If you’re going to write about seedy underbellies and strange subcultures, then follow the road map created by Scott Phillips: Make it funny, make it ribald, make it memorable. That’s what Phillips has been doing ever since his lauded 2000 debut, “The Ice Harvest.”
THE DEVIL RAISES HIS OWN (Soho Crime, 368 pp., $27.95) is his latest novel to feature the photographer Bill Ogden, who was first seen in “Cottonwood,” set on the Kansas frontier in 1872.
Now, more than four decades removed from his “Cottonwood” shenanigans, he’s living in Los Angeles, still able to work (and score), albeit more slowly. His granddaughter, Flavia, fresh off killing her husband back in Kansas (“I recently collapsed Albert’s cranial vault,” she says), has taken on partner/successor duties at his photography studio. Both are pulled into the orbit of the “blue movie” industry — milder in 1916, to be sure, but still prone to violence — where they encounter a vivid, pungent cast of scoundrels and flimflam artists, from a film star named Magnolia Sweetspire to a mousy postal inspector named Melvin de Kamp.
Phillips always adopts a wonderfully deadpan air, but beneath his black humor is a steely emotional core. “The Devil Raises His Own” is a romp, but it’s also a poignant exploration of chosen families, broken homes and desperate dreams.
Hollywood muck also figures prominently in Morgan Richter’s THE DIVIDE (Knopf, 292 pp., $28), a wild ride of a novel that never quite proceeds in the expected direction. Jenny St. John has been haunting the fringes of the film industry ever since her supposed big break — the lead role in an indie film called “The Divide” — evaporated. There’s only so much money she can make grifting people as a psychic life coach.
Then Serge Grumet, who directed the film she hoped to star in, turns up dead, and his ex-wife, Genevieve, goes missing. Problem is, the cops think Jenny is Gena because they look remarkably similar. Shown a picture of Gena, Jenny “felt a shock of recognition you get coming across a photo of yourself you didn’t know existed.” As she is pulled into the world of her doppelgänger, one populated with other strivers and schemers and — it would seem — a killer, Jenny understands their resemblance has a biological connection, if only she can figure out what it is.
Richter, an industry veteran and pop culture critic, writes with the energy of a freshly charged battery, full of bright sparks, quick wit and vivid color. Even if I didn’t buy every plot twist, I found Jenny devilishly fun company.
The opening line of Snowden Wright’s THE QUEEN CITY DETECTIVE AGENCY (Morrow, 270 pp., $30) sets the tone immediately: “On New Year’s Day of 1985, Turnip Coogan, facing 20 to life for capital murder, decided he’d have to be dumb as a post not to break out of jail, and his mama didn’t raise no post.” Turnip, a low-level Dixie Mafia guy, turns up dead in due course, shortly before the town of Meridian, Miss. — known as Queen City — is overrun with those who make crime their business, and those who want to.
After Coogan tumbles off a roof, his mother hires Clementine Baldwin, the proprietor of the Queen City Detective Agency, to find his killer. Clementine is capable and confident, her skin thickened by too many instances of casual racism, but as the case moves in unexpected and upsetting directions, she discovers the cost of unearthing Queen City’s skeletons from their hiding places.
Wright writes sentences that beg to be quoted. He clearly has studied the pacing and syntax of hard-boiled fiction. And yet, enjoyable as this book was, I wanted it to be more in tune with itself rather than the rhythms of an entire genre.
Finally, Jamie Harrison’s mysteries featuring Jules Clement, published between 1995 and 2000, were recommended to me in my bookseller days over 20 years ago, but it took their reissue — and the publication of a fifth, THE RIVER VIEW (Counterpoint, 334 pp., $28) — to read them all in a frenzied gulp.
Over the course of the series, Jules transforms from an East Coast doctoral student and archaeologist into the sheriff of Blue Deer, Mont. — the post once held by his father, who was murdered when Jules was a teenager. “Maybe Jules chose archaeology because it was the perfect profession for facing the enormity and the inevitability of death,” Harrison writes, “but in the matter of his father’s death, he wanted nothing of the past.”
As the new book opens in 1997, Jules, married and with a young child, has resigned from the sheriff’s office and is working as a P.I. He’s also dabbling in archaeology, plumbing the mysteries of old bones — even his father’s — as he tries to make peace with Blue Deer and forge a new path. I can’t help wondering what he’s doing in 2024, and I hope Harrison catches readers up to the present soon.
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