The Uses of Mystery: The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

The discovery of a body in 1979. What is a more classic mystery opening than a stray and unexpected corpse? Followed up, in this case, by a police visit to an old man who looks very much like the prime suspect? Category police drama anyone?

 

In The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, James McBride has some other ideas. The passage about the discovery summarizes events that were genuinely mysterious to most of those involved back when the deceased was dropped in an abandoned well at Chicken Hill, a hardscrabble section of Pottstown, PA.

In 1932, Chicken Hill was home to the newer inhabitants of an increasingly industrialized town. Blacks fleeing the Jim Crow South and east European Jews fleeing pogroms scratch out mostly marginal lives with one eye on the unwelcoming forces of law and order. 

Two of the more fortunate inhabitants are Moshe and and Chona Ludlow. He runs the local theater and has found considerable success booking Black as well as Yiddish musicians. She runs the grocery store that, with its generous credit, functions as a life line in the current hard times and gives her rapport with locals in the Black community, especially Nate and Addie Timblin.

The Timblins' struggle to keep a young, deaf relative out of the notorious orphan home enlists both Ludlows and provides a spine for the dramatic events of the novel. But even the genuinely gripping main plot line is only the armature for McBride's detailed portrait of the community, bursting with fully realized and fascinating characters. 

 

Many are engaged in some dubious hustle, as Chicken Hill copes not only with poverty but with a lack of basic services. Even a water supply is tricky; health care is a dangerous gamble, and decent jobs are basically beyond the grasp of even competent people like the Timblins.

 

The 1920's and 30's saw a resurgence of the Klan, widespread anti-Semitism, and a deep suspicion of immigrants. This was true in the north as well as the south. The Depression only deepened those social ills and a fear amounting to hatred of those on the margins.  

 

Success, or even survival, in Chicken Hill takes sharp wits, a sense of community, and a great deal of ingenuity, social, political and mechanical. The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store is a portrait of a community under stress: intelligent, but under educated and full of odd customs, superstitions, and rituals. 

 

Is there a mystery in there, too? Certainly, with two bona fide villains, a contract killing, a fatal assault, and some high risk schemes involving the brotherhood of railroad workers. There is plenty going on but the novel takes some familiar mystery conventions and tropes and works them into a bigger picture. 

This gives National Book Award winner McBride time to expand his characterizations and atmosphere, to indulge in some flights of fancy, and even to harken unto the supernatural. Some mystery fans may prefer a more streamlined plot. But I think most will be charmed by how some favorite devices are employed in this beautifully written and very accessible novel.

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Janice Law's The Falling Men, a novel with strong mystery elements, has been issued as an ebook on Amazon Kindle. Also on kindle: The Complete Madame Selina Stories.

 

The Man Who Met the Elf Queen, with two other fanciful short stories and 4 illustrations, is available from Apple Books.

The Dictator's Double, 3 short mysteries and 4 illustrations is available

Birnam Wood and the Uses of Mystery

Ah, New Zealand, land of mountains and fjords, beautiful and isolated. What better place for a survivalist billionaire to purchase a little just-in-case bolt hole? None, it appears, and in Birnam Wood, Booker prize winning New Zealand author Eleanor Catton offers up a plausible one: Robert Lemoine.

He's about to buy an old sheep farm adjoining one of the South Island's national parks when he finds Mira Bunting trespassing. She spins him a yarn which he soon unravels: Mira is actually loitering with intent to garden. Talk about contrasts: she is an idealistic guerrilla gardener hoping to short circuit the capitalist system, while Robert became one of the richest people on the planet by purveying surveillance equipment and high tech drones.

That's the key meeting in Birnam Wood, a psychological thriller that delivers considerable suspense while presenting incisive character studies of the principal actors and a good deal about New Zealand leftist politics. It also raises interesting questions about the costs and feasibility of a quick conversion from fossil fuels and about the potential and astronomical profits for anyone in the right place with the right minerals.

