There’s a rather pathetic sub-group among mystery fans (I’m part of it) that’s always on the lookout, without much hope, for the author who will truly fill the shoes of John D. MacDonald and his private eye, Travis McGee. Randy Wayne White’s Doc Ford comes the closest so far, in my view, but he doesn’t quite hit the mark.

When I started Tom Lowe’s A False Dawn, I thought I’d found the successor at last. For a few chapters. Then it kind of fell apart, but that first impression was strong enough to give me hopes for this author.

Sean O’Brien resembles Travis McGee in his Florida east coast location (on the St. John’s River in this case), and in living—at least part of the time—on a boat. Also in his relations with his neighbors at the marina. But the great resonance is found in Sean’s narration, in his wry and world-weary decency.

Sean is a retired Miami police detective. He left the job after his wife died of cancer, and devotes himself to restoring his house and his boat. Also to looking after his dog, a dachshund named Max. He has no intention of interfering with police matters until he discovers a dying girl lying on a river bank. She expires in his arms, speaking words in a language he doesn’t know.

Although two of the cops who come to investigate seem decent and competent, one of them appears determined to pin the girl’s murder on Sean. Sean’s desire to clear himself, as well as a feeling of obligation to the dead girl, impels him to put his own detective expertise to work, leading him to discover a festering swamp of human smuggling, sex trafficking, and political corruption.

Although Sean O’Brien has the makings of a great character, in my opinion, he didn’t impress me so much as this story went on. His penchant for walking, eyes wide open, into ridiculously dangerous situations struck me as simply self-destructive. And frankly, I’m tired of stories (SPOILER HERE) where wealthy industrialists turn out to serial killers. How many millionaire serial killers have there been in real life? How many have you encountered in novels, movies, and TV shows? The final showdown didn’t work well for me either. I found it far-fetched.

There’s an element of mysticism in this book which I’m not sure how to take. A spiritualist makes a prediction which comes true, but Sean has nothing good to say about her and seems to find her occult practices repellant. There’s also a mysterious Native American character, who may or may not be a ghost. At one point, at a grave, Sean makes the sign of the cross.

All in all, I give A False Dawn a mixed review. Still, on the basis of the strong opening, I think I might be willing to give Tom Lowe another chance. I think he has the potential to become a strong and successful detective writer.

Cautions of language, violence, and sexual situations.

Badge of Evil is chiefly memorable as the source text for Orson Welles’s film Touch of Evil. It’s a competent mystery/thriller, written in the 1950s in a style that would be considered pretty languid today.

The film writers made a number of changes in the basic story, written by “Whit Masterson,” a pseudonym for the creative team of Wade Miller and William Daemer. In the movie, Charlton Heston played Miguel Vargas, a Mexican drug enforcement officer, married to an American woman played by Janet Leigh. This was a reversal from the book, whose hero was Michael Holt, an assistant district attorney in an unnamed California city, married to a woman of Mexican heritage.

In the book, Michael is assigned to assist in the prosecution of an heiress and her fiance, charged with the dynamite murder of her father. Michael is unsatisfied with the detectives’ case, and his own digging soon uncovers a different suspect who immediately confesses.

Michael becomes suspicious of the two detectives—heroes in the city—and begins to research other cases they’ve “closed,” to see if they’ve planted evidence before. Before long both he and his wife are under attack.

For a contemporary reader, there’s not a lot of punch here. The idea of corrupt cops who plant evidence was shocking in the 1950s, but has become a cliché in today’s fiction. Also, a district attorney with these kinds of suspicions would get a lot more support from a police department nowadays.

I was intrigued by the portrayal of Michael’s marriage. The authors make a special point of noting that Michael’s co-workers joke about his wife being jealous of his career, but in fact she’s extremely supportive. Michael’s marriage is portrayed as a genuine partnership, and his wife as a good friend as well as a lover. It strikes me that a modern writers would have given her her own career, and would have also ramped up the conflict between the spouses. What does that say about marriage, then and now?

Badge of Evil should be approached as an artifact of its time, and the reader had best not bring contemporary expectations to it. I found the prose a little flaccid, and the action a little tame, but that’s probably typical of the style of the times. Suitable for most readers, teens and up.

Minnesota thriller and mystery writers, as you’ve probably noticed, almost always get at least one shot with me. Douglas Dorow is a Minneapolis writer (I’ve never met him, but then I’ve never met almost everybody), and I have a suspicion (based on hints in this book) that he’s a Christian. He’s written a promising, if not stellar, thriller in The Ninth District, and I think it will go over well with most of this blog’s audience.

The title refers to the Ninth District of the Federal Reserve Bank, which is located in Minneapolis. The story begins with the murder of a bank teller in suburban Wayzata. FBI agent Jack Miller, along with his junior partner Ross Fruen, are investigating it as one of a string of bank robberies in the Twin Cities area, committed by a gunman they call the Governor (because he wears a mask that looks like one of our former governors—Jesse Ventura, one assumes). The stakes are raised as they gradually come to realize that they’re facing a very clever, entirely ruthless criminal who has a much bigger score in mind than a few bank jobs.

I think Douglas Dorow has the makings of a first-class thriller writer, but he hasn’t yet mastered plotting. Although he ramps up the danger at regular intervals, as the genre demands, he makes the common mistake (I understand it well and am probably guilty of it myself) of not going full out for the climax. A master writer would have put Jack’s family (the portrayal of the family and his strained but loving marriage is one of the book’s strengths) in peril at the end, but Dorow chooses to take them out of the action and concentrate on the showdown between Jack and the Governor. That’s understandable, but it lowers the tension.

