The Searcher by Christopher Morgan Jones

Published by Penguin Press on March 22, 2016

Despite his name, Ike Hammer isn’t a classic tough guy who solves problems with his fists. Not that he wouldn’t like to, but the goons he encounters have guns and he knows better than to bring a fist to a gunfight. I like that element of realism in The Searcher.

Ike Hammer isn’t as famous as Mike Hammer but he’s in the same business. He is a private investigator who runs a respectable agency. His former partner, Ben Webster, is a crusader who wants results and doesn’t mind paying some bad guys to do bad things if they can help him achieve those results. The clash of business philosophies explains why Webster is a former partner.

The police suspect that Hammer did something in the course of business that should send him to prison. Hammer suspects that Webster did the thing for which Hammer is being blamed. Webster is missing, having traveled to the country of Georgia to attend a journalist’s funeral ... or at least that’s what he told his wife. Now Hammer needs to find him. When Hammer flies to Tbilisi to find Webster, Hammer is beaten by a mob and arrested for the crime of being an American. And so the story begins.

Hammer is in a tough position. He can rat out Webster or he can go to prison, unless a third option presents itself in Georgia. And so he goes on a quest that takes him into the mountains and across the Russian border. He meets some very good people, living simple and honorable lives in the mountains, and he meets some very bad people. He also forms a love interest because thriller heroes always have time to go to bed with beautiful women.

Hammer apparently didn’t go to thriller hero school, where unarmed thriller heroes learn how to disarm three or four heavily armed soldiers without breaking a sweat. Hammer is in good shape and not easily intimidated, but he knows he’s no match for someone who is holding a gun. Instead, Hammer spends most of the novel trying to bribe people, with a surprising lack of success. I appreciated the fact that Hammer spends most of the novel feeling helpless, even as he battles steep odds in his effort to save Webster.

Christopher Morgan Jones’ writing style sets The Searcher apart from thrillers that create the illusion of speed by using short paragraphs and short chapters. The pace is steady but the novel doesn’t race to a conclusion while neglecting character development or atmosphere. There are enough action scenes to generate excitement without bogging the story down in mindless fights and shootouts. Jones didn’t make me invest in any of the characters and the plot holds few surprises, but that didn’t prevent me from enjoying the story. For its realism and strong writing, I give The Searcher an unqualified recommendation.

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The Second Life of Nick Mason by Steve Hamilton

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on May 17, 2016

Nick Mason has been released from prison twenty years early but he isn’t free. For ten grand a month and a swank Lincoln Park residence in which to live, he is required to be on call. For what, he’s not sure, until he receives his first assignment. As you might expect, he wasn’t freed from prison so he could sell Girl Scout cookies.

Mason just wants to watch his daughter play soccer, which he must do at a distance because his ex-wife won’t let him back into their lives. That humanizes Mason a bit, which is good since he isn’t the world’s nicest guy. Readers who are so inclined can nevertheless cheer for him because his victims are bad guys.

It turns out that there are dirty cops in Chicago (who knew?) but one honest one, Detective Sandoval, wants to get at the guy who owns Mason, a prisoner named Cole. The dirty cops are protecting Cole but Sandoval is willing to use Mason and everyone else to bring down Cole. Mason, of course, is caught in the middle.

The dirty cops are the most interesting (and realistic) aspect of the story. Dirty cops always start out as cops who bend the rules in the belief that their actions are justified because they are putting away criminals. Once the police start to believe that they are above the law, it is a short road from arresting criminals to becoming a criminal. The novel illustrates that point convincingly.

Readers who enjoy stories about anti-heroes will find much to like in The Secret Life of Nick Mason. The story moves quickly, the plot doesn’t overreach, action scenes are credible, and the characters have believable personalities. I’m not sure the ending is as satisfying as I might have liked, but that’s because this is the first of a series and resolving the main storyline would have killed the series. Nevertheless, the moral quandaries Mason is facing make him more interesting than most thriller tough guys. He isn't deep but he isn't a typical tough guy idiot.

The Second Life of Nick Mason is a promising start to a series. I look forward to the next installment.

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Charcoal Joe by Walter Mosley

Published by Doubleday on June 14, 2016

Set in 1968, Charcoal Joe is the latest chapter in the story of Easy Rawlins. Continuing a theme that began in Rose Gold, Easy’s life seems like it’s getting better. He’s started a private detective agency with Tinsford “Whisper” Natly and Saul Lynx. Things are going well with his daughter Feather. He’s planning to make his life complete by marrying the woman he loves. But Easy’s life is never easy. The question that series fans will soon ask is whether Easy will again be enveloped by the darkness that defined his life in Blonde Faith and Little Green.

Aside from the personal drama that afflicts Easy’s life, the plot of Charcoal Joe involves a job that Easy is hired to do for a friend of his deadly friend Mouse. The friend, Charcoal Joe, wants Easy to investigate the murder of two men. A young physicist named Seymour Brathwaite has been convicted of the crime. Charcoal Joe wants Easy to prove Seymour’s innocence.

During the murder investigation, Easy learns that are large sum of money has gone missing, as have some diamonds. Several unsavory characters, ranging from gangsters to a police detective, would like to find the money.

Charcoal Joe returns a number of familiar series characters, including Fearless Jones, Mouse, and Jackson Blue. Easy has assembled a makeshift family, many of whom are of dubious character, but they all take care of each other, which makes them easy to like, if not admire. Feather serves as his anchor, but keeping a lover in his life is problematic. Easy learns something new about life from every encounter with another character, and so does the reader.

