New books by Thomas Perry, Charles McCarry, and Allan Guthrie
Three major crime/espionage authors have new books out for the summer. I got them all at the Mysterious Bookshop last week.
Jack Till is looking for someone in Vegas:
He put his suitcase in his room and then went to work. The telephone company had told him Ann Delatorre's number was unlisted, so he would have to find it some other way. He called the offices of unions and the personnel offices of all the large companies he found in the phone book. When he found nothing, he went back to the telephone book and looked at the ads for local private detectives.
He found plenty of agencies that looked honest and reliable: "All our investigators are former police officers, fully licensed and bonded, " or "Offices in New York, Dallas, and Chicago." He didn't want anybody like that, so he kept searching the pages. He found one that had a suite on the second floor of a building with an address that sounded like a strip mall. The small, cheap ad said: FRAUD DETECTION, MARITAL, DEBT COLLECTION.
He took a cab to that address…A woman in her forties with bright red hair came through the door. She placed her hands on the counter, and Till could see a set of long blue fingernails painted with flowers. "How can I help you?" she said without enthusiasm.
Till took out his identification. "My name is Jack Till. I'm a private investigator from Los Angeles. I'm searching for a former client of mine. I'd like to find out if she's living in Nevada."
She shrugged. "We're skip-tracers. We can do that."
"Her name is Ann Delatorre."
"You haven't said you represent a company she owes money, or that you're trying to deliver money they owe her, or anything. There are laws."
"Oh. Did I forget to mention that? She hired me and didn't pay. What do you charge?"
"Depends. Just to see if we've got her under our noses is forty bucks. That includes a search of the biggest databases."
He took out two twenty bills, wrote down the name...She went away for no more than ten minutes, and returned with a skip-trace sheet she had printed out.
There is no one that makes the time go by faster than Thomas Perry. He is the ideal writer for a plane or train; in fact, if you haven't finished the book by the time you get to your destination, you might wish that there was a little further to go until you are done reading.
The best Perry books explore the dance between hunter and the hunted without much involvement from the official police. The age of cell phones, internet access, and Homeland Security has made it much harder to make these scenarios believable, and his previous novel, Nightlife, while still exciting, was really just a serial killer novel (of which there are too many on the shelves already). In Silence he is back on firm ground, with an ex-cop-turned-private-eye needing to protect a hunted woman.
I adore Perry's heroes, who are always terse professionals. They can be either good or bad: in the Butcher's Boy and Sleeping Dogs, the hero is a hit man, and in Pursuit, the hero is hunting a hit man. (These are my three favorite Perry novels.) Jack Till again:
He gave himself a last examination in the mirror...He supposed that he looked like what he was: a man in his forties who had spent his entire adult life carrying a gun for a living.
Christopher's Ghosts is the 9th book about master spy Paul Christopher and his family. In 1939 Berlin, Lori Christopher is being stalked by Reinhard Heydrich and her son Paul has fallen in love with a Jewish girl. She turns to the American consulate and old family friend O.G. for help. For a moment, O.G. is considers a course of subversive action.
Heydrich did have superiors, even if there were only two of them, Himmler and Hitler, and they would not be pleased by the unfortunate publicity…
…O.G's sinuous mind played for a moment with that scenario. Was it actually possible to destroy or at least diminish this fat-assed monster at the cost of sacrificing his best friend's wife and the boy who was his godson? Could such an exchange be defined, if not defended as a moral action? O. G. liked moral conundrums; at Yale, ethics had been his favorite course. It instilled in him the habit of thinking like a spymaster long before he became, a few years hence, the most powerful one in the world.
O.G does not act on his imagined scenario, but I quote it because it illustrates the kind of "grey area" that Charles McCarry explores so well. Indeed, McCarry is considered by many to be the greatest living American espionage writer.
It is a genre that the British invented and perfected. One of the strengths of, say, Ashenden by Somerset Maugham, The Human Factor by Graham Greene, The Coffin of Dimitrios by Eric Ambler, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John LeCarre, Funeral in Berlin by Len Deighton, or Other Paths to Glory by Anthony Price is the absence of cheering at the end of each book. Instead, there are just unanswerable questions about the ethics of betrayal.
McCarry is more in this English tradition than any other American espionage author with the possible exception of Ross Thomas (although Thomas is best when staying entirely domestic to parse the labyrinths of labor unions and Washington politics). The rest of the American writers are usually firmly in the "go team!" tradition of James Bond, a tradition that instigated the much less interesting genre of one-dimensional techno-thrillers by authors like Tom Clancy.
