The Flimflam Affair by Bill Pronzini

Published by Forge Books on January 15, 2019

I’m a fan of Bill Pronzini’s noir-flavored thrillers and his Nameless Detective series. Pronzini manages to create tight plots and interesting characters with an economy of language that lesser crime writers should study. While Pronzini brings those qualities to the Carpenter & Quincannon series, I am less enthralled by his historical novels. The Flimflam Affair, set in 1897, nevertheless has some entertainment value and ends in a way that might make fans suspect it is the culmination of the series.

John Quincannon has gone north to a mining town to investigate the theft of gold from a railroad safe. He figures out how the thieves managed to open the safe, and thus solves the crime just in time to be summoned back to San Francisco to help his former boss in the Secret Service catch a counterfeiter who supposedly died a decade earlier.

While Quincannon is out of town, an investment broker, hires Sabrina Carpenter to determine whether a spiritualist who summons the dead is a charlatan. The fact that he’s a spiritualist would be a sufficient answer for most people, but the broker’s wife is convinced that communication with the dead is possible. Carpenter takes the case and enlists Quincannon's help when he's back in town. The story turns into a whodunit that the reader will probably solve as easily as Carpenter and Quincannon. More interesting are the secrets used by spiritualists to con their gullible audiences.

The third storyline — and the novel reads like three short stories that were fixed up into a novel — has Quincannon chasing the counterfeiters. The story moves quickly but comes across as something that Pronzini dashed off without putting much effort into the plot. And that may be what happened, because the way the novel ends suggests that he may have written the novel to bring the series to a close in a way that would satisfy fans of the two detectives.

The novel’s virtue lies in the ongoing struggle between Quincannon, who has something of an ego, and his female partner, who might be seen as an early feminist who deserves more glory than Quincannon can easily share. Unfortunately, Carpenter plays a minor role in two of the three stories, which focus on Quincannon’s tenacious investigative style. I probably would have enjoyed the novel more if the two characters had interacted more, but I liked it well enough to commend it to fans of the series. Readers who haven’t read a Carpenter and Quincannon novel probably won’t want to start with this one.

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Give-a-Damn Jones by Bill Pronzini

Published by Tor/Forge Books on May 8, 2018

As much as I love the lyrical descriptions of setting and the complex characterizations found in literary fiction, there is a special place in my heart for storytellers who confront memorable characters with compelling conflicts and resolve their plots without placing an unnecessary word on the page. Not many storytellers have that gift, but the prolific Bill Pronzini is one of them. While Pronzini primarily writes crime fiction, he’s authored a number of westerns, including his most recent, Give-a-Damn Jones.

Owen Hazard, who narrates the first and last chapters in Give-a-Damn Jones, meets Artemas Jones in Butte, where Hazard hopes to find temporary employment as a typesetter before resuming his roaming. Hazard is awestruck; Jones is something of a legend among itinerant typesetters.

When Jones moves on to Box Elder, the story moves with him. Various chapters are narrated by: a ramrod who works for a cantankerous rancher named Elijah Greathouse; the town’s newspaper owner and his son; the town marshal and his deputy; a farmer; a bartender; a saddle maker who is waiting to die at the hand of a newly released prisoner who vowed to kill him; the released prisoner, who is innocent of the crime for which he served time; a painless dentist who sells an elixir and has his own version of a traveling medicine show; and the dentist’s banjo-playing sidekick. And then there’s Greathouse’s daughter, who loves the released prisoner, despite Greathouse’s efforts to keep them apart. Greathouse — who wants to keep all the ranch land in eastern Montana for himself and is trying to drive off settlers and itinerant farmers who have every right to be there — is the novel’s primary villain, although the saddle maker is a close second.

With so many characters, the plot zigs and zags to interesting places before it settles on an ending. Part of the story addresses the conflict between Greathouse and the released prisoner while another involves the conflict between the released prisoner and the saddle maker. Greathouse schemes against the newspaper owner, whose animosity toward Greathouse is evident in frequent editorials. Still another subplot introduces a conflict between the painless dentist and a mean-spirit blacksmith who doesn’t think his tooth extraction was as painless as advertised. Jones stays in the background for much of the story, although he wanders into the plot at opportune moments.

Prozinski doesn’t use his carefully chosen words to describe the big Montana sky or how characters feel about their childhood, but he crafts easily visualized settings and gives each character a distinct personality. Most of his workmanlike prose is used to move the story along its winding path. I always enjoy Prozinski’s novels for exactly that reason: he puts the story first, without neglecting characterization or atmosphere.

Traditional westerns are known for confronting issues of justice and injustice in stark terms, for separating the white hats from the black hats, and Prozinksi furthers that tradition here. While Give-a-Damn Jones isn’t a story of moral ambiguity, and while Jones has the classic humility of a western loner hero, the novel has elements of realism (Greathouse’s daughter isn’t chaste; Jones carouses in bordellos and hates riding horses) that distinguish it from the Westerns of the 1950s. In the end, Give-a-Damn Jones gets my recommendation because Pronzini, as he always does, tells a good story.

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The Other Side of Silence by Bill Pronzini

First published in 2008; published in digital edition by Open Road Media on May 19, 2015

Too many noir writers adopt a style that reads like a parody of noir. Bill Pronzini's style is understated but definitely noir. I always enjoy his books because the plots are believable, the story moves quickly, and the characters have a reasonable amount of depth.

