Dreams of Justice

books."

Introduction by Tom Nolan

It seems apt that Dick Adler begin this outstanding collection of crime-fiction reviews and related pieces with a tribute to Anthony Boucher, the founding father and (as someone once said) patron saint of mystery reviewing. Of all those professionals now critiquing detective novels on a regular basis, Dick Adler perhaps best replicates that revered pioneer’s blessed combination of good taste, sound judgment and articulate ability. As Ross Macdonald said of Boucher, He has a knack for many-sided concentrated praise which no writer could fail to appreciate.

Certainly no writer who has come under Dick Adler’s generous scrutiny (including this introduction-writer) could fail to appreciate his knack for seeing and celebrating the best elements a book has to offer. And no interested reader could fail to benefit from Adler’s educated guidance. His expertise is fueled by a diesel-strength love for good writing. Dick Adler has what Isaac Singer once called the greatest gift of all: the gift of enthusiasm.

He expresses that informed enthusiasm in a prose style worthy of (and often evoking) the books he explicates. Note, for instance, how he brings attention to the constantly tightening fist of the stories of Walter Mosley; and how that author’s narrative grabs you by the elbow from the getgo, exposing the racism that has always lurked behind the benign, smoggy grin of Los Angeles.

And even as Adler urges you to notice the particular fine points of a given book, he is giving you clues to that book’s larger significance and effects — as when (to stick with Walter Mosley) he points out that what puts the glow of greatness on that author’s Easy Rawlins chronicles is the way they’re rooted … in the land-owning dream of Los Angeles; and how the wary Easy knows that no matter how far he’s come, At any second he can still lose everything.

Reviewer Adler is open to all sorts of subgenres: American hard-boiled to English espionage, European historical to California contemporary. His stated preference is to focus attention on worthy new writers, of which there is an abundance in this era which someone somewhere surely has called, correctly, the second Golden Age of mystery fiction.

Dick Adler’s knack for finding fine new books and authors is formidable; Dreams of Justice is hence filled with telling analyses of such talented relative-newcomers as Rebecca C. Pawel, Denise Mina, John Shannon, Naomi Hirahara, Terrill Lee Lankford and John Burdett. Time and again, Adler pinpoints in a phrase what makes these and other authors so special — as when he notes how the late Bruce Alexander’s perfect sense of pitch and proportion for the period (England in the 18th century) induces a most welcome blend of trust and amazement. Or as when he writes: Qiu Xialong knows that words can save your soul, and in his pungent, poignant first mystery, ‘Death of a Red Heroine,’ he proves it on every page.

Adler is equally good at appreciating veteran masters; and when he writes about a book by Tony Hillerman or Sara Paretsky or Colin Dexter, he takes the time (and has the knowledge) to assess it in the context of that author’s whole oeuvre.

Dreams of Justice can thus serve as a reader’s/buyer’s guide to some of the most fascinating and well-written mystery fiction of the past few years. And it can also be savored as a compendium of some of the most succinct and evocative mystery-reviewing of that same period.

To describe the premise of a novel in a way that conveys its charms without revealing its secrets, to let a reader know your opinion (and the reasons for it) in a logical and non-egotistical way, to convey through your own style something of a particular book’s special flavor — these, I think, are the hallmarks of a great reviewer. Dick Adler is undoubtedly a great reviewer.

And, I would argue, more than that.

Anthony Boucher said a reviewer wrote for the moment, while a critic wrote for the ages. Boucher, though, seemed to do both at once. Adler has that knack, too — as this collection amply proves. Written to deadline, Dick Adler’s thoughtful and graceful pieces bear rereading at leisure. All they needed was a book of their own.

1

Crime On My Hands

When I got my first job as mystery reviewer, for the original Book World edited by Byron Dobell in the 1960s, my mother said, Mystery reviewer? Why can’t you use your real name? And my friend Richard Condon was frightened that if I included one of his books in my column, it would suffer financially and socially from being seen in the company of unworthy books.

Mysteries have never really gotten the respect they deserve—either as examples of good writing or as social documents. (Condon would be pleased to know, however, that they are selling very well, bursting out onto bestseller lists everywhere.) But in the last twenty years, they have begun to be taken more seriously—mostly because of the writers: excellent novelists who prefer to work in the genre form. Partly to honor their dedication and partly to justify the thousands of hours I have spent reading and reviewing them, I’ve decided to put together and annotate this collection.

The line between mystery and thriller is a vague one: to my mind, mysteries most often have continuing casts of central characters who reach some solution to the crimes committed by a mixture of rational deduction and inspiration. Thrillers more often deal with larger, single events, occasionally political, and often end in scenes of violence. Both are worthy forms, and both provide plenty of reading pleasure. But I have decided to stay on the mystery side of that vague line—although a few books included here might well be called thrillers.

Not many of the bestsellers I mentioned above make it into my column, due mostly to space limitations. I’m lucky enough to be able to call attention to 10-12 new mysteries and thrillers of my own choosing each month, out of the hundreds published in various formats. And if choosing a first novel by an unknown writer means leaving out the fifth or 15th book in an already successful franchise, I can live with the guilt—especially since it is usually these books upon which publishers spend their advertising budgets.

