Private Eyes, They're Watching You
Lest it be thought that I haven't read anything that I liked recently (other than, you know, the few reviews before those last two), I should throw in three books that actually did provide exactly what I expected from them: Sleeping Beauty and Find a Victim, both by Ross Macdonald, and The Only Good Lawyer by Jeremiah Healy. These are all novels in what I think of as the hard-boiled mode: first-person narration by private eyes who are quick with a snappy response, and find themselves involved in cases that are far more complicated than they first appear.
The two Macdonald books both feature Lew Archer, and pretty much everything I said about him earlier this year still applies. I was a little surprised to find that the two books are separated by almost twenty years, as they feel very similar. Archer apparently exudes the same sort of time-distortion field as Nero Wolfe, as it seems to be perpetually 1949 where he is. These are as close as I've found to Raymond Chandler, though-- the language doesn't soar in quite the same way, and there's a bit of psychobabble in all of them, but other than that, they nail the atmosphere.
Healy's books, featuring John Francis Cuddy (Start with Blunt Darts), are more a tribute to Robert Parker than Chandler or Hammett. This means that they're considerably bloodier, but this is Parker re-written to involve actual human beings. Cuddy pays a price for what he has to do in a way that Spenser never does, but there's a little of the same righteous vengeance element to the stories. It's a slightly different mode of private eye novel, but still enjoyable.
The plots of these books really don't bear description. They're too tangled to be summarized in a concise way (writing jacket copy in this genre must be absolute torture), and they're enough in the mold of their respective series that it's sort of pointless to repeat the descriptions.
All three were perfectly good entries in their respective series, and if you like the other books by those authors, these scratch the same itch.
Posted at 8:52 PM | link |