Catton uses a complex structure to keep all these strands together, presenting the action via  the viewpoints of several characters, including the key Birnam Wood folks: Mira, founder and leader, whose tendency to step over the line in a good cause leads to the crucial meeting with Robert; her increasingly resentful roommate and second in command, Shelley Noakes, who proves not only more practical but more ruthless, and former member, Tony Gallo, an aspiring investigative journalist and an ideologue with some serious political ambitions. 

We also get inside the head of Jill Darvish, devoted wife of the recently ennobled Lord Owen, who sees some disturbing fissures in their long and happy marriage since her husband was raised to the peerage. The Darvishes own the old sheep farm where Mira wants to plant veggies and Robert wants a bunker – and perhaps more.

Robert is a bit of a Master of the Universe caricature, perhaps almost a necessity since his sense of his own power and intelligence drive much of the action. He is a chilly guy, never more sinister than when he is being charming and helpful.

The others are a more complex, but each has not only marked strengths but little weaknesses which become more pronounced after the Birnam Wood volunteers are settled at the farm, where their work is underwritten by Robert's largesse. Catton skillfully creates a situation where one careless decision creates a disastrous cascade. To my taste, there is perhaps more disaster than needed, but Birnam Wood is very much in the contemporary style with its splashy climax.

There is another character in the novel that deserves mention, rural New Zealand itself. Catton not only sketches in the spectacular beauty of the landscape but also the extreme isolation possible given the ruggedness of the terrain, the few roads, and the vast forests with only a few trails and even fewer hikers huts or services. It is a place where a lot can happen out of sight as the characters eventually discover.

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Janice Law's The Falling Men, a novel with strong mystery elements, has been issued as an ebook on Amazon Kindle. Also on kindle: The Complete Madame Selina Stories.

The Man Who Met the Elf Queen, with two other fanciful short stories and 4 illustrations, is available from Apple Books at:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-man-who-met-the-elf-queen/id1072859654

The Dictator's Double, 3 short mysteries and 4 illustrations is available at:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-dictators-double/id1607321864

Sleeping Giants

Mysteries rely, perhaps more than we like to admit, on evil. Murder and violence are essential to the genre and often simply a given. Not so in the novels of Rene Denfeld. Yes, there is violence, including violence against children, and murder pops up as often as it does in most mysteries. What makes her four novels different is an obsession with the the roots of evil.

In Denfeld's work, evil stems from evil with the inevitability of Greek tragedy, and it has its roots in the same institution: the family. The sacrifice of children in the House of Atreus caused a cascade of blood violence. In Sleeping Giants, as in Denfeld's terrific The Enchanted and the Child Finder stories, cruelty to children produces monsters who, in turn, terrify and traumatize the next generation.

All this may sound rather grim and formulaic, but Denfeld is an excellent writer with a real knack for creating rounded characters, especially young ones. She also produces sensitive portraits of characters who are more or less outside the norm. These range from the poetic, but truly psychopathic, hero of The Enchanted to Amanda, the dedicated zoo keeper of Sleeping Giants, whose mind, as she admits, does not work quite like other people's.

Amanda has trouble with clocks and making change and simple math, but she understands her charge, Molly, an unhappy polar bear. She proves to be brave and resilient and, though no great student, a very competent researcher.

Unsurprisingly, her twin areas of interest both involve families. She wants to know just how Molly came to be orphaned in the far north of Alaska, and she wants to know what happened to her older brother Dennis, who, unlike her, was not adopted as an infant, but confined in Brightwood, a supposedly progressive facility for disturbed children and youth.

Located on the wild northern coast of Oregon, Brightwood is an abandoned relic by the time Amanda sets foot in it. But the reader knows from the opening pages that Dennis was indeed incarcerated there and that, subjected to holding time, a popular crank therapy, he committed suicide by running into the treacherous and dangerous surf. All that's left is a gravestone and the general reluctance of locals in the small town to discuss Brightwood, although they have some good things to say about Martha King, the former superintendent.

Amanda might well have become discouraged but for another well drawn character, Larry, an ex-cop who is mourning his late wife and falling into depression in his remote cabin. A chance meeting with Amanda arouses his protective instincts, and he adds his expertise and some of his former professional contacts to her search.

