Fool's Gold by Dolores Hitchens

First published in 1958; published by Library of America on July 7, 2020

Written in 1958, it is unsurprising that Fool’s Gold reads like a classic crime novel. It well deserves its inclusion in the Library of America’s eight volume Women Crime Writers anthology showcasing novels from the 1940s and 1950s. Hitchens published about half her fiction under the name D.B. Olsen, but Fool’s Gold was published under her own name. The novel was filmed as Band of Outsiders by Jean-Luc Godard. The Library of America released Fool's Gold this year as a standalone paperback.

Fool’s Gold is the story of a crime gone wrong. A criminal in Vegas named Stolz purchased money that a kidnapper needed to launder. Stolz got a good price because the ransom was paid in consecutive bills, making the currency easily traceable. Not knowing quite what to do with it, Stolz hid it in the Pasadena home of Mrs. Havermann, his ex-mother-in-law.

Mrs. Haverman raised Karen, now a teenager, from the age of nine. She’s taking courses in a night school that is also attended by Eddie and Skip, both of whom are just out of their teens. Karen is flattered by the attention she receives from Skip after class. Skip is interested in the story Karen tells about the money that Stolz has stashed in Mrs. Havermann’s house.

Skip hatches a plan to steal the money. He mentions it to his Uncle Willy, a professional thief with mob connections. Willy decides that Skip isn’t sufficiently seasoned to take on Stolz. Sensing an opportunity to make some money for himself, Willy tells Big Tom about the money, who decides to steal the money himself, giving Willy a finder’s fee for the tip. This arrangement doesn’t sit well with Skip, who decides to steal the money with the help of Eddie and Karen before Big Tom can get it. The crime does not go as planned, leaving the key characters with more trouble than they can handle.

Like most 1950s crime fiction, the plot is credible. Hitchens doesn’t try to shock the reader. She makes it easy to feel sympathy for Karen, who reeks of 1950s innocence. It is just as easy to scorn Skip, who takes advantage of Karen’s infatuation and Eddie’s friendship. If Skip were living in the era of message T-shirts, his would say “Born to Lose.”

An interesting subplot involves Uncle Willy’s compulsion to steal. He attends an AA meeting with nefarious intent until, inspired by all the selfless people who want to help him, he has an epiphany that gives him a chance to overcome his weakness.

The story moves quickly as characters enter converge upon and flee the crime scene. They make a series of bad choices for which they pay a price. True to 1950s noir, a reader can expect the bad guys to get what they deserve and the less-bad guys to get a chance at redemption. The story’s ending is thus predictable but only because it gives readers what they want — or at least what they wanted in the 1950s.

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Merry Christmas!

The Arrest by Jonathan Lethem

Published by HarperCollins/Ecco on November 10, 2020

Integral to the story Jonatham Lethem tells in The Arrest is a nuclear-powered supercar called Blue Streak, apparently inspired by nostalgia for a past that imagined the wondrous future of technology. Unlike Blue Streak, most technology in this near future novel has stopped working. Like the power failure in Don DeLillo’s The Silence, the source of this calamity is the subject of speculation rather than explanation. And like DeLillo, Lethem takes a tongue-in-cheek approach to how characters respond to the collapse of the familiar.

The Arrest started with the loss of television, which “contracted a hemorrhagic ailment” that led to the brief return of Family Ties and news of the Vietnam War before it died completely. Email and social media suffered “colony collapse disorder.” Guns worked for almost a year before gunpowder stopped igniting. In the absence of connectivity, the United States was replaced by wherever you happened to be. Technology gave way to solar dehydrators and rooftop rain collectors. Why the Blue Streak (which was assembled from a tunnel boring machine) still works is a mystery to everyone.

Journeyman (a/k/a Alexander Duplessis or Sandy) lives with his sister Madeleine on her farm that operates as a commune. Three towns near the farm occupy a peninsula in Maine. Journeyman’s role in this new world is to bring food and supplies to Jerome Kormetz, a child molester who has been exiled by agreement to a lakeside cabin. He also delivers food to the Cordon, whose members had probably fancied themselves to be a militia before their guns stopped working. The Cordon have formed a perimeter, supposedly to protect the peninsula from attack by New Hampshire. The Cordon are actually more interested in intimidating peninsula residents to assure that the Cordon are fed.

