The bright lights of Hollywood Boulevard took on a shimmering radiance, neon burning in the coolness of dusk, the hard, unpleasant edges of an ugly one-industry town blurred into blemish-free beauty. Like an aging screen queen with a great makeup artist, a gauze-draped key light, and a Vaseline-smeared camera lens, Hollywood didn’t look half bad.

Continuing my random-order reading of the novels in Max Allan Collins’s Nate Heller historical mystery series, I came to Angel in Black, his treatment of the Black Dahlia murder.

1947 finds Nate Heller newly married and honeymooning in Los Angeles. He’s riding along with a newspaper reporter when they follow a police radio call and become the first two people (after the murderer) to see the naked, bisected female corpse that will soon become a national sensation.

Heller, a former cop and well-known private eye, is invited by the chief investigator to help out. He agrees, for reasons he keeps secret. Continue reading Angel in Black, by Max Allan Collins →

I have to give T. L. Hines a lot of credit. In Faces in the Fire he has, first of all, broken with standard Christian genre fiction in making his message implicit, not explicit. You’ll search in vain here for a conversion moment or an explanation of the way of salvation.

Secondly, he’s messed with the form. It’s not that nobody has ever written a story out of sequence before, it’s just that Christian novelists, in general, don’t have the confidence to do something so experimental. Faces in the Fire begins with Chapter 34, and proceeds to tell the major characters’ stories out of sequence, showing us the consequences before we see the causes. He does this pretty well, with the result that the reading experience closely approximates the mystery that is all of our lives.

Also, it’s the rare Christian novel that features a hit man, an e-mail spammer, and a drug addicted tattoo artist as sympathetic main characters.

We’re talking grace here, not works.

The story begins with Kurt Marlowe, a metal sculptor and sometime over the road trucker, who hears ghostly voices (he calls them “spooks”) in the used clothing he buys at estate sales. He does not respond to the voices, but uses their messages as inspiration for his art. Then one day he picks up a pair of shoes that put a picture in his mind more compelling than any he’s seen before. It’s an image so compelling it scares him. So he tries to throw the shoes away. But they keep coming back to him.

He meets a woman in a truck stop, who gives him a ten digit number written on a napkin, in a plastic bag. Then the story switches to her background, and passes from her to yet another character…

It all comes together pretty neatly in the end. The plot strains a bit at points, I think, but that’s almost inevitable in a tightly woven story of this kind. All in all, a very good read.

Recommended, with cautions for adult subject matter.

Like the rest of the country, I’d seen in the papers that Huey had, on the floor of the Senate, accused FDR of aiding and abetting a murder plot against him; something about conspirators meeting at some hotel somewhere. But I’d really merely read the headlines, skimmed the stories. Nobody was taking it very seriously. After all, Huey made a habit out of such accusations. He was a wolf who kept crying little boy.

I’m delighted to have rediscovered Max Allan Collins’s Nate Heller novels. They’re textured and well-written, and something like George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman novels in providing entertaining, excellently researched history lessons. I knew almost nothing about the death of Louisiana governor and senator Huey Long before I read Blood and Thunder, but now I do.

The novel starts in 1935. Chicago private eye Nathan Heller has been persuaded by Senator Long (who met him on an earlier visit to the windy city) to become one of his bodyguards. After a visit to the Oklahoma State Fair they return to Louisiana, and Nate is introduced to the continual circus that is Huey Long’s presidential campaign. Formerly a supporter of the New Deal, Long has broken with Roosevelt, and dreams of taking his populist wealth redistribution campaign to a national stage. He entertains visitors and reporters in his hotel suite dressed in green silk pajamas. He writes music. He parties hard. He has connections with organized crime. Heller has about had his fill of it all (in spite of an enjoyable affair with one of Long’s ex-mistresses) when Long is shot to death. According to eyewitness reports he was killed by an angry dentist who was then riddled with bullets by Long’s furious bodyguards (Nate is off on an errand at that moment). Nate goes home. Continue reading Blood and Thunder, by Max Allan Collins →

I think the general consensus is that, of all Dennis Lehane’s Patrick Kenzie/Angela Genarro private eye novels, the most perfect, memorable, and troubling was Gone, Baby Gone, which was also turned into a very good movie that not enough people saw. In that story, the detectives, who were also lovers, nearly split up for good over the decision of what to do about a little girl kidnapped from a neglectful home. The conclusion of the book was heartbreaking and a real moral puzzler.

After more than a decade, author Lehane has picked up the story again in Moonlight Mile. Much has changed for the Boston investigators. Patrick, having barely survived a gunshot wound, has turned to less dangerous forms of detective work, doing contract jobs for a large firm. Angela is working on a graduate degree. They have a four-year-old daughter who is the light of their lives. Money’s tight, but if they can hold out until Angela finishes school, life ought to be good.

And then the past shows up. The aunt of Amanda McCready, the little girl kidnapped in Gone, Baby, Gone, who originally hired Patrick and Angela, approaches Patrick. Amanda, now sixteen years old, has disappeared again, she says. She fears it has something to do with the girl’s stepfather, an ex-convict and drug dealer with a record of sexual abuse.

Continue reading Moonlight Mile, by Dennis Lehane →