New Crime Fiction

Nov 17, 2023

Crime & Mystery

The plucky, trash-talking detective in “Viviana Valentine Gets Her Man,” by Emily Edwards, is a throwback to fictional characters from decades past.

Credit...Pablo Amargo

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By Sarah Weinman

VIVIANA VALENTINE GETS HER MAN (Crooked Lane, 277 pp., $28.99), the sprightly debut by Emily J. Edwards, is an ode to a certain type of girl-detective novel (such as the works of Mabel Seeley and Mignon G. Eberhart, as well as an underrated early Dorothy B. Hughes effort, “The Cross-Eyed Bear”) that was published plentifully in the years before and after World War II.

It’s 1950 in New York City, where Viviana works as the assistant to Tommy Fortuna, a private investigator who’s just taken on the exceedingly rich Tallmadge Blackstone as his client. Blackstone wants to know why his 18-year-old daughter, Tallulah — a debutante who’s “all Betty Grable legs and Jane Russell curves” — seems so reluctant to marry his business partner, a man more than three times her age. Does she have a boyfriend on the side? But before Tommy can discover what Tallulah is hiding, he disappears, leaving Valentina to do the sleuthing.

Edwards writes with flair, leaning into snappy dialogue, making it easy to speed past occasional plot holes and pesky anachronisms.

“I’ve been a girl Friday for the best P.I. in the city for years, ya moron,” Viviana tells the cop who can’t quite believe she’s cracked the case. “You think I didn’t learn a thing or two?”

Novels based on real-life crimes often fall flat, which was at the back of my mind as I began Mariah Fredericks’s THE LINDBERGH NANNY (Minotaur, 320 pp., $27.99), which examines the 1932 kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh Jr. through the eyes of the boy’s nanny, Betty Gow.

My reservations evaporated within the first few pages. Fredericks spends ample time creating a three-dimensional portrait of Betty, a Scottish immigrant with a tragic past who lands the lucky assignment as the Lindbergh baby’s primary caregiver. Or at least, she knows it should feel like luck, but she can’t shake the feeling of unease around the boy’s father.

So when it all goes horribly wrong, the reader feels Betty’s agony, and the suspicion levied upon her for what she did or didn’t do. Fredericks fills in substantial details from real life, but never forgets to put the human cost, and its lasting damage, at the forefront of her narrative.

As soon as I saw the title of Loren Estleman’s latest, PAPERBACK JACK (Forge, 240 pp., $26.99), I knew the novel would be a love letter to the paperback industry of decades past — one that spawned so many tightly written mysteries bound with lurid covers.

It’s 1946, and though Jacob Heppleman, 29, has survived the war, he comes home changed by the horrors he witnessed. The dime magazine industry that once paid for his stories has “gone south with Hitler’s brains,” withering away as the market for pulp paperbacks has grown. So Heppleman transforms himself into Jack Holly — “a swashbuckler of a name” — and begins churning out crime novels, which sell because of his supposed connections to the underworld.

A linotypist “cast Jack Holly’s words in lead alloy, then used an ink roller to press the ink onto cheap newsprint, four pages per sheet,” which were “trimmed, bound and shipped to every retail outlet in the U.S. that contained a paperback rack. There, some browser might pick it up, skim the description on the back (‘He made his living off the misfortunes of others: until fate — and a blonde named Marcy — made it his dying!’) … and possibly plunk down two bits to read the rest.”

Estleman crams a sweeping historical epic — the action ends in the late 1970s, encompassing congressional hearings, mob ties, book conventions and grand romance — into a novel of utmost brevity. It is far more soulful than I expected. “Jacob would never get over the wonder of it, that a grown man should make up stories, write them down and expect sane people to buy them.”

Though I wished for more, I admired — as I always have — Estleman’s ability to chisel every page, every sentence, down to the bone.

“His eyes flicked from toad to mirror to blind spots and back to the road. His right hand danced between the steering wheel and the gearshift in a controlled blur.”

Spencer Burnham, a onetime British rally driver, knows how to drive fast, very fast, without stopping or looking back. It’s pretty clear, from the opening pages of Craig Henderson’s breakneck debut, WELCOME TO THE GAME (Atlantic Monthly Press, 376 pp., $27), that his personal fuel tank is just about empty.

Grieving for his wife, who died in a gruesome accident, and caring for their daughter while his car dealership slowly goes under, Spencer is coping — barely — thanks to booze, pills, coke and the occasional Viagra-fueled sexual encounter.

Then he meets Dominic McGrath, who runs a “profitable niche business … currency movement, that kinda thing.” Dominic needs a driver, a good one, and Spencer — out of other options — gets reeled into Dominic’s criminal enterprise.

Henderson, a BBC television presenter, mixes a keen sense of the absurd with sly turns of phrase, like this about one of the McGrath criminal crew members: “Every outfit has a Denny — a guy who’s not especially capable but not useless, trusted but not a member of the inner cabal, only occasionally funny but always ready to laugh at the jokes of others.” The vibe is George V. Higgins with a British accent, and the ride, though bumpy at times, gets readers to the destination.

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