Cheap as Beasts by Jon Wilson
5 stars - Highly Recommended by Kate
Pages: 242
Released: Feb 2015
Guest review by Kate Vane
Declan Colette is a private
investigator in 1950s LA. When a young woman is killed on her way to an
appointment with him, he comes under suspicion. To extricate himself, he must
solve the mystery of her death, while entangling himself with a powerful
family, obstructive police, resentful rivals and local gangsters. And a
redhead. But the redhead is male.
This is the setup for Cheap as Beasts. It’s classic noir in
the Chandler vein and yet it isn’t. It faces the eternal challenge for the
genre novel – give us what we know, what we want, but give us something
surprising, moving, new. And for me this book really does.
Everything about it is
subtle. The prose is clever and laconic. The characters are all fluent in
subtext. Colette has the obligatory world-weary take on the world. People may
think they can take him in, but he’ll work out what’s going on. When he quotes
Shakespeare he doesn’t stop to explain it. You’ll get it. Or you can look it
up. (I had to look it up.)
It’s clear that, whatever
Colette is telling you, there’s a lot more he’s keeping back. Colette’s ironic
detachment comes, you sense, from a feeling that he’s living in a world he no
longer believes in.
The book takes on themes
that are controversial or ambiguous or sublimated in Chandler. When Colette
sees a black lawn jockey, an image taken from Chandler’s The High Window (okay, I had to look that up too), he thinks of the
humiliation of the black servant who has to polish it. It’s the same world, but
from a different perspective.
Ideas of masculinity are
questioned. Men judge each other, not only on their words or their strength,
but on their war record. Colette’s sexuality is acknowledged, with varying
degrees of acceptance – as long as he can pass those other tests.
World War Two and its
aftermath are at the heart of this story. The man Colette loved was killed in
the war. Clubs and bars are renamed to conceal their Japanese ownership. The
case Colette is investigating turns in on itself, testing family alliances
against wartime bonds. War and loss subtly suffuse everything.
Chandler himself wrote
about how he struggled against the constraints of genre. This book, in turn,
takes on Chandler and creates something new.
Kate Vane writes crime
and literary fiction. Her latest novel is Not the End. She lives on the Devon coast in the UK.
No comments:
Post a Comment