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Adam (Addy) Zantz is a failure, as he tells us almost in his first breath as he begins his story of his relationship with Annie Linden, a legendary folk/pop icon singer from the 1970s who has retreated into a comfortable but obscure retirement in her beachfront estate in southern California. At thirty-seven, Adam says he has failed as a song-writer, a pop critic, and a recording engineer. He also was once employed as a private detective in a minor sort of way. Currently he is a Lyft driver and hopes not to rack up another failure.
That was how he and Annie met - in his Jetta. And since then he has been driving her off-app whenever she asks. Annie encouraged Adam to keep at his song-writing and indeed he did start working on his lyrics again. But one night, having been summoned by Annie to drive her somewhere, he arrives at her estate to be told by police that her bodyguard has been murdered and Annie is missing. It is not long until her body turns up on the beach.
Adam is devastated at the loss of someone he believes to be the last person left in his life who both valued his talents and encouraged him. Furthermore, she had been about to ask him to utilize his admittedly rudimentary detective skills to find someone important to her. Now she is irretrievably gone and the best he can do is to try to find out who she had wanted him to find and why. Perhaps this would lead to whoever was responsible for her death.
His first approach is to the widow of Troy, Annie's murdered security man. The visit is less than successful and in some ways will set the pattern for much of what Adam reluctantly learns in his investigation. Troy's ex-wife is strongly critical of Annie's emotional hold over her husband. Adam is not yet aware of it but his investigation will lead directly to an inquiry into Annie's character that will be painful. But he has committed himself to carrying on, a resolution that is made more firm when another of Annie's entourage, her assistant Bix Gelden, is arrested for the murder, largely because he is a convenient suspect in a hot case. Adam is no fan of Bix's but he is convinced he is innocent.
One of his early visits is to Eva Silber-Alvarez, former mentor to and lover of Annie and a prominent feminist activist in Annie's heyday of the 1970s. Like Troy's widow, she has little praise for Annie and a degree of contempt for the weakness of the men who let themselves be used by her.
It gets worse. Adam, for reasons too complicated to detail, finds it necessary to attend a meeting of a group called M.O.R.E which stands for the Men's Organization for Rights and Equality. The meeting is a kind of masculinist reversal of a consciousness-raising group of the 70s, and the primary message is "we men are strong, we don't need women at all." At this point the reader might fear that Adam will be liberated from his obsession with Annie by a dose of toxic masculinity, but Weizmann has something else in mind.
Although the snippets of Adam's lyrics do little to support the notion that he is wrong to call himself a failure when it comes to song-writing, his prose is another matter. That is fluid, lyrical, compelling, and insistently evocative of the noir classics that inform it. But he is writing in the twenty-first century and the common noir conclusion that the female is evil incarnate needs considerable revision. The guys from M.O.R.E represent that fear and the subsequent isolation that is its logical consequence. Adam isn't having it.
As a result, the novel ends on a more positive note than the common clenched-tooth stoicism of traditional noir. The two sexes are not left in a state of wary antagonism. It also holds out hope for further looks at Adam's future career, perhaps as a full-time private eye. This Songbird may be the last but one can certainly hope it is not the end of Adam.
§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal. She's been editing RTE since 2008.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, May 2023
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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