It's the end of summer, so let's grab what escape we can, which, for me, means reading suspense fiction.
The Intrigue, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Six years ago, I stopped eating mushrooms. The cause was Silvia Moreno-Garcia's horror novel, Mexican Gothic, in which fungi become frightful. Moreno-Garcia, who excels at playing around with genre fiction, recently brought out a noir novel set in 1940s Mexico. Called The Intrigue, it's so stylishly evil, it begs for a movie version, in black and white, of course.
The plot is a classic one in which a predator risks becoming a patsy. A con artist named Ulises makes his money by placing ads in the lonely hearts sections of magazines and waiting to see if any rich widows or spinsters respond. When Perla, the owner of a mansion-turned-boarding-house in the port of Veracruz, invites Ulises to visit, he thinks he's in clover; but trouble awaits in the form of Perla's niece, Inés.
Inés rightly wonders what a man who bears a resemblance to a movie star like Tyrone Power is doing courting her grim aunt. Moreover, Inés desperately wants out from under her aunt's thumb. Who could blame her? Here's a snippet of a scene where Perla announces to friends that she's chaperoning Inés to a dance:
“I will escort her,” [Perla] said firmly. My father always told us ladies from good families are like delicate flowers, which must be carefully pressed inside a good book, and I agree with him.”
Inés’s hand wrapped around a fork, her fingers squeezing it tight. She wished she could stab her aunt with it. ...
A carefully pressed flower, she thought. A dead thing.
The double and triple crosses — as well as the body count — mount in The Intrigue, which subverted all my guesses about who would be left standing at the end.
Under the Falls, by Richard Russo
This summer, Richard Russo brought out his first crime thriller. Originally written as a TV script, Under the Falls, is set in upstate New York in a place called Stone Mountain. The plot, like that of Moreno-Garcia's novel, is indebted to noir, where the past is never really past.
Tyler Sinclair hasn't been back to Stone Mountain since he ran off from an abusive father and romantic complications at 18. Now, 18 years later, he's returning as a big-shot country-rock singer. The occasion is a fundraiser for one of Tyler's old friends, nicknamed "Doc," who was paralyzed in a diving accident when they were all teenagers.
But, as Doc now informs Tyler, not everybody in the Mountain is a fan of his:
“It’s not just that you made all that money,” Doc explains. “It’s that you made it writing songs about us. About our lives. Where’s our cut? is how they look at it.”
The benefit concert ends in multiple deaths, prompting Tyler and others to excavate his hometown's secrets. Beyond the crime plot, though, Russo excels here at what he's long excelled at: chronicling the world of working-class America and the limited opportunities for those in places like Stone Mountain.
The Blue Flame, George Pelecanos
George Pelecanos started writing his crime series starring African American private investigator Derek Strange in 2001. In the intervening years, Pelecanos has written for series like The Wire and Treme, but he's always kept intermittent faith with Strange. Fourteen years after his last outing, an older-but-still-street-wise Strange returns in The Blue Flame, investigating two murders that have struck within a once-tight group of friends.
It's been long enough that I can repeat a cliché about Pelecanos: Namely,
that he does for Washington, D.C., what Raymond Chandler did for LA. Strange takes us into the D.C. the tourists and politicians don't know: from neat rowhouse neighborhoods to the D.C. Central Detention Facility. The title, The Blue Flame, refers to the fact that Strange, an ex-cop, still has that burning cop curiosity. I hope it's never extinguished.
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