NEW STUFF: The Lock Artist - Steve Hamilton

A combination of the coming of age story and the crime novel is not exactly the kind of book I am immediately drawn to. I thought I had my fill of teen angst novels (I've certainly had my fill of teen angst in the movies and TV) but this award winning book quickly proved me wrong. 

Mike has suffered a traumatic incident when he was nine years old.  He is nebulous in talking about it, but the reader knows he survived a violent episode that left him an orphan. He is raised by Uncle Lito, a liquor store owner, who has no real parenting skills but does his best to give Mike a life of stability and safety. Though Mike survived the terror of his past he has not spoken since. His silence remains a mystery to the various psychologists, neurologists and other doctors who examined him for years but can find no real medical reason. Typically, they slap a variety of clinical and unhelpful diagnoses on him and send him back to his uncle. It is his silence that will draw him into two different very private worlds.

The title has a double meaning. For not only is Mike skillful with a set of picks and tension bars but he is also a talent with pen and a drawing pad. His drawing pad becomes a refuge from his silent interactions and the attendant mocking and ostracism that follow him throughout his school days. He will meet one fellow teen artist, Griffin, who will become his best friend and gain at least one adult ally in his seemingly cynical art teacher. Mike thinks he will follow in the steps of Griffin by attending art school after graduating high school.  His other talent, however, much to his surprise will prove to be his Fate as he is coerced, or even forced, by nearly everyone he meets to reveal the secret awesome power of opening locks without a key.

Like many new crime novels The Lock Artist has a dual story line told in alternating chapters.  The Sherlockian which I read last fall had a similar alternating structure and the time difference between the two parts was two centuries. Hamilton's book alternates between the mere span of one year - 1999 and 2000 - but the differences in Mike's life from one year to the next are almost analogous between boyhood and manhood.  He undergoes so much in a relatively short period of time.

One half of the book is mostly made up of capers that take place in 2000, the year Mike became a career criminal.  The other (to me, the more interesting half of the book) is Mike's coming of age and the slow reveal of how he went from being a kid who knew how to pick locks to an artist with a magic touch under the tutelage of the mysterious master safecracker known only as "The Ghost."  While there are action scenes galore in the caper portions of the book it all seemed familiar to me.  But the story of Mike committing his first break-in, his punishment at the home of Mr. Marsh, and the very intriguing relationship that develops between Mike and Marsh's artist daughter Amelia all surpass the action of the various lock picking and safecracking escapades.  The connection he finds with Amelia, another one talented in drawing, in their secret illustrated communications makes for one of the more fascinating sequences in the story.  In fact at one point I was so caught up in the artwork exchange between Mike and Amelia that I read only those chapters in quick succession until I came across three characters who I did not recognize.  I had to go back and then read the odd numbered chapters until I got to the point where they were introduced.  By that time I realized that even though the structure was alternating the book was carefully meshed together and that each odd numbered chapter was subtly commenting on the following even numbered chapter.  That'll teach me to cheat while reading a book with this type of structure.

That says something about Hamilton's admirable skill in creating a literally page turning story.  I had to know what happened next.  I found myself furiously flipping pages and skipping huge chunks of the book.  By the time I was midway finished I was keeping one finger of my right hand at the start of every other chapter to make for the smoothest possible transition between the even only chapters and the odd only chapters.  Try that with an eBook all you Nook and Kindle addicts. Bet it's not so easy.

The Lock Artist recently won the Edgar Award for Best Novel of 2010.  I haven't read any of the other nominees, but I can't imagine anything more entertaining, surprisingly poignant or stunningly original than this crime novel.  I sure would've voted for it.  You ought to read it and find out exactly why it won the prize.

Geoffrey Homes & the Reporter Sleuth

The Man Who Murdered Himself (1936) - Geoffrey Homes

Reporters make good detectives. Well versed in the five Ws of fundamental journalism, armed with sharp wit, innate curiosity, and usually gifted with manipulative interviewing skills they are a natural choice for a mystery writer's protagonist. Add a sarcastic sense of humor, a jaded outlook on life, and a mistrust of humanity in general and you've got the makings for the prototype of a private eye. Although one of the earliest reporter detectives is Joseph Rouletabille created by Gaston Leroux back at the turn of the 20th century, the journalist sleuth is a typically American choice of hero for crime writers. There's Kent Murdock and Flash Casey (both reporter/photographers); the numerous reporter heroes in the wacky novels of Harry Stephen Keeler; the newspapermen (both editors and reporters) in Fredric Brown's books; an entire library full of the Phoenix Press mystery novels, a publishing house that seemed to require that the lead character be a reporter detective. Geoffrey Homes' (in reality Daniel Mainwaring, a former San Francisco Chronicle reporter himself) contribution to this popular type of fictional detective is the one-time alcoholic journalist turned private eye Robin Bishop.

