We've all been things we aren't anymore

A little more than a year ago, I wrote the following about Richard Aleas's first novel, Little Girl Lost (2004):

The novel ends with the protagonist—who in himself is the best part of the book to that point, a young detective whose inexperience leads him to make dangerous mistakes—making a morally unacceptable choice. He knows he's done wrong, but even so, neither he nor the novel seem to fully admit how wrong his decision is. It made me pull all the way back to questioning the author's ethics, and that's not where you want to leave a reader at the end of a mystery novel.

With his second novel Aleas lays those questions to rest. Songs of Innocence (2007) brings back Aleas's detective John Blake to reveal that not only does Aleas know how bad Blake's decision--to hand a murderer over to mobsters, who will brutally kill her--was, but that Blake knows as well, and that the knowledge has been preying on him for two years.

At the time of Little Girl Lost Blake was a English lit graduate school dropout who'd stumbled into a job as a private detective; his inexperience--which showed in rookie mistakes like his getting clobbered while distracted by his cell phone--put him somewhere between a real gumshoe and one of those ordinary saps so common to noir, the sort of guy who sees his first pistol when the femme fatal hands it to him and tells him who need shooting.

In Songs of Innocence, Aleas is more interested in what the title implies, the essential innocence that John Blake's namesake posited centuries ago as the opposite of experience. For despite the guilt that torments Blake, he remains an innocent, perpetually surprised by the darkness and depths of human life. It's not that he's always thinking the best of people--he has, after all, worked as a private detective--but that when he thinks the worst, it's almost never bad enough. Combined with his inexperience, that innocence is a volatile mix. He's innocent enough to believe that actions taken in good faith will have good outcomes, and he trusts his instincts too much, jumping to unsupported conclusions. In a violent world, those conclusions all too often lead to violence, the consequences of which are unpredictable, dangerous, and, like the consequences of Blake's long-ago bad decision from the first novel, irrevocable.

Songs of Innocence sets the stage with a magnificent opening line:

I was a private detective once. But then we've all been things we aren't anymore.

In large part because of his guilt over his role in the murderer's death in Little Girl Lost, Blake has left the agency he worked for in favor of a job as an administrative assistant for Columbia's writing program, a job that allows him to take writing classes on the side. His girlfriend, Dorrie, a fellow writing student and part-time escort, is dead, an apparent suicide--but Blake isn't convinced. He has been fighting suicidal depression himself, and they had a last-chance phone call pact; he can't believe she would have killed herself without at least telling him first.

So Blake begins doing what any bereaved lover with detective skills would do: he starts digging. He meets Dorrie's employers and customers, and soon he's diving deep into the world of New York prostitution, with all the gangsters and violence that come with it. He quickly becomes unhealthily obsessed, as if solving Dorrie's murder could still save her, and maybe even clear the stain of his earlier mistake as well; his intentions are noble, but he refuses to acknowledge that sometimes even the most dedicated knight can do nothing to right the wrongness of the world.

To make it worse, there are real questions surrounding Dorrie's death, and the more Blake investigates, the more he is trapped in them, with nothing to do but keep struggling. In scenes reminiscent of the fever dreams of Mark Smith's The Death of the Detective, he sinks lower and lower until he becomes a fugitive himself, huddled all day on a Central Park boulder, waiting for the welcoming anonymity of night so that he can recommence his investigation.

As Blake's mistakes--all committed in good faith, and several with horrible, jaw-dropping outcomes--pile up, it's hard to imagine how Aleas is going to extricate him. The consequences he's facing are too severe to be neatly escaped. That Aleas succeeds in bringing the novel to a satisfying close without denying either his characters or the reality they live in is impressive, and it sets Songs of Innocence well above the usual run of crime novels. I think it's the best book Hard Case Crime has published, and it has me really looking forward to Aleas's next book.

A recipe for restless sleep

{Stacey: Let's read Chilling Ghost Stories!
Carson: How about we read Flowers instead?}

This is a new version of a longtime family favorite, guaranteed to produce a frothy mix of vaguely frustrating and disturbing dreams, full of shadowy characters, betrayals, and the low hum of constant danger.

Restless Sleep

{Ingredients}

1 spy novel, all but the last hundred pages read
1 breathlessly anticipated seventh volume of an unprecedentedly popular children's series
1 dry gin martini, up, with olive

{Preparation}

Begin reading the remaining pages of SPY NOVEL in time to be finished by 9:30. Set aside and let rest for fifteen minutes (It can later be lent to one's father.). Prepare and drink MARTINI. When clock reads 10:00, settle into comfortable reading position and begin reading BREATHLESSLY ANTICIPATED CHILDREN'S BOOK. Read one hundred pages, or until clock says 11:00. Set book aside (Remainder can be enjoyed as leftovers for up to three days.). Sleep; dreams should follow apace.

As an adaptation of a family staple, this recipe is fairly forgiving--quantities and times need not be exact for you to achieve the desired result. In a pinch, substitutions can be allowed--I find that Luc Sante's Low Life, Mark Smith's The Death of the Detective, Patricia Highsmith's Ripley novels, or Ecclesiastes work well in place of the spy novel, while the role of the children's book can be reasonably approximated by Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, the collected works of Charles Schulz, or, oddly enough, any of the novels of Haruki Murakami. There is no substitute for the martini.

