Caricature Assassination

Under the Covers with Justin Bauer

by Justin Bauer

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Published: Jun 9, 2009

William Lashner has got a talent for stereotype. Some of them, like Blood and Bone's (William Morrow, Feb. 10) main character, Kyle Byrne, allow him to skip over a little exposition with an old T-shirt, a tattoo and three days of unmotivated stubble as shorthand. Others, like the toothless and casually abusive Old Tommy Trapp holding down the end of a South Philly bar, give a shot of color. Still others are scenes, like the opening beer-league softball game against an unathletic Dirty Frank's team, and probably play more to an audience that's watched a game or two at Palumbo Rec.

Lashner's reliance on types doesn't weaken his books at all — he writes thrillers, beach books — and the shorthand they provide ups his page-turning velocity. Lashner's previous books centered on Philadelphia lawyer Victor Carl, and fleshed out the stock moves of the legal thriller with an especially appealing hero with a heart of gold and an eye on the main chance. Lashner retired Carl at the end of his last book, but his pacing, the onrush of events and twists, is undiminished in Blood and Bone.

What Lashner adds here — in addition to a fine sense of humor and a good amount of regional local color — is an element of Gothic. These machinations and grotesqueries might seem to belong to the South, with empty graves and unspeakable affairs and madness. But Lashner, who has brushed up against Gothic before (in Bitter Truth) taps into a Philadelphia tradition that dates back to Charles Brockden Brown's colonial shocker Wieland; he sees something rotten up in Chestnut Hill, and winds it up tight in the springs of his plot. 

The rapidity and ease that Lashner puts on display in Blood and Bone contrasts sharply with The Way Home (Little, Brown, May 12), George Pelecanos' latest. This should be strange, as both writers concern themselves with crimes and their consequences, and both come from a genre born out of pulp. Pelecanos, after all, is arguably the best crime writer we have, and, with his membership in David Simon's fraternity of writers for The Wire, may yet gain a reputation to match his abilities.

Plotting, though, has never been Pelecanos' strong suit. This might be the reason he's not broken out, like his peers Richard Price and Dennis Lehane, and why the cover of this new book slugs his TV work rather than his novels. Plot is always subordinate to Pelecanos' real concerns — early in his career, creating unparalleled stories from the fringes of D.C.'s punk and working-class bars; later, showing the decay of his home city from street level with a cataloguing, tamped-down fury.

Pelecanos writes long, multi-novel arcs, as if he needs more space to work out a set of characters or an idea fully. The Way Home nestles comfortably next to his last few books in its concerns — old crimes and how they're paid for, fathers' influences on sons, sons' duties to fathers and the individual moral rigor required for manhood.

Dennis Tafoya, whose debut, Dope Thief (Minotaur, April 28), shows a clear debt to the kind of character- and moral-driven fiction Pelecanos practices, goes one better by opening his book with a last-big-score setup. Each timeworn beat shows up couched in Spillane-y hard-boiled prose: jittery wheelmen, exhausted amorality, sawed-off shotguns, viscera and botched plans. Like Blood and Bone, Tafoya's book starts at a sprint and hits its marks, juicing up a familiar plot with style and purpose.

Ray, the kind of fringe hood who keeps body and soul together through crimes against other criminals, is also the kind of guy who sports an occupational tattoo — that reads "dope thief," of course — and who knows his luck can't hold out forever. Inevitably, that last big score ends badly.

But instead of closing his book with the bad end of the caper, as Pelecanos' novels once did, Tafoya's real concerns about the aftershocks of violence and the difficulty of rejoining straight life take over. Abruptly, Dope Thief stops being a tight-wound thriller and becomes a looser, shaggier book altogether, held together less by plot than by Ray's efforts to inhabit a moral code as a bulwark against his past.

While Tafoya runs some risks, with his sudden shifts in tone and too-cute arbitrary coda, the fearful undercurrent of Ray's experience lifts Tafoya's character, and his novel, out of stereotype and stock and moves it into fine and serious company.

(j_bauer@citypaper.net)

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