Wednesday, February 19, 2014

I find some crime novels that make the grade

Except for Patricia Highsmith's brilliant Ripley novels and Edward Anderson's "Thieves Like Us," I feel fairly cool toward crime fiction, but I enjoyed these because they have a good grip on human motivation, even at its weirdest.

The Alienist ***1/2
by Caleb Carr
Teddy Roosevelt is police commissioner of New York City and somebody in his city is butchering underage male prostitutes. With the help of Samuel Moore, a reporter with a yen for gambling, booze, and women, Roosevelt calls in Dr. Lazlo Kreizler, the eponymous alienist.

The fictional Kreizler and our 26th president studied at Harvard with the great William James, and Kreizler has become an eminent but controversial expert in abnormal psychology, an alienist in the parlance of the time. The progressive Roosevelt also promotes two Jewish detectives and a female secretary with a yen to be a P.I. to help with the case. They, along with Kreizler's colorful household, culled from prisons and mental wards around New York, and Moore, form the unlikely special detective team with Teddy making cameo appearances to keep the dumb Tammany cops and the smarter Tammany bosses and their pals out of the way.

Carr has really done his homework on what was known and believed about psychology at the time, and it's fascinating stuff. You get a lot of William James Lite lessons along the way as Kreizler holds forth in Central Park, Delmonico's, and other places that give the novel a nice 1890s patina.

UPDATE: Carr's "The Angel of Darkness" is another good entry. This novel returns to many of the same characters (with another charge by TR), and explores the resistance society had (and still has) with women as criminals. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Clarence Darrow make cameos.

Already Dead *** and No Dominion ****
by Charlie Huston
In a recent NYT magazine article, Adam Sternbergh advises readers to stop feeling guilty for "guilty pleasure" reading and mentions Huston's vampire/noir novels as an example. Just to see what I ought not to feel guilty about, I downloaded a sample of "Already Dead," and I was hooked.

I've always loved the vampire as symbol for everything from excessive greed to amorality to marginalized humanity. And Huston uses a bit of all that in creating his hard-boiled rogue vampire who does free-lance investigation and a lot of rough stuff on the side. The style is pure noir that Huston uses handily to create some thrill-a-minute reading, excellent characters, and compelling anti-hero in Joe Pitt.

The set-up is that vampirism is the result of a virus. Worried that they will be rounded up and quarantined, the vamps form a sub-culture that has sorted itself into self-governing clans. The Society is run by a hippie who seems to be pushing for peace, love, and acceptance. But he's not above resorting to war lord techniques to retain power. The Coalition has money and resources, and threatens other clans. The Hood, a loose confederation of black and hispanic vampires, is in a state of political confusion when their leader, Luther X decides to leave the vampire life permanently. Perhaps most engaging is the Enclave, quasi-religious mystics who live in a state of near starvation in an attempt to evolve to some new plane of being through the vampire virus. The landscape reflects what might happen in a post-apocalyptic New York, and watching Pitt, navigate that landscape is a bunch of fun that I didn't feel guilty about (because the NYT told me I didn't have to).

There are some sly references to vampire pop culture--something Pitt abhors--moral conundrums aplenty, but what sets Pitt apart from prototypes like Sam Spade is that he is a more fully developed character, full of quirks, weaknesses, and a past. Pitt is not above "tapping" a junkie for blood, and he doesn't beat himself up too much if his appetite gets out of hand and he has to dispose of a drained and dessicated corpse. But he doesn't like poseurs, sadists, or power-trippers. He respects good soldiers. He has a weakness for the sick and children. He's not much for sharing his feelings.

Huston has a deft hand with backstory and quick-sketching characters. A young turk vampire with a trust fund who peddles vamp dope, lives with three dim vamp girlfriends, and wears a Count Chocula tee-shirt pretty much tells you all you need to know about that character and that Pitt is going to wipe the floor with this snot-nosed brat. But how and when he does it is the fun part.

Huston's re-imagining vampire lore is fresh and satisfying. Pitt has a love interest (fascinating twist there), but the emphasis is solidly on Joe's position as independent P.I. If nothing else, Huston is to be congratulated for moving my beloved Undead out of the the romance fantasies shoveled by Charlaine Harris and Stephenie Meyer.

UPDATE 3/15: There are three more novels in the Joe Pitt series, "Half the Blood in Brooklyn," "Every Last Drop," and "My Dead Body" that I plowed through. Huston doesn't disappoint in his ability to create impressive underworld characters. Each book has its own story contained plot line and could be read as a stand-alone, but better to read the books in order to get the full effect of the overall story arc.

Doctor Sleep ****
Stephen King
Stephen King's sequel to "The Shining" follows Danny Torrence into early middle-age. Danny still shines, but it's a burden. Especially when some of those ghouls from the Overlook won't stay out of his life. Booze deadens the horror, and Danny is pretty much a full-blown alcoholic when the book opens.

King fairly quickly sketches in the intervening years and corrects misinformation readers might carry over into this book if what they know about "The Shining" is limited to Kubrick's movie version (a movie King hates and refuses to discuss). 

However, this novel is less horror and more crime novel than "The Shining," which was replete with supernatural phenomenon. Here, the demons are alcohol and despair, mostly. There is a mob of ghouls who feed off people who shine, and they set their sights on a little girl whose powers surpass Danny's. Danny's job is to get sober, find out how to live with the shining, and, of course, save the little girl.

I realize there are dangers in reading too much biographical info into a novel, but King has been pretty public about his own addictions, and it's hard not to see Danny as a stand-in for King, and the ghouls, who are oddly sympathetic in their way, as the self-doubts and self-destruction that addicts must contend with. It's also difficult not to see the little girl as the inner child that Danny must protect and guide through her own struggle with the shining.

All in all, this is a mature and introspective work. King's oeuvre demands, I suppose, that there be gothic elements in this story. But I can't help think that they're pretty much superfluous to the real story of recovery and redemption.

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