Forgotten Friday: Review of The Lime Pit by Jonathan Valin (Felony and Mayhem, originally published 1980)

Harry Stoner is a PI in the classic Chandler mould, but with a more sentimental and romantic side. Having completed a profitable out-of-town job, against his better judgement he decides to take a charity case – an old man with little means to pay is trying to track down a young, homeless girl that he’s befriended. It soon transpires that the girl has been co-opted into a child prostitution ring by a young, handsome couple, and soon Stoner is questioning various low lifes, although it’s clear the answer to her whereabouts lies amongst a circle of rich men that prey on naïve and vulnerable children. With everybody warning him to give up the case, Stoner carries on regardless, knowing that even if he does find Cindy Ann Evans, it’s unlikely to have a happy ending either for her or himself.

As I noted yesterday, Jonathan Valin is a great observational writer of both characters and places. In Harry Stone he created a multi-layered, complex and flawed character that one immediately identifies with and cares about, and the book is populated with a myriad of other memorable and well drawn characters. The pacing is good and the dialogue snappy and realistic, and the contextualisation is strong without being overbearing. I thought the first half of the book was excellent, but the story started to slip a bit in the second half losing a bit of coherence and realism. Without giving any spoilers, my feeling was that Stoner’s judgement becomes suspect and slightly out of character and I think the story could have been resolved more effectively. Otherwise, I thought The Lime Pit was a great read and Stoner is definitely a character I want to catch up with.

On Bus Stations and Restaurants: The Lime Pit by Jonathan Valin

Given that Jonathan Valin’s The Lime Pit was first published in 1980, I’m holding over my review until tomorrow as a Forgotten Friday book. The novel was recommended to me in my plea for crime novels set in Ohio or Kentucky (where I’m heading to in ten days time) and The Lime Pit is set in both – Cleveland (Ohio) and Newport (Kentucky).

This is the first Valin book I’ve read, but what strikes me about his writing is that he’s a great observational writer, both with respect to characters and places. Here are two passages concerning everyday spaces of the city – the bus terminal and the restaurant – that I think capture the essence of both.

No matter how noisy a bus terminal gets – and on a July Saturday they get pretty damn loud – you can always hear your own footsteps echoing above the crackle of the loudspeakers, the hiss of air brakes, the soft sigh of bus doors opening, and the amplified roar of the diesels as they pull out of their loading docks. I don’t know how they do it, how they calculate the eigentones and reflecting angles to bring the click of heels and shoe leather into such crisp prominence. Nor do I understand why bus stations are always made to look so dreary. Or why the people sitting on the hard blue-and-red plastic benches are invariably as cheerless and sullen-looking as the gaunt men and women in Walker Evan’s studies of the rural poor. Even the attendants and guards are seedy and impassive, and everyone looks too damn bored to talk about it. If there’s an urban hell, the bus station must come pretty close to being it.

The Bee shut down at half past nine. I sat alone in the dining room while the waitresses cleared the tables and smoked and joked and toasted one another with empty Coke glasses. A restaurant is a far cheerier place after the customers are gone. Everyone is loose and clubby. Left-overs are eaten. Drinks are poured. No one wants to go home. It’s like leaving a warm, friendly kitchen.

I recognise both descriptions and they’re spot on. And one more for good luck.

When this was just a market town, maybe Cindy Ann could have afforded to come here wide-eyed and unwary. But cities grow up and become delinquents. Even cities as strict and unglamourous as this one. Years pass and what is just a smirk or a piece of conventional wisdom out in the farmlands becomes an industry in the flats.

I like the idea of cities as delinquents. I also managed to find these other covers.

September Reviews

A very good and varied month of reading with three 5 star reviews.

The Collaborator of Bethlehem by Matt Benyon Rees *****
Zoo Station by David Downing ***
The Reapers by John Connolly ***
Go to Helena Handbasket by Donna Moore *****
The Damned Season by Carlo Lucarelli ***
The Price of Darkness by Graham Hurley ****
A Trace of Smoke by Rebecca Cantrell ***
'Rommel?' 'Gunner Who?' by Spike Milligan ****
The Foreign Correspondence by Alan Furst *****
Queenpin by Megan Abbott ****
Disco for the Departed by Colin Cotterill ****
All the Colours of the Town by Liam McIlvanney ***

A difficult choice, but my book of the month is Matt Benyon Rees' The Collaborator of Bethlehem, which I thought was an excellent debut. As I stated in my review, 'As first novels go, they won’t come much better than this for a reader like me who likes a mix of a strong plot, good characterization and memorable characters, informative contextual history, good pacing, a balanced blend of action and dialogue which lacks overly thick description, and a story that stimulates my interest in a place and an issue and stays with me long after I finish reading it.'

The past three months I've been following a steady pattern of reviews every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. That's going to change for a while now that some pressures on my reading time have resurfaced, not least getting two of my own contracted books finished and in the post by the end of October, plus having to read student work and prepare lectures.

Laughing in the face of danger

The following short passage from Spike Milligan's book 'Rommel?' 'Gunner Who?' caught my attention when I read it a couple of weeks ago (review here). The two men involved have just survived a sustained mortar and 88mm bombardment in the Tunisian desert.

'Capt. Rand and Bombardier Edwards came down, both grinning. Strange, after sticky situations men always grinned, even burst out laughing.'

I thought it interesting that their reaction was one of laughter. In crime fiction the mood of anyone who survives a violent encounter is, I think, almost universally dark, sombre and introspective rather than light and jokey. I'm wondering why that is (assuming my perception is accurate)? Following Milligan's account there should be much more laughter in the genre - either as a stress and mood lightener before a dangerous encounter or as a safety valve afterwards.

