Deadline Reading

I did it: I finished both of the murder mysteries that the main library gave me only seven days to read.

First finished was the Man Who Never Returned by Peter Quinn. I vaguely remember seeing a review in the New York Times book review and can’t remember whether it was favorable or not. It is however steeped in New York State history – a fictionalized attempt to solve the case of a missing person, namely Judge Crater who disappeared from the streets of NYC in 1930. Quinn is himself a former speech writer for two NY governors and fascinated by this legend through his father’s interest in the case.

The solution proposed by Quinn is both fantastical and possible, although once-removing the perpetrator from the likely male suspect to his daughter is a stretch. Quinn employees his series detective, Fin Dunne, to reconstruct the crime for a sensational headline in a new magazine to be first published twenty-five years after the disappearance of Crater.

Quinn introduces each chapter with a quote from Dante and forces his supporting characters to connect the literary reference to the progress of the investigation. It does not work. The tension and twists and political corruption is not Infernal. Quinn also intrudes too much in the story line by having his professional characters mock their Jesuit and Ursuline education, all the while evoking the talents of an author who must have been similarly well-trained.

The story is visual enough to imagine it being readily converted to a screenplay, but it reads as if it is slightly modified/plagiarized first hand police reports and adaptations of Depression era scandal sheets.

Much better and page turning is R. J. Ellroy’s The Anniversary Man. I don’t know how a book becomes a nominee for an Edgar or other murder mystery award but this should be on someone’s short list of candidates. From the introduction where Ellroy uses stream of consciousness to delve into mass murderer survivor John Costello’s mind and his succinct depiction of Costello’s life before the attack, the words sing off the page:

“ … Jersey City … always the smell of the Hudson; place looked like a fistfight, even on a Sunday morning when most of the Irish and Italians were dressed up for church … Costello’s father … standing out front of The Connemara diner – named after the mountains where his ancestors fished … and hauled their catch home after dusklight, and lit fires and told tales and sang songs that sounded like history before the first verse was done.”

Costello’s behaviors to cope with surviving are near psychotic. He has worked for over twenty years as a researcher for a NYC newspaper where he is quick to pick up a pattern underlying several seemingly unrelated murders of teenagers. He convinces his editor to draft a story showing that these crimes are re-enactments of ones from convicted mass murderers.

Ray Irving, the detective investigating one of these murders, leads an uncanny parallel life to Costello’s: alone after the death of his sweetheart, totally consumed by the work he does, a creature of habit in terms of where and what he eats and how little socializing he engages in. Seventeen people are murdered over the course of five or six months as the complicated relationship and suspicions between Irving, Costello and his editor Karen Langley play out. The tension of these relationships is almost as raw edged as the replication of the murders.

Here is a story with less apologia; the author knows he is mining true crime and using it to tell his story but it is not as contrived nor apparent as Quinn’s effort. As I raced through the last few chapters of a book almost 400 pages long, I was reverting to childhood postures of security, my shawl snuggled under my nose to be safe from the danger.

Irving may be the crime solver but it is Costello’s book. Costello’s terror-caused view of humanity and the inability to understand the motives of a mass murderer make the story all the more scary and real. His ability to live with the first hand knowledge of violence and its aftermath is a wonderful counterpoint to the more typical cop jaundiced distancing from the crime scenes’ victims.

Need to bump Ellroy up on my must read list. See already I am starting my 2011 list to read broadly and then everything written by a captivating writer. Ellroy fits the bill.