When Old Midnight Comes Along by Loren D. Estleman

Published by Macmillan/Forge Books on December 3, 2019

When Old Midnight Comes Along is the kind of detective novel that should be a model for the genre. Loren D. Estleman’s plot is tight and credible. He conveys the depth of his characters without exploring their backgrounds in unnecessary detail. His prose style is clear and uncluttered while retaining a literary flair. Estelman has distilled, in this 28th Amos Walker mystery, the essence of what a detective novel should be.

Francis Xavier Lawes, a prominent Detroit businessman, hires Amos to find his wife. That could be tricky since Paula Lawes has been missing for more than six years and in less than a year will be presumed dead. Lawes tells Amos he wants to know his wife’s fate because he plans to remarry and would like to get the declaration of death out of the way without delay. Lawes’ intended is Holly Pride, who began working for him as a receptionist before (in my uncharitable interpretation of her intent) she decided to become a gold digger.

Amos starts by charming Deborah Stonesmith at the Detroit Police Department to let him review the file regarding Paula’s disappearance (in other words, she wants Amos to get out of her hair). He learns that Lawes and his wife were overextended on vacation home mortgages and credit card debt. That brings Amos to the police detective who ran the investigation. John Alderdyce has moved on to private security, but he's convinced Lawes murdered Paula and regrets his inability to prove it.

A complicating fact involves Paula’s car, found abandoned near the site where a cop named Marcus Root was killed. A retired police commander, Albert White, tells Amos that Root was shot while he was following Paula’s car. Root’s notebook was missing from his patrol car, suggesting that Root was killed because he had information about Paula that his notebook (or Root) would have revealed.

Other key characters include Oakes Steadman, a former gang member who now works for the police as a gang consultant, George Hoyle, who was having an affair with Paula, and Andrea Dawson, a publicist who was working with Paula when she dropped off the grid. As Amos wears down his shoe leather, the information he gathers about Paula from each character becomes even more confusing. The confusion is compounded when he discovers that a ring — probably but not certainly Paula’s engagement ring — might be connected to a crime.

The various characters provide conflicting clues that Amos and the reader will need to sort out to discover Paula’s fate. The characters have the fullness of unique individuals, unlike the stock characters that so many genre writers recycle. Estleman creates atmosphere without dwelling on needless lessons in Detroit's architecture or political history. The solution to the mystery is clever and not easily guessed (at least not by me). Unlike many modern crime novelists, Estleman finds a plausible way to bring all the characters and clues together and leaves no loose ends dangling. When Old Midnight Comes Along is exactly what an old-school detective novel should be: entertaining, challenging, and satisfying.

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Night of Camp David by Fletcher Knebel

First published in 1965; published by Vintage on November 20, 2018

Night of Camp David is a prescient novel; its foreshadowing of today’s political landscape is eerie. It is easy to understand why Vintage decided last year that it was time to rerelease this 1965 book to a new audience. Its author, Fletcher Knebel, was a journalist turned novelist who is best known for the political thriller Seven Days in May.

President Mark Hollenbach invites Senator Jim MacVeagh to Camp David in the middle of the night. The president wants to discuss his plan to wiretap every phone in the nation. Now this is 1965, back when the notion that the government would invade our privacy and use computers to store millions of telephone calls was still shocking. The novel also imagines that people are shocked to learn that the vice president steered a construction contract to his friends. What would the public in 1965 have thought about a president who profits when foreign officials book rooms in his hotels? Nothing shocks any more.

At any rate, Hollenbach sees his vice president as an enemy (the mild corruption scandal in any event means the veep has to go) and is considering MacVeagh as his candidate for vice president in his second term. Hollenbach doesn’t know that MacVeagh is having an affair with a woman named Rita. MacVeagh knows he should break it off (again, the novel was written in an era when having an affair might have been a liability for a politician) while Rita knows that MacVeagh is a lovable, good-natured, lazy bum who has no business being VP.

The novel recalls a simpler time when affairs by politicians were not often publicized because voters would have held them against the candidate. Today a president can brag about grabbing women by the pussy and be accused of multiple sexual assaults without losing the loyalty of his base. The times they have a-changed.

