The Simple Art of Murder

"A museum is a place where one should lose one's head."

- Renzo Piano

Isn’t funny how some of the heirs of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, setting up shop on those mean streets during the 1970s, became the custodians of the traditional, (mostly) fair-play detective stories by incorporating elements from them into the first-person, reflective narrative that defines the Hardboiled Detective?

Notable examples are Joe Gores and the husband-and-wife writing team consisting of Bill Pronzini, known for his ongoing biography of the Nameless Detective, and Marcia Muller, creator of the iconic female private eye Sharon McCone. I have reviewed work from all three writers, having delved more extensively in some than in others, but combined, you can trace a line between their stories that delineates a movement of crime writers who were aware of what came before them – and build upon those traditions rather than disregarding them. The old cunning fox may have been dragged out of his warm, comfy drawing room, but a few of his descendents obviously inherited some of his tricks.

Marcia Muller's The Tree of Death (1983) introduces a new character, Elena Oliverez, curator of the Museum of Mexican Arts in Santa Barbara, who is forced to play detective after a murder threatens to ruin the opening of the museum and even curtail her freedom!

The victim in question is the indolent and repulsive Frank de Palma, director and fundraiser of the museum, who accepts a monstrous, garish ceramic árbol de la vida, tree of life, from a rich patron of the museum, but Elena despises it – thinking that a piece that looks like an oversized souvenir from Tijuana reflects badly on the rest of the collection. Oliverez and De Palma bounce opinions off one another, before the later decides that he really should fire her and the former concludes that someone ought to murder him. And someone does. De Palma decides to work late and Oliverez sets the alarm and locks the door, effectively locking him in until he decides to leave, but when she comes back next morning he's still there – buried under the debris of the tree of life. Naturally, Lt. Dave Kirk fancies her as his number one suspect.

Well, at first, I lumped Oliverez in with Lawrence Block's Bernie Rhodenbarr and William DeAndrea L. DeAndrea's Matt Cobb, professionals in their field who, through their work, come into contact with murder and their narrative voices echo the hardboiled school, but they're more softboiled whodunits, however, as the story progressed, it became more and more reminiscent of Herbert Resnicow's Alexander and Norma Gold novels.

Another museum piece of crime!

The Tree of Death gives the reader a peek behind the walls of rooms and cellars of a museum that are normally closed-off for visitors, much like in The Gold Frame (1987), and is populated with professionals and knowledgeable people who occasionally share little nuggets of information – something that was (admittedly) more pronounced in Resnicow than in Muller. The solution for the problem of the locked museum is also something that can be labeled as typical Resnicow, who must have found even a sealed library to be too claustrophobic for a proper impossible situation. Locked rooms and closed spaces consisted in Resnicow's stories of multi-level chambers for acoustic testing (The Dead Room, 1987), entire theatres filled up with people (The Gold Deadline (1984), The Gold Curse (1986) & The Gold Gamble, 1989) and are stage with a play in progress, but always managed to wrap them tighter than Scrooge's wallet and used every nook of a building to his advantage. That's exactly what Muller did here and made me love the book even more, because I dote on Resnicow and The Tree of Death may have left its mark on his work! 

The most interesting difference was how the victim was characterized, which in Resnicow's novel is usually done after the murder has been committed and we get a thorough account of his life, sort of a short story within a novel, but here we get to know De Palma through the eyes of Oliverez. We get the impression that he's your stereotypical murder victim who was born to play the part of a corpse, but Muller humanizes him in an interesting way. After the body is discovered, someone fetches a drink for Oliverez and gets it in De Palma's cup - with a heart and the word "DAD" printed on it. It won't make you care a lick more or less about De Palma, but it's a good objection to his murder no matter how unlikeable he was. I never had second thoughts like that by any of Resnicow's victims, and more importantly, it's a fact that's not beaten into the ground. It's a reflection, a sudden realization that the mangled body on the floor was a person and not a stageprop. And that made it feel more real and memorable.