In his pre-collapse life, Journeyman pounded out screenplays for his friend Peter Todbaum, a Hollywood producer who has the ability to pitch but not to create. He made a good living pitching ideas that Journeyman turned into scripts and then pitching the scripts to studios. They were working on a movie about a dystopian future called Yet Another World before the Arrest. Todbaum wanted Journeyman to cobble it together from classic works of post-apocalyptic fiction. As it references those works, the novel takes a well-deserved shot at Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, an example of the caveman version of the genre.

Todbaum visits Journeyman after the Arrest, driving the Blue Streak cross country from Malibu, intuiting that Journeyman would have gone to ground with Madeleine, with whom Todbaum once had an ambiguous relationship, or at least an ambiguous encounter, before Madeleine fell in love with a Somalian refugee named Astur. Todbaum apparently riled up a good many people during his trek, behavior that the commune members regard as unhealthy for the commune. Exactly what Todbaum saw during his journey is unclear. He tells a character named Gorse that America has been completely destroyed, then tells Gorse that their peninsula in Maine is actually part of an experimental biosphere that has been cut off from civilization. The truth is likely to be entirely different, but Gorse will never know.

The plot involves a conflict between Todbaum and the Cordon as well as a conflict between Todbaum and members of the commune who seek refuge from Todbaum and from the Cordon on “an island at the end of land and time.” A mysterious tower on the island becomes a focal point of those conflicts.

Readers might expect novels about the loss of technology to illustrate dependence on technology, but Lethem has traveled beyond allegorical expectations. The Arrest seems to suggest that it’s time to move past the apocalypse and to begin rebuilding on the assumption that it is already upon us. Todbaum discusses and Journeyman frequently ponders “the worth of ritual action”: pillaging, human sacrifice, “the destructive impulse.” Kormetz tells Journeyman he grasps too little of that human need. Perhaps Lethem wants us to understand that we ignore it at our peril.

The Arrest was so different from my expectations that I had to start it three times before I began to wrap my head around it. I kept coming back to it because Lethem wrote it and he’s never disappointed me. When I finally got into it I discovered that, for all its humor, it requires a close reading. Contrary to appearances, this isn’t a light novel. I’m certain it’s a novel I don’t entirely understand. I think Lethem is saying, as does a minor character, that the structure of society doesn’t matter much because “bullshit power games” will erupt in even the most egalitarian communities. The communal peninsula might be a citadel or it might be a prison. That same character tells Journeyman to “tell the truth in what you write,” advice that frightens Journeyman because he doesn’t want to arouse contempt. In the end, perhaps the truth, or a search for truth, is all we have. That, at least, is the message that I took from this puzzling but amusing novel.

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The System by Ryan Gattis

Published by Farrar, Straus and Girou/MCD on December 8, 2020

The System is a fascinating novel about the criminal justice system as seen from the perspectives of multiple characters. It is one of the most perceptive takes on crime and criminal justice I’ve encountered in some time.

There are actually two systems at work in the novel. Running parallel to the government’s system of law and order is one that imposes a different sort of order. It determines how prisoners run prisons and how gangs run streets.

Key characters experience events that change them in ways that are beneficial or unsettling or both. Some of the characters have epiphanies that the reader hopes will guide the rest of their lives. Those characters give the novel its heart. To their misfortune, other characters fail to take advantage of opportunities to change. Those characters contribute to the novel’s sense of realism.

The story begins with Angela Alvarez breaking up with her boyfriend, Jacob Safulu, a/k/a Dreamer. Angela is beautiful and smart. She lives in a house she inherited from her aunt in a low-income neighborhood. She lives with Dreamer and her cousin, Omar Tavira, a/k/a Wizard. She works as a barista and takes nursing classes because she wants to make a better life for herself. Dreamer and Wizard are good friends but Dreamer isn’t part of Wizard’s gang life. Dreamer doesn’t know what he wants to be. Angela thinks he’s drifting in order to avoid responsibility. That’s not what she wants in a boyfriend.

As Angela is delivering the bad news to Dreamer, Wizard is shooting a woman named Scrappy. The hit has been ordered by Wizard’s gang leader to send a message about Scrappy’s failure to respect territorial boundaries. An addict named Augie Clark was trying to score from Scrappy shortly before the shooting. He sees it go down and saves her life after the shooter flees. He also steals all the heroin she’s hidden on her person and the gun that the shooter dropped at the scene.

