Bishop looked the man over. He was a big, evil chuckle-head. A white guy approximately the size of Denver. He had short blond hair and stupid eyes and a vague pharmaceutical smile. He had a voice so deep it sounded like an earth tremor.
Andrew Klavan’s Weiss-Bishop trilogy comes to a thundering conclusion in Damnation Street. I’m pretty good with words, but I struggle to express how much I enjoyed it. And I’ve read it before.
Quick background: Big, sad, middle-aged San Francisco private eye Scott Weiss has fallen in love with a woman he’s never even met – a prostitute who calls herself Julie Wyant. He also knows that she’s living on the run, in fear of the Shadow-man, a legendary professional assassin. The Shadow-man has a chameleon-like gift for disguise, and is an utter sadist. His dream for Julie is to catch her and torture her to death. That’s his idea of love.
This dynamic has formed a subplot in the first two books, but it takes center stage in Damnation Street, as very different obsessions draw these two men into a final showdown. In some ways they are mirror images of one another – so which force will prevail? Empathy or diabolic hate?
Weiss could use his partner, Jim Bishop, at a time like this, but Bishop failed him badly in Shotgun Alley. Bishop has always been the kind of man who lives on the edge, and he may have fallen beyond redemption now.
There is one more character in play, though. One I didn’t mention in the previous review.
The narrator of the trilogy is actually one of its most interesting characters. He’s clearly a fictionalized portrait of the author himself in his post-college days. He tells us he took a job with Weiss and Bishop because he’d always loved detective fiction, and wanted to learn about it first-hand, so he could write hard-boiled books himself.
In Dynamite Road, the narrator met Emma McNair, the girl of his dreams. But he was prevented from calling her because – with all the idiocy of young, horny men – he stumbled that very night into a sexual relationship with an older woman, and has been too cowardly to break it off since. In Damnation Street, he encounters Emma once again, and she gives him an ultimatum – “I want a man I can look up to and admire. Don’t come back until you are one.”
Which is how he comes to find himself in a fistfight outside of a brothel, giving Weiss the best backup he’s capable of.
But it all finally culminates in a showdown in a lonely house, where Weiss entices the Shadow-man. Author Klavan sets the scene like Hitchcock, letting us know everything there is to know about the Shadow-man’s plans, dangers Weiss can’t know. Time slows down, and the dramatic tension is exquisite, even after multiple readings.
These books can be taken on several levels. On the surface, they’re well-crafted hard-boiled mysteries. On a deeper level, they’re chivalric romances, transposed into a modern key. And – perhaps – on the deepest level, they’re meditations on that mystery of love and idealism that motivates all of Klavan’s work.
The publishers made a serious error in the Kindle edition, by placing their “Thank you for reading” message after the last numbered chapter, but before the Epilogue. Don’t miss the Epilogue, though. It’s important.
The Weiss-Bishop books are, I contend, an apotheosis of the hard-boiled genre. I recommend them, and even urge them upon you. But cautions are in order for violence, sexual situations, and very rough language.