An honest cop with an attitude, a young woman in trouble, the mob, the feds, a dash of romance -- a winner!

I enjoy a good detective novel, and B. A. Morton’s “Mrs. Jones” is a gem. Detective Connell is an honest cop with an attitude about authority, a smart mouth and Irish charm.  Lizzie, aka Mrs. Jones is a young British woman in New York City on a mission she doesn’t understand who witnesses a hit-and-run her first day in town. When she and Connell connect with each other and the bad guys, a bought cop and the Feds, well, the story quickly becomes one I couldn’t put down until I’d finished it. I can see that B. A. Morton is going to become one of my favorite crime writers. I do like good crime novels with mouthy detectives.

I can hardly wait for the next one in the series, Molly Brown, which is due out sometime in 2012.

A very definite 5 star read.

A good book that needs some work

The story opens on 23 October 1935 as hard-boiled private eye Errol Black is tucking into a nice, bloody porterhouse steak. Then someone walks into the restaurant and begins shooting and his dinner with partners Dyke Spanner and Terry Shadow is blown all to Hell. So are Terry Shadow and the two intended victims, notorious mob boss Dutch Schulz (who lives for 23 hours) and one of his henchmen.

The story then shifts to 1945 and the mid-town Manhattan offices of Black and Wentz Detective Agency where we find Errol Black alone in the office doing paperwork. The door opens and a beautiful young woman named Claudia walks in seeking help. She suspects her fiancé of cheating on her. Is she trouble, or isn’t she? Young, beautiful, flirtatious and naive, she’s just the kind of gal hard-boiled detectives fall for. I kept warning him off, but of course he didn’t listen, In spite of his personal failings, he’s good at his craft of detecting, the case is an interesting, convoluted one, and he finally solves it after many convoluted twists and turns. Living happily ever after is a different matter for a hard-boiled,PI, but we already knew that when we started. The many-splendored thing called love is something that eludes hard-boiled guys. Black Shadows is an enjoyable read and I’m glad I read it.

That said, would benefit greatly from some further editing. The story Begins in 1935 with the shoot-out, then shifts to 1945. Though it appears to remain in that year, it isn’t clear: reference is made to an article written in the 1960s; a two-foot thick solid steel door is opened by touching a red button on a keypad on the wall; Errol Black takes Claudia out to celebrate her birthday on July 3,1940; and soft rock is heard on a radio. And I am confused.

Other problems are as follows: A South American man can’t understand a man who is talking to him because he has a poor grasp of Guatemalan. (There is no such language.) In several places the names of two Chinese characters -- Wang and Ping -- are mixed up, once in the same paragraph. As Black is talking with Ping, Ping’s name suddenly changes to Wang. In another place Weeny Jung Ping is called “Weeny Wang”; this should to have been caught (or explained), but wasn’t.

One of the more interesting characters in the novel is Dutch Schultz’s half-brother, “known colloquially as The Portly Gangster,” a cultured, hugely overweight, vain, and greedy man who has spent his life looking for a blue diamond, said to have been Dutch Schultz’s. No matter how hard I try, “the portly gangster” isn’t a likely colloquialism in Big Apple or New Jersey criminal or popular culture of that day. “Fats”, “Fatty” or “Fatso” yes, but “The Portly Gangster”? I can see someone like Margery Allingham using it, as it fits the upper middle class British culture she wrote about back in the 40s, 50s an 60s.

So ... as good a novel as I think Black Shadows is, I can only give it 3 *** . If someone can show me that I’ve gone terribly wrong, I’ll be happy to change my rating. I look forward to seeing some more of Simon Swift’s work.

As boisterous, hair-raising and funny a crime novel as you're likely to read

The title alone was enough to convince me that I’d found a book I wanted to read. What Robert Adams says in his brief introduction clinched it. “The real experts on crime are not the professionals but the criminals themselves. The Really Dreadful Crime Company sets out to fill the gaps left by the police and carries out its own unique, if not always strictly legal, methods of crime intervention. The next best thing to crime prevention is crime reduction, but if you can’t actually reduce it, at least you can try to bring about a better class of crime.”

Middle-aged Joan Johnson, a part-time private investigator, is mugged one day in her hometown of Hull, England. Getting absolutely no satisfaction from the excuse-making, “too busy” police, she sits down with her good friend Muriel and hatches a plan to make Hull a safer place for all its citizens. Reasoning that criminals know more about crime than the police, and that many criminals might want to leave crime, she proposes the following plan. She will found The Really Dreadful Crime Company and use criminals to investigate muggings, break-ins, harassments, crimes against women and other crimes the local police seem too busy to bother with. Though Muriel is dubious, the idea intrigues her. To Joan’s husband Harold, it is an accident waiting to happen.

