Mysteries
A pickpocketing private eye, a doomed friendship and a dance to the death.
One of the pleasures of a good mystery is the chance to be transported to a different place; the city itself can be a character as fascinating as any detective or villain. Five new whodunits, each set in a major American city, illustrate the ways that a sleuth's character is reflected by his or her hometown.
The Big Apple Is Rotten
Sara Gran's grimy take on the Big Apple, Dope (Putnam, $21.95), introduces the memorable Joe Flannigan, former junkie turned full-time pickpocket and part-time private eye; the opening page finds Gran's anti-heroine fencing a ring freshly pinched from Tiffany. The fact that "Joe" is short for Josephine is almost incidental in this pitch-black mystery set in 1950s Manhattan. In taking on the underground world of drug addiction in postwar New York, others might have settled for a be-bop tour through jazz clubs and beatnik hangouts, but Gran's harshly lit world is both bleaker and more authentic, a Weegee photograph in words.
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A wealthy Westchester couple gives Joe $1,000 in cash to look for their missing daughter, who scrammed out of Barnard College for life on the streets. For a low-rent gumshoe like Joe, such a gig seems too good to be true -- and, of course, it is. Joe's trek takes her through flophouses and dopehouses, from tenement rooms in Hell's Kitchen to a seedy "queer joint" in lower Manhattan, in a tour that's less Philip Marlowe than it is the Bowery netherworld of Joseph Mitchell's Up in the Old Hotel .
Gran writes tight, with the muscular, vinegary style of a really good pulp novelist, and if the reader gets ahead of her on a few plot points, it does nothing to lessen her tour of dope-sick 1950s New York. Unsentimental to its clammy core, Dope 's not for everyone, but there's not a spare word in this nasty little lulu.
Love That City
Perhaps more than any other American metropolis, Chicago is still a city of neighborhoods, and Terror Town (Forge, $23.95), the ninth book in Stuart Kaminsky's Abe Lieberman series, is also the nickname for a violence-choked area of the South Side. Lieberman is as unlikely a gumshoe as ever -- sixtyish, raising two grandkids, with a cholesterol count off the charts and an outlook that alternates between philosophical and resigned. "His wife, Bess, thought he looked like Harry James," writes Kaminsky. "His grandchildren thought he looked like the dog in some cartoon they watched."
This time out, Lieberman and his partner are on the trail of a self-styled messiah running an Internet betting scheme, a pair of thugs who shot a young black woman to death on a busy public street in midday, and a crazy man who is, well, just crazy. But beneath the mystery is a valentine to Chicago and its characters: a washed-up Cubs southpaw, a Pakistani dollar-store owner and the old Jews who spend their days in Abe's brother's deli, kibitzing over bagels and herring. It's a sentimental city of broad shoulders and blue collars, where gastronomic nirvana is a street hot dog with mustard, celery salt and tomatoes. Kaminsky makes both his beloved Chicago and his hangdog hero wistfully appealing.
Murder and Ethnicity
Cleveland -- another city of gritty neighborhoods -- takes center stage in Michael Koryta's Sorrow's Anthem (Thomas Dunne/Minotaur, $22.95), the sophomore outing for Lincoln Perry, a young ex-cop turned P.I. When a childhood friend falls afoul of the cops and ends up dead, Perry takes the case, despite pressure from the cops, an ambitious district attorney and the dead man's family. Soon Perry is piecing together a puzzle that involves arson, urban redevelopment and some old family secrets.
Perry is an appealing fellow, and Koryta is a straightforward storyteller, but the real pleasure here is touring the back streets of C-Town -- particularly Perry's boyhood neighborhood, slowly being populated by Hispanics but still home to a diehard, dying "bunch of Poles and Czechs who worked hard and drank harder." Nominated for an Edgar Award for best first novel at the age of 21, Koryta is now 22, but Sorrow's Anthe m is no sophomore slump.
Death on Point
The ballet world, with its primo egos, is prime territory for the right kind of mystery writer. Gore Vidal's first attempt at a whodunit, the 1950 piffle Death in the Fifth Position , dealt with the murder of a prima ballerina on the cusp of a New York performance. So does Death Dance (Scribner, $26), Linda Fairstein's latest outing for sex-crimes prosecutor Alexandra Cooper. The murder is based loosely on a real case from 1980, when a violinist vanished during a Lincoln Center performance and was later found to have been thrown from the roof.
As always, Fairstein studs her work with details both forensic and arcane (who knew that ballet dancers sew their shoes with dental floss instead of thread for strength?), making it a fun read for the "Law & Order" generation; you can almost hear the show's signature ba-DUMs at the end of each chapter.
Fairstein's medical and courtroom scenes feel authentic, even if Alex -- a gorgeous blonde with a trust fund -- doesn't. It's hard to reconcile a prosecutor's lifestyle with Alex's swell Manhattan apartment, her cozy retreat on Martha's Vineyard, her chic wardrobe, her bevy of supportive girlfriends and her wisecracking, handsome-but-wounded partner, Mike. (Even devoted fans will wish for more grit and less girly stuff after a letter bomb goes off in Alex's face and she makes an emergency appointment with her colorist and stylist.) By the end, Death Dance isn't so much "Law & Order" as it is "Sex and the City" without the sex -- or the language. These are perhaps the cleanest-talking cops and prosecutors in modern mystery fiction.
B-Level Crimes
Hollywood in the 1940s is the backdrop for Out There in the Dark (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's, $24.95), screenwriter Wesley Strick's first novel. It's about the movie colony during the complicated era of World War II, when the big stars were off to war and the B-list stayed behind, making wartime propaganda flicks in Culver City.
Derek Sykes is getting his big break, directing a major motion picture called "The Big Betrayal"; B-movie actor Harley Hayden, picked to star, is in the same position. But Sykes has a secret -- he's a German emigré, born Dieter Seife -- and when he and Hayden clash on the set, a P.I. and a shady psychoanalyst enter the picture, as do spying, blackmail and a mysterious package.
Strick has the details down -- the cars, the nightclubs, the period songs, the L.A. geography -- but Dark never achieves the film noir tone for which it strains. The murky plot doesn't get going until midway through the book, and much of the ersatz-snappy dialogue rings as clunky as a zinc penny. "Acting under these conditions feels like an earthquake under my feet while I'm trying to do a Roseland foxtrot," gripes Hayden, in one of the novel's many D.O.A. bits of dialogue. Philip Marlowe would wince, and Los Angeles itself deserves better. ·
Kevin Allman is the Edgar Award-nominated author of "Hot Spot" and "Tight Shot."