THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 15, 1995 TAG: 9510190586
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY DOUGLAS G. GREENE
LENGTH: Long : 131 lines
There has long been an uncomfortable relationship between the detective novel, with its clues and deductions and least-likely suspects, and the action and tension-packed crime thriller.
Purists of the ratiocinative form invented by Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle often turn up their noses at the thriller as appealing solely to emotions, not to reason. Yet, many fine writers of detective fiction, including Michael Gilbert and Michael Innes, have succumbed to the lure of writing thrillers.
Two writers known for their fine private-eye novels have, in their most recent offerings, produced hybrids. Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini have combined the puzzle element with high-speed action and understated violence and produced two of the best novels of the year. Both authors seem to be saying that, in our violent world, sometimes reason is not enough.
In A Wild and Lonely Place (Mysterious Press, 386 pp., $19.95), the 17th novel about Sharon McCone, Muller presents a contemporary plot of a serial bomber who has been targeting foreign consulates, especially the small Arab state of Azad. McCone is drawn into confused Azadi family politics centering on Malika Hamid, Hamid's playboy son, his American-born alcoholic wife and their 8-year-old daughter, whom McCone tries to protect. When the child is kidnapped and hidden on a Caribbean Island run by international gamblers, McCone flies to the rescue.
Meanwhile, though it is understated, the problem remains of identifying the so-called ``Diplo-bomber.'' This immensely satisfying book is one of Marcia Muller's finest novels.
Just as satisfying is Bill Pronzini's Hardcase (Delacorte, 215 pp., $21.95), the latest adventure of his Nameless private investigator. For sheer writing ability and sensitivity to the relationship between personal and social forces, Pronzini is the best heir to the Hammett/Chandler/Ross MacDonald hardboiled tradition. In the traditional private-eye caper, a sleuth is hired to find a missing daughter; in Hardcase, Nameless is hired by a young woman named Melanie to find her birth parents.
As an adult, Melanie has discovered evidence that she was adopted and now wants to know her roots. Hesitant about what he might unearth, Nameless nevertheless begins the search and identifies Melanie's parents. But then he finds that someone is willing to kill to keep the information secret, and he must protect Melanie and ultimately himself. Where Muller's book is a story abut global, all-encompassing violence, Pronzini's novel is about the violence that is within all individuals. Both A Wild and Lonely Place and Hardcase say a great deal about our times.
A pure thriller without any strong elements of mystery is Mary Willis Walker's nail-biting novel, Under the Beetle's Cellar (Doubleday, 311 pp. $22.50). A deranged religious leader calling himself Samuel Mordecai has kidnapped a busload of school children and their driver and is holding them until Armageddon arrives - which, he says, will be soon. Neither the FBI nor religious leaders can reason with him or, it seems, even talk his language.
The story switches adroitly between the efforts of the bus driver to care for the children while organizing a means to escape and the investigations of Molly Cates into Mordecai's past in an attempt to find some weakness she can exploit. Walker is a master at portraying pure evil and flawed good. Once you start Under the Beetle's Cellar, you won't be able to put it down.
After Muller, Pronzini and Walker, it is something of a relief to recommend some traditional detective novelists. Considering that he has won the Shamus for the best private-eye novel of the year, Harold Adams remains too little-known.
Set in the Midwest of the 1930s, Adams' stories about Carl Wilcox, an itinerant sign painter and occasional sleuth, masterfully capture a time and place while accomplishing the difficult task of creating a detective who is both tough and sensitive. In The Ditched Blonde, the local mayor hires Wilcox to investigate the death four years ago of a pregnant young woman. The three boys who had competed for her attention all deny that they were responsible for her pregnancy, and none seems to have had the opportunity to have killed her.
Wilcox peels away layer after layer of lies and desires before he finds the killer. Adams writes in an unadorned style suited to the flat landscape of his stories.
The traditional British mystery is perfectly represented in one of this year's best puzzle stories, Susannah Stacey's Bone Idle (Pocket Books, 311 pp. $21). The book has all the elements dear to the hearts of traditionalists: murder in a stately home, the corpse found wearing Japanese armor and shot through the neck with a crossbow bolt, an unsuspected heir from the Colonies, a library filled with erotic books, a bus tour made up of British eccentrics, a sensitive British copper and a large cast of suspects. Stacey handles all this with aplomb, sprinkling clues and shifting suspicion with great agility. She does not succumb to the temptation of treating Superintendent Bone's investigations as a comic parody of the 1930s Agatha Christie style. Everything is handled seriously - and compellingly.
Two books that do look upon a detective novel as an unserious, indeed lighthearted, diversion between the author and the reader are Corinne Holt Sawyer's dreadfully titled Ho-Ho Homicide (Donald I. Fine, 247 pp., $20.95) and Carolyn G. Hart's Mint Julep Murders (Bantam, 277 pp., $19.95). Sawyer's sleuths are two residents of a retirement home, Angela Benbow and Caledonia Wingate, who constantly meddle in the investigations of Lt. Martinez. The home, Camden-sur-Mer, seems to have as high a murder rate as Cabot Cove and St. Mary Mead, and not even the Christmas holidays are an exception, as a corpse is found under the Christmas tree. Benbow's and Wingate's methods are the ``let's question everybody'' variety, but the least likely culprit may be unique in fictional detecting.
Hart's Mint Julep Murder is full of name-dropping references to mystery writers and fans, and she overpraises one of the least natural coastal areas in the Southeast, but within all that she tells a good story.
Mystery bookstore owner Annie Darling is arranging the itineraries of a group of authors at a book festival. The authors are all amusingly exaggerated versions of types, if not individuals, on the current best-selling lists. Their book signings are marred by the activities of a boorish publisher, Kenneth Hazlitt, who has announced plans to feature them all in a scandalous roman a clef, and it is no surprise when someone poisons his bourbon. Annie finds herself the target of police suspicions, so in classic fashion she gathers the suspects together at the murder site to ferret out the truth.
Yuletide seems to begin for publishers (like department stores) shortly before Halloween, so let me conclude by mentioning a charming story by Mary Higgins Clark, Silent Night (Simon & Schuster, 154 pp., $16). Just before Christmas, Catherine Dorman plans to carry a St. Christopher medal to her critically ill husband, but when it is stolen, her son Brian runs after the thief, Cally Hunter. Cally is trying to help her brother, who has escaped from prison. The brother then takes Brian with him on a car trip to Florida as camouflage.
The different emotions of Catherine and Cally, and above all, the feelings of Brian Dorman - Clark's strength as a writer has always been in her depiction of children - will tug at the reader's heart. And it's not a bad idea for some heart-tugging to go on during the holidays. MEMO: Douglas G. Greene is director of the Institute of Humanities at Old
Dominion University and author of ``John Dickson Carr: The Man Who
Explained Miracles.'' by CNB