COLETTE'S LIST

Brief Reviews Writ Loud
by Colette Bancroft

Small Towns, Mean Streets

LOOK OUT FOR SMALL TOWNS. The hard-boiled mystery may have started out as an urban genre, set in gritty, teeming cities like Los Angeles. But some contemporary writers in the form explore the mean Main Streets far from the first, second or even third coasts, and they find plenty of crime, corruption and major-league evil out in the boonies.

James Crumley

James Crumley sets his novels way past city limits, mainly in Meriwether, Montana, though manic drug- and alcohol-fueled road trips take his characters from Seattle to El Paso. Crumley's knowledge and pie-eyed love of the Mountain West in all its unforgiving splendor are among the most winning elements in his novels.

But his best hook is character -- in his case, two series characters, Milo Milodragovitch and C.W. Sughrue. They're partners in a private investigation firm, at least part of the time, but Crumley features one or the other as the main character in each of his novels, except for Bordersnakes, his most recent, which involves them both, narrating alternate chapters.

If you're not already a Crumley fan, don't start with Bordersnakes. Though it can stand on its own, it builds on the histories of both characters, so it makes sense to get acquainted with them in the four earlier novels.

Milo Milodragovitch is a Meriwether native, the scion of one of its "old" families, which means his great-granddad stole enough land from the local Indians to create a fortune. Milo will inherit a cool $3-million -- just as soon as he celebrates his 53rd birthday, a hitch engineered by his "insane mother," who fretted that he would squander his money on booze and broads just because that's what Milo's father did, up until he shot himself when Milo was 12.

So Milo makes his way toward the fateful birthday, squandering a much smaller amount of money on women (he racks up five wives, four divorces, one wife dead, countless affairs) and booze, as well as a wide variety of controlled substances, up until the day he quits them all and becomes a "dry bartender" at his saloon, the Slumgullion, where Sughrue also slings beers, on both sides of the bar.

Milo stars in Dancing Bear, a dandy tale right from its beginning, a Native American fable about a hunter who outwits the bears by becoming one of them -- or does he?

Milo is augmenting his income during a dry stretch for his PI business as a rent-a-cop when he receives an elegant note on old-fashioned stationery requesting his services (how Sherlock Holmes). The note turns out to be from an old woman as beautiful and elegant as the missive, a very rich old woman who lives in Meriwether's finest old mansion, and an old woman -- ah, small towns! -- who was one of Milo's father's mistresses and of whom Milo has fond and erotic memories.

What she wants to hire him for seems little more than the satisfaction of an old woman's whim. From her windows she has been spying on a couple who meet each week at a nearby park. She wants Milo to find out who they are, why they meet. It seems simple and obvious -- up until the man's car is shattered by a bomb and Milo watches him die, then takes off with the dead man's ID, his considerable arsenal and a shitload of top-grade cocaine.

Nothing is what it seems, not the dead man, not the woman he was meeting, not even the old woman. And by the end of the story, even Milo is not what he began as. But he does have a grizzly bear's skin to show for it.

The Mexican Tree Duck stars Vietnam vet, private eye and part-time bartender C.W. Sughrue, who tells his twisted tale in the kind of voice you could listen to all night. Sughrue -- "Shoog as in sugar, rue as in rue the goddamn day" -- is uproariously funny, but that's just for starters. As an observer, he's as jagged and sharp as a broken tequila bottle, as cool as a Montana midnight.

And how can you not love a guy who executes a juke box after it's reprogrammed to replace Hank Snow with Michael Jackson? That musical crime lands Sughrue on the skids and in the middle of a case that requires him to repossess five thousand dollars' worth of tropical fish. If you think that sounds simple, you don't know Sughrue. But you should.

Sughrue was raised in Texas, a major factor in his prickly character. But the defining experience in his life was Vietnam, and that ludicrous and terrible war haunts every page of this novel. The quest for the fish soon turns into a search for the kidnapped wife of an oilman-politician, and Sughrue enlists his old First Cav buddies to help -- Denver cop Frank Vega, a cool, dying giant, and mad postman Jimmy Gorman. Also in on the journey, although his exact role is always in question, is Sughrue's old friend, sometime employer and attorney Solomon Rainbolt, who left part of his leg in Vietnam -- but whose life Sughrue saved.