Augie’s parole agent, Phillip Petrillo, finds the drugs and the gun during a search of Augie’s room. Petrillo is also Wizard’s parole agent. When Augie admits that he stole the gun after watching Wizard shoot Scrappy, Petrillo convinces him to say that Wizard’s accomplice, who Augie didn’t recognize, was Dreamer, who Augie doesn’t know.

Petrillo wants to set up Dreamer because he knows Dreamer is dating Angela and, having met Angela a few times during home visits with Wizard, he knows Angela is hot. To get Dreamer out of the way, Petrillo searches Angela’s house and plants the gun in the room where Dreamer sleeps. Petrillo has used his position to further inappropriate relationships with many other young women but he sees Angela as his biggest conquest.

The plot moves forward through the arrest and trial of Wizard and Dreamer. Chapters narrate the story from each of their perspectives as well as those of Angela, a defense lawyer, a prosecutor, and a couple of cops. I love the variety of distinct voices in which the story is told. Each voice is articulate in its own way, reminding the reader that intelligence and formal education are two different things.

Angela is a sympathetic character. Through Petrillo, she gets a taste of what opportunities the world outside her neighborhood might hold. When she realizes what a cad Petrillo is, she struggles with the fact that she felt attracted to him and begins to realize that the attraction was not to Petrillo but to what he might represent.

Dreamer also changes, moving in different directions as the novel unfolds. His adaptation to prison life might in some ways be unhealthy, despite the imperative to do what it takes to survive. At the same time, he begins to realize that his loyalty to Wizard hasn’t been repaid and that the code of the street isn’t as important as the ideas he encounters after diving into the prison library. The fact that Dreamer and Angela both take advantage of the opportunity to confront life in a more positive way suggests that all of us might be able to do the same.

The novel encourages the reader to empathize with the kind of people who are often condemned by society. It similarly encourages the reader to understand that people who perform jobs that purportedly benefit society are sometimes interested only in benefiting themselves. Ultimately, the novel reminds us that life is more complex than people with limited experience imagine it to be.

The plot might be faulted for delivering such a satisfying ending. Trial scenes are compelling but not always accurate in detailing how the judicial system works. Those are insignificant quibbles about a story that kept me spellbound.

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Indigo by Loren D. Estleman

Published by Forge Books on July 28, 2020

I don’t have enough fingers and toes to count all the books Loren D. Estleman has written. Indigo is the sixth novel in his Valentino, Film Detective series. I’ve dipped into and enjoyed his Amos Walker mysteries but this was my first exposure to Valentino.

Valentino tracks down lost motion pictures for the Film and Television Archive at UCLA. He’s also rehabilitating an old theater called The Oracle and lives in an apartment in the projection booth. His girlfriend, Harriet Johansen, is a forensic pathologist but she doesn’t have much of a role in this novel.

Among Valentino’s many friends is Ignacio Bozal, who made some money somewhere, then bought and restored a resort in Acapulco that made even more money before he showed up in Hollywood and began making generous contributions to the Film and Television Archive. Bozal gets Valentino interested in a Hollywood actor named Van Oliver who made one movie, a noir called Bleak Street. Insiders who saw Oliver work thought the realism he brought to the part was revolutionary. Bozal suggests that Oliver had a shady past that gave him insight into the behavior of gangsters. Oliver disappeared in 1957 and was widely presumed to have been murdered.

Bozal got his hands on the only surviving copy of Bleak Street. He gives it to Valentino, whose boss thinks the premiere will get huge press if Valentino can solve the mystery of Van Oliver’s disappearance. As the plot unfolds, Valentino discovers that multiple people for multiple reasons want Bleak Street to remain out of the public eye.

Indigo is a pleasant novel written in Estleman’s erudite prose style. Estleman’s investigation introduces the reader to a variety of credible characters, including gangsters, cops, and a Hollywood retiree who might have something of value to contribute if he has a lucid moment. The story misdirects, as a classic mystery should. The solution to the mystery caught me off guard, as a classic mystery should.

Indigo is, in short, the kind of book that should appeal to fans of classic mysteries. It isn’t a thriller — don’t expect shootouts or car chases — but it does create tension at key moments. Valentino is a bright, unassuming fellow whose knowledge of film trivia seems to be unparalleled. That makes Indigo a good choice for fans of film noir as well as fans of mysteries.

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