IN BRIEF: The 3-13 Murders - Thomas Black

It isn't often that I am so entranced by another person's review that I find I have to read the book immediately. When I came across a post on an author I was hardly familiar with on TomCat's blog Beneath the Stains of Time I found myself unable to resist temptation. It was really one single sentence that made up my mind:  "The 3-13 Murders is one of the finest and cleverest hardboiled detective novels ever written, which I recommend, unreservedly, to all."

Clever? Yes. One of the finest? No, I don't agree.

The  most notable aspect that makes the book stand out is an unusual murder which TomCat has likened to the use of intricate gizmos and gadgets you'll find in the works of John Rhode.  And I have to tell you that any astute reader will pick up on the two vital clues mentioned none too subtly within the narrative. One of those clues is mentioned three separate times making it rather obvious. Paying close attention to the oddities observed by our private eye hero can easily lead the reader to figuring out how that murder was achieved. At least I did. I know what was created in the room where the murder was committed, but not exactly how the murder was pulled off.  Is this enough to make a book one of the finest, the part that sent TomCat into a rapturous rave?  In my estimation, no.  But then I look at the book as a whole and not simply for the ingenious murders, a surprise identity of the murderer, and other puzzle pieces.

The setting is also unusual for a private eye novel. Black lays the action in the fictional urban milieu of Chancellor City which must be in the Midwest somewhere, close to Wichita mentioned a couple of times. Over the course of the novel Al Delaney, the private eye protagonist, gives us details of his taxi jaunts mentioning specific street names. A close look at street maps of Missouri and Kansas cities reveal a match up with Kansas City, Kansas. Black was born and raised in Kansas. Makes sense that he would want to model his books on his home state.

One other noteworthy feature is Black's use of unusual gangster slang that I've never encountered in any other writer's vocabulary of the underworld.  Taxis are referred to as "Yellows", women in prostitution rings as "whitebirds" (I guess a signifier of white slavery), "percentage girl" is a prostitute who works for a pimp or in a brothel. The title itself reveals a very odd slang term for two types of illegal drugs that I think Black simply made up. He tells us what "3-13" means late in the book and it's a tip-off to another coded remark mentioned earlier that I managed to figure out. At least those other words seemed closer to real slang terms.

This novel turns out to be something of a diatribe against the vices that rule career criminals and make them rich. More than anything The 3-13 Murders recalled to my mind less of Black's hardboiled colleagues and more of Sax Rohmer's Dope. Frankly, had I known that this book was all about gangsters, drugs and prostitutes I think I would've just skipped it.  My least favorite topic in ANY crime novel is drug dealing.

Black is majorly influenced by pulp magazine writers of the era and probably private eye movies since his work comes so late in the heyday of private detective mania. His dialogue reminds me of the type of wisecracking stuff you hear spouted by B movie characters of the 1940s rather than the characters in the books of the demigods of the hardboiled genre like Hammett and Chandler. Many of the characters are very familiar and come across as stereotypes like the vixen client who turns on the sex appeal to manipulate our hero; the motherly landlady; the repellent brothel madame; the faithful secretary; possibly corrupt leader of a weird religious cult (a la The Dain Curse) and a slew of immoral would-be sophisticates. There's even a pretty boy sadistic hitman (a favorite un-PC fictional type) who I thought would turn out to be gay but who surprisingly has a wife.

The plot is well done if mired in the past. A portion of the book makes utterly no sense -- the retention of an incriminating letter that leads to one of the murders. Black's reasoning for the character who keeps hold of the letter is very weak (it involves blackmail). He turns the letter over to a neighbor for safe keeping and of course she is then killed in a horrific manner. All of this seemed not to mesh with the rest of the book which is all about venal and greedy people who act on impulse.

Black is a clever writer, I will admit. He does a good job of planting clues. But at this stage in my life I've read so much crime fiction in all of its subgenres that I can't give this too much attention. A well plotted (if overly complex) book with one ingenious murder method doesn't merit being called "one of the finest and cleverest hardboiled detective novels ever written."  There are many more better examples with better realized characters, more maturely thought out motivations, and less -- dare I say it -- contrived storytelling.

But in keeping with my "give 'em a second chance" nature I did buy a copy of Black's The Pinball Murders to see if perhaps he truly was consistently good at dreaming up weird murders and intricate plots or if this book was just a fluke. Stay tuned...