McCarry can be incredibly snobbish (this is true of LeCarre as well). This can be wearing, but some of the snobbish details give real delight.
O. G. prided himself on his cocktails. English gin and French Vermouth stood on a side table in his office...O.G. poured four parts Beefeater's and one part Noilly Prat into a glass pitcher, added ice, and stirred the mixture gently with a long glass rod. He strained the cocktails into chilled glasses. Then, turning his back to his guests, he removed a small medicine bottle from his waistcoat pocket, and with an eyedropper placed one drop of absinthe in each glass. This was the secret ingredient he never disclosed, not even to Hubbard.
McCarry's hero, Paul Christopher, is born of a bloodline that is rich, artistic, smart, and austere. (No working-class gunmen from a Thomas Perry novel are in sight here!) The first eight Christopher books told his story from the sixties onward, and now Christopher's Ghosts goes back to his adolescent beginnings as a spy.
To Rima Paul said, "Your father taught you how to do what you did tonight?
"In a manner of speaking, yes," Rima replied.
Paul waited for her to go on. Even at sixteen he believed, as he believed for the rest of his life, that nothing useful could be learned by asking questions.
McCarry's prose is always wonderful. I have my concerns about his snobbery and worse, his politics (a right-wing demagogue is a hero in The Better Angels) but there is no doubt that if you like espionage, reading all of McCarry is recommended. The first four books have been recently reissued, which is excellent, since before that you had to pay a fortune to get even a beat-up mass-market copy of them.
Charles McCarry Wikipedia.
Just as the first really successful and authentic American espionage novel was Charles McCarry's The Miernik Dossier from 1973, the first really successful and authentic English hard-boiled crime novel was Ted Lewis's Jack's Return Home from 1970. (This was made into the classic film Get Carter. Also strongly recommended is Jack Carter's Law, which is probably Lewis' most exciting book.) Much more recently the Scottish have been writing some tough books, too. (See: Tartan Noir.) I can't imagine a tougher book than Allan Guthrie's latest.
Pearce is looking for revenge:
He crossed the street. Strolled up to the door. Rang the bell.
He was calm. Slight speeding up of his heartbeat, but that was only to be expected. And, yes, a light sweat. But what the fuck, this was more dangerous than a fucking job interview, and people sweated at those.
Wallace answered the door, a piece of paper in his hand, probably a bill, judging by the torn brown envelope on the floor by his feet.
Pearce judged the situation instantly, grabbed the frame of the door and shoved.
Cracked against Wallace's forehead. Knocked his glasses at an angle. Almost comical, but nobody was laughing.
Peace pushed the door again.
Wallace managed to scamper out of the way before he was hit a second time. Just as well. Had to be a good joke to be funny twice.
Pearce stepped inside, switching the knife into his right hand...Wallace stood at the far end of the hall, a flight of stairs to his right, a door to his left. A tiny cut had opened on his forehead above his right eye and a thin trickle of blood ran towards his eyebrow. "Haven't a fucking clue who you are," he said, straightening his glasses. "But I'm going to cut your balls off and make you eat them."
If Perry is blue-collar and McCarry is hoity-toity, Guthrie is the voice of the poor. The family that starts all the trouble in Hard Man would be called trailer-trash in the States. Guthrie's Kiss Her Goodbye has a similar milieu.
Both of these books are excellent, although the torturous central scene of Hard Man was a bit much for my delicate sensibilities: I had to "skim lightly" for several pages, fearing nausea. However, Hard Man is also very funny, sporting several one-liners that had me howling.
May said, "We need to get him [a dog that had been hit by a car] to the vet's." She gave Wallace her best stare. If he argued, she'd bloody well do him. He had a gun, but she didn't give shit. He only had one good arm. She had some nasty thoughts swirling around in her head right now. And she had Flash's present in her handbag. Good old Dirk. Wallace could do his worst but she wasn't going to let Cutey-pie lie on the road and bleed to death.
She told Wallace how she felt.
"All fucking right," he said. "Just calm down."
"She told Wallace how she felt." Is that not perfect?
Guthrie has only three novels published so far, and apparently his first, Two-Way Split, also features Pearce. Like with Perry and McCarry, I now plan on reading all of his books.