Easy’s observations of life are sharpened by the dangers and petty insults that black men must endure to survive in 1960s Los Angeles. His is a world of “dark skin, darker lives, and a slim chance of survival.” Yet it’s a changing world and Easy is hopeful that the future will be better, for the sake of Feather and other members of the next generation if not himself. Then as today, the changes are arriving at a snail’s pace, leaving Easy at once impatient and grateful.

If only for the brightness of his prose and the clarity of the images he evokes, Walter Mosley is always a joy to read. The plot of Charcoal Joe is intricate but never padded or confusing. But it is the depth of Mosley’s exploration of his characters that puts him in the top ranks of crime writers. Danger forces Mosley “to appreciate life; to understand its frailty, transience, and its incalculable value,” but the burden of history forces Mosley to understand himself, or at least to try.

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An Honorable Man by Paul Vidich

Published by Atria/Emily Bestler Books on April 12, 2016

An Honorable Man is set in 1953, against a backdrop of the Cold War and the McCarthy hearings. One of the characters is loosely based on James Speyer Kronthal, a CIA agent who was blackmailed by the NKVD. He submitted to the blackmail, and thus became a traitor, rather than risking the exposure of his homosexuality. Kronthal committed suicide before he had to answer McCarthy’s questions, which would have focused on his sexual history rather than his (still unknown) betrayal of the CIA.

In the novel, George Mueller works for the CIA. He is disgruntled and everyone knows it, so he is perfect bait. The agency dangles him before Vasilenko, a Russian agent who wants to recruit him. Mueller, of course, is playing the same game, hoping to get information from Vasilenko about a Soviet mole in the CIA known as Protocol.

When a Russian embassy driver runs him off the road as he’s bicycling, Mueller doesn’t know if he was the victim of an accident or an attempted homicide. However, the accident gives him a chance to meet Beth, who picks him up and tends his wounds. Beth is Roger Altman’s sister. Their father, a former IMF secretary, is caught up in the communist witch-hunt. Roger Altman recruited Mueller to the CIA. Small world, isn’t it?

That set-up introduces a plot that is a staple of spy fiction. The reader (like the main character) is challenged to find the mole. But that really isn’t a challenge since the book must conform, at least in a general sense, to history. The story therefore moves toward a destination that the reader can easily foresee.

The characters lack complexity, which makes me chuckle as I take note of the blurbs that compare Paul Vidich to John Le Carré. Still, a novel shouldn’t be judged by how well it lives up to its blurbs, nor should a fledgling novelist be compared to a master. Taken on its own merit, An Honorable Man manages to generate a reasonable amount of dramatic tension.

The novel is relatively short, sacrificing an intricacy of plot for bare-bones storytelling. Paul Vidich’s depiction of the Cold War atmosphere is a key to the novel’s success. Vidich’s prose is above-average and is peppered with literary references. Given the limits imposed by the novel’s length, Vidich also does a better than average job of exploring the implications of espionage, the tendency to treat it as a game without considering the morality of using human game pieces that die (or worse) when they are sacrificed or captured. There is a reasonable amount of meat in this slender novel. It works better as a novel of psychological suspense than as a spy novel, but however a reader might classify it, the novel contributes something to the espionage genre, if only as a window that allows the reader to glimpse a true story.

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The Chinese Bandit by Stephen Becker

First published in 1975; published by Open Road Media on January 12, 2016

The Chinese Bandit is a classic adventure story. The title is misleading because many of the characters are bandits at heart. Traders and military officers are as likely to engage in a form of banditry as actual bandits -- which makes the bandits, in an odd way, more honest than the traders and officers. The title ironically refers to Jake Dodds, who isn’t Chinese and is no more of a bandit than most of the other characters.

The Chinese Bandit begins in the summer of 1947. As a Marine with twelve years of service, including a Purple Heart that he earned in Japan, Dodds has a mixed military record. Alcohol, brawling, and petty theft impaired his opportunity for career advancement, not that he particularly wanted to rise in the ranks. But now he’s in China, the war is over, and he’s made some money by arranging for Chinese buyers to steal supplies from a military truck. His colonel wants him to reenlist but that option becomes less attractive after Jake punches a general. Thus does Jake begin a new career, most of which is devoted to the avoidance of death.

With a little help from his Chinese friends, Jake leaves Peking. He hopes to make it to Turkestan, “where peaches, plums and melons grew, and men had four wives, and a foreigner could grow rich in gold and silver and mountain furs.” For the first leg of the journey, however, he must work as a camel-puller on a dangerous trek to Mongolia. Through unhappy circumstances, he later finds himself traveling with a roving group of bandits, conquering each day as it comes.

The literary themes of conflict -- man against man, against nature, and against himself -- weave together as Jake struggles with bandits, with the barren lands, and with his conscience. Low-key humor is infused in the story, partially in the form of Dodds’ irreverence, partially due to Stephen Becker’s dry wit. I particularly enjoyed the English translations of the characters’ creative Chinese cursing (favorites include “Dogs defile your great-grandmothers, all four of the chicken-defiling bags of dung” and “Bugger your mother and your father and all ancestors to the original generation of maggots”).

Yet there are also some poignant moments, revealing human behavior in the stark way that is common to westerns. Another section of the novel celebrates the joy of life, joy that can be found (or might best be found) in the most unexpected places. Friends can also be found in strange places and under odd circumstances, particularly if one is able to forgive old enemies. In fact, the story is one of personal transformation for Jake, as he discovers who he is and who he can become. But the will to change is one thing; the ability to overcome destiny is quite another.

In short, The Chinese Bandit is a rousing adventure story with depth, humor, and strong characters who engage in moral struggles. Becker is one of the underappreciated authors of the second half of the twentieth century. Works like The Chinese Bandit and A Covenant with Death allow Becker’s humility, honesty, and humanity to shine from his grave.

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