Crumley indulges his fondness for firefights here, so if big ole weapons are your thing, you'll revel in the second half of this novel. Even if the ordnance leaves you cold, the characters will pull you along -- the agelessly beautiful and mysterious kidnap victim Sarita Cisneros Pines, the Texas Zenmaster Barnstone (not to mention his orgasmic duck) and Sughrue's true love, Wynona, a redneck madonna in the old-fashioned sense of that name, and her charming Baby Lester -- not to mention Sughrue himself.

After you've made the boys' acquaintance (Milo also narrates The Wrong Case, Sughrue The Last Good Kiss), then turn to Bordersnakes for a double jolt.

K.C. Constantine

Way East and way different are K.C. Constantine's novels, set in Rocksburg, Pennsylvania, one of those stricken, stunted little rust belt cities where third-generation Americans still identify themselves as Italians or Poles. Constantine's signature character, Mario Balzic, is both, as well as the police chief of Rocksburg, a town he knows as intimately as his own bruised heart.

In the Balzic books, you won't find any wide open spaces, or any firefights either. In some of them you won't even really find a mystery.

What you will find is compelling evocation of a place and its people, both of them unglamorous and sharply real. The same is true of Balzic himself, who is a rarity in detective novels -- a real policeman, one who does his job patiently, incrementally, and not always successfully.

Balzic talks to people, he listens to people, he thinks about what he finds out. He's intelligent, humane and painfully moral, and his greatest strength is his personal connection to his little city, his knowledge about its people and their pasts. That connection can complicate matters as well -- Balzic is not the kind of man who can solve a problem by going in with his guns blazing, because he went to school with the bad guy and their mothers are in the same ladies' sodality down at St. Theresa's.

A fine introduction to Balzic is The Man Who Liked to Look at Himself. Balzic has been pressured into going hunting with the chief of the state police. He dislikes the guy, and he likes his hunting dog, a snappish Wiemeraner, even less. But when the hound digs up a human bone on a farm, Balzic gets interested. When a search turns up lots more bones scattered across the county, and the bones all seem to have saw marks, and those bones turn out to have belonged to a missing local man whose friends and partner and ex-girlfriend don't want to talk about him, Balzic goes looking for other skeletons.

Joey's Case, on the other hand, comes looking for him. Joey Castelucci was, as all his friends tell Balzic, "born an asshole and he died an asshole," shot, apparently in self-defense, by his wife's new boyfriend. But Joey's father follows Balzic around for five months, haranguing him to investigate the case, even though it's out of his jurisdiction.

Balzic, distracted by his own medical problems, digs into Joey's death just to shut the old man up and finds that the father is right about one thing -- the investigation was royally botched. And Joey was indeed an asshole, but hardly the only one in town. Constantine balances the unraveling of Joey's case skillfully against the tensions and tenderness of Balzic's private life.

A Note On Availability

You may have to haunt the used book shops for Crumley's earlier novels, many of which (including Dancing Bear) have been allowed to go out of print or are "temporarily" out of publisher's stock. Constantine, though a fine writer, apparently does not sell briskly enough for the big terraspace chains, making both his new work and his early titles hard to find. Both writers are worth seeking out.

Colette's Archive

Colette's List 1: Hiaasen: Murder Under The Palms

Colette's List 2: Hall, MacDonald & More Murder

Colette's List 3: Crews: The Artist As Scar Lover

Colette's List 4: Mosley: Easy In The City Of Angels

Colette's List 5: Chandler: Trouble Is My Business

Colette's List 6: Mango, Mortal Sin & Margaritaville

Colette's List 7: A Monstrous Regiment of Women

Colette's List 8: The Inferno: James Ellroy's L.A.

Colette's List 9: Spenser Is Parker, Only Taller

Colette's List 10: Tony Hillerman: The Navajo Way

Colette's List 11: Small Towns, Mean Streets

Colette Bancroft, a writer known at various times in her career to date as The Goddess of the Classroom, The Empress of Haute Cuisine and The Spitball Queen, is at work on a mystery novel of her own. She is an editor on the Metro Desk at the St. Petersburg Times.

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