The unraveling of the mystery of Dennis's life is nicely done, but the heart of the book lies elsewhere, in the glimpses of the difficult and withdrawn child's life, his friendship with Ralph, the custodian, and his brief moments of joy. Denfeld has some surprises with her adult characters, too, and despite the grim events and the narrowness of many of the characters' lives, the novel eventually comes down on the side of cautious hope.

Rene Denfeld

Evil generates evil, but goodness has its powers, too, if much less spectacular ones. Evil flashes out in violence, all is quick and final. Goodness is slow, patient, in for the long haul. Not too many books in any genre illustrate this contrast as well as Sleeping Giants, which manages to produce an entertaining mystery as well.

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Janice Law's The Falling Men, a novel with strong mystery elements, has been issued as an ebook on Amazon Kindle. Also on kindle: The Complete Madame Selina Stories.

The Man Who Met the Elf Queen, with two other fanciful short stories and 4 illustrations, is available from Apple Books.

The Dictator's Double, 3 short mysteries and 4 illustrations is also available from Apple Books.

Towles in Hollywood

One of the oldest plot lines in the canon is the one about the old guy who comes back to triumph. From the days of the old war horse and the old samurai to the old gunslinger, the old spy and the old cop, the age and experience of a supposedly washed-up guy turns out to trump vain and overconfident youth in these stories.

Guy, that is, as in masculine. I am sure there are some mysteries where the surprisingly capable older character is female, but lets face it: the pattern for the older woman sleuth was set by Miss Marple, who appears to have been born complete with her spectacles, sweaters, and skepticism. 

The females in the plots under consideration tend to be young and beautiful with surprising tastes in May-December romances. While I am old enough to enjoy the triumph of age over youth, I feel a certain impatience with what are clearly fantasy plots based on masculine wishful thinking.

So it was with real pleasure that I discovered Eve in Hollywood, a short novel tucked into Amor Towles' new collection of stories, Table for Two. He's taken Eve Ross, a character from his 30's New York novel, The Rules of Civility, sent her to Hollywood at the height of the studio system, and landed her right in Raymond Chandler territory. It's a good move.

Eve is great: brave, intelligent and loyal. And like almost all Towles's characters, she is a charmer. Indeed, charm is almost the hallmark of this author, whose characters are almost uniformly entertaining, eloquent, and appealing. His particular talent has seldom been on such varied display as in Eve in Hollywood.

Besides Eve, we have Charlie, the widowed and retired cop who meets her on the train west. He's returning home from New Jersey when he chats with Eve, regaling this eager listener (how different from his chilly and bored daughter-in-law!) with tales from his professional past. They won't be wasted on this gal.

No sooner have we met Charlie, then we are introduced to another supposed has been, Prentice, a once important screen actor who, literally, ate himself out of stardom. Prentice still has an eye for pretty starlets, though, and, more importantly, a genuine and protective sympathy for actors on the lower rungs of the treacherous Hollywood ladder. 

He and Charlie are going to be our comeback guys but with a difference. No cliched feats of derring do from these two, and plenty of mistakes, wobbles, and mishaps, and plenty of help accepted from younger friends. No age-inappropriate romancing, either. These are realistic older guys, and their great moments are all the more satisfying for being almost entirely plausible. 

The book is unusual in structure as well as in theme, being organized in short chapters, each from a different point of view. We get Eve, Charlie, and Prentice, but also a wide range of other voices and characters, from Olivia (de Haviland, a real golden age actress) to an out of work still photographer, a big time studio lawyer, and the house detective at fancy Beverly Hills Hotel where Eve, Olivia, and Prentice are residents. 

This design requires tricky plotting to keep the action moving, and Eve in Hollywood is a real master class in structure as well as in differentiating characters' speech and outlooks. But far from being a novelty ornament, the organization of the novel is a fine complement to the plot, which relies less on individual heroics and super hero skills than on the cooperation and courage of folks of ability and good will.  

This novel began as a Penguin Books ebook and as a print edition, apparently published by Towles, himself, while one of the stories was an Audible original: signs that even best selling, big name authors are dabbling in new ways to reach audiences.

