COLETTE'S LIST

Brief Reviews Writ Loud

by Colette Bancroft

Rust Belt Noir

AS DUSK FALLS ON THE WATER, a figure in an overcoat disappears around the corner of a crumbling brick warehouse trailing a faint contrail of cigarette smoke. A van in the parking lot across the street shifts suddenly on its tires, though it seems to be empty. As a flight of pigeons rises from a bridge, music falls from a high window, something like a violin, sounding lonesome. Nearby, a crooked cop strolls through the purple light, musing about his own death, which is much nearer than he realizes. Welcome to the mean streets of La Crosse, Wisconsin.

Say what?

You were expecting maybe L.A., maybe New York, at least Chicago. In The Driftless Zone and the newly published Billy Verité, Rick Harsch relocates the noir mystery to the Rust Belt river city of La Crosse.

How does the genre fare there? If Raymond Chandler, Mark Twain and Tom Waits collaborated on a hard-boiled mystery, it might read a little like these novels. The Driftless Zone, published in 1997, takes its tone from the ironies of its title. The term is a geological description of the terrain where La Crosse is located: eons ago, the great glaciers that reshaped most of the continent detoured around it. Like the rocks and earth that stayed put instead of going adventuring in the embrace of the ice, Harsch's characters are left behind.

One of the book's narrators, a nameless "I" who reappears in Billy Verité, says a demographer explained the phenomenon to him: "A city is defined as much by who has left as by who remains. What you see in small cities -- rather, what you don't see -- are the beautiful and the talented.... What you do have is a high percentage of misfits, fools, various mediocrities, ineptitude, a shabby sort of grandiosity, an enlarged capacity for botching ill-conceived projects."

Those driftless types populate these novels, which are alternately lyrical and chilling, affectionate and parodic, and always original. The Driftless Zone has a touch of the Pynchonesque: one of its plot lines revolves around a romance of sorts (one of those ill-conceived projects) between characters named Spleen and The Sneering Brunette. They meet at the scene of an almost-suicide and fall into a paranoia-laced relationship entangled with the Brunette's ex-boyfriend, Deke, a motorcycle gang leader of dubious authority; Richie Buck, a hit man perhaps in Deke's employ who bites the heads off live pigeons; and a pair of corrupt cops, including an undercover cop whose ability to function secretively is hampered by the fact that he's the only black man in town.

Harsch's prose is jazzlike in its shifts and improvisations but never takes itself too seriously; the plot, as befits noir, is violent and resistant to neat explanation but leavened with weary humor.

A minor character in The Driftless Zone becomes the title character in Billy Verité, just published this month. An ex-snitch (one of those driftless zone job descriptions) turned would-be private eye, Billy is known as the ugliest man in a pretty ugly city, but he's pure of heart. Or as pure as anybody gets in La Crosse.

That's lucky for Gerard, a friend of Spleen's who's also a minor character in The Driftless Zone and a ghost from the first pages of this novel. Gerard (before he becomes a ghost) has a problem with Torgeson, the black undercover cop: Gerard had an affair with Torgeson's wife and the cop wants revenge. The situation is complicated by Gerard's involvement, albeit casual, with a pretty barfly and small-time coke dealer named Lola, who's also involved with Torgeson -- there's just not much else to do in La Crosse, it seems.

As another ill-conceived project enters the first stages of being botched, Gerard persuades Billy to hide Lola, at first in Billy's specially equipped private-eye surveillance van. Billy is delirious with excitement; Lola is royally pissed, especially as days go by without easy access to bathroom facilities (a problem few other private-eye novels address).

The situation is complicated by the arrival in town of a truly peculiar character named Skunk Lane Forhension. Sent by the national organization to replace motorcycle gang leader Deke, who has met his demise, Skunk is a silver-tongued ringer for Lee Harvey Oswald who possesses the uncanny ability to take one look at people and divine their potentially fatal medical conditions. What he really wants and the lengths he will go to to get it is among the mysteries the novel sort of unravels, with the desultory aid of the returning nameless narrator.

As conditions escalate, or disintegrate, Gerard takes Billy and Lola to a little island in the Mississippi, just off La Crosse, to hide them from Torgeson and other interested parties. Red Oak Ridge Island was abandoned by farmers decades before, and among its forests and shores Billy and Lola transmogrify into a driftless-zone version of Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher. They fish, they work out a signal system, they build a fort and plan for an invasion (the book includes a handy map of the island complete with trails, death pits and Forbidden Sectors), and they fall in something like love.

But Billy Verité is no children's tale. Of course, neither are Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn, but that's another story. Twists and betrayal and much weirdness ensue, both ashore and in the midst of the Mississippi.

Billy Verité builds on the setting, characters and innovative style of The Driftless Zone, and Harsch's skill at handling them has clearly sharpened. He plans a La Crosse trilogy, and I'm looking forward to number three.

Buy The Book @ A Discount:

Billy Verité
by Rick Harsch

Cloth, 230 pages; first edition published by Steerforth Press in September 1998.

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List Price: $22; Our Price: $15.40; You Save: $6.60 (30%).

The Driftless Zone
by Rick Harsch

Cloth, 200 pages; published by Steerforth Press in June 1997.

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List Price: $21; Our Price: $14.70; You Save: $6.30 (30%).

Books previously reviewed in Colette's List may be
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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's List 12: James Lee Burke: Blood On The Bayou

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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