All the reviews here are favorable, or at least informational—even if some contain quibbles. Again, I’m fortunate enough to get to choose what I review—and one of the pleasures of doing this collection was being able to pick the best of the best. Several writers get more than one review; in some instances, I was happy to discover that their second book was up to the standards of their first (Olen Steinhauer. Jim Kelly, Barbara Nadel). And in other cases (Sara Paretsky, John Shannon, Walter Mosley, Scott Phillips, George Pelecanos. Donna Leon, Laurie R. King), my intention was to note their continuing excellence.

At a Mystery Writers of America symposium in 1979. an attendee asked the members of the panel, What prompts writers to want to make death so entertaining?

Robert L. Fish, noted novelist and short story writer, answered that Death is the last joke. Frederick Dannay, with Manfred B. Lee one half of the Ellery Queen franchise, suggested that murder mysteries were safety valves for readers, taking care of their frustrations and aggressions. Another expert agreed, saying crime novels link the past with the present, forbidden desires are acted out, the world of the id predominates. And a literature professor summed it up by saying, Crime is the greatest story in the world, starting with Cain and Abel. It appears in all the fairy tales; I counted fifteen crimes committed in Little Red Riding Hood.

All of those reasons still hold true, and make reading and writing about mysteries such a continuing pleasure.

2

Anthony Boucher—The Man Who Invented Mystery Reviewing

Whenever I’m faced with a mystery of a type that I’d normally shun (fun mysteries about wedding planners, caterers, gardeners and the like are current villains), I drag out Anthony Boucher’s famous quote, The important distinction is not between the schools of the whodunit but between the good and bad books whatever the school.

Boucher can without the slightest stretch be called the man who made mystery reviewing a serious occupation—first for the San Francisco Chronicle, later for the Chicago Sun-Times and New York Herald Tribune, and from 1951 until his death from lung cancer at the age of 56 in 1968 as the author of the weekly Criminals At Large column in the New York Times, for whom he wrote 852 columns, each reviewing about six books.

The fact that his name is now mostly known, even to more serious readers, because of the annual Bouchercon mystery convention, is an irony that would have delighted him.

Boucher wasn’t even his birth name: it was William Anthony Parker White. But when he found 75 writers named William White in the Library of Congress, he decided to adopt the maiden name of his maternal grandmother, pronouncing it as she did to rhyme with voucher.

Boucher’s life in his home on Dana Street in Berkeley was an awesome mixture of reviewing, editing and writing (both mysteries and science fiction), and other activities from poker to opera to acting as a scout for local sports teams. Like other major figures in the mystery field (G.K. Chesterton, Dorothy L. Sayers and C.S. Lewis come immediately to mind), Boucher was a figure of strong Christian faith.

He struggled daily with the severe asthma he’d suffered from since childhood, and his son Lawrence White gives a sad and vivid description of his father’s battle every morning to start the breathing process.

Although he compared himself to the sundial with the motto, ‘I count only the sunny hours,’ in his ability to blot out weakness and pain, wrote Francis M. Nevins, who edited collections of Boucher’s earlier reviews, he and [Ellery Queen co-creator] Fred Dannay often said to each other only half in jest ‘that if both of us had been blessed with good health, how much more we could have accomplished!’ Bouts of illness often forced Boucher to scrap or postpone projects to which he’d made commitments.

Boucher’s mystery reviews were eclectic: he wrote about hardcovers, paperbacks and mystery magazines. During his career as a critic, he won Edgar Awards (named for Edgar Allen Poe) in 1946, 1950, and 1953 from the Mystery Writers of America, whose national president he was in 1951.

He enjoyed established writers such as Erle Stanley Gardner (Among his many other virtues, Gardner is surely the finest constructor of hyper-intricate puzzles in evidence), Agatha Christie (the most satisfactory novel in some years from one of the most satisfying of novelists, he wrote about They Came to Baghdad), Frank Gruber, Dorothy B. Hughes, Ian Fleming, Georges Simenon (Grade A Simenon, which means studies in murder at its most chilling and convincing) and Donald Hamilton.

Of Raymond Chandler, he wrote Chandler, generally acknowledged as the foremost creator of hard-boiled detective stories after Dashiell Hammett, has written regrettably little of late. After a large number of first- rate novelettes in the Nineteen Thirties and four distinguished novels, 1939-43, he has produced only two novels in the past eleven years. The first of these, The Little Sister (1949), I found badly disappointing though some critics rated it high among Chandler items: but the newest, The Long Goodbye," more than assuages the disappointment and makes one wish that Chandlers were as frequent as Gardners.

"This one is rather off the hard-beaten path of Chandler-iana. It’s about private detective Philip Marlowe, of course, as are all Chandler novels, but both Marlowe and his creator seem to have mellowed somewhat in fifteen years. The plot deals relatively little with the professional criminal classes, but rather with the tensions—emotional, psychological and fundamental of the upper middle class.

"On the whole, despite occasional outbursts of violence, it’s a moody, brooding book, in which Marlowe is less a detective than a disturbed man of 42 on a quest for some evidence of truth and humanity. The dialogue is as vividly overheated as ever, the plot is clearly constructed and surprisingly resolved, and the book is rich in many sharp glimpses of minor characters and scenes. Perhaps the longest private-eye novel ever written