Product Placing: City of Secrets

Eventually, I stopped reading Kinky Friedman murder mysteries because he spent more time and words describing his cigars and espresso machine than he did on plot or character development. His smoking and drinking habits overwhelmed his story telling, like those of a resident barfly at a local pub who never had anything new to say.

So too I find Kelli Stanley. Even before finishing her second novel, City of Secrets, I wished I could deface this library book with a highlighter, coloring in the many sentences on every page that referenced her Chesterfield cigarettes and the various lighting implements she used to strike up her “sticks.” I really believe the book would be fifty or more pages shorter. It was one long ad for smoking. (Why aren’t the anti-smoking police, so avid in their monitoring of movies, focusing on the printed word, yellowed with nicotine?) While I was reading this book, coincidentally, I was selling an old Chesterfield tin on eBay, one that I found in my mother’s flotsam and jetsam from before my long deceased from lung cancer father switched brand loyalty to Camels. It was not getting much attention at auction and I was sorely tempted to contact Ms. Stanley and tell her it had her name written all over it for a mere $5.00; eventually, I believe it was some college student in North Carolina who snatched it up.

I digress into my own issues because there is so little to say about CoS. Yes it has won a couple of awards, but the type that is the equivalent of a ceremonial key to a city, praise for her depiction of pre-WW2 San Francisco. Perhaps the setting rings true, but the detective, Miranda Corbie, the Chesterfield addict, does not. Stanley mimics a choppy, phrase as sentence, noir style of dime crime novel detectives, but grafting them onto an ex-hooker seems forced and too much of a contemporary revisionist device. Corbie deals with crimes against a background of anti-Semitism; I guess her previous novel used a similar backdrop of anti-Japanese.

Which brings me to the uber-question I ask about each storyteller: why does she write the book; what truth is she trying to have the reader discover? Rather than answering what I got or didn’t get out of CoS, I only want to comment that as I’ve asked myself such questions, I’ve come to realize that the more blatant the message, the less interpretative and personally identifiable, the less I enjoy the writer’s effort. Kelli Stanley is a novelist who I will neither read again nor recommend to others, even as we in the “real world” book club focus more on the importance of place to plot. Could these murders only have happened at this time in San Francisco … probably; could they have been solved by Miranda, never.