Hollenbach turns out to be creepily authoritarian. He wants to cut off White House access to a journalist who portrays him in an unfavorable light. Why does that sound familiar? He views himself as the victim of vast conspiracies, complaining of “an obvious conspiracy afoot to sully and demean me, even to destroy me.” He doesn’t use the phrase “witch hunt,” but the president’s paranoia is otherwise familiar to current consumers of the news. The Secretary of Defense, justly worried about the man who has his finger on the button, notes that Hollenbach “thinks he’s the victim of conspiracies who are plotting to destroy him, and he has obvious delusions of grandeur.” Yet Hollenbach is, for the most part, a competent president, unlike the “very stable genius” who currently occupies the office.

Hollenbach wants the United States to add Canada and the Scandinavian countries to its territory (presumably adding to the nation’s whiteness). He doesn’t mention buying Greenland, but again the similarity between fiction and fact is uncanny.

Relatively early in the novel, MacVeagh begins to fear that the president is insane. The president’s supporters, on the other hand, make it seem that MacVeagh is the crazy one. Perhaps they have alternative facts at hand. In any event, treating bearers of unwelcome news as the enemy is another way in which the novel foreshadows the current political landscape.

Leaders of the president’s party (he happens to be a Democrat) are reluctant to interfere with the presidency, but to their credit, they eventually realize that something needs to be done. Knebel probably would never have imagined a political party acting as a cheerleader for a corrupt, morally bankrupt president who suffers from paranoia and delusions of grandeur. He did, however, understand that “millions of ordinary people like to imagine there’s a conspiracy behind everything.” That problem, exacerbated by the ability of conspiracy theories to go viral on the internet, has only grown worse.

Hollenbach at least is capable of recognizing when he goes over the top and apologizing for his paranoid attacks on loyal citizens. He apparently hasn’t learned that never admitting error and doubling down on obnoxious behavior is the best way to excite a bloodthirsty base.

If not for its remarkable parallel of a president who came to power more than 50 years after the novel was published, Night of Camp David would be too dated to recommend. Women are treated as silly creatures whose job is to serve men. As a political thriller, the novel is tame by modern standards. The crisis resolves too easily and the resolution isn’t particularly believable. But given Knebel’s ability to imagine a future that has come to pass, the novel is of more than historical interest.

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Destroying Angel by Richard Paul Russo

First published in 1992; published by Dover Publications on April 17, 2019

Destroying Angel is a better-than-average example of science fiction noir. The story is set in the near future. Society has taken a dystopian turn that provides the background for a crime story involving a gruesome serial killer. The novel tells a self-contained story, but it is also the first book in a trilogy.

Louis Tanner is a former cop. He became a cop to help people with drug problems because his girlfriend, Carla, died from an overdose, a death that still obsesses him. Tanner quit his job after he and his partner were shot. His partner died, leaving Tanner with the brooding sense of guilt that is common among ex-cops who star in crime thrillers.

As Tanner watches the bodies of a man and woman, chained together, being pulled from the water, he remembers when he pulled two chained bodies out of the water. There have been more than three dozen victims of the Chain Killer, but none in the last two-and-a-half years. The chains are fused to the bones of the victims and angel wings are tattooed inside their nostrils.

Tanner engages with Homicide Detective Frank Carlucci, who is supervising the extraction of the bodies. Notwithstanding his retirement, Tanner wants to know whether and why the chain killer has returned. Tanner and Carlucci work together to track down the killer.

Tanner lives in San Francisco, outside of the walled-off Financial District that houses the city’s wealthiest inhabitants. Chinatown has absorbed the former Italian enclave of North Beach. The Tenderloin is still dicey. Street soldiers keep order in the rest of the city, except for an area called the Core that is at least partially underground.

The street soldiers can’t stop a girl named Sookie from stealing motorized skateboards. But while Sookie is trying to hide in the underground tunnels, she comes across a room with chains that are very like the chains she has seen on the murder victims.

The science fiction elements give the novel an offbeat spin without overpowering what is essentially a detective story involving a serial killer story. For example, Tanner is asked to arrange a trip to the New Hong Kong satellite for a criminal who wants to regenerate his damaged body. There’s also a cyborg angle to the story that readers won’t encounter in a typical crime novel.

