose is lyrical and smooth, tends to over-describe at times (we know how to light a cigarette, thanks), but Skin River draws the reader in masterfully and delivers a great ride all the way to the slam bang ending. There’s not much mystery, but a lot of suspense and action and even a jolt of a coda.

Although Buddy would seem to be an ideal series character who could stand to be developed further, Sidon’s second novel Bone Factory features different protagonists, which, take my advice, is no way to succeed in the mystery game. All in all, though, Sidon is an yet another example of why we should always listen to Steve Hamilton.