The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon

The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon
A junkie is murdered. His next door neighbor in the flophouse motel is down-and-out police detective Landsman, who wakes up beside “the shotglass he’s been dating recently.” Turns out the junkie was shot in the back of the head execution style by a small caliber automatic. And since all of the jews who live in Sitka, Alaska only have another few months before they are exiled into a world that will not take them, Landsman has to move fast.

Thus begins The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, a fascinating alternate history noir detective novel which ends up being a meditation on some of the concepts of judiasm and the self-made traps people and peoples find themselves unable to escape.

As a noir detective novel, this is high quality stuff, which embraces some cliché while defying others. As science fiction alternative history, the novel works well. As a piece of prose, the novel is beautifully written, with more great sentences packed into many paragraphs than many writers achieve in a lifetime. As a truly great novel wrestling with huge themes… Well, it tries quite hard. I’d be curious to know what others think, particular any jewish friends.

I suspect that Chabon may have been seen as a race traitor or an anti-semite by some; I did not find that to be the case, but then, I don’t actually know much about Jewish orthodoxy, and finding fault in one of the world’s major religions isn’t something I’m bothered by.

A Deadly Affair at Bobtail Ridge by Terry Shames

A Deadly Affair at Bobtail Ridge by Terry Shames

Terry’s newest book is more sure-footed, denser, and darker than Samuel Craddock’s previous escapades have been. Samuel himself is a more nuanced character here (he makes the occasional mistake, and has moments of self-doubt.) Feels like we’re moving away from the small-town cozy and towards a more mature and complex mystery. Though there are very few surprises here, because the whodoneit part (and even the location of the body) is telegraphed quite heavily, there is enough other stuff going on here that I was engaged the whole ride. There’s still a little bit of art, a lot of cinnamon rolls and iced tea, some horses and cows, and some Texas dialect. But mostly, we’ve got a chief-of-police tracking down a couple of (long cold) murders and digging up dirt (literally!) on the moderately sordid past of an old friend.

I enjoyed this one a lot and am eager to read the next one!

A Purple Place for Dying by John D. MacDonald

Travis McGee, wanderer, knight, poet and solver of problems is back! In this installment, written in about 1965, he witnesses the murder of a beautiful stranger and is drawn into the complicated web of connections that makes up small town life. Along the way he kills a few people, solves some crimes, wisecracks, and saves a damsel in distress by teaching her about love. Standard MacDonald fare, but lots of fun.

The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper by John D. MacDonald

The second John MacDonald novel I read was every bit as quick, but a good deal less interesting than The Deep Blue Goodbye.

Travis McGee goes to a small community in Florida where a beautiful young woman is busy flushing her life down the drain. Investigations, fist-fights, drinking, and boat chases ensue. McGee nearly finds love but is thwarted.

Don’t get me wrong, this is still first class pulp ripoff-noir stuff. It’s just that first class tripe is still tripe.

Entertaining, fast, violent, and characterized by the same sorts of “look at the wreckage of our modern lives” observations as MacDonald’s other work. Great for students of the genre, largely already lost in the back lots of used bookstores for everyone else.

The Deep Blue Goodbye by John D MacDonald

The Deep Blue Goodbye is cool. It’s always fun when you get introduced to a new dirty pleasure you never knew existed. Thanks to friends B & HP in Vancouver, I’m now aware of John D MacDonald the way I’m aware of masturbation, s’mores, or clove cigarettes. None of them really do you any good, but they can be a great deal of fun.

MacDonald is most comparable to either Raymond Chandler or Elmore Leonard. This novel, starring his famous character, Travis McGee, takes place among the marinas, hotel rooms, and bars of steamy Fort Lauderdale and the Keys in the confusing, fading days of the late nineteen sixties. Hot babes, scuzzy criminals, and the wise cracking hero with a knight errant’s heart fill out it’s too short two hundred pages. This is pulp fiction at it’s best—deeply derivative noir soaked in the sunscreen and cheap gin of the Florida Keys.

For my money, MacDonald is closer to Chandler than Leonard. His dialog isn’t so cropped or trendy as the latter, and his plots and characters are more reminiscent of Chandler’s LA crowd than of the mean streets of Detroit.

There’s plenty of sex, a little bit of violence, and lots of fine quipping to enjoy here. I’ll not bother with a plot summary. If you’ve read the above, you already know the kinds of streets you’ll be winding your way along here.

Highly enjoyable, and I found this morning that MacDonald has about ten or twenty other paperbacks available at the local Half Price Books for about $1.25 each. I just bought them all.

Here’s to guilty pleasures! From MacDonald, through the mouth of McGee, a little bit that could almost be Updike:

“Bless them all, the forlorn little rabbits. They are the displaced persons of our emotional culture. They are ravenous for romance, yet settle for what they call making out. Their futile, acne-pitted men drift out of high school into a world so surfeited with unskilled labor there is a competition for bag-boy jobs in the supermarkets. They yearn for security, but all they can have is what they make for themselves, chittering little flocks of them in the restaurants and stores, talking of style and adornment, dreaming of the terribly sincere stranger who will come along and lift them out of the gypsy life of the two-bit tip and the unemployment, cut a tall cake with them, swell them up with sassy babies, and guide them masterfully into the shoal water of the electrified house, where everybody brushes after every meal. But most of the wistful rabbits marry their unskilled men, and keep right on working. And discover the end of the dream. They have been taught that if you are sunny, cheery, sincere, group-adjusted, popular, the world is yours, including barbecue pits, charge plates, diaper service, friends for dinner, washer-dryer combinations, color slides of the kiddies on the home projector and eternal whimsical romance with the crinkly smiles and Rock Hudson dialog. So they all come smiling and confident and unskilled into a technician’s world, and in a few years they learn that it is all going to be grinding and hateful and brutal and precarious. These are the slums of the heart. Bless the bunnies. These are the new people and we are making no place for them. We hold the dream in front of them like a carrot, and finally say sorry you can’t have any. And the schools where we teach them non-survival are gloriously architectured. They will never live in places so fine unless they contact something incurable.”