Murder Is Their Business
By WILLIAM A. HENRY III
WHAT: FIVE ECLECTIC MYSTERY NOVELS
WHO: JAMES LEE BURKE, COLIN DEXTER, H.R.F. KEATING, EMMA LATHEN AND ED MCBAIN
THE BOTTOM LINE: Masters -- and a mistress -- demonstrate the genre's range.
To those who still don't care who killed Roger Ackroyd, all murder mysteries look pretty much the same. A corpse is uncovered early. Midway through, a prime suspect emerges, only to develop an unshakable (or is it?) alibi. At the climax, a recklessly brave detective confronts the cunning culprit and somehow elicits a confession. Any detours along this well-traveled route are apt to involve the jiggery-pokery of disguises, coincidences and undisclosed facts. To aficionados, however, the mystery is not one genre but many, and similarities of plot are far outweighed by differences of setting, texture and world view. The range of the form is demonstrated by five new novels, each from an acknowledged master of his or her own niche. One is really a business novel; another ruminates on the inescapable history of the American South; a third is a courtroom thriller; a fourth is a classical puzzle mystery; and the last celebrates the blue-collar work ethic among police.
Right on the Money (Simon & Schuster; 255 pages; $20) is the 22nd novel about investment-banker-cum-detective John Putnam Thatcher written under the pseudonym Emma Lathen by Mary Jane Latsis, an economist, and Martha Henissart, an attorney. All the plots center on financial skulduggery, and almost invariably the villain is the least developed principal character, typically a faceless mid-level manager who shows unrecognized ingenuity in concocting a scam. The team's prose is always easy and mildly amusing. While offering less psychological insight than the average TV sitcom, it convincingly conveys the general corporate mindset and the nubby details of an industry, this time home appliances. The liveliest scenes depict Thatcher's bickering colleagues; the folkways and preening of high financiers are observed with utter lack of awe.
James Lee Burke won an Edgar award from the Mystery Writers of America for Black Cherry Blues, a 1989 novel about Cajun detective Dave Robicheaux, a recovering alcoholic and avenging angel. There's a New Age-ish twist to most of Burke's work. In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead (Hyperion; 344 pages; $19.95) is haunted by not one but two ghosts: a black man Robicheaux saw murdered as a teenager whose corpse resurfaces, and a Civil War officer sometimes accompanied by battered but unbowed troops. Throw in the Mafia, visiting Hollywood moviemakers, a serial killer and such fillips as Robicheaux's adopted Salvadoran daughter and pet three-legged raccoon, named Tripod, and one has a gumbo to clog any narrative. It doesn't, because Burke writes prose as moody and memory-laden as his region.
Ed McBain is better known for police procedurals, but his flights of fancy are more engaging in novels about defense attorney Matthew Hope, a Northerner transplanted to, and not enchanted by, ticky-tacky southwest Florida. All the books have nursery-rhyme or fairy-tale titles and themes. The 10th, Mary, Mary (Warner; 372 pages; $19.95), concerns a retired teacher turned avid gardener whose yard contains pretty maids all in a row -- three young girls in shallow graves. Hope refuses to defend anyone he does not believe is innocent; here he has only blind faith to go on. McBain skillfully blends abnormal psychology and tongue-in-cheek contrivance. But he is as convincing as Scott Turow or John Grisham when he puts his lawyer, deadpan, before a judge and jury.
Colin Dexter is Britain's most esteemed crime writer these days, with six Gold and Silver Dagger awards (trans-Atlantic counterparts to the Edgars) for his novels about Chief Inspector Morse, a donnish Oxford policeman. Not for Dexter the flawed antihero of most modern fiction, even genre fiction; Morse may be overly fond of a drink and a cuddle with a female stranger, but his intelligence makes him seem omnipotent. In The Way Through the Woods (Crown; 296 pages; $20), he deciphers puzzles within puzzles within puzzles, from abstruse poetry to British-style crosswords, in pursuit of a missing Swedish woman and a vanished pornographer who may be connected. By the end the story is so baroque and self-referential that a reader aiming at a solution may be a whit confused. But Dexter plays fair and provides colorful moments and witty asides for those who just want to be buoyed along.
H.R.F. Keating's novels about Bombay policeman Ganesh Ghote are masterpieces of imagination -- not least because several were written before Keating had ever set foot in India. While Ghote will always fret on a tight budget, Keating ponders the impact of wealth on a similar cop in The Rich Detective (Warner; 248 pages; $18.95). When Bill Sylvester wins a Spanish lottery and becomes a millionaire, he chucks his post in the north of England, only to realize he misses it. He gives away money, but the people he would like to have it don't want it, and the people who want it don't deserve or appreciate it. He resumes prying, on his own time, to catch a man he believes is befriending old people and murdering them for bequests. His own tabloid celebrity gets in the way.
Both cop and con man are vividly sketched, and the cat-and-mouse game between them -- one willing to do anything for money, the other ruing the day he got any -- is worthy of the sort of Victorian novel suggested by the setting and chatty prose. Keating may have meant to get away from the mystery- as-travelogue. He has created a man so interestingly cranky and idiosyncratic that one ends the volume, as its hero heads to Australia, feeling sure a new travelogue series is in the offing. In a season bringing the greatest abundance of high-quality mysteries for some years, The Rich Detective is the richest.