Bishop's first case is an involved tale of multiple missing persons that leads to the discovery of multiple dead bodies. His employer, Oscar Morgan, runs a private detective agency that specializes in missing persons and Morgan selects the most financially rewarding cases by scanning the local newspapers and keeping a eye out for life insurance policies with large pay outs. At the start of the story Morgan proposes to Bishop that they go after the missing brother of a recent apparent murder victim.

Allen Hastings, an unemployed pilot is found drowned in a reservoir. He has also been shot in the abdomen. Broken chair and bloodstained walls in his kitchen indicate a struggle there. A .32 caliber bullet is pulled out of the living room wall. Smart aleck and lazy cops assigned to the Hastings murder find a way to manipulate the coroner's inquest jury to return a verdict of suicide. The newspapers rage at the cops. Next day, in retaliation for the absurdity of the inquest findings the papers are calling Hastings "The Man Who Murdered Himself."

Hastings has a brother, Robert, who the police can't locate. He's the sole heir to a $20,000 life insurance policy. Morgan figures he and Bishop should track down Robert, give him the good and bad news, and maybe they will get a cut of the insurance money. This is the standard operating procedure at Morgan & Company. Bishop agrees to start the search for Hastings by visiting his brother's rooming house. In the basement he finds a trunk and when the landlady is distracted by a phone call which takes her back upstairs he manages to steal the trunk, load it into his ca,r and take off. Inside the trunk he finds a cache of hidden letters - the first piece of evidence that will take him on a wild chase throughout southern California as he unearths secret after secret in the two Hastings brothers' lives.

Homes depicts the police in this book as lazy, irresponsible dullards. They simply don't want to do any investigating. If the case has even the slightest appearance of an accident or suicide they'll do their best to monkey with the evidence to close the case so that it is never treated as a murder. It is Bishop and a fellow reporter, Guy Bentley, who do all the real work. There are several scenes where the reporters badger the police, show them up at their own game, reveal that they have more evidence than the police (they usually hit the crime scenes first and steal the evidence), and pretty much make the police look like a bunch of fools. Bentley even boasts that he found one of the missing people in the morgue. The chief of police shoots him down by saying "You found Raymond Harris in the morgue" (an alias for the true identity of the dead body). Splitting hairs, to be sure, and a feeble attempt by the police to save face.

Homes has a laconic style, serves up a fast paced action based story, and is most adept at creating dialog that sings with realism and wit. The story gets very involved and hints at the convoluted noir masterpiece that would be his final novel Build My Gallows High, later turned into a classic film noir Out of the Past. The plot machinations involving two different life insurance policies are almost unnecessary because in the end they are nothing but red herrings. The solution and the identity of the killer do come as a big surprise but we learn everything second hand in a lengthy monologue from Bishop who tells of his findings to Bentley and Mary, the secretary at Morgan & company.

I'll be reviewing the rest of the Robin Bishop books in the coming weeks. This is a short series and I'm interested in reading them in order to see how Homes continues his views on reporters whom he purports to be better at detective work that actual police detectives. For a book written in 1936 it's one of the best of the semi-tough subgenre of the hardboiled school (I think some call it soft-boiled, but that's too evocative of diner food to me). More smarts here than brawn. Maybe the witty wordplay and verbal sparring give way to more physical fighting later in the series. But to be sure this was a most promising debut of one of the best of the reporter detectives of the American Golden Age.

Robin Bishop detective novels
(Books reviewed elsewhere on this blog have colored links)
The Man Who Murdered Himself (1936)
The Doctor Died at Dusk (1936)
The Man Who Didn't Exist (1937)
The Man Who Murdered Goliath (1938)
Then There Were Three (1938)
(This last novel introduces Humphrey Campbell,
a milk drinking private eye who replaced Bishop
as Homes' series character.)