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Janice Law's The Falling Men, a novel with strong mystery elements, has been issued as an ebook on Amazon Kindle. Also on kindle: The Complete Madame Selina Stories.

The Man Who Met the Elf Queen, with two other fanciful short stories and 4 illustrations, is available from Apple Books at:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-man-who-met-the-elf-queen/id1072859654?ls=1&mt=11

The Dictator's Double, 3 short mysteries and 4 illustrations is available at: 

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-dictators-double/id1607321864?ls=1&mt=11

Locked Rooms

Although the narrator of Seishi Yokomizo's The Honjin Murders claims that, "The locked room murder mystery [is] a genre that any self-respecting detective novelist will attempt at some point..." I must confess not only to quite disliking the genre but to have no ambitions whatsoever to attempt one.

Nonetheless, recently I found myself reading three novels that contain locked room mysteries. What was interesting, even to a non-connoisseur ,was how the puzzle was embedded in different sorts of books, and how all three toy with deaths that might be murder that looks like suicide or suicide that might be murder. 

Yokomizo was a great admirer of western golden age mysteries, with a particular fondness for the puzzles of John Dickson Carr, and, it appears, for cerebral detectives of an eccentric nature. The Honjin Murders, published shortly after World War II but set in 1937, was his first to feature what would be his long running amateur sleuth, Kosuke Kindaichi.

Rather than beginning with the detective, Yokomizo uses a crime writer as his narrator ( a tactic that Anthony Horowitz has used to great effect in his Tony & Hawthorne novels) and presents the ghastly murders at the Ichiyanagi family compound in an almost documentary fashion. He describes how he learned of the case, quotes various official documents, and finally gives what he describes as accurate a reconstruction of his sleuth's detecting as possible.

The brutal murder of a couple on their wedding night presents a stiff challenge, and the solution is a masterpiece of ingenuity if scarcely plausible. But this is detection as escapist fiction, a bloodless puzzle despite the many gruesome details. It is only in the aftermath, when Kindaichi ponders the why, rather than the how, of the crime, that we get into the psychology of the characters and the peculiarly Japanese elements of the situation that make The Honjin Murders quite different from some of its prototypes.

I came across this interesting period piece, because Anthony Horowitz mentions a couple of locked room mysteries in Close to Death, a mystery that, yes, incorporates a locked room case. The novel also marks a deviation from the format of the earlier, and to my mind, more successful, Tony and Hawthorne mysteries. 

Close to Death delays Hawthorne's arrival on the scene by relying on an ambiguous case from several years earlier which involved Hawthorne and Tony's predecessor. This was perhaps a decision taken in the name of realism, as poor Tony has been rather endangered and damaged in prior outings. But just as Sherlock is senior partner to Watson, so Hawthorne is the really key figure in Horowitz's outings.

The switch does, however, enable Horowitz to construct a nicely complicated puzzle set among the well heeled and elegantly housed, a sort of urban Midsomer, with, like the Midsomer Murders series, a good helping of social comedy and satire. Misdirection and red herrings abound, something Yokomizo does nicely as well, and if plausibility is stretched, the book is amusing.

Robert Dugoni, whose many novels include the Tracy Crosswhite series, features a tricky locked house killing in Her Deadly Game, featuring Keera Duggan, an ambitious young lawyer handling her first homicide defense and her first really high profile case. She is also juggling an alcoholic father, a vengeful ex-lover and various difficult siblings– the sorts of personal baggage now almost required of the modern sleuth.

The crime is ingenious and the solution very nearly as complex as the one Kindaichi comes up with in his case. The difference is that this locked room is embedded in a careful and plausible account of police procedures, forensic examinations, and legal strategy. Curiously, though, the resolution of Kerra's personal problems is perhaps less convincing than the rather glum conclusions of the old Japanese mystery.

The Honjin Murders, Close to Death, and Her Deadly Game are all ingenious and, in their own ways, revealing of the attitudes and values of their times and places. What is crucial in each is different and so are the techniques employed, although all rely on close looking and careful listening. Honor, respectability, money, safety, and revenge play out in different ways, but in each story, a powerful motivation leads to an elaborately organized death and a challenging puzzle.

