Dan's Papers - August 15, 2008

If you like a mystery full of red herrings, spiced with grisly murders and peopled by forlorn characters running from something or other, then this crime novel by Daniel Judson is just the thing to drag to the beach. It takes place on the East End, in a span of 24 hours, in an off-season setting of rain and fog. Fog is a good analogy for the complicated plot. Judson's description of felonies and corruption makes Southampton sound like the Wild West. The East End milieu should be a nice fillip as the author drops the names of real and imaginary businesses and locales, but it's only good for passing interest.

Like most murder mysteries, it's not a cheerful story. And it's not about the beautiful people who clog the Hamptons in summer. The players are cops, criminals or blue-collar grunts. One of the challenges is to follow the parallel sagas of two protagonists. Jake "Payday" Bechet is a retired pug living with the beautiful Gabrielle Marie Olivo. When things get rough, Bechet stashes her in his Brooklyn hideout left to him by his felonious father. At one time Bechet worked as an enforcer for the Castello crime family dealing in illicit drugs. He finally broke away from them and took up a job as co-owner of a local cab company. But Jorge Castello wants him back to sniff out a traitor in his gang. Despite his reluctance, he's not above knocking off a couple of bad guys when necessary.

The other main character is Tommy Miller, former Southampton cop and private investigator, now living above a restaurant in a building he owns near the train station. (Say, isn't there a restaurant in that very location?) His father was a corrupt Southampton police chief until he was murdered by hired killers and replaced by Chief Roffman (we never found his first name) who asks Miller's help in solving the crime.

The novel starts with the macabre scene of two minor miscreants hanging from the railroad bridge over the Shinnecock Canal. They worked for Castello and were stupid enough to think they could skim money and drugs from him in the course of their nefarious duties. The Water's Edge is a shuttered restaurant on the canal where the bad guys do bad stuff to other bad guys.

Judson sprinkles in a few more haunted characters to make an almost impenetrable mixture. Bobby Falcetti drives for the cab company and is kept busy ferrying other characters around the area until he gets his nose into trouble. Kay Barton, another former Southampton cop and a friend of Miller's, left the force after a miserable love affair with Chief Roffman. She plays a heroic role in sorting out the mess. Detective Mancini is assigned to solve the bridge hangings, but he has a much bigger agenda than a couple of murders and ultimately wants to get rid of Roffman. Throughout the novel, Miller keeps thinking about the mysterious Abby Shepherd, who left him a couple of years ago because he was too engrossed in his job. He should have been relieved, she really wasn't very nice, but Miller worries about her and keeps expecting her to reappear. At one time she worked at Le Chef on Job's Lane, which the author says is a French restaurant.

A couple of lethal Algerians, LeCur Junior and Senior, work for Castello and do his dirtiest jobs, like using ice picks on the good guys. At some point, Bechet and Miller realize it's going to take the two of them to unravel this plot and they begin working together.

It isn't until page 331 of 374 pages that we get some clue of what's been going on when the dying Falcetti tells all to Bechet in a monologue that sounds like Charlie Chan wrapping up one of his old movies. In the course of the novel, various characters ask themselves long lists of rhetorical questions, which of course go unanswered. Judson writes clear prose, but he explains far too much, stretching and slowing down the narrative. If an editor had trimmed it to around 300 pages, it would be a crisper, faster moving story. Supposedly taking place over 24 hours, by the end of the novel, it feels more like a month.

An editor also might have caught a few quirky ingredients. Several characters are always pulling on and taking off galoshes, presumably to mask their footprints, but after a while the repetitive mention of such old-fashioned footwear gets undeserved attention. Maybe galoshes are a police thing? Also there's so much activity involving telephones - cell phones, pay phones, home phones - how to use them without being traced, or when not to use them, that we wonder if the author ever worked for Verizon.