Читать книгу The Bessie Blue Killer - Richard A. Lupoff - Страница 5

INTRODUCTION

by Jane Langton

A suspense novelist sometimes carves out a special niche, a personal space, by sticking to one subject or setting.

Tony Hillerman writes about crimes on Indian reservations in New Mexico, Emma Lathen about shady manipulations on Wall Street, Jonathan Gash about hanky-panky among dealers in antiques.

Richard Lupoff’s bailiwick is all his own, the world of the nostalgic collector. His protagonist, Hobart Lindsey, works for International Surety, an insurance company that must shell out when the valuable collectibles it insures are stolen—rare comic books or classic cars or antique airplanes. Lindsey does his best to save the company enormous sums by tracking down the lost articles himself. Along the way, the reader is treated to fascinat­ing lore about Batman and the Human Torch in The Comic Book Killer, a parade of glamorous automobiles in The Classic Car Killer and a succession of Zeros, Focke-Wulfs and B-17 bombers in The Bessie Blue Killer. Of fabulous value and heavily insured, the comic books and the magnificent cars and the heroic war planes vanish or are threatened, and International Surety sends Lindsey on the road to find out what happened. Like any ordinary hard-boiled private investigator, he must work his way past many a dangerous obstacle before tracking down the clever deceiver at last.

Along the way, bobbing up in Lindsey’s mind during his pursuit of lost valuables, are remembered fragments of the pop culture of the thirties, forties, fifties and sixties. Walking into villainous bar or sleazy hotel, he is reminded of old films with Victor Mature and Jane Russell, or Jack Webb in “Dragnet,” or the music of Miles Davis, or the jingle of Gary Cooper’s spurs as he saunters into the Last Chance Saloon.

There was a TV set above the bar. It looked like something out of the Lyndon Johnson era. It was silent and dark. Maybe they’d left it up as a memorial to the Great Society.

Swift images like these enliven the action, evoking layer upon layer of time. The sense of a superimposed present and past is not easily come by in a thriller. Most of the characters in a mystery novel inhabit a flickering now. Lupoff’s have histo­ries that sometimes coincide with our own. We too remember Billie Holiday. The intersection of the reading self with the invented one brings the fictional person sharply alive.

Another specialty of Lupoff’s, part of the niche he inhabits, is the setting, his home territory, the California cities of Berke­ley and Oakland. Hobart Lindsey moves in a landscape that rises vividly around us as we follow him—the sun falls behind the East Bay hills, fifty thousand people roar in the Oakland Coliseum, the morning fog descends on Berkeley, kids mill around on a dangerous street in downtown Richmond, a gray cat strolls down a gangplank to a wooden pier on the Oakland Estuary.

He drove to Oakland…and found the Embarcadero. Roberts’ address was in a block of modernistic condos opposite a railroad track and an industrial slum. But the condos themselves looked expensive, and with the estuary on the other side, it seemed a safe bet that the occupants wiped the sight of the factories and ware­houses from their minds when they got home at night.

This is more than pleasant description, it’s social commen­tary, evoking a complex image in depth, reminiscent of the way Raymond Chandler writes about Los Angeles.

The landscape isn’t merely a background against which events happen. Rather it has an organic relation to the story, which grows out of it like a strangling vine wrapping around the legs of Hobart Lindsey and Morton Kleiner and Aurora Delano and Desmond Richelieu and Lieutenant High.

Something else that sets Richard Lupoff’s stories apart is his profound interest in the color of his characters’ skins, his close examination of a multiracial metropolis. It’s not simply his white protagonist’s love for Marvia Plum, an attractive and brilliant black woman. It’s his keen depiction of the interaction of black and white at every level.

A poignant example is the moment when Lindsey introduces Marvia to his mother on the last page of The Comic Book Killer. Throughout the story as it unfolds we have become familiar with Mother, lost in a dream world of the 1950s, completely out of touch with the present. Through her son’s concern and sympathy we too are committed to her welfare. It is all the more shocking when she greets Marvia as if she were the new cleaning woman:

“You must be the new girl,” she said. “1 try to keep up with the house but it’s such a problem with a little one underfoot and my husband away at war. It’s hard to get a good colored girl to clean up. I hope you’ll work out better than the last one we had.”

It hurts. There’s a real pang. And pangs are few in detective fiction, in spite of the proliferation of murders as we flip the pages.

Lost collectibles, nostalgia, Berkeley and Oakland, race rela­tions—these are all part of Lupoff’s special niche. But the prin­cipal occupant is Hobart Lindsey himself, a man of stature. As a character, he is both real and good, no mean trick. Lindsey moves through Lupoff’s chapters cautiously, making his way thoughtfully from point to point, carrying no gun:

“Well, what about your pistol permit?”

“Don’t have a permit. Don’t have a pistol. Don’t know how to use one. Don’t want to learn.”

“That’s the trouble with you minimalists. Nothing we can threaten to take away from you. How are we supposed to keep you in line?”

Unarmed, his courage is the greater, if more wary. Inevitably, he is attacked. Violence swirls around him, and he goes down. When he gets up, he doesn’t reach for the gin and leap into his car. He has a terrible headache. But his limited strength is balanced by intelligence and a politely ironic view of the world. His likableness grows on us, turning into admiration. Lindsey, we discover with gratitude, is a man of compassion. For in­stance, after learning that a child has been killed in Richmond:

He gave it up and turned off the TV and climbed into bed and stared at the ceiling some more.

Eventually, God sent morning to make things better.

All the more satisfying in contrast with Lindsey’s humanity is the ghastliness of some of the other characters. It’s always a pleasure to read about a genuine bastard:

Lindsey got himself an English muffin and a cup of coffee. Mueller ordered bacon and eggs up and a prune Danish, and proceeded to dip the Danish in the egg yolk.… He hadn’t shaved and a yellow blob adhered to the stubble just below his lip.…

Lindsey wanted to limit the conversation to business. “Look, fill me in on Bessie Blue.…”

“Bessie Blue? Name of a B-17, I don’t know what the name means. Ask a jig and see if he’ll tell you.”

Lindsey felt his jaw clench. “Please, Elmer.”

“…Oh, right. 1 keep forgetting what a good liberal boy you are, Hobie. Don’t ask a jig.” Mueller looked at Lindsey with something that might have been an impish grin. “Ask an American Africoon.”

The opposite of a good hate is a good love. Sex pops up frequently in Lupoff’s novels. But just as his violence is tem­pered with pity, his bedroom scenes are laced with tenderness. They are not slipped in merely to titillate. They advance the story and deepen our commitment to two admirable human beings.

It’s trite to say that people read mysteries because the real world is a confusing and chaotic place, and that in these books, at least, order is restored, justice handed down and evil van­quished. Indeed, in Lupoff’s novels the world is plentifully bad, but in the person of Hobart Lindsey simple integrity lends a saving grace, along with a naïveté, a doggedness, a masculine kind of graciousness and even the love of Mother.

In the words of Lindsey’s lover, Berkeley Homicide Investi­gator Marvia Plum, “We can’t let the haters win.”

More power, then, to the good guys, in fiction as in life. Sometimes, perhaps, they are one and the same. Is Richard Lupoff really Hobart Lindsey? If so, it would support my Nice-ness Theory of Literary Authorship: good books are written by good people, because only they have the gift of empathy, of understanding others, of writing with sympathy. The actual character of writer Richard Lupoff backs up my theory bril­liantly, since it is just as superior as that of his creation.

Unfortunately my theory breaks down altogether in consid­ering the entire history of literature in the English language, since so many great works of fiction were written, as everyone knows, by really rotten human beings.