Summer two-fer
With lackluster options, time to dust a few greats off the bookshelf

by Jeffrey Mannix

I’ve been through and discarded at least a half-dozen June releases from New York publishers, reading sometimes a single page before finding such mediocrity that I tossed each aside until I exhausted all the June releases.

So I turned to my bookcases and precarious pillars of books to find a book, no matter its age, with a story I have etched in my mind. There were many, but I selected two, and I bring them enthusiastically to this month’s “Murder Ink.”  

It’s like asking a mother which of her children is her favorite, or if a 1959 bottle of Henri Jayer Richebourg Grand Cru wine is better than a 1971 Château Mouton Rothchild. And so, Lori Rader-Day’s “Little Pretty Things,” released in 2015, and Lynne Raimondo’s “Dante’s Dilemma,” also from 2015, are equally hard to pick as one greater than the great other one. These are two terrific stories written by two of crime fiction’s most talented noir writers.

Every writer of fiction has a distinct narrative personality, and each has a primary focus on one of two things: artistic prose or powerful story telling. Writers who can achieve both dizzying paragraphs and riveting plots are far between and become rich and famous – think Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Toni Morrison. And what we have with “Little Pretty Things” and “Dante’s Dilemma” are writers who have remarkable gifts for storytelling. They write well, no question, but they have chosen to forego the clever turns of phrase, double entendres and nosebleed heights of word smithing so they might disappear altogether from the story they have a fire in the belly to tell.

“Little Pretty Things,” a genius title to begin with, follows up on Rader-Day’s bizarrely stunning debut, “The Black Hour,” and is about one Juliet Townsend who cleans rooms in the fleabag Mid-Night Inn under a roaring interstate in a woebegone Midwest town. Juliet has proved herself a loser, a lifetime achievement first stenciled on the running track 10 years ago at Midway High School. There she was perpetually second-best to track star Maddy Bell, her best friend in the way of pilot fish to sharks – feeding on the leftovers, basking in the ferocity while feeling small, helpless, nearly worthless. Then some ugly years later, her lowliness now etched in stone as she steals little pretty things left behind by hourly room renters and road-weary families skimping across the heartland.  

One night, Maddy Bell swishes into the Mid-Night Inn in her flowing gabardine trench coat, Italian high heels and bobbed and tinted hairdo, sporting a walnut-sized diamond ring, red nails and lips and a thousand-watt smile. She bubbles over when she sees Juliet, rents a room for one night, and by the next morning Juliet, clinging to her little pretty things, is the prime murder suspect when Maddy is found hanging from the rusted railing outside Room 14, right above the ice machine. How this gets sorted in the hands of Lori Rader-Day is a clearly rememberable reading experience.

“Dante’s Dilemma,” by Lynne Raimondo, is nearly as pithy as “Little Pretty Things” though not quite as sensational as her debut novel, “Dante’s Wood,” or as deliciously tricky as her next installment in the Angelotti series, “Dante’s Poison.” But her protagonist, Mark “Dante” Angelotti, a blind psychiatrist, is arguably the most charming and incisive crime solver in anybody’s book. In “Dante’s Dilemma,” Angelotti is hired by the prosecution to decide upon the sanity of the estranged wife and confessed murderer of a University of Chicago professor found in one of the exhibits at SCAV, the school’s world-famous annual scavenger hunt, missing a vital piece of his anatomy. Nothing about a Raimondo novel is quite as it seems, and “Dante’s Dilemma” will keep you up long past a sensible bedtime.    

If you ever thought of writing a crime novel, you’d want to carefully study the books of Lori Rader-Day and Lynne Raimondo to learn how. You might check with Maria’s Bookshop to see if they can order these paperbacks and receive your 15 percent “Murder Ink” discount. Or you could try Amazon.