Anyhow, this is a blog dedicated (mostly) to neglected mystery writers, but The Tree of Death rubbed in the fact that I have been neglecting Marcia Muller. I'’m sure I will have to answer for that to a couple of ghosts, but at least DeAndrea as the Ghost of Christmas Present should be fun as he shows me the error of my ways.

From the Files of All Souls

“All Souls Law Cooperative works like a medical plan. People who can’t afford the bloated fees many of my colleagues charge buy a membership, its costs based on a scale according to their incomes. The membership gives them access to consul and legal services all the way from small claims to the U.S. Supreme Court.”

- Ted Smalley (“The Last Open File,” from The McCone Files, 1995)

They say that behind every good man stands a strong woman, in which case Bill Pronzini can rest easy knowing that "the founding 'mother' of the contemporary female hardboiled private eye" has his back. Marcia Muller has written 29 novels and published two collections of short stories featuring her female private gumshoe, Sharon McCone, who shares her universe with her husbands "Nameless Detective." I realize that mentioning the fact that Muller took home a Private Eyes Writers of America Live Achievement Award should take priority over noting the fact that they occasionally pooled their series detectives, but I really, really love crossovers. I really do.

Anyway, Marcia Muller made a previous appearance on blog when I reviewed Double (1984), in which "Nameless" bumps into Sharon McCone at a conference for private investigators. It was tremendously fun to watch two universes collide and morph into one world, but I had only explored one of them before and therefore missed that small, but essential, part that prevented me from truly appreciating the novel for what it was. I vowed that I would remedy that omission post-haste, but don't pull a third degree on me to get an answer as to why it took six months before I decided to pick up The McCone Files (1995). You should allow some thing to go unexplained.

I expected Marcia Muller to have a similar style as her husband, as both have identified their work as humanistic detective fiction, which is, of course, their main resemblance, but the McCone stories in this collection have without the presence of "Nameless' an entirely different atmosphere. I'm not sure if I can explain this feeling, but the earliest "Nameless" short stories, which, I think, stand the closest in comparison to the ones collected here, have that classical gritty feel – while these stories seem to be written in full-color. I know, it's a lousy way of explaining it, but perhaps it's the way in which Muller use words to paint an evocative landscape or urban setting. It really gives you the feeling that you're right there with Sharon McCone when she's exploring a valley on horseback, wanders through a surrealistically described building where urns are stored or walks up and down the street of a poor and crime ridden neighborhood.  

But let's take them down from the top:  

The Last Open File

This collection opens with a story of how Sharon McCone, after her previous employer kicked her to the curb, for not taking "direction well" and being "nonresponsive to authority figures," became a staff investigator for All Souls – a legal outfit designed to help the less fortunate in society rather than squeeze a few last bucks out of them. McCone's first assignment consists of tracking down a man who left a young, naïve girl with a stack of unpaid bills and a handful of bounced checks. It's an interesting, open-ended story that will find closure in the final story of this volume. 

Merrill-Go-Round

A mother asks All Souls to help her find her child, a 10-year-old girl named Merril, who went missing after a whirl on a merry-go-round, but she's very reluctant to involve the police and the matter is dropped on Sharon McCone's desk – who grapples with it until she has wrestled the truth from it and as a result may have mended a broken family.

Wild Mustard

Sharon McCone has a favorite restaurant, situated above the ruins of San Francisco's Sutro Baths, that she likes to patronize with regular visits and during each meal she observes an old Japanese woman, wearing a colored headscarf, scouring the slopes for edible herbs. But when the old woman fails to put in an appearance, McCone begins to slowly lose her appetite and starts' digging around the place – and what she uncovered is one of those unfortunate tragedies that usually merits no more than a few lines on page 3.

The Broken Men

The longest story in this collection, at forty and some pages, has Sharon McCone moonlighting as a personal bodyguard for a famous clown-duo, Fitzgerald and Tilby, during their gig at the Diablo Valley Clown Festival, but when one of them splits and leaves a body, garbed in his custom, in his wake it becomes one of those regular working days for McCone. A well-written story that is a lot closer to a traditional mystery than the ones preceding it and also has a nicely imagined, tranquil scene in which McCone explores the region on one of the gentlest (read: slowest) horses in the west. 

