Ellroy marks time between installments of his outsized LA saga with a slender collection of crime fiction — a novella and five stories (1986-94) — all reeking of his trademark corruption and stylistic flamboyance. Readers impatient with Ellroy's indulgently telegraphic prose in L.A. Confidential (1990) and White Jazz (1992) may be surprised to find that the most recent (and excessive) of these stories, the substantial "Dick Contino's Blues," is the strongest. Its honky-tonk accordionist hero, introduced in a could-be-factual prologue, "Out of the Past," tries to boost his stalled movie career by arranging to have himself and starlet Chrissy Staples kidnapped — then watches the hoax spin dangerously out of control when waves of hoods, capped by the fearsome Whipcord Strangler, muscle in on the action, making for a scary, funny, bluesy climax. The other stories, as you'd expect, are all content with a narrower range of effects. In the routine crime story "High Darktown," Sgt. Lee Blanchard goes after a pair of liquor store thieves just out of prison and hot for his scalp. Blanchard's back in the offbeat "Dial Axminster 6-400," paired with Davis Evans, a hard-nosed cop who goes after a trio of violent kidnappers in the hope of repossessing their two-tone 1936 Auburn speedster. "Since I Don't Have You" asks why Gretchen Shoftel, a cozy friend of both mobster Mickey Cohen and billionaire Howard Hughes, was still working as a carhop just before she took off for parts unknown. In the foolishly likeable "Gravy Train," Stan Klein works his way up from hard time to acting as minder for Basko, a dog who's just inherited $25 million. And "Torch Number," the weakest and most sentimental of the batch, shows shamus Spade Hearns pursuing a torch singer who's gotten hold of a song his old love wrote and performed just for him. Nothing here like the power of Elroy's LA quartet; but all the stories are effective as genre pieces, and most of them equally interesting for their manic ambivalence toward postwar California.
Pub Date: June 1, 1994
ISBN: 0307278794
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1994
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous...
A struggling student’s English assignment turns into a mission to solve a 30-year-old murder.
Joe Talbert has had very few breaks in his 21 years. The son of a single and very alcoholic mother, he’s worked hard to save enough money to leave his home in Austin, Minnesota, for the University of Minnesota. Although he has to leave his autistic younger brother, Jeremy Naylor, to the dubious care of their mother, Joe is determined to beat the odds and get his degree. For an assignment in his English class, he decides to interview Carl Iverson, a man convicted of raping and killing a 14-year-old girl. Carl, who maintains his innocence, is dying of cancer and has been released to a nursing home to end his life in lonely but unrepentant pain. The more Joe learns about Carl—a Vietnam vet with two Purple Hearts and a Silver Cross—the more the young man questions the conviction. Joe’s plan to write a short biography and earn an easy A turns into something more. Even after his mother is arrested for drunk driving and guilt-trips Joe into ransacking his college fund to bail her out, he soldiers on with the project, though her irresponsibility forces him to take Jeremy into his care. But it’s his younger brother who cracks the code of the long-dead murder victim’s secret diary and an attractive neighbor, Lila Nash, who has her own agenda for helping Joe solve the mystery, whatever the risk.
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous than championing a bitter old man convicted of a horrific crime.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61614-998-7
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Seventh Street Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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