"But what you see isn't always what's happening."- Jonathan Creek (The Problem at Gallows Gate, 1998)
After
posting the review of Marco Books' De dood van Callista de Vries (The
Death of Callista de Vries, 2012), I exchanged emails and swapped opinions
with Books on, inter alia, the deviations in clueing and the incorrect solution
I came up with while reading the book, which was, nonetheless, endorsed and
imprinted with the authors rubber stamp of approval. Of course, the one time I
come across scholarly and make a few astute observations, it’s only read by one
other person. But, yes, there's a point to this palaver. The conversation gave
me an insatiable appetite for another slice of neo-orthodox detective fiction,
but the next installment in Books' series is still in the works and thus I
turned to one of his contemporaries, Bill Pronzini, whose work is well
represented on my bookshelves and to-be-read pile, and the latter had one of
his books that embellishes its plot with no less than three impossible
scenarios – so it was easy pickings.
Scattershot (1982) follows in the footsteps of
its predecessor, Hoodwink (1981), in which The Nameless Detective solves
a pair of murders, perpetrated under seemingly impossible circumstances, tied
to a group of pulp writers who were all the rage back in the 1940s. He also
meets Kerry Wade, who becomes his love interest. You'd think that solving a
baffling murder case and getting the girl would turn over a new leaf in the
life of this lonely wolf, but Scattershot offers up a picture of one of
the worst weeks in his life and only Tsutomu Yamaguchi could’ve claimed to have
had a worst week.
The
problems opposing Nameless in this novel can be categorized into two kinds:
personal problems and professional problems. The personal ones come mainly from
the uncertainties of the status of his relationship with Kerry and the
interference from her father, who's not a fan that his daughter is seeing an
older man with an unsavory, low-paying job. Professionally, the problems may
acquire a personal note when an unsatisfied and somewhat unbalanced client
starts a media campaign to get his license revoked and take away his
livelihood.
I have to
note beforehand that the three impossible situations in this book had previous
lives as short stories and they were sewn together with bridging material. Just an FYI.
Edna
Hornback hires Nameless to shadow her husband, Lewis, and gather evidence of
his infidelity and find the money he pilfered from their company, which is a
routine job for a private detective. Nameless follows Lewis around like a cat
chasing its own tail, but the man actually manages to shake off his own shadow
when he vanishes from his locked car, which Nameless was constantly watching
from his own car, leaving only a smears of blood on the front seat as a
reminder that there was actually someone in the car. Nameless does a good job
at figuring out how the stunt was pulled off, but not before his reputation
takes a beating it might not recover from when his client decides to file a
suit for criminal negligence and riles up the media against him. It's also one
of Pronzini's cleverest and most satisfying ploys involving an impossible
disappearance (an honorable mention to the (overly?) ingenious "The Arrowmont
Prison Riddle," collected in All But Impossible!, 1981, edited by Edward D. Hoch) and I wonder if this plot strand was a conscious nod to John Dickson Carr's (writing as Carter Dickson) She Died a Lady (1943). The solutions
have a few points in common and the setting of the crime-scenes (cliff/slope)
were also a bit similar.
Anyway,
Nameless is advised to stop frequenting his usual spot of trouble, at least,
until this blows over and he has another assignment waiting, which consists of
tracking down a reckless socialite and serve her with a subpoena. What can
possibly go wrong? It's not like she too is going dissipate into thin air,
however, he does find her in a locked cabin in the company of her secretary,
shot to death, and she seems to have been the only person who could’ve pulled
the trigger. This was sort of a short story within a novel, covering two
chapters, but it's nonetheless admirable how many clues were crammed into this
short intermezzo.
I loved
how this book played on theme of the story book detective (read: murder magnate)
who always happens to be mooning around when the criminal elements are abound,
and this, uhm, talent is at the root of his more pressing problems and it's not
something you can turn off like a light switch. Take, for example, the last
assignment of his disastrous week: guarding wedding gifts that are locked away
in a secured room and he has to plant his ass in front of the door with a pulp
magazine. What can possibly go wrong this time? Well, the sound of broken glass
and stumbling in the room drags Nameless away from his fictional colleagues,
and kicks down the door to discover that a valuable ring has been stolen,
however, the broken pieces of glass were found outside – indicating that
thief somehow materialized out of nowhere in a locked room and that completely
threw me off. I identified the thief before it happened and even spotted the
method before the room was locked-up, but I began to second guess my deductions
when the theft appeared to be far more complex than I anticipated. Well played,
well played.
Scattershot shows Bill Pronzini in one of his
unapologetic moods, balancing a cunningly plotted and fairly clued narrative
with excellent character development, which, admittedly, was not a big focus of
this review, but it was done well enough that I couldn't help feel sorry for
that poor gumshoe – and that made the depressing ending perhaps the only
downside of this book. A very complex, but satisfying, detective story and one
that I recommend unreservedly, but you might want to take a look at Hoodwink
first.
On a
final, somewhat related, note: Robert van Gulik once made the following challenge, "I
think it might be an interesting experiment if one of our modern writers of
detective stories would try his hand at composing an ancient Chinese detective
story himself." Scattershot is not set in ancient China,
but the three separate cases with an overlapping theme definitely follows the
structure of an ancient Chinese detective story. Just something my brain pricked
upon.
All the books I reviewd by Bill Pronzini:
All the books I reviewd by Bill Pronzini:
Twospot (1978; with Collin Wilcox)
Bones (1985)
Shackles (1988)
Carpenter and Quincannon (1998) - an addendum
Carpenter and Quincannon (1998) - an addendum
Nightcrawlers (2005)
Savages (2006) - co-reviewed with Patrick 
I've only recently discovered Pronzini, partly through this book. He manages to square the circle and create imaginative,Carr like puzzlers, but places them in a more 'hard-boiled' background. All the ones that I've read so far have been splendid. The only problem that I have is that Pronzini is extremely hard to find in the UK. He is probably missing out on considerable sales because he seems to have no British publisher.
ReplyDeleteSame problem here. I have to order most of them online, but got lucky a few weeks ago when I found (to my very great surprise) Quicksilver and Epitaphs at a secondhand bookstore. You should be able to easily get them online and it does pay-off to wander into a secondhand bookshop from time to time. Good luck with tracking them all down!
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