The Death of the Detective

On the recommendation of my former coworker, Jim, I picked up the Northwestern University Press reissue of Mark Smith's The Death of the Detective (1974) expecting a dark noir tale. And that's what I got . . . for a while.

The Death of the Detective is set in Chicago at some vague point between the late fifties and the closing of the Riverview amusement park in 1967. The postwar boom has faded and is beginning to be replaced by urban decay, white flight, racial and ethnic strife, and a creeping sense that the city is beginning an irreversible decline. It opens with a madman intent on murdering a dying Lake Forest millionaire, and we quickly meet the detective who will oppose him, Arnold Magnuson. In his fifties and essentially retired, Magnuson is famous for the detective agency he founded, which now makes most of its money supplying the ubiquitous Magnuson Men, a sort of combination of Andy Frain ushers and the Pinkertons. Called in by the millionaire, who anticipates the murderer's arrival, Magnuson finds himself deeply enmeshed in what quickly becomes a confusing web of murder and deception.

But that's just the basic plot that gets the book moving; after a while, it becomes clear that the plot is the least important part of The Death of the Detective. To have a sense of the thick, textured concoction this novel really is, you need to blend that story with Carl Sandburg's hog butcher, steep the result for a few decades in a broth of Dickens, Kafka, and Melville, and then salt it with a bit of the prose styles of James Jones, Nelson Algren, and W. M. Spackman. From Dickens, Smith takes a love of the grotesque and a fascination with the patterns of urban life: the unpenetrated neighborhoods rife with secrets, the endless hiding places to be found there, the unexpected and unsettling meetings with people one has known in other contexts. Kafka supplies the gaping horror at the fact that we can never quite do what we mean to do, perpetually distracted trying to catch up to what we should have done already--overlaid with the gnawing fear that there is no hope for any true justice because guilt is showered liberally on us all. Melville, meanwhile, provides the unstinted ambition and raging, unbridled prose: the full, complete story of every part of this brawling city can be told, and Smith is determined to make the attempt.

So he puts us perpetually, restlessly, in motion. We travel to the 31st Street Beach, a meat-packing plant, the Gold Coast, a West Loop Skid Row, Evanston, Edgebrook, Uptown, Bughouse Square, a topless bar in unincorporated Niles, Rogers Park, Bronzeville, the West Side, North Avenue Beach--the list goes on, covering every conceivable Chicagoland location. Yet somehow Smith never gives the sense that he's checking items off a list; rather, the wanderings of his characters seem to make a crazed sort of sense, like they, too, need to see the city as a whole in order to begin to understand how its corruption, decay, and sickness have damaged them--and yet how its underlying vitality has enabled them to keep up the fight.

Throughout, the characters see Chicago in its past and present incarnations simultaneously, casting dark shadows on its uncertain future:

What a change from the old days when ironmongers and rag-pickers would cruise up and down the alleys in horse and wagons or those high ancient trucks like ornate indestructible stagecoaches, each man with his own unique, recognizable, unintelligible cry; as would the trucks and wagons delivering coal and hawking whatever fruits and vegetables were in season, produce from the truck farms just to the north and west of the city and no that far from the neighborhood. And the residents themselves, man, woman, and child, would walk the alleys, preferring them to the sidewalks or the streets, using them like a secret network of footpaths and short cuts that traversed the neighborhood.

Throughout, there is a sense that the city may have in the past made sense, with everyone and everything in its place--but the future is uncertain, its categories shifting in unexpected ways. Smith spends a lot of time exploring the city's simmering racial and ethnic divisions, and his characters find themselves frequently confused both about their own identities and where those identities, if it's possible to stabilize them at all, could fit in the ever-shifting mosaic of the city. Large-scale change is on the way, and even the vague intimations of it the characters feel are unmooring them. At times, it seems all of Chicago is slowly going mad.

Smith crams the book's 600 oversized pages with description and digression, and he drags dozens of characters through multiple overlapping plots. I can't deny that The Death of the Detective could have used some editing: some portions drag, some characters never amount to much, and some scenes are repetitive. But Smith's ambition is so vast, and the tapestry he weaves so detailed and compelling, that I'm willing to forgive him the occasional lapse. I imagine that the book's length is one of the reasons it stayed out of print for so long--upon its release in 1974 it was a best seller and a National Book Award finalist, but it spent more than twenty-five years out of print. It's tough to print such a big book economically, and it can be similarly tough to convince readers to pick up such a huge book by a little-known author.

I think that neglect is also a reflection of Chicago's second-city status: had this book been set in New York, I have no doubt that it would have remained in print and would be regarded as a true American classic. But that's fine by me. Everyone knows New York's glories; us Chicagoans get to keep many of our city's treasures to ourselves, secret recompenses for living through February and August. The Death of the Detective definitely belongs on that list, Chicagoans.

[I see the writer of Neglected Books agrees with me; you can find some more information there about the book's critical reception.]