Sunset Swing - Ray Celestin

 Sunset Swing is the closing number of his City Blues Quartet.   It's Christmas 1967.   Ida Young has recently retired, selling her PI business in LA.   Kerry Gaudet, a USAAF nurse, facially scarred by napalm, has flown in from Vietnam to find her missing brother.   Nick Licata, boss of the LA Mob, calls in fixer Dante Sanfelippo to find his missing son.   Louis Armstrong flies in to perform on Steve Allen's Christmas special.

Armstrong and Ida are friends from way back in New Orleans.   Dante and Ida have worked together before.   Ida has retired and Dante is about to, hoping to exchange his wholesale booze business for a vineyard in the Valley, deeds to be signed on December 26 - coincidentally the day Licata Jnr is due to answer bail, otherwise his father is out half a million bucks.   Kerry, of course, only has a few days leave.   So the clock is running from the outset, always a bonus in any thriller.

Meanwhile the Night Slayer is prowling the city.   He might have killed a young woman called Audrey.   Dante doesn't think so, given that she was Riccardo Licata's secretary.   Ida has no interest - until the cops find her name and former office number in Audrey's handwriting.   Slowly, gradually, the threads are drawn together to unpick a massive conspiracy, government agency against government agency, and a horrible truth becomes apparent.   The CIA are using Faron, the legendary killer Ida almost caught in postwar New York in The Mobster's Lament (see review below) twenty years earlier.  Faron is a serial killer but he is not the Night Slayer.   The feds are using him to track down and kill the handful of losers who might be the Night Slayer.   Kerry Guadet's brother Stevie is one of them.

It's complex, maybe slightly far-fetched, though much of conspiracy angle is fact-based; but Ray Celestin has the writing skills to pull it off.   Sunset Swing reads like a breeze (like the Santa Ana which is fanning LA wildfires in the novel), pacy, punchy, noir when its needs to be, and yet always compassionate.   Dante builds a touching relationship with a stray dog he has picked up along the way, Ida with Kerry; and Ida's longtime friendship with Satch has always been a welcome distraction.   Celestin even gives us a musical motif - a tune I don't know by Chet Baker - which ends with a beautiful Christmas twist right before the shooting starts.

The Quartet has plenty of through-lines but unlike so many epics you don't need to read them in order.  I didn't.   Each novel stands alone, has its own themes and developments.   Jump in with the first one you come across - and enjoy.

The Second Murderer - Denise Mina

 The Second Murderer is a Philip Marlowe novel.   Yes, that Philip Marlowe, the Raymond Chandler one, continued by the fabulous Denise Mina.   It is, unsurprisingly, fabulous.   Mina does not put a foot wrong in recreating the mean streets of LA, the Forties repartee, the tone of the original.   Tone is the key, because Chandler was a lot more cutting in his moral judgments than most people remember.

I've read at least one other Marlowe continuation, the one where he comes out of retirement, but Mina is wise to stick to the Forties.  This is because she is so damn good at establishing period.  I thought her Rizzio was superb and am looking to pick up her Savanarola take, Three Fires.   It doesn't have to be half a millennium ago for Mina, her Peter Manuel novel, The Long Drop, was equally convincing.

Here, Marlowe is summoned by an evil millionaire to track down his errant daughter and sole heiress.   Marlowe finds her dabbling on the art scene - acting as guide for an Abstract Expressionist exhibition for a gallerist who is a brilliant amalgam of Peggy Guggenheim and Big Edie Bouvier in Grey Gardens (and she's just a walk-on character).   From there Marlowe is drawn to the Lesbian scene.   He is in conflict and unofficial partnership with female detective Anne Riordan whose advances, professional and personal, he has previously spurned, and butts heads with Moochie Ruud, rising star of the LAPD thanks to marrying the boss's unappealling daughter.

Key to the book's success is Mina's ability to pull off Chandler's trick - the murder and who did it is only the device that brings the characters together.   It doesn't matter who dies or who did it.   I only finished reading yesterday morning and I have already forgotten who did it.   Interestingly I do remember who the titular second murderer was, but never guessed whilst reading.   Brilliant, I do hope Mina writes more Marlowe.

The City and the Pillar - Gore Vidal

 The City and the Pillar is both a roman a clef and perhaps the first American homosexual novel, certainly the first one to break through from underground genre to mainstream.  Considering it came out in 1948, when the author was only 22, I find Vidal surprisingly frank and yet mature enough to know that his readers know perfectly well what he is talking about.

It is not in any sense a novel for gay readers only.  Jim Willard is another ordinary middle class youth in Virginia, living with his parents and siblings, who happens to be good at tennis and not much else.  His best friend is Bob Ford (great choice of name, by the way), who dreams of running off to sea.  Immediately before Bob makes his escape, the boys spend a night out in the woods where one thing leads to another.  Bob becomes Jim's epitome of manhood and love - but Bob is away at sea.  Ultimately Jim follows, without much direction but always in search of Bob.  He joins the merchant marine too but after an embarrassing foursome in Alaska he jumps ship and ends up teaching tennis in Hollywood and living with the clandestinely gay movie star Ronald Shaw.  Then he travels with the failed novelist and scriptwriter Paul Sullivan, who introduces Jim to a older woman, Maria Verlaine, the sort of woman he can love but not physically, which is what she wants and needs from him.

Then comes the war.  Jim enlists but never makes it overseas.  He falls ill and is discharged with rheumatoid arthritis, the result of an infection that nearly killed him.  He naturally re-evaluates his life.  He gets in touch with all the people he has let down and spends the rest of the book catching up and resolving issues as far as he can.  Finally he makes it home to Virginia, and faces up to the last remaining issue,,,

I've previously read only Vidal's vast historical series Narrative of Empire, written at the other end of his distinguished career.  The City and the Pillar is slight by comparison, yet it is deeply felt and extraordinarily vivid.  It captures the fragmentation of lives torn between public and private.  It celebrates the lonely ones who search for their dream, be it Shaw's desire to be a proper stage actor, Sullivan's ache for success as well as reputation, or Maria and Jim's simple search for the one who will love them back.  It is enlivened by comic moments - the gay set clinging to one another because nobody else wants them, camping it up and gossiping cattily.

It's a tremendous achievement by a great writer.

The Black Eyed Blonde - Benjamin Black

Black's latest book stays in the post-war decades but switched from Dublin to Los Angeles and revives Raymond Chandler's legendary private dick, Philip Marlowe (and also, apparently, uses a projected title from Chandler's notebooks).  Chandler's books were never about plot, other than that it should be impenetrable, and all about tone.  Black manages to capture both.  Oddly, given John Banville's eminence as a writer of literary fiction, he seems to miss out on the zing of Chandler's prose.  Observations on twinkling streetlights are all very well but they don't come near "Down these mean streets".  With that single reservation, though, this book is a joy.  I wouldn't like to see Black abandon Quirke altogether but I would relish another trip to LA land.