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Late in the case Don Strachey, an Albany, N.Y., private investigator working for the moment in bordering western Massachusetts, explodes: "What the hell is this all about . . ., this business of just about everybody involved in this weird, ugly mess wearing masks?" The man being questioned replies, "We all have our reasons." And indeed, by the end of the investigation we learn they do. But before that point few in this taut murder mystery are who or what they say they are (not even an off-stage Boy Scout). As the epigraph to the book says, quoting Batman, "We all wear masks." The case begins with a telephone call from the town of Great Barrington. Jim Sturdivant is worried. His good friend Bill Moore is engaged to marry Barry Fields within a few weeks. But Fields’ previous lover died, a suicide that Sturdivant suspects was murder. Might Bill be next? So Sturdivant asks Don to investigate Fields. From the beginning Don is suspicious: normally a supposedly uninvolved friend is not the one who hires a private investigator. But Don can't resist taking the case when he discovers that Fields's best friend is Bud Radziwill, a "Kennedy cousin." Don's partner, Timothy Callahan, has a Kennedy story (he met Eunice Shriver while he was in the Peace Corps), so why shouldn't Don have one too? On such a flimsy pretext, begins the latest in a series that dates back to 1981 and that is currently being transformed, one novel at a time, into a miniseries starring Chad Allen for Here! Television. This ninth case is every bit as good as the earlier ones; altogether they are as satisfying a private-eye series as has come along since Phillip Marlowe and Lew Archer took down their shingles. Before this case is finished, there will indeed be a murder. It's just not the person Sturdivant expected it to be. Several people will disappear and have to be hunted down. Don will take on various political, legal, religious, and shady economic institutions. His encounter with the last will leave him some major car repairs and a burned-out office to replace. Since Sturdivant himself didn't anticipate the fact, he couldn't think to mention that remnants of a mob might become involved. Don quickly determines that neither Fields nor Radziwill, nor for that matter Bill Moore, existed on record before 2000. Who were they then, and why have they taken on new identities? The surprising and very believable answers offer quite a bit of insight into the national psyche. Even Sturdivant's birth name, it will turn out, was Murano. As Don remarks, ". . . remaking oneself has always been the quintessentially American act. It almost ought to be a requirement of citizenship." Don's wisecracks provide much of the reader's enjoyment. (It is impossible for me to read his lines now without hearing Chad Allen's dry delivery in my head.) Don has no more started the telephone conversation with which the book opens than he is quipping about the legalization of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts: "My partner, Timothy Callahan, and I would do it ourselves if we lived over there in the Berkshires. Here in New York State we continue to be deprived of the well-known enduring features of legal marriage – adultery, divorce, excess kitchenware, perpetuating the patriarchy, and so on." He and Jesuit-trained Timmy engage in constantly running repartee. Don nearly meets his match in a feisty 89-year-old manager of a Great Barrington movie house, Myra Greene, with whom he swaps dialogue from old gangster films. Don's actions are cut from the same cloth. I particularly love the scene in which he lets the air out of all four tires of a Range Rover blithely parked by an obviously fit driver in a space reserved for the handicapped. The way Don engineers the final showdown between the good guys and two different sets of bad guys is a triumph of unconventional justice at work. After reading the interview "Sixty Second with Richard Stevenson," which was among the earliest posted by RTE, one comes away with the feeling that Strachey may be Stevenson's alter ego in more ways than one. It mystifies me why his books are not right there on the shelves beside the other best-selling mysteries. I would not like to think that part of the reason is Stevenson's insistence in each novel on including details about the continuing struggle for gay rights. When Joseph Hansen finally was admitted to the mainstream of detective fiction, his gay death-claims investigator was repeatedly linked with Tony Hillerman's Navaho detectives and Arthur W. Upfield's part-aborigine inspector as a means for readers to become armchair anthropologists canvassing new social and cultural grounds. If that is what it takes, then readers-as-voyeurs should take note that, while engaging in some crackling good stories, they will actually discover much more to think about in Stevenson's works.
Reviewed by Drewey Wayne Gunn, June 2008
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