Slackers, Lost Souls and a Serial Killer

In mysteries, as in every other category, fashion decrees novelty, and it is always pleasing to come across something new – or new again. Perhaps in response to the super heroes of the last few years, the Jack Reachers and Lisbeth Salanders of the thriller world, not to mention the high tech apparatus of procedurals, there have been some novels featuring not so polished heroes and not so much efficiency.

Mick Herron's Slough House series kicked off in 2010 with Slow Horses, named for the washed up and seemingly incompetent spies inhabiting Slough House. In 2019 Alexander McCall Smith debuted what his publisher calls Scandi Blanc, featuring a competent Inspector Ulf Varg investigating frankly whimsical crimes.

Now we have Anders de la Motte's, The Mountain King, the first in a promised trilogy, which combines super competent and alert investigator Leo Auster (reminiscent in more than one way of Lisbeth Salander) with The Resources Unit, AKA The Department of Lost Souls (a Slough House if there ever was one). Their truly trivial crime of the moment is a complaint about rogue figures appearing in a super-sized model train layout.

Can this work? Well, yes it does. De La Motte manages the tricky combination of super cop, a young woman prepared, literally, for every conceivable danger by Prepper Per, her intelligent but seriously paranoid and sadistic father. Given dear old dad and her high powered lawyer mom, Leo has her problems and a decidedly difficult style of personal relations.

Unsurprisingly, she is not a great team player. Faced with a high profile kidnapping, she soon runs afoul of the powers that be and of her sworn enemy Jonas Hellman, a honcho in the National Police. Removed from the investigation partly because her mother is one of the victim's family lawyers, Leo is literally send downstairs to the Department of Lost Souls.

The department's prior head, the alcoholic and seemingly disorganized Bendt Sandgren, is seriously ill in hospital after a heart attack and a fall. He's left her with the case of the disturbed model railway setup, and Leo is not best pleased with either that or with the slackers who inhabit the department.

When she pushes ahead with her own line of investigation into the kidnapping, danger and mayhem ensue. This is all very satisfactory because, besides what looks like whimsical eccentricity, De La Motte has included a really chilling serial killer and one of the scarier hideouts in recent literature. If you are claustrophobic, read this one with a door or window open.

De La Motte channels Agatha Christie with a bevy of red herrings and suspects as well as creating very plausible inter-office tensions and rivalries. He himself served in the Swedish police force and clearly knows the territory.

Anders De la Motte

So, this one has helpings of noir and Scandi blanc, too. Do we need a new category for the combo or like all good mysteries does The Mountain King need no label?

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Janice Law's The Falling Men, a novel with strong mystery elements, has been issued as an ebook on Amazon Kindle. Also on kindle: The Complete Madame Selina Stories.

The Man Who Met the Elf Queen, with two other fanciful short stories and 4 illustrations, is available from Apple Books.

The Dictator's Double, 3 short mysteries and 4 illustrations also available at Apple Books.

True Crime History

I am not particularly fond of true crime books, which often have a sensationalist and voyeruistic angle that makes one feel for the relatives and friends of the protagonists. I am not even fond of those lightly fictionalized novels, "ripped from the headlines" as one of my old editors like

But I have no reservations about Timothy Egan's A Fever in the Heartland, an account of a true crime certainly, but, even more, a vivid history of a real criminal enterprise. The book's subtitle, The Klu Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them, provides a handy if rather exaggerated subtitle.

Still, even if the plot only managed control of Indiana, the "fever in the Heartland" was a substantial historical event and, I think readers of the book will agree, an informative and cautionary tale that is still relevant. 

America in the 1920's was very much a society in transition with all the strains of modernity under its jazz age exhuberance. There was a reservoir of racial bigotry north as well as south, along with anti-semitism and a general anti-immigrant animus, spurred by a sense that the nature of the country was changing and that the old social order, white and protestant, was under threat.

One of the men who saw promise in this stew of prejudice and resetment was a not particularly successful salesman named D.C. Stephenson, who devised a way to make hate pay well. He took over what had been a small time Klan outfit and revitalized it with big parades, picnics, and entertainments. The aim was to take bigotry mainstream and make the Klan look superficially like just another popular fraternal organization.

