Are You Curious? Eat Someone Else!
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Author: John Straley
Title: The Curious Eat Themselves Genre: mystery Private Eyes, like eggs, come in a number of varieties, and one of each is hard-boiled. You know the stereotypical hard-boiled PI: the guy has an uppercut like a pile driver, can take a bullet like most of us can take a vaccination, drinks his whiskey straight up with a beer chaser, and afterwards roars off after the bad guys in his muscle car. For some unfathomable reason, the shelves in his living room are invariably filled with traditional jazz (on vinyl, natch). He has a name like Hammer, Spenser, or Warshawski (hard-boiled PI-dom has gone equal opportunity). How 'bout a name like Cecil? Yep, here's a new one for you: part-time private eye and occasional defense investigator Cecil Younger, operating of Sitka, Alaska. Now Cecil isn't your garden-variety hardboiled PI. I don't know; maybe it's the name? No offense to people named Cecil, but the name just doesn't compute for the kind of guy who's supposed to knock heads and carry a "rod," not to mention have his way with the dames... Suffice it to say that John Straley ain't a modern-day Mickey Spillane, just like his character's no Mike Hammer. Just check this out: A Curious Sort of Mystery Somebody killed Louise Root before Cecil could finish the job she'd hired him for. A lot of his failure to deliver had to do with Louise's reluctance to give him the information he needed get that job done, but, then, she was the client and the customer is always right. Except in this case, the customer was dead right. Since Louise had paid him in advance, Cecil figured perhaps he ought to poke around and find out who had killed her. Why he didn't think the local police were up to the task was never clear, but apparently he wasn't the only one to doubt . When Global Energy and Mining hired Cecil to more or less remove his nose from Louise's affairs, it slowly dawned on him that he'd been bought off. Given that his "look-the-other-way" money amounted to a cool fifteen grand, Cecil intended to stay bought. But he hadn't counted on the appearance of his one-time lover Hannah, the woman who'd sent her friend Louise to him in the first place. You see, Louise had been raped at the mining camp where she'd worked as a cook for Global, but the company had covered up the incident and sent the rapist out of town. Only a few days later, the mine shut down entirely to address environmental concerns, and the local police - "local" is a relative term, since the mining site was in the middle of nowhere - seemed content to close the investigation. Maybe they'd been bought, too. Or maybe Louise had gotten too close to information Global would rather not make public? A Heck of A Big Company Cecil ended up tracking down the rapist - everybody in town but him already knew the guy's name - at a huge Global facility amidst the North Slope oil fields (above the Arctic Circle); though when he found him, said miscreant had already been shot in the head. Since Hannah was loose in the area with a pistol, Cecil was concerned. Sort of. But he didn't know where to look for her, so just he went home - lo and behold, there she was, hiding in his boathouse. Once back in Sitka, Cecil and Hanna and their Tlingkit Indian buddy Albert Tom found themselves stalked by Global's stable of bad guys in the midst of a nasty spring storm. Suddenly it was all over, and the whole mystery just unfolded itself for Cecil. Must be nice to have the answers dropped in your lap, eh? A Slacker Detective? Cecil Younger lives a decidedly low-rent existence. He's carless, but it's no big deal - his license was yanked for multiple DUIs back in the days when he and Hannah were an item (a scandalous item). Besides, there's no place to drive, since most of his work is on an archipelago of islands linked by ferries and air traffic. He doesn't carry a weapon, in fact Cecil never even punches anyone or gets punched in the story. In lieu of shots and beers, since he's straight and sober now, just about every minute finds him yearning for a drink or a line of coke. He shares living quarters with an autistic adult, Todd (who's no relation to him), and Todd's aging Labrador retriever Nelson (that is until the dog disappears) - though he does have the obligatory collection of jazz. He's also spent a few months in stir for some of his more, shall we say, "chemical" offenses. Cecil's work habits are a bit unorthodox for someone asking to be paid to look into mysteries. His methodology for investigation is definitely at odds with the usual hard-boiled PI: instead of chasing down clues, putting the arm on informants, and bribing folks at the phone company; he sits around and waits for the answers to come to him. About the only actual investigation he does in the whole mystery is look for that missing dog. As far as the death of Louise Root is concerned, somebody finally tells him who raped her (Cecil being one of oh, six people on the planet who didn't already know). As far as the death of the rapist, well, nobody actually ever comes out and says who did it. Louise's killer confesses the misdeed; another body with a slashed throat is cleared up, and everybody goes home to have a wake for the dog. All in all, it's a nice simple solution. My only question is what the heck did Cecil Younger have to do with that solution? Seems to me that everything would have come out exactly the same way if he hadn't even been there! A Book The Curious Eat Themselves -- the title's a line from a work by Cecil's favorite poet (Theodore Roethke's Straw for the Fire) that Hannah had tattooed on her shoulder - was Straley's second Cecil Younger mystery (1993), the first being The Woman Who Married a Bear. He's followed those two up with another four since. Straley's setting is at the very least unusual: Cecil finds himself ranging the length of Alaska, from Sitka to Juneau to Anchorage to Deadhorse, all by plane (commercial airliners, private jets, bush pilots). He plies his trade - what little there is of it - in fairly populated cities, tiny fishing towns, tinier native villages on isolated islands, an oil-company compound on the North Slope, and a remote mining camp. And to be honest, Straley has done justice to both the immensity of Alaska and to its minuscule population density. He also reminds us of the enormous resources of his state, and of the powerful interests lined up to extract those resources, and of other interests dedicated to keeping the first group out. Unfortunately, he has a tendency to vastly oversimplify some very complex questions. So what else is new on the subject of jobs vs.the environment? A Mystery Fans of the mystery genre are due for a different experience in The Curious Eat Themselves. Though Cecil shows some typical traits of the hardboiled PI - lots of time in bars, the obligatory jazz collection, lots of time on what passes for mean streets in Sitka and Juneau and Anchorage and... Younger is the antithesis of the hard-working guy (or gal) PI of an earlier generation. He lacks a certain work ethic - Straley might have us believe that voluntary hand-to-mouth existence isn't uncommon in the archipelago - and seems content to let the clues fall wherever they land. When it comes to "detecting," Younger's style runs to the lay back and let the bad guys turn themselves in. That approach might work with the drunks and amateur criminals of Younger's experience, but it just wouldn't fly in Chicago or Boston or Gotham. Nope, Cecil Younger's not the guy I'd hire to do a little detecting in Alaska. What's sad is that Straley describes an Alaska tourists never see; a land of glaciers and jagged peaks along the coast, or industrial slums on the North Slope. He sets his scenes beautifully, from desolation to grubby coastal towns. It's just that Cecil Younger is, frankly, pretty darned uninteresting: he's a whiner, a drunk, a loafer, a failure. His idea of work seems to be to let the world pay him what he thinks he's due, to wander about aimlessly and let his case come together on its own. Straley's written him as a drunk who does no drinking and a detective who does no detecting. Regardless of the setting or the topicality of the story - there are loads of references to the Exxon Valdez - it's still not much of a mystery, and Cecil Younger's just not much of a detective. Read it to get some insight into the politics of Alaska - seen through a glass darkly, I'll wager - or to meet your first slacker detective. Read it for the fear you get from Straley's description of flying the bush, for the chill you feel at his description of the frigid north. Just don't bother to read it for a mystery, 'cause it simply ain't much of one. all content copyright © 2001-present by scmrak
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