The Paradise Affair (2021) by Bill Pronzini

In 2005, Bill Pronzini revived his two historical gumshoes, John Quincannon and Sabina Carpenter, who sold their professional detective services in San Francisco at the turn-of-the-century – when the Old West was coming to an end. This new run of short stories appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine starting with "Quincannon in Paradise" (collected in Quincannon's Game: A Western Quartet, 2005) and seems to have ended with "Pick Up Sticks" (2021). During the 2010s, Pronzini started to rework the Quincannon and Carpenter short stories into novel-length mysteries with his wife, Marcia Muller. The series began with the delightful The Bughouse Affair (2013) and some have called it the novel that rebooted the series, but it's more of a continuation of Quincannon (1985) and Beyond the Grave (1986) merging and streamlining the short stories with the original 1980s novels.

The Paradise Affair (2021) is the ninth and, as of this writing, seemingly last entry in the series based on the short stories "Quincannon in Paradise" and "Pick Up Sticks." A whole lot has changed since the days of The Bughouse Affair.

John Quincannon and Sabina Carpenter finally tied the marital knot, "their future together was bright," but Quincannon, "the most accomplished detective in the western United States," suffered an affront to his pride and skills – allowing two slippery criminals to escape his clutches. Jackson "Lonesome Jack" Vereen ("an ironical moniker, for he was a libertine of gargantuan appetites") and E.B. "Nevada Ned" Nagle ("whose primary vice was the opium derivative morphine") are con artists who graduated over their lengthy career from bait-and-switch trickery to swindling people with phony stocks. Their latest mark and Quincannon's current client, R.W. Anderson, not only bought two-thousand dollars of bogus stock in a nonexistent silver mine, but the two swindlers seized upon an opportune to make off with his portfolio of stock certificates and bearer bonds. Anderson hired Quincannon to bring the two to justice and hopefully recover the stolen portfolio. However, two weeks of exhaustive detective work gets thrown out of the window when Quincannon learns his quarries booked a passage for for Honolulu, Hawaii.

Sabina spots an opportunity for a second, busman's honeymoon ("we deserve a vacation, even if it is a working one") and convinces both her husband and their client to follow Lonesome Jack and Nevada Ned to Honolulu.

The Paradise Affair takes place during the first-half of 1898, "the Sandwich Islands Kingdom was overthrown and Queen Lili'uokalani's reign ended in January of '93, five years ago," but before the United States annexed the then independent Republic of Hawaii – which happened later that year on August 12, 1898. So the story is drenched in local and historical color. The impending annexation is a popular conversational topic ("...if Japan doesn't invade and annex it first, as they have threatened to do"), while the Spanish-American war and increased U.S. military presence hover in the background (Admiral Dewey's Asiatic Squadron swarm Honolulu Harbor). However, the best and most evocative part is Quincannon riding a donkey pass the rugged coastline, fishing villages, lava tubes and spouting blowholes as he tracks down his elusive quarries. It takes Quincannon's resigned Scottish pessimism ("no boats, no horses, naught but wagons and asses! What other handicaps did these island gardens of delight hold in store?") a while to acclimate, before his feelings towards the islands begin to mellow. And while her husband is hunting down a pair of swindlers, Sabina gets a case of her own practically thrown in her lap.

During their voyage, the Quincannon's befriended the Prichards, Lyman and Margaret, who are traveling homeward and invited them to stay at their Waikiki home. So stays with their new friends when her husband is roaming the islands for Lonesome Jack and Nevada Ned, but one particular hot, stuffy night, Sabina ventures out into garden when "an explosive report broke the quiet" – a gunshot coming from the house next door. Gordon Pettibone, owner of the neighboring property, had apparently had locked himself in the study with a loaded gun and opinions differ on how he got shot. The local police believes it was suicide, but Philip Oakes insists his uncle had been fiddling with the gun and accidentally shot himself. A twenty thousand dollar insurance policy with a nonpayment clause in case of suicide depends on it. Oakes heard Sabina is a detective and asks her to prove his uncle's death was due to an accidental misfire, but she has the sneaking suspicion Pettibone might have been cleverly murdered. Sabina thought she a shadowy shape close to the back wall shortly after hearing the gunshot and than there's those three, strange words Pettibone spoke before he died, "pick up sticks." Like the old nursery rhyme ("One, two, buckle my shoe. Three, four, knock on the door. Five, six, pick up sticks").

Ah, yes, an Ellery Queen-style dying message inside a John Dickson Carr-like locked room mystery. The detective story's take on the riddle wrapped inside an enigma and Sabina's knows dying messages and impossible murders is Quincannon's bread and butter ("conundrums of this sort intrigued him"), but "she had, after all, been instrumental in solving a few conundrums herself." Sabina makes short work of the locked room and dying message puzzles with the latter having a clever answer to the criticism often leveled at the dying message. Why would a mortally injured and dying person come up with a cryptic clue on the spot instead of outright naming the murderer? This dying message is even more damning than simply naming the murderer. The locked room-trick is a nicely-done variation on an impossible crime technique that always fascinated me (ROT13: haybpxrq qbbef naq jvaqbjf gung nccrne gb or ybpxrq naq obygrq sebz gur vafvqr). So both quickly, and neatly, wrap up their respective investigations with days left to spare to enjoy that second, well deserved honeymoon.

The Paradise Affair is a relatively short, but tightly written and plotted locked room mystery full of local and historical color, which certainly makes it a standout of the series. More importantly, it provided a satisfying closure to the character-arcs of John and Sabina Quincannon. John Quincannon was introduced as a broken ex-Secret Service operative haunted by the gun battle in which his ricocheting bullet killed a pregnant woman ("the burden of responsibility for the loss of two innocent lives had been unbearable"). Everything changed when he met Sabina, then a "Pink Rose" of the Pinkerton Agency, who had lost her husband in the line of duty. Their first collaboration allowed both of them to move on and create Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services. So, if The Paradise Affair really is their last outing, they got a happy sendoff that retrospectively brightened Beyond the Grave. A crossover across time between this series and Muller's short-lived series-character Elena Oliverez, which takes place in 1894 and 1986. The 1986 portion of the story makes it very clear Carpenter and Quincannon are long gone. Either way, this is not the last you have seen of them on this blog. I still have The Bags of Tricks Affair (2018), which I overlooked and forgot about. The stories collected in Quincannon's Game warrant a second look as three of the four stories are locked room mysteries. Why not end where the series began, Quincannon, because that would be on theme for this blog.