Stephenson was charismatic but also shrewd. His deal with the organization let him keep a substantial portion of what he promised would be increased profits from selling Klan regalia and robes and from membership fees. He was soon living luxuriously but there was still plenty of money left over to pursue his big aims, respectability and power. Under his direction, the Klan bribed judges and cops, subsidized pliant ministers, and funded like-minded or venial politicians.

Soon Stephenson and his associates were political powers in Indiana, and the Old Man, as he was called, had even begun to imagine a run for the White House. He might have been backed in the attempt, because his version of the Klan looked clean and upright and All American.

Of course, there was the dark side, the cross burnings, beatings, and not so subtle visitations of robed and hooded Klan members. But public sentiment saw the Klan as protecting their values and keeping lesser folk in their place. As for the journalists and independent thinkers who might raise a fuss, the Klan was backstopped by cops and judges and top officials.

Timothy Egan gives a vivid picture of how a democratic society was corrupted by hatred and money before he relates how the Klan and Stephenson fell from grace. Those savvy about American history will perhaps not be too surprised that it was not the Klan's politics that got them into trouble, nor their assaults on Blacks or Jews, but Stephenson's private failings, which ran to booze-fueled parties and sadistic sex. One of his victims was Madge Oberholtzer, an unlikely hero, who proved to be the one brave witness whose testimony began to unravel the Klan empire.

Sharp characterizations, careful research, fast moving narrative – would more histories read like A Fever in the Heartland. I may have to modify my opinion of the true crime genre.

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The Falling Men, a novel with strong mystery elements, has been issued as an ebook on Amazon Kindle. Also on kindle: The Complete Madame Selina Stories.

The Man Who Met the Elf Queen, with two other fanciful short stories and 4 illustrations, is available from Apple Books at:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-man-who-met-the-elf-queen/id1072859654?ls=1&mt=11

The Dictator's Double, 3 short mysteries and 4 illustrations is available at:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-dictators-double/id1607321864?ls=1&mt=11

"The Colonel"

When Sleuthsayers settled on Murder Neat, with stories set around watering holes of all kinds, I had a problem: I don't drink. I find beer, which smells so interesting, disappointing, while hard spirits bring up reminders of childhood illness.

I was susceptible to colds as a kid – possibly our drafty one room schoolhouse had some part in that – and my Scots immigrant parents were convinced of the medicinal powers of their national beverage. Rightly so, perhaps, because my mother brought Punch, our beloved parakeet, back from paralysis and near death by administering whisky and water.

In any case, the hot toddy of my childhood, whisky, hot water, lemon, and honey, served to inoculate me against a taste for alcohol save for the occasional glass of wine or cider. Glass, singular, as any more and I fall sleep.  Participation in Murder Neat, therefore, called for imagination.

Fortunately, my childhood, which clearly hampered a career as a writer of the hard drinking tough guy school, provided alternative sources of inspiration, including a couple of road houses. Yes, the same sort of isolated drinking establishments that Raymond Chandler found so inspiring in California.

These were in rural Dutchess County, N.Y., and we regularly passed the roadhouse that appears in "The Colonel" on the way to music lessons. The tavern was on a bare open stretch of state highway, fields and pastures on every side.

The dark brown, one story bungalow sat alone on top of a hill at the juncture of a county road. A lonely place, a lonely building, on the unlit roads with its lighted sign, it became The Huntsman in my story, a little nod to the fox hunting that so many of the rich estate owners loved.

The Huntsman was an odd place for a man of wealth and culture like the Colonel, who came to drink inferior spirits when he undoubtedly had better at home. But who knows what people need? I surely did not as a child in the late 40's and early 50's, though I was aware of troubled people who could not find happiness, despite possessing everything that should have made their lives good. 

But after Korea, Viet Nam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, we all have a better grip on post war costs. There are wounds that nothing can heal, and in the late 40's and early 50's there were a lot of veterans for whom time had not done even the smallest work. The Colonel was one of them. I recognize that now.