Still, not a bad summer read. The values are good, and it’s suitable for teens and up. Well worth four bucks for the Kindle version.

Train travel I was used to; plane travel was something new, and a little frightening. Truth be told, I slept through a lot of it. Twenty-five other hearty souls and I sat within the DC-3 “Flagship,” a noisy, rattling projectile that churned through the night sky like a big kitchen mixer.

I’ve praised Max Allan Collins’s Nate Heller novels here before, especially the early volumes. The first three in the series, True Detective, True Crime, and this book, The Million Dollar Wound, comprise what’s called the Frank Nitti Trilogy—three books that don’t necessarily focus on gangster Frank Nitti (whom, if you only know him from the movie The Untouchables, you don’t know anything about at all), but are set in the Nitti era of Chicago crime, and end—in this volume—with his death.

The Million Dollar Wound (military slang for a non-debilitating wound serious enough to send a guy home, see also, “Hollywood Wound”) begins with Nate Heller waking up in a military mental hospital, unable to remember his name or how he got there. A sympathetic doctor tries hypnotism on him, which allows us to flash back and learn how he—in spite of being old enough to avoid the draft—had enlisted in the Marines with his friend Barney Ross, the prizefighter, in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. We learn of the hell they endured on Guadalcanal, but most of the book concentrates on a post-war adventure, when Nate is hired by newspaper columnist Westbrook Pegler to investigate mob influence in motion picture unions, and then—dangerously—hired by those very labor racketeers to tell them if anybody is nosing around in their business. Famous people encountered include actor Robert Montgomery, fan dancer Sally Rand (Nate’s current girlfriend), Eliot Ness, and—of course—Frank Nitti.

Author Collins’s realistic—though sometimes far-fetched (the two things aren’t necessarily contradictory)–take on Frank Nitti and his era is fascinating. Nate Heller would deny being a friend of Nitti’s, or admiring him, but he sees him as far smarter—and less toxic to society—than his predecessor, Al Capone, or the lesser mobsters who followed him. This is Chicago, after all, Nate would say. There’s an element of tragedy in Nitti’s ugly end.

Recommended, with the usual cautions for language, violence, and adult situations.

“…They even make virtues out of ‘humility’ and ‘turning the other cheek’ and ‘loving everybody.’ Because it alleviates their guilt. It’s much nicer to pretend to yourself that your passivity makes you a saint, rather than just another gutless puke who won’t take a stand for what’s right.”

The passage above kind of encapsulates my ambivalence about the novel HUNTER: A Thriller, by Robert Bidinotto. There’s much to enjoy and appreciate in the book, and it promotes some ideas with which I strongly agree. But in my view it’s taken a little farther than I, as a Christian, can endorse. It’s not merely that I disagree with the Randian point of view on display here; I think the treatment weakens the argument (and the story) in some ways.

I usually do a synopsis of a novel’s opening chapters when I write a review, but the peculiar structure of this story makes that hard to do without spoiling the central surprise (if surprise it is). So I’ll mostly talk about the concepts underlying the story.

The central problem of this book is the early release of dangerous felons into society. Our justice system, as Bidinotto paints it (and he says all the atrocities in the story are based on true events) is that in order to take pressure off the courts and prisons, we’ve set in place a system that automatically pleas down criminal charges, and then shortens even those abbreviated prison sentences through early release for “good behavior.” This early release is facilitated by a naïve network of social service agencies staffed by do-gooders eager to let the prisoners out, proud of their “success” in rehabilitating them. But when those prisoners kill again, these do-gooders feel no responsibility. Continue reading Hunter: A Thriller, by Robert Bidinotto →

First of all, I’ll just start by saying thumbs up on this one. Killer Swell isn’t the greatest private eye story I’ve ever read, but it drew me in and kept my interest. The characters were well-drawn and realistically layered, for the most part.

In this first novel of an ongoing series, Noah Braddock, San Diego surfer/private eye, is approached by the mother of his former girlfriend. The girlfriend, whom he had deeply loved, broke up with him years ago under pressure from her parents, when she went off to college. But now she’s gone missing, and they’re desperate enough to come to Noah for help.

And he, of course, can’t resist the appeal, even coming from them. But things get messy very quickly, and soon he’s forced to delve deeply into his lost love’s personal life, discovering things he’d much rather have never learned.

I’ve often written about the archetype of the American private eye. Particularly the fact that he’s often a figure of male fantasy. What guy, in his heart, doesn’t sometimes dream of living unfettered, setting his own hours, having uncommitted sex with a series of dangerous dames, and being the Spillaneian Jury?

Noah Braddock seems like a prime example of this paradigm. He combines two occupations that appeal to every guy’s inner Peter Pan—the P.I. and the surf bum.

And yet, Noah is an oddly responsible man. I thought his strength of character, oddly, a weakness in his character, if “character” is understood in its purely literary sense. It seemed odd to me that a guy this mature would choose a lifestyle that might as well have a sign reading “Perpetual Adolescent” taped to it. He seemed to me more suited to conventional police work (though he tells the reader he tried that and got bored) and a traditional marriage.

But that’s just my quibble. Others may disagree. I enjoyed Killer Swell, and will probably return to the Noah Braddock series.

The usual cautions for language and adult themes apply.