Ho-Ling would love and hate this story at the same time! 

Deceptions

McCone haunts the ghosts of the Golden Gate Bridge, where  "some eight hundred-odd lost souls have jumped to their deaths from its decks," hoping to find a vestige of Venessa DiCesare – a young law student who left a suicide note in her car and disappeared. I'm afraid this was, for me, a somewhat forgettable story and the evocative opening was the only thing that stuck to my long-term memory. Well, they can't all be winners.

Cache and Carry (co-written with Bill Pronzini)

It was a nice surprise when I turned over the final page of the previous story and read that this one was co-written with her husband, Bill Pronzini, co-starring his "Nameless Detective," who Sharon affectionately nicknamed Wolf, and the problem he helps her solving is of the impossible variety! The entire story consists of a telephone call between McCone and Nameless, in which she relates to him the facts in the case of a theft of two grand from a locked and secured room at a Neighborhood Check Cashing – and this suggests that the money never left the room but it was stripped-searched without results. So it’s up to "the poor man’s Sir Henry Merrivale" to locate this apparent invisible cubbyhole. Good, short and simple.

Note that McCone has no clue who H.M. is. *shakes head disappointedly*

Deadly Fantasies

Marcia Muller manifests herself in this story as a more traditional plotter and dreams up an ingenious method to administrate poison, in this case, to a young heiress who inherited her fathers multi-million dollar company and came to All Souls because she's afraid that her brother and sister, whose names were conspicuous by their absense in their fathers will, are slowly poisoning her. I, too, suspected that her siblings were feeding her something, such as unfounded suspicions to feed her paranoia and get a court to declare her mentally unsound and usurp the family fortune, but the ending turned out to be quite different – and far more tragic. 

All the Lonely People

A series of burglaries has been tied to a dating service, All the Best People, and McCone has filled out one of their application forms and braves the dating scene – looking for a man with a raccoon mask and a stuffed sack flung over his shoulders. As a crime story, it's not spectacular but a lot is made-up with McCone going on actual dates to probe for a lovelorn housebreaker.

The Place That Time Forgot

Sharon McCone is engaged to track down the estranged granddaughter of an old shopkeeper, Jody Greenglass, whose ramshackle store sneaked away from the march of progress and stands steadfastly in defiance of the rapidly changing world around it. McCone goes through the skeleton-stuffed closet of the Greenglass family and dusts off a lot of old family tragedies, but a catchy and soulful tune leads her to the end of her quarry.

Somewhere in the City

On October 17, 1989, a major earthquake that killed over seventy people and injured thousands struck the San Francisco Bay Area. This is the scene in which Sharon McCone finds herself after her last conversation with an anonymous phone caller, who has been making threatening calls to the Golden Gate Crisis Hotline, but when the city began to shake the last thing she heard, before the connection was broken, was a cry for help. Undoubtedly, the most original and fresh story in this collection.

Final Resting Place

A friend of McCone asks her help in finding out who has been leaving flowers at the San Francisco Memorial Columbarium, where the urn encapsulating her mothers ashes are interred, and what the relation of this person was to her mother – and when she begins to dust-off this problem she naturally uncovers another dreadful secret. The best part of this story was Muller's almost surreal description of the Columbarium where urns are stored under a leaky roof. 

Silent Night

This Christmas tale reminded me of Doyle's "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle," but instead of going on a wild goose chase for a fabulous jewel McCone spends her Christmas Eve looking for her missing nephew – and finds out how little she really knew about the boy. Along the way she also meets a few of society's misfits who spend their evening alone and makes for a nice, humanistic story.