The tavern, that from its architecture began as an ordinary dwelling, may have been established with just such folks in mind. It was quiet and out of town and out of sight with its parking lot tucked in the back.

What ideas might come in such a place to some wounded soul? The title, Murder Neat, says it all.

The Uses of Mystery part 3: Tim Dorsey

It is probably a sign of old age, but lately I seem to get book recommendations from the New York Times's obits. Depressing as that may be, Tim Dorsey's December 2023 obituary led me to more interesting examples of the uses of our favorite genre, which in Dorsey's hands becomes the capacious satiric receptacle for obsessions and complaints, along with sex, drugs, rock and roll, fart jokes, and digressions on US policy and the CIA.

At least, that's the total for The Maltese Iguana and the opening pages of No Sun Screen for the Dead. But as Dorsey racked up 22 other novels, I am sure he found lots more of the Sunshine State to include.

In fact, that's certain. Dorsey, a former Tampa Tribune reporter, has not only a genuine love for his home state, but an encyclopedic knowledge of its history, geography and culture. Much of which he gifts to Serge A. Storms, his central character, who operates with his drugged up and alcoholic wingman, Coleman, a man with an uncanny ability to regain sentience at crucial moments.

These occur in rapid succession because the charismatic and voluble Serge combines features of two favorite mystery/ thriller protagonists: the lone avenger/ protector and the serial killer, an unusual combination that works for Serge. He's a one man consumer protection bureau, out for grifters, unscrupulous sales people, pandemic profiteers, and computer criminals, with a special look out for elderly victims.

Totally on the side of the angels is Serge, with just a little weakness for the extra-judicial punishments that, by the end of The Maltese Iguana, have left a body count to rival Hamlet. But don't expect blood spatter and weapons a la Dexter. Besides his knowledge of the weirder aspects of Florida history, Serge has science at his fingertips.

I won't spoil future reading pleasure with the details, but death by ping pong balls was never on my radar, and while the cause of the so called Havana Syndrome has eluded all experts, Serge not only knows the instrument but has his own version. 

In The Maltese Iguana, Serge and Coleman are the spine of the story, flitting in and out of the action while running The Underbelly Tours of the Florida Keys. Around them are two story lines, one, a CIA op in Honduras with a lively cast of wannabe militia types, an honest Honduran cop, and a CIA bodyguard in a sequined cowgirl costume. And two, and only slightly less flamboyant, the trials and tribulations of Reevis, an honest reporter in Miami.

How these story lines merge in a spectacular denoument involving the culminating shoot of a major motion picture is a thing of beauty, and Dorsey gets high marks for plotting as well as his marvelous titles. Who can resist monikers like Florida Roadkill, Atomic Lobster, or The Tropic of Stupid? 

The latter could, I suspect, be the title for any of his novels, for Serge, and in Iguana, Reevis, too, inveigh against stupidity in many forms, including foreign policy, the degradation of the press, corporate consultants, rampant marketing, and crowd think. 

The lively mystery is an armature for Dorsey's satiric observations, and genuine bad guys like the dubious "Colonel" come in for vicious caricatures. There are no shades of gray in this moral realm, and that is rather odd, given that Serge, himself, is equal parts White Knight and serial killer.  

But Serge is perhaps an acquired taste. While admiring the construction and the flamboyant prose of The Maltese Iguana, I did not really take to the protagonist, who, to my mind, is an irritating motor mouth of slender social skills. 

Still, conviction and energy count for much in prose, and Tim Dorsey has both in abundance, along with a lot of strong opinions and evidence of buried malfeasance. In his hands, mystery easily stretches to satire and social critique without ever losing its footing.

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The Falling Men, a novel with strong mystery elements, has been issued as an ebook on Amazon Kindle. Also on kindle: The Complete Madame Selina Stories.

 

The Man Who Met the Elf Queen, with two other fanciful short stories and 4 illustrations, is available from Apple Books at:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-man-who-met-the-elf-queen/id1072859654?ls=1&mt=11

 

The Dictator's Double, 3 short mysteries and 4 illustrations is available at: 

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-dictators-double/id1607321864?ls=1&mt=11