TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/040389/04038900.042

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 5.7 KB | 110 lines

                                                                                BOOKS, Page 81

Going Beyond Brand Names


Some superb new mysteries from lesser-known writers

By William A. Henry III


    One almost infallible measure of the true mystery buff is
that when asked to cite his favorite current author, he will
respond with some name the general public would never recognize.
To the obsessive fan, the big story is rarely the arrival of a
new Elmore Leonard or Ed McBain or Dick Francis -- although, as
it happens, each of those established commercial writers has a
new book out at the moment, all of middling quality. The main
event is more likely to be, say, a new Simon Brett or Stuart M.
Kaminsky, a new Jonathan Valin or Michael Allegretto. These less
heralded figures often produce a prose more intense and
flavorful, a sense of scene more convincing and a story more
tightly wound yet believable than the brand-name superstars. And
occasionally an outright newcomer, not hardened thus far by his
agent's insistent counsel to repeat what worked before, will
come up with a tale that delights by being absolutely original.

    The most potent writing to be found in any mystery of
recent months appears in Jonathan Valin's Extenuating
Circumstances (Delacorte; 234 pages; $15.95). His detective,
Harry Stoner, yet another of the shopworn ex-cops so beloved of
the genre, is hired to investigate the disappearance of a
wealthy politician and do-gooder. The missing man is found
tortured to death. His killers: two boy prostitutes, one of whom
was seeking a father figure, the other of whom scorned his
client as a masochistic "beat freak." The who in this whodunit
is known early in the story. Valin is more interested in
precisely what happened and why, in how tenderness turned into
a transaction and then to fatal abuse. The hustlers' barren
backgrounds, the meat-rack bars where they work, the aging
queens who shelter them, all are convincingly evoked in Stoner's
impassioned journey of detection.

    Among other hard-boiled writers, the most impressive effort
of the past year comes from Michael Allegretto. His Blood Stone
(Scribner's; 261 pages; $16.95) is a superb example of the
"cold crime" subgenre. A seedy private eye, approached by an
even seedier pal, starts looking for the proceeds of a famous
jewel robbery out West a couple of decades after the theft. His
allies and enemies in an ever shifting set of alliances include
an aging femme fatale, a spunky tomboy and her ex-con
grandfather, a trio of murderous Indians, a small-town newspaper
editor and a crooked policeman. The plot and mood are vaguely
reminiscent of The Maltese Falcon, except that, yes, there is
a treasure to be had.

    Another homage to the era of The Maltese Falcon appears in
Buried Caesars (Mysterious Press; 179 pages; $15.95), in which
Stuart M. Kaminsky's sleuth Toby Peters is hired by General
Douglas MacArthur on a matter of national security and gets a
helping hand from Dashiell Hammett on a spree. The volume is one
of the sprightliest in the series built around Peters but is
overshadowed by A Cold Red Sunrise (Scribner's; 210 pages;
$15.95), which features Kaminsky's other recurring detective,
Soviet policeman Porfiry Rostnikov. That sly and assiduous
investigator is dispatched to Siberia to look into the killing
of another officer, who in turn was probing the killing of the
daughter of a prominent dissident. Despite the smallness and
privation of the village, Rostnikov unearths a wealth of
believably evoked secrets on his way to a disquietingly
equivocal solution.

    Simon Brett specializes in what mystery fans call "the
cozy," a story in which most of the mayhem is discreetly
offstage, and the detective is more likely to be a canny old
woman than a boozy middle-aged man. Of the many imitations of
Agatha Christie's Miss Marple, none has been quite so slippery
and criminous as Melita Pargeter, a white-haired, well-heeled
widow of a burglar whom Brett beguilingly introduced in 1987's
A Nice Class of Corpse. Having skewered the pretenses of her
fellow residents of a retirement hotel in that volume, she
returns in Mrs, Presumed Dead (Scribner's; 248 pages; $16.95)
to expose the follies of an executive suburb where the previous
owner of her home has disappeared. Aiding in her attempts to
locate the missing woman are a wry assortment of her late
husband's crooked cronies, all of them, like Mrs. Pargeter, now
at least semilegit.

    The newcomer of the year thus far is John Collee, a British
physician and writer of TV medical scripts. In A Paper Mask
(Arbor House; 232 pages; $16.95), his second book, the premise
is that most emergency-room orderlies fancy themselves able, by
practical experience, to diagnose and treat patients, and that
one of them decides to give it a try. This antihero, who assumes
the name and hospital residency of an acquaintance who is killed
in an accident before he can report for duty, makes some
disastrous mistakes -- but such is the imposing aura of his
purported professional credentials that he keeps his post
through scrape after scrape, and sometimes does succeed.
Nonetheless, he lives in fear of exposure, and tension mounts.
The character is depicted with a remarkably skillful blend of
empathy and distaste, so that from page to page the reader roots
for him to get caught or to get away with it all. With complete
believability, the plot keeps twisting right up to the final
words. Like so many fellow toilers in mystery-genre obscurity,
Collee proves himself a true novelist. A Paper Mask should
satisfy readers who have never cared whether the FBI was
bursting into the kitchen or, as Christie suggested in a title,
the body was in the library.