TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/040389/04038900.042

Text File | 1990-09-22 | 6KB | 96 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.