Perhaps not enough writers have experienced the situations they write about? Maybe laughter just seems inappropriate or out of place in the narrative and it's tamed or cut out? Maybe the kind of violence and danger in experienced in crime is more personal and harrowing and that suppresses any instinct to joke and laugh? I'm not sure, but it's an observation that has certainly given me pause for thought. Next time I have a character survive a sticky situation I'll have a go at forgetting the impulse to write a gloomy, introspective account and have him/her use their adrenaline to laugh off their fear and see how it turns out.

Review of All the Colours of the Town by Liam McIlvanney (Faber and Faber, 2009)

Gerry Conway is a journalist with the Tribune on Sunday, a Scottish paper of record that is feeling the pinch given slowly declining sales and a recent take over. Newly divorced, with two young sons, Conway’s personal life is in the doldrums, and his professional life seems precarious given rationalisations at the paper. When he’s contacted about a story concerning the Scottish Justice Minister, Peter Lyons, he initially dismisses it out of hand, but a photograph from the early 1980s showing Lyons at a UVF gathering in Belfast changes his mind. He soon discovers that Lyons returned to Glasgow in 1983 fearing for his life, and after a narrow escape whilst snooping at a loyalist, Orange parade in Lyons’ home town, Conway heads to Belfast to try and discover the reason for Lyons’ apprehension. At the time Lyon’s fled, the UVF had been responsible for three murders and Conway suspects that Lyons had been involved in at least one of them, only nobody in Belfast is particularly keen to rake over the past and the story appears to be going nowhere until a chance encounter with a Scottish gangster.

All the Colours of the Town is what I would call an ‘okay read’. It wiled away a few hours pleasantly enough, but it didn’t bowl me over. In part, I think my ambivalence is partly a matter of taste, something I’m becoming more conscious of as I write reviews. As I’ve noted elsewhere, I prefer relatively fast paced stories, strong on dialogue and action, rather than introspective tales that devote a fair chunk of the narrative to the inner thoughts of the lead voice. All the Colours of the Town has a good sized chunk of introspection, but for me it also has issues with padding and pacing. To take one example of padding, at one point there is a totally unnecessary paragraph describing a hotel cleaning cart. If it were removed, it would make absolutely no difference to the story, so why is it there? There are countless other descriptive passages that are really not needed and add little to the plot. With respect to pacing, the story seems to come in spurts separated with introspective lulls, and the ending is too hurried with one of the central characters falling out of view. For me, I think the book needed tightening up – if it lost 30-40 pages whilst retaining the same plot it would jaunt along at a nice, even pace. That said, the characterisation is fine and the story is interesting enough, and the book provides a contemporary companion of sorts to Stuart Neville’s The Twelve, with a Scottish twist on violence, politicians with shady pasts and Northern Ireland (my review here).

The Lazy Sunday Service

Posts I enjoyed this week
The A.D.D. Detective - Criminal Brief
A Cool Six Thusand - Detective Beyond Borders
Motivation - Do Some Damage
Ban Ignorance, Not Books - In Reference to Murder
The Regulars - Confessions of a Mystery Novelist
A Gem of a Murder by Carlton Keith - Killer Covers
Hunting Jacques Futrelle by Steven Steinbock - NoirCon

My post this week
Review of The Foreign Correspondent by Alan Furst
A poor hunt turns good
Review of Queenpin by Megan Abbott
Putting Cartography back on the map
Review of Disco for the Departed by Colin Cotterill
Saturday Snippet: The Price of Darkness by Graham Hurley

Saturday Snippet: The Price of Darkness by Graham Hurley

Graham Hurley's DI Faraday novels are set in one of Britain's less fashionable provincial cities, Portsmouth, which is perhaps why he doesn't seem to have attracted the same kind of attention as other British police procedural writers such as Ian Rankin and Colin Dexter. This, I think, is a shame as Hurley's novels are first class; well researched and plotted, with realistic dialogue and a strong sense of place. It's clear that he knows the city and environs well. Here are two extracts of the positive and negative sides of the area.

At last Winter felt firm ground beneath his feet. He explained about the history of the place, all those wars, all that prize money, all the matelots sailing home in triumph after hammering the French. He described the Harbour, HMS Victory, world-class museums in every corner of the dockyard. Then he moved onto the venue itself, Spithead, the biggest stage in the world, a stretch of water made for an event like this.
To be honest, he said, Portsmouth had always raised a bit of a smile on anyone who really knew it. The place had always been full of character but a bit rough, a bit scuzzy. Lately, though, money had been flooding into the city. He told her about the glitzy new shopping developments, the harbourside apartment blocks, the marinas packed with ocean-going yachts. And now, he said, the council had found the bottle to fund the jewel in Pompey's crown, the Spinnaker Tower, five hundred feet of soaring concrete, a fantastic peg on which the city could finally hang its hat.

The Millboork flats lay at the end of the spur motorway to Southampton docks, a gaunt Sixties tower block stuffed full, according to Bazza, with problem families. Rain had pooled on the cracked paving stones outside the main entrance and a spilling wheelie bin, abandoned in the middle of nowhere, was attracting a cloud of squalling seagulls. ...
Winter was gazing up at the flats. The sheer size of the building reminded him of similar blocks in Pompey. Somerstown or Portsea, he thought. Grey lives, grey concrete, grey sky. No wonder half the population had settled for shit television and a freezerful of pizzas.

It's a shame that none of this could be captured on the cover which bears no relation to the story. My review of The Price of Darkness can be found here.