Benny's Space

All Souls is engaged on behalf of Mrs. Angeles, a poor and hardworking mother whose social status condemned her to an even poorer neighborhood, who has been bombarded with death threats – after witnessing a local gang leader being shot. The case is referred to their staff investigator, Sharon McCone, and comes to a conclusion that puts the murder in a whole new perspective. This crime story really benefited from the poor, violent neighborhood that functioned as its backdrop. 

The Lost Coast

A local politician and his wife are under siege from a nefarious stalker, who sends dramatically worded death threats and sends floral arrangements suitable for funerals, and Sharon McCone ends up looking into the matter and stumbles over a body before she got hold of the truth – which turns out to be one of the oldest crimes in the book. I wonder if Muller found inspiration for this story in Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin because it strangely felt like one of their cases. Perhaps it was the threatening floral arrangement in combination with the murderer being trapped on an inconsistency in a statement.

File Closed

Sharon McCone's tenure at All Souls has come to an end and opened up an investigation firm of her own, but as she's cleaning out her old office she comes across her first, unclosed file – and decides to give it one last shot to tie-up all the lose ends before opening a new chapter in her life. This is perhaps the best kind of story to end a collection with.

Announcement: The Bughouse Affair (2013) by Pronzini and Muller

"They're coming to take me away, ho, ho, hee, hee, ha, ha

To the funny farm..."

- Napoleon XIV

Pronzini and Muller

Consider this an addendum to the review posted on Sunday, in which I briefly discussed the stories comprising Carpenter and Quincannon: Professional Detective Services (1998). John Quincannon and Sabina Carpenter, a former secret service man and a female ex-Pinkerton operative and widow of a Pinkerton detective, who have gone into business together and run a private detective agency during the dwindling years of the nineteenth century, are Bill Pronzini's secondary characters – both of whom sporadically roam the pages of The Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.

However, in a recent exchange of emails, Bill Pronzini divulged that he and his mystery-writing wife, Marcia Muller, are collaborating on a series of full-length Carpenter and Quincannon novels for Tor/Forge – and the first of them has been delivered to them and will be published in January 2013. The book has been titled The Bughouse Affair and I can reveal that part of the plot will revolve around a locked room/impossible disappearance ploy and that a new recurring character, who fancies himself to be Sherlock Holmes, will contribute to the solution of the story.

At the moment, Bill Pronzini and Marcia Muller are firing up their word processors to begin working on the second entry, The Spook Light Affair, which will also contain one or two impossible situations. I, for one, can't wait to dig into these affairs!

In other news:

Marco Books, who penned, IMHO, one of the best crime/mystery novels of 2011, De laatste kans (The Last Chance), submitted another prospective masterpiece to his publisher and additional information is expected to be released in December. Now if only a foreign publisher out there would pick him up and introduce his work to an (English-reading) audience he deserves!  

Curt Evans, a mystery scholar who's actually dispelling misconceptions of the genre instead of nurturing them, in order to feed them to a pet theory, has entered the blogosphere like a comet – and you can follow him along over at The Passing Tramp. This erudite scholar is also the author of the upcoming book Masters of the Humdrum Mystery: Cecil John Charles Street, Freeman Wills Crofts, Alfred Walter Stewart and the British Detective Novel, 1920 to 1961, in which he champions the cause of the shamefully neglected and often ill treated humdrum writers.

"If you call one wolf, you invite the pack"

 "It is not so much our friends' help that helps us, as the confidence of their help."

- Epicurus.

When I critiqued the cooperative effort Twospot (1978), penned by Bill Pronzini and Collin Wilcox, I dropped a hint that the next nameless tale loitering in the queue was another crossover novel, in which Pronzini and his mystery writing wife, Marcia Muller, had pooled their series detectives – and in preparation, I wanted to dig into one of her Sharon McCone stories first. Well, that didn't happen. The problem that upset my initial plan, is that the book that piqued my interest also happens to be one of a handful of her tomes that is not within the immediate grabbing range of my covetous claws. So I decided this book would be my formal introduction to her characters. What else was I suppose to do? Exhibit more patience? 

