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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
In our roundup of the best new mysteries, black America's answer to Ross Macdonald, a Danish boy fights the Nazis, and the great Ross Thomas, back in print at last.
Mar 17, 2003 | "Thin Walls: A Smokey Dalton Novel"
By Kris Nelscott
387 pages
St. Martin's Minotaur
Order from Powells.com
When Kris Nelscott's first novel, "A Dangerous Road," came out three years ago, the mystery writer Loren D. Estleman called her "a Ross Macdonald for the black experience in America." That's a very large claim. For a lot of people, and I'm one of them, Macdonald's Lew Archer novels are the pinnacle of American detective fiction. Deliberate and humorless, but with the most gentlemanly of all detectives, Macdonald's novels are about families whose respectability and security are threatened by the past they've tried to bury. A typical Macdonald bypasses thrills and suspense in favor of Lew Archer's bone-deep sadness for the people he encounters, for his attempt to hold on to his constantly embattled decency.
Now, with "Thin Walls," the third book in Nelscott's Smokey Dalton series, Estleman's claim feels more than ever on its way to being justified. Nelscott's detective, Smokey Dalton, doesn't have the luxury of the weariness that hovers over Lew Archer. In many of Archer's cases, it's too late for him to salvage the lives of his clients. The family problems Smokey encounters are largely his own. Trying to raise Jimmy, his adopted 10-year-old, won't allow Smokey even the pretense of distance that Archer, a man who cares too much, forces on himself. It's impossible for Smokey, or for us, to separate what becomes of Jimmy from having any hope for the future. Smokey isn't making the parental mistake of living through his adopted boy. Trying to make sure that Jimmy has a life is, he realizes, what he has power to influence, and that gives his stern patience the drama of a life-and-death struggle.
Books are not good or bad because of the importance (or frivolity) of their subject. In fact, the more ambitious they are, the easier it is for their faults to be held against them. But ambition has to count for something. In the three Smokey Dalton novels ("Smoke-Filled Rooms" comes between "A Dangerous Road" and "Thin Walls") Nelscott is doing nothing less than writing about the transition from the civil rights era to the period of black power. The first book begins with Smokey as a Memphis P.I. in the weeks before Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. It ends with Smokey and Jimmy, now using assumed names, escaping to Chicago just in time for the chaos of the 1968 Democratic Convention.
In "Thin Walls," it's Christmastime of that awful year, after the assassinations, the convention and the election of Richard Nixon. The plot follows Smokey investigating the murder of a black dentist, a death the cops have dismissed as a mugging. What Smokey finds is linked to the brutality of Mayor Richard Daley's police department, and to the ingrained racism of a city whose segregation defeated even Dr. King when he tried to break it.
Set at a time when the gains made by the civil rights movement felt as if they had been cruel hoaxes, Nelscott's novels are deeply conservative books, in the true sense of that word. The irony is that what Smokey wants to preserve are advances barely a few years old, though, advances that are conservative in the sense that they represent America choosing to live up to its stated values of equality. But a gulf separates the March on Washington, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and 1968. So Smokey is ostracized, both by the racist whites who see any black in favor of equality as a dangerous agitator, and by members of the black power movement he distrusts, who, especially in light of King's assassination, see his refusal of revolutionary rhetoric as kowtowing to the white man.
Smokey is a dedicated integrationist, rejecting segregation no matter who's arguing for it or why. His on-again, off-again affair with a wealthy white woman (whose own story Nelscott uses to hint at the rise of feminism), and the easy friendship he forms here with an older Jewish lady are also Nelscott's rejection of the narrowness of race consciousness that still infects our discussions of these issues. (Next to Nelscott's novels, the macho posturing of Walter Mosley makes clear the large chip he carries on his shoulder, and his use of the genre as revenge fantasy.)
The mystery in "Thin Walls" is compelling, tense and cleanly written, while avoiding the macho clichés hardboiled detective fiction falls into so easily. But the drama is elsewhere, in the clash between Smokey's reasonable, ordinary goals -- to raise his son as a good man and provide him with a decent life -- and the looming dread familiar to anyone who was alive in 1968. If I've slighted Nelscott as a mystery novelist, it's because literary critics do not usually credit genre writers (when they notice them at all) for anything beyond doing their job efficiently. Somebody needs to say that Kris Nelscott is engaged in an ongoing fictional study of a thorny era in American political and racial history. If that's not enough to get "serious" critics and readers to pay attention to her, it's their loss.