After Rick Fallon's son dies, so does his marriage. He leaves the urban stress of Encino for the emptiness of Death Valley. While hiking, he comes across a woman in distress. Fallon helps her because it feels like the right thing to do.

The woman's son has been taken. Fallon's efforts to find him take him on a tour of the Southwest, from Death Valley to Vegas to San Diego and places like Laughlin and Indio. Pronzini always creates a sense of place without bogging the story down in unnecessary detail. Fallon comes across a mix of believable characters during his travels, most of whom are a mixture of good and bad, as people tend to be.

This isn't so much a "whodunit" as it is a "who did what?" story. The Other Side of Silence is a quiet little novel. I wouldn't call it a thriller or even a suspense novel. The Other Side of Silence is a throwback to the days when crime fiction focused on characters and motivations rather than loving descriptions of weapons, martial arts moves, and ridiculous plots that are meant to be heart-stopping.

To the extent that this is a novel about a man who saves himself by saving others, it might be a little hokey, but by telling a believable story, Pronzini convinced me that the novel is more uplifting than hokey.

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Blue Lonesome by Bill Pronzini

First published in 1995; published digitally by Open Road Media on April 22, 2014

Jim Messenger is a lonely CPA. If he had the talent of Duke Ellington, he would write a ballad called "Blue Lonesome" for the woman who eats alone every night at the Harmony Café. He views her with a sort of "seductive bewilderment." Sensing a kindred spirit, Messenger tries to strike up a friendship. His efforts are rebuffed but he becomes obsessed with her. He soon learns that the woman, who has been living under an alias and withdrawing cash from a safe deposit box to meet her needs, has committed suicide.

Messenger makes it his mission to discover the woman's identity. The quest takes him to Beulah, Nevada, where he meets the woman's sister and learns about her past. Or rather, he learns a horrific version of the woman's past, a version he doesn't believe. That prompts him to search for the truth. Most people in Beulah don't want to know the truth. They are comforted by the lies they tell themselves. For Messenger, the small town of Beulah becomes a dangerous and unwelcoming place.

Bill Pronzini establishes Messenger as a dull man living a lonesome life, a man who is afraid to take chances (and who lost the only love of his life for that reason). Messenger's mission forces him to abandon his safe life and to take risks for the first time. Blue Lonesome is therefore more than a crime novel; it is a story of personal growth. As the story evolves, Messenger begins working as a ranch hand, an experience that transforms him as much as his growing feelings for the woman who employs him.

Blue Lonesome is not the best of Pronzini's crime novels. The crimes are ordinary and the "whodunit" reveal comes as no great surprise, although a wicked twist at the end is satisfying. In many respects, the story is secondary to the novel's other virtues. The atmosphere of a traumatized town that refuses to heal, a town built upon dark secrets and intolerant attitudes, is chilling. Unlike many current crime writers, Ponzini writes tight prose that moves the plot forward at a steady pace. While the characters in Blue Lonesome are better than the story, they are enough to make the novel worth reading.

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The Eye by Bill Pronzini and John Lutz

First published in 1984; published digitally by Open Road Media on April 22, 2014

The Keeper of the Eye kills a drunken old man for committing the sin of rude behavior. He kills a gay man for committing the sin of being gay. He kills his third victim by mistake, but decides the man committed a sin worthy of death by having casual sex with Jennifer Crane. His fourth victim is a woman who is having an affair with an unemployed artist. The killings all occur on the same block. The killer, Lewis Collier, a/k/a the Keeper of Eye, is educated and articulate, but he has the deranged notion that he is the Lord's Avenger. The Eye sees everything and all that it sees is sinful. One of the novel's mysteries is how Collier sees and knows so much about the people on the block (as well as the undercover cops who are roaming about, hoping to find him).

Catching the serial killer is the job of Detective E.L. Oxman. He finds it hard to focus on the case after he meets Jennifer Crane, a woman on whom all men seem to focus. In the tradition of serial killer novels, Collier reveals himself to Oxman without revealing his identity, causing Oxman to worry that the Eye might have his eye on Jennifer Crane. Oxman's wife, on the other hand, is worried that Oxman might have his eye on another woman.

Although most of the novel is written in the third person, Collier tells his story in the first person as he dictates a recording of his thoughts. Bill Pronzini and John Lutz give Collier a distinct voice, educated and chilling, that imparts a creepier tone to his sections of the novel.

The attempt to catch a deranged killer is a familiar theme in crime fiction. This incarnation of that theme is particularly clever. The story winds its way to a twist at the end that I probably should have guessed but didn't. More importantly, The Eye distinguishes itself with its portrayal of the psychological impact of the murders on the intertwined lives of the block's residents. Relationships sour, friendships end, lives change. The disparate characters who live on the block -- including an aspiring actress who shoplifts jewelry to make ends meet, a burglar, a mentally disabled building superintendent who wants to be recognized for his winning streak at gin rummy, and a number of others -- are carefully drawn and generally sympathetic despite their faults, as is Oxman. The ensemble of credible neighborhood characters make The Eye stand out in the world of serial killer crime fiction.

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