Double (1984) is set at a luxurious San Diego hotel hosting a convention for professional snoopers, who collect their paychecks in the private sector by keeping adulterous spouses under surveillance and nosing around for missing persons, which seems a likely spot for two ace investigators to bump into one another – as well as cueing the cog-wheels of faith to open another can of bodies. The first of these victim fell from one of the hotel spires, four floors to an ugly mess on the cobblestone strewn soil, witnessed by that anonymous murder magnet who recognizes in the remains the establishments chief of security and former associate of Sharon McCone.

A lamentable suicide or an ill-fated accident is the prevailing opinion of Elaine Picard leaping into oblivion, but subtle undercurrents at the hotel gives a different interpretation of her death – and Nameless and McCone withdraw themselves from the hustle and bustle of the convention to embark on an exhaustive, perilous quest for the truth without the backing of a client or the prospect of a fee!

The story is told in the unmistakable, first person narrative that is the trademark of the private eye genre, but here the perspectives alternate between Nameless and McCone – which is a really nifty recital device when you have two such distinctive characters at your disposal to give the reader a report of the events as they went down. But this also included a drawback for me. I spend half of the book peeking over the shoulder of a character I was already on first name terms with, while the other was a complete stranger to me and this gave me more of a connection with story when Nameless was narrating a chapter – which contained everything I enjoyed about these novels. Pronzini always creates an opportunity to bring up his pulp collection and there were subtle bits of humor here and there (e.g. giving the name of his father-in-law when he invaded an adult book-and-curio shop, although, I would've probably LOL'd hard if he had identified himself as Russ Dancer).

Nonetheless, it was a delight to make my acquaintance with Sharon McCone and loved the nickname she stuck nameless with through out the story, namely Wolf, which was lifted from a newspaper article labeling him as the last of the lone-wolf private eyes – and she's the only one who can call him Wolf and get away with it. Nope. It's not what you think. Their relationship is nothing like that. McCone kindles Nameless paternal instincts rather than his amorous ones and it's just a friendship based relationship grounded in a common, professional interest that also happens to fuel their investigation into the death of Elaine Picard.

Like I noted a couple of paragraphs earlier, McCone and Nameless work, more or less, pro-bono on this case and even take a financial beating by voluntarily probing the wasps' nest that is the hotel and vanquish some minor evils as they attempt to close in on the truth. These quests include tracking down a mother with her son, after they vanished from one of the hotel bungalows, locating a private club which was frequented by security chief months prior to her death and leaving only two additional bodies in their wake – which should've been a lot higher with these two cursed detectives working on the same case. So you have to applaud them for not causing a small-scale holocaust at the convention!

The plot itself wasn't bad, but only the first murder was properly clued (as far as clueing goes in a private eye novel) and the other deaths were an additive of the first murder, but then again, this is not the type of story in which you're suppose to be on the look-out for clues and put down the book to construct a clever theory of your own. You simply have to fulfill the role of silent partner as you tag-along with Nameless and McCone on a very bumpy ride on the road of discovery, and find out how a series of events could've escalated in a murder that ended up wrecking the lives of half-a-dozen people. At heart, this is one of those dark, gritty crime stories but also one of the best of its kinds that I have read. Not quite as ingenious as Hoodwink (1982) or as grabbing as Shackles (1988) though, but close enough to be considered as one of his better stories and one that argued a pretty good case for me to be less picky when it comes to scoring a Sharon McCone novel.

If you told me a few years ago, shortly after pledging my alliance to John Dickson Carr and his devoted followers, that there would be a day when I would be reading and praising abrasive, hardboiled private eye novels, I would've probably chucked a string of garlic at your head while hollering, "The power of Edgar Allan Poe compels you!" 

On a sidenote, I toned down my overblown writingstyle a bit (compare this blog post to the previous one) and I want to know if this is preferable or not.

All the books I have reviewed in this series: 

Twospot (1978)

Hoodwink (1981)

Double (1984)

Bones (1985)

Shackles (1988)

Nightcrawlers (2005)