While Tanner is a typically tortured noir character, he is a sympathetic protagonist who has enough depth to carry the novel. Carlucci and Sookie are developed in less detail, but they probably have all the characterization they need. The Chain Killer is suitably creepy and his motivation to be evil is credible, at least in the context of a science fiction novel.

The story is gritty. It moves at a steady pace, not so fast that the dark atmosphere is lost but not so slowly that tension dissipates. The ending is true to the novel’s noir nature. Crossovers of the science fiction and crime genres don’t always work, but this one works better than most.

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Happy Thanksgiving!

Return to the Enchanted Island by Johary Ravaloson

Published in France in 2012; published in translation by Amazon Crossing on November 5, 2019

“Love, more often than anything else, ends. The thing that makes it seem to us to transcend all else is that when it dies, those who had it in their lives become like dead men.” Those accurately depressing words are spoken out of the blue, and to his wife’s dismay, by Ietsy Razak, the main character in Return to the Enchanted Island. The title sounds like the reboot of a bad television show, but Enchanted Island is the name given to Madagascar in a 2005 documentary.

Ietsy Razak lives in the family home (Anosisoa) on the Enchanted Island with Lea-Nour, his wife of fifteen years, and their children. Ietsy enjoys a life of ancestral privilege. His antics as a child caused his transfer from the local Jesuit school to a boarding school in France run by Benedictine monks. His aunt and uncle live in Paris, and from them he learned about his absent mother. For the most part, Iestsy chases girls and bombs out of school, becoming “an illegal immigrant through sheer indifference,” while explaining to his friends that “doing nothing, for him, was a philosophical project.”

The novel includes an origin myth, explaining that the original Ietsy fell to earth and, alone on the enchanted island, created statutes for company. Breath took pity and breathed life into the statutes but took the breath away from some of them to punish Ietsy for a sexual transgression. The living statutes became known as the Vazimbas, who are now considered the earliest inhabitants of the mountains of central Madagascar. The origin myth evolves into the story of The-Lord-Who-Never-Gets-Wet and his search for a sacred lake made from tears, leading to the Vazimba migration.

I enjoyed the origin myth and at least some of the story in France. After Ietsy returns to Madagascar, the story is uneventful. Ietsy spends most of his time taking note of how privileged he is in comparison to most of his fellow citizens, while reminiscing about or adding to his varied sexual conquests. He often states, perhaps with ironic intent, that he is “blessed by the Gods and Ancestors,” but he seems to regard the blessing as entitlement. We learn how Ietsy rediscovers and marries Lea-Nour but the relationship is dull.

Apart from the origin myth, Return to the Enchanted Island tells us surprisingly little about Madagascar. We learn that the “cultured Malagasy elite had readily given up their mother tongue,” particularly when they are in the presence of foreigners so as not to give offense. We learn that the elite work hard to perpetuate their elite status, but that’s true everywhere. We learn very little about the non-elite. We hear that Ietsy has returned to the “City of a Thousand Circumstances” and the “City of a Thousand Lovers” and the “City of a Thousand Rites” and several similarly glib descriptions, yet we learn little of the city itself.

So while the story provides insight into Madagascar’s oral traditions and the role of Vasimbas in modern life, it does little to paint a picture of contemporary Madagascar. Perhaps that’s because Johary Ravaloson lives in France, which is the novel’s primary focus. Ravaloson can write about anything he pleases, but the title implies that Ietsy’s return to his native land might change him in some way, or that he might change Madagascar. If he comes of age in Madagascar by finding his place in the world, as blurbs suggest, I didn’t notice.

Ietsy’s time in France, viewed as a portrait of a wasted life, is more interesting. Ietsy’s efforts to avoid ID checkpoints that are the bane of illegal immigrants give the story some dramatic meat. Competing perspectives on love, including a French lover’s contention that “love that was based on trust should not be confined within a couple, but should instead allow each individual to blossom and give the other person strength to explore the world and life,” add a splash of pop philosophy to the narrative. The portions of the novel that address Ietsy’s return to Madagascar, however, are too problematic to make the book a success.

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