THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 25, 1996 TAG: 9602270475
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY DOUGLAS G. GREENE
LENGTH: Long : 108 lines
Detective and mystery novelists often refuse to be pigeonholed. John Dickson Carr, the master of locked-room mysteries, also wrote historical novels. Agatha Christie wrote poetry. P.D. James has produced a science fiction novel. Charlotte MacLeod has written a time-travel fantasy. And, to get to the point of this review, some of the best current mystery writers have tried new directions.
For example, Bill Pronzini, famed for his ``Nameless Detective'' private-eye novels, recently produced a wonderful combination of pure detection, thrillerish action and midlife angst. Blue Lonesome (Walker, 207 pp., $21.95) is about Jim Messenger, a loner going nowhere in a 9-to-5 job. He meets another loner, a woman calling herself Janet Mitchell. She puts him off, but he sees her desperation reflecting his own, and he can't forget her. When she commits suicide, he is compelled to find out why her life ended.
Giving up his job, he moves to Mitchell's tiny western community and works on a ranch. As he peels layer after layer from Mitchell's past, he discovers who he himself is. Blue Lonesome is a powerful novel that shows how the formal medium of the detective novel - its motifs of search and discovery - can say much about our world.
Lawrence Block is known for his Matt Scudder private-eye stories, some of the toughest and bleakest in the genre. But Block also writes witty, charming tales about a clever but fundamentally moral burglar named Bernie Rhodenbarr. For the first time, Block's 1978 novel, The Burglar in the Closet (Dutton, 243 pp., $21.95) is available in hard cover, and it's just as funny as when it was first written.
To help his dentist retrieve some diamonds from his soon-to-be ex-wife, Bernie agrees to burgle her apartment, but he mistimes his larceny and is locked in a closet. When he emerges he finds the wife murdered and himself as the main suspect. How he extricates himself from the mess makes for entertaining reading.
William L. DeAndrea, one of the few writers to win three Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America, is known for contemporary mysteries full of the twists and turns of classic writers such as Carr, Christie and Queen. However, his latest novel, Written in Fire (Walker, 163 pp., $19.95), is a Western, set in Wyoming around 1880.
Former lawman Lobo Blacke, confined to a wheelchair after being shot in the back, plays a Nero Wolfe character, with the narrator Quinn Booker being Archie Goodwin. The plot - two murders, a corrupt sheriff, a mysteriously missing photograph and fair play in the clueing - is handled well, and DeAndrea's dialogue crackles.
Anne Perry and Lynda S. Robinson are more commonly associated with historical mysteries than is DeAndrea. Cain His Brother (Fawcett, 387 pp. $22.95), Perry's fifth novel about Victorian investigator William Monk is not one of her best works: The plot is slight for the length of the book, and experienced mystery readers should be able to work out the fate of a missing twin brother long before Monk does. Perry, moreover, too frequently analyzes the personalities of her characters, rather than letting us see them in action. But despite all that, Cain His Brother is an enjoyable re-creation of the mid-19th century, and Perry adroitly introduces a theme that has become a major concern in our decade.
Robinson's Murder at the Feast of Rejoicing (Walker, 229 pp., $20.95) is the third of her marvelous novels set in the Egypt of Tutankhamen. Lord Meren, the ``pharaoh's eyes and ears,'' is on a brief holiday with his bickering relatives, when the lifeless body of an in-law is found stuffed into a granary. Meren has to discover the murderer while protecting the young king from conspiracies hatched by enemies of the dead heretic king and queen, Akenatun and Nefertiti. This is an enthralling detective novel by an author who gets better and better.
The traditional British ``cozy'' is represented by Hazel Holt's Mrs. Malory Wonders Why (Dutton, 185 pp., $20.95). The detective is an amateur snoop, the setting is a village, the characters are all village types and the writing style is comfortably familiar.
A local doctor is trying to persuade (or coerce) an elderly woman to leave her apartment so that the doctor can make a huge land deal. The woman refuses, and she is duly murdered - with a poisonous dessert. Sheila Malory sorts through all the suspects, including a greedy nephew, a neighbor-lady who is ``no better than she should be,'' and the capitalistic physician. Holt handles everything with aplomb, though I wish that the solution had been more dramatically revealed.
The two most interesting short-story collections of recent months feature British police inspectors, but otherwise they are quite different. Colin Dexter's Morse's Greatest Mystery (Crown, 242 pp., $23) includes a few non-series stories, one of which, ``A Case of Mis-Identity,'' twists and turns a famous Sherlock Holmes story in a way that only Dexter's labyrinthine mind could manage, but most readers will turn to the six Morse mysteries in miniature. ``The Inside Story'' depends, like many of the Morse novels, on wordplay. The title story shows an unexpectedly human side to the irascible inspector, and ``Neighbourhood Watch'' does a marvelous job of bamboozling the reader in only 14 pages. This is a book to savor.
Joyce Porter's Dover: The Collected Short Stories (Foul Play, 296 pp., $20) takes the traditional characterization of the British copper and turns it upside down. Chief Inspector Wilfrid Dover is lazy, unkempt, obese and stupid. Yet, his short cases (like the 10 Dover novels) are excellently plotted examples of fair-play detection filled with suspects and, at the end, a surprising revelation of the guilty party. How Dover manages to solve crimes, his long-suffering Sergeant MacGregor has no idea, but somehow in these 11 hilarious tales, Dover comes out on top. It's as though P.G. Wodehouse has joined forces with P.D. James - much to the reader's enjoyment. MEMO: Douglas G. Greene is director of the Institute of Humanities at Old
Dominion University. His book, ``John Dickson Carr: The Man Who
Explained Miracles,'' was recently nominated for an Edgar Award. by CNB