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Crime
The War at Home
Rennie Airth ignores all the popular wisdom about how to maintain a detective series. His meticulously detailed procedural mysteries are beautifully written but few in number and published five to six years apart. And his all-too-mortal characters not only age but lose their edge. Yet this South African-born writer has produced three novels that are well worth reading, and rereading, whenever we’re engaged in war.
The story Airth has to tell doesn’t deal with combat itself — the only battle scenes are the ones relived in the minds of his haunted characters — but with the disorienting social and psychic illnesses that emerge in its aftermath. Beginning in 1999 with “River of Darkness,” he examined the impact on a tranquil village in Surrey when a deranged World War I veteran breached the peace by invading homes and slaughtering entire families. Since serial killers were almost unheard of in 1921, Inspector John Madden and his colleagues at Scotland Yard were forced to educate themselves in new and baffling fields of forensic science. Jumping to 1932, “The Blood-Dimmed Tide” found England caught in a crippling postwar Depression that cost people their homes, their livelihood and their dignity. So, along with absorbing the shocking phenomenon of serial sex killers, the detectives also sought to find a humane way of dealing with the armies of dispirited homeless men, many of them war veterans, wandering the countryside.
Without entirely leaving the series’s Surrey setting behind, THE DEAD OF WINTER (Viking, $25.95) shifts the scene to London, which in 1944 is still under German attack. Although long retired from the police force and now living a rural life, Madden comes up from the country to investigate the murder of the Polish “land girl” who worked on his farm and had been visiting her aunt in the city. The world he finds in these last days of the war is harder and colder than the one he once knew. It’s not just the prostitutes and thieves working the bombed-out streets; international criminals have also made sophisticated advances in smuggling. And, unlike the murderers in the previous books, the man killing refugees who have found sanctuary as agricultural workers is a new kind of villain — a professional assassin — so the police hardly know what to make of such an anomaly.
Reading these three novels in sequence, it’s impossible to miss Airth’s cautionary message: wars never end; they just bring the violence back home to poison the ground we all walk on.
A man who calls himself David Loogan settles down in Ann Arbor, Mich., takes an editing job at a literary mystery magazine called Gray Streets, forms a friendship with the publisher, has an affair with the publisher’s wife and helps his employer dig a grave for a man he has just killed. All this happens in the opening chapters of Harry Dolan’s first novel, BAD THINGS HAPPEN (Amy Einhorn/Putnam, $24.95), so you better believe he has a gift for storytelling. Although the plot is fairly outlandish, the narrative comes with startling developments and nicely tricky reversals. There’s also something appealingly offbeat about the wry, dry tone of its academic humor, which has much to do with the self-important authors who figure in the hectic plot, either as murder suspects or as the victims of a killer who seems to be culling the Gray Streets contributors list. Aside from the interestingly enigmatic hero, the publisher of the crime mag is the only character with a fully developed mind and conscience, and when he’s murdered we cheer Loogan’s loyal efforts to find his killer. But the lying literati are more fun to watch as they fluff their professional feathers in an attempt to justify their illicit, illegal or just plain nasty behavior.
Two late-19th-century cowboy brothers who become so caught up in “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” that they turn themselves into Wild West “deducifiers” in the manner of Holmes and Watson — how cute is that? Not only cute but clever, as Steve Hockensmith demonstrates in THE CRACK IN THE LENS (Minotaur, $24.99) and the three previous books in his idiosyncratic series featuring Old Red Amlingmeyer (the gloomy, thoughtful brother) and his irrepressible younger sibling, Big Red (the one who knows how to read and write). The “deducifying” is pretty primitive, but so is the society the boys find themselves in when they set out for the Texas hill country and the whorehouse where Old Red’s one true love was murdered a few years earlier. Before Old Red puzzles out the mystery of her death, Hockensmith makes sure that readers get a lightly comic taste of Old West manners and morals, so be prepared for some lively lynchings and saloon brawls — and a whole lot of spitting.
Sloane Pearson, the Chicago cop who was introduced in Theresa Schwegel’s “Probable Cause” and who returns in LAST KNOWN ADDRESS (Minotaur, $24.99), is a fighter, which is genre code for a woman constantly goaded by men into unladylike eruptions of temper. (The guys at the station house are always flicking her ponytail.) Pearson’s pugnacious temperament happens to suit the situation here, which has the scrappy officer standing up for the traumatized victims of a serial rapist. Schwegel doesn’t advance her staid but serviceable style by pointlessly shifting the narrative voice, but she’s consistently firm on her theme: the vulnerability of young women forced to become “social pioneers” by making their homes in the only neighborhoods they can afford — the dangerous ones.
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