The result is one of the most rollicking, hair-raising, funny crime novels I’ve read in many a year. Filled with plenty of action, two rival crime families – the Sleights and the Fiddlers – a bakery that employs ex-cons and serves as a front for the Crime Company, a host of loopy characters and incompetent cops, murder, romance and … The best thing to do is get yourself a copy, sit yourself down and enjoy a great adventure that will have you laughing throughout. I can see this yarn as a wonderful adventure / comic movie or TV series. I’d watch it, more than once.

For you Yanks, one of the crime bosses drives a luxury car called a "merc"; that's a "Mercedes", not a Mercury. I can't imagine anyone mistaking a Mercury (called a "Merc" in the USA) for a luxury car. It's (or was) the Ford product positioned between a Ford and a Lincoln.

A clear ***** read.

A glass of sherry, pleasant evening kind of read

Margery Allingham's Mr. Albert Campion was her best-loved character. I remember watching him the PBS Mystery! series eons ago as one of my favorites. I have to admit that until my friend Paul Bauck sent me a box of mysteries with this one in it, I have never read one of her novels. Much the pity.

Mr. Campion's Quarry, co-authored by Youngman Carter and copyrighted in 1970 four years after her death, reminds me of Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey -- refined, cultured upper class dabbling in sleuthing and darned good at it. The kind of book to be read after dinner with a fire going in the fireplace, a glass of sherry and a biscuit or two. A delightful British whodunit whether read or watched.

Delightfully, it's available at amazon.com from their resellers, from $0.01 for used copies (really, that's the price), $4.99 for hard cover, and $2.96 for mass market paperback, which is what I have.

I give this book *****

Living inside a maelstrom haunted by ghosts

James Lee Burke is one of my favorite writers. His prose is eloquent, quotable, and graphic. He views the world from the perspective of the marginalized and maimed and forgotten, some of whom struggle to escape an ugly karma and live lives that are happy and relatively tranquil. Some of them make it, some of them don't, and some of them are left with questions that are never really answered.

In this book, and in many others he has written, the protagonists are two friends, New Iberia, Louisiana cop Dave Robicheaux and his best friend and compatriot Clete (Cletus) Purcel, ex-New Orleans cop, private investigator, decorated Vietnam veteran and alcoholic. I like both of these men ... and they are not easy men to like because of the ghosts that haunt them both, ghosts of their upbringing and Vietnam and alcohol. 

Over the past several novels, Dave has been working on getting his act together -- he has quit drinking, joined AA, and married Molly, a wonderful ex-nun who loves him and refuses to get enmeshed in his torments. Clete is like watching a runaway eighteen wheeler careening down a mountain highway with bad brakes and a lunatic at the wheel. You know there's an awful crash waiting somewhere, but you don't know just where. The guy has an amazing ability to right himself, but you know he's ultimately going off a cliff if he doesn't stop drinking. 

Most of the Dave Robicheaux novels take place in Louisiana. This one takes place in Montana, where Dave and Molly have gone on a fishing vacation, taking Clete along to give him a break,.

"Clete Purcel had heard of people who sleep without dreaming, but either because of the era and neighborhood in which he had grown up, or the later experiences that had come to define his life, he could not think of sleep as anything other than an uncontrolled descent into a basement where the gargoyles turned somersaults like circus midgets .. His dreams clung to his skin like cobweb and followed him into the day... But on this particular morning Clete was determined to leave his past in the past and live in the sunlight from dawn until nightfall and then sleep the sleep of the dead."

But for Clete, there are no breaks, and trouble finds him on the banks of a pristine river, fishing when two men in a bright red diesel extended cab truck pull up and spoil the idyllic scene. It isn't surprising. From there events descend into the dark regions of the soul where hobgoblins dwell and hurting people struggle to live fulfilling lives and try to stay out of the way of greedy, wealthy elites who use evil as a tool to possess more. "When people talk about class war," Dave muses, "they're dead wrong. The war was never between the classes. It was between the have-nots and the have-nots. The people on the hill watched it from afar when they watched it at all." Which, I'd say, is pretty close to the truth.

I found Swan Peak a hypnotic read. It's plot is many-layered, its mood dark and heavy, with glimmers of hope for some of the hopeless characters that one least expects will make it out of the maelstrom that, Burke muses, in which we all live, "an era that is so intense and fierce in its inception ans denouement that it can only be seen correctly inside the mind of a deity."

Yet, in spite of all this, the story ends on a not of hope. Looking at fingerling salmon in a cold stream, Dave knows that when spring comes, the adult salmon will work their way into the main stream and on down to the sea. "All of these things will happen of their own accord, without my doing anything about them, and for some strange reason, I take great comfort in that fact."

A fine novel, if not, like life, always a pleasant one.