UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Sara Paretsky, Bitter Medicine (1987)

            Women have been writing mystery fiction almost from its very beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, but until the 1970s, hard-boiled American detective fiction was the province of men. But authors such as Marcia Muller, Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton and Janet Evanovich changed all that. These writers invented tough private investigators who were different from their male counterparts in more than just gender. The stereotypical male private eye is a loner and lonely, a wise-cracking street-talker with a questionable background. The female detectives of Paretsky, Grafton, and others tend to be more connected with friends and family, better educated—for example Paretsky’s detective has a law degree—but also able to take care of themselves.

            Sara Paretsky’s detective, V. I. Warshawski, takes on corrupt institutions and corporations in her books, which often involve a murder committed to cover up a white-collar crime.  It’s a variation of the stance of the traditional hard-boiled American detective, who set himself—when it was a male-only club—against a corrupt society. In Bitter Medicine, Warshawski goes after a crooked medical establishment.

            Warshawski takes sixteen-year-old Consuelo Alvarado Hernandez and her no-good husband Fabiano to a job interview as a favor to Warshawski’s old friend Mrs. Alvarado. Consuelo goes into labor, and at the private Friendship 5 hospital in the Chicago suburb of Schaumberg where Warshawski takes her, first the baby and then Consuelo die, despite the efforts of the Friendship doctor and the perinatal specialist Malcolm Tregiere, an associate of Warshawski’s friend Dr. Charlotte (Lotty) Herschel. Then Tregiere is murdered, and Lotty asks Warshawski to look into the case.

            Seemingly unrelated incidents in the book signal a widespread misogyny: Warshawski’s face is slashed by a gangster who is a former client; Lotty’s abortion clinic is attacked and vandalized; Consuelo’s death, a result of negligence, is covered up by doctors and entrepreneurs in the private medical establishment.

            Sara Paretsky has lived in Chicago for many years. She began writing the Warshawski books with Indemnity Only, published in 1982. Bitter Medicine is the fourth in the series. She is especially good in recreating Chicago neighborhoods, with their interesting ethnic mixes.  The only movie that has been made from Paretsky’s stories is V. I. Warshawski, a 1991 film starring Kathleen Turner as Warshawski. The movie was based on the second book in the series, Deadlock, and was not a commercial success, probably because the filmmakers made a decision to play the story for laughs.

 

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Walter Mosley, Always Outnumbered, always Outgunned (1998)

             Mosley’s main character is called Socrates Fortlow, and he is not a detective like Easy Rawlins, the hero of Devil in a Blue Dress and most of Mosley’s previous books.  Socrates, like his namesake, is a moral philosopher.  But he is also a double murderer who spent twenty-seven years in prison for his crimes.  When he tries to show people around him the moral consequences of their actions, what their duty is, or that they need to feel guilty for wrongs done, he speaks from his own profound sense of guilt, and he usually fails to convey his own sense of rightness to others.  His own life is an attempt to live in strict moral rectitude, avoiding any dishonesty or harm to others, and he doesn’t always succeed.  But the attempt means that he is poor, he spends a lot of his time turning the other cheek, and nothing is very easy for him.

            There are fourteen chapters in the book, and although each is a stand-alone story that originally appeared separately in a magazine, there are some continuing threads, like the mystery of Socrates’s past and especially what sent him to prison.  There is also the question of what will happen to a young boy Socrates is trying to rescue from the gangs of the inner city.  In a way all these stories are about attempted rescues, as Socrates tries to redeem his own life and save what he can from the ruin around him.  And Socrates’ rescues are not limited to people; he saves a dog late in the book, an episode that almost lands him back in jail but instead has a happy and romantic ending.

            The book’s setting is a grittily realized piece of Los Angeles, Slauson and Marvane and other streets of Watts at the time of the Rodney King riots.  But its scope includes Socrates’s past, stretching back to the Vietnam War, and a repeated theme is that past actions have their consequences.

            Somehow the book manages to be bleak and hopeful at the same time: bleak in setting and in its overall picture of the world of south-central Los Angeles, but hopeful in the small triumphs Socrates brings about among his friends and the other people he touches. 

            Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned was made into an HBO movie in 1998 and Mosley has written a sequel titled Walking the Dog.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (1929)

With The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett started an entirely new, entirely American variety of detective novel—the hard-boiled mystery. To be fair, Hammett has to share the credit with other writers for the pulp magazine Black Mask, where The Maltese Falcon first appeared in serial episodes starting in September, 1929.

One of the features of hard-boiled fiction is that everybody lies. Brigid O’Shaugnessy, who says her name is Wonderly, comes to consult Sam Spade and Miles Archer. She makes up a name, makes up a sister, makes up a story. And it is no surprise to Spade. “Oh, we didn’t believe your story,” he says to O’Shaugnessy, “we believed your two hundred dollars.” Then, almost immediately, Archer is murdered; the man, Floyd Thursby, whom Wonderly says first helped, then betrayed her is murdered; Joel Cairo, a perfumed “Levantine” with a small gun that Spade easily takes away comes to offer Spade money and then to search for the Maltese Falcon, a figurine he says is worth a huge fortune; and the police give Spade a hard time over the death of Miles Archer because they know he was having an affair with Archer’s wife, Ida. Spade lies to them. The detective lies; everybody lies. Even physical objects participate in the deception: the black bird is not what it has promised to be.

            A teenaged gunsel named Wilmer starts tailing Spade, who becomes romantically, but not emotionally involved with O’Shaugnessy, who tells him a different story of her search for the figurine. A man named Casper Gutman offers Spade a partnership in the pursuit of the falcon. A dying ship’s captain deposits the statuette at Spade’s office, and spade puts it in a bus locker and mails the key to himself. In a long final scene everything is resolved, and Spade reveals that he knew who the murderer of Miles Archer was all along. The solving of the crime takes a back seat to the butting of heads in this sort of fiction.

            The lack of sentimentality in Spade’s taking Archer’s name off the door the morning after his death, his brushing-off of Ida, his refusal to shield O’Shaugnessy despite having been her lover—these are characteristic of the hard-boiled hero, and so is the code that allows him to take money from the bad guys over what may be stolen property while he makes the killer of his partner pay for the crime. The spare dialogue and gritty settings are also a part of this sort of mystery, and the fairly small (but real) role played by the detective’s figuring things out.