Messy Reality

Spencer Quinn's "Mrs. Plansky’s Revenge" and Toya Wolfe’s "Last Summer on State Street"

Source: Peter Abrahams

One of the most memorable lines in Murder, My Sweet, the 1944 film based on Raymond Chandler’s novel Farewell, My Lovely, is delivered by the insidious psychic healer and blackmailer Jules Amthor, speaking contemptuously to the protagonist, private detective Philip Marlowe: “Your thinking is untidy, like most so-called thinking today.” Amthor is played by the actor Otto Kruger, whose role here recalls his performance in Hitchcock’s Saboteur (1942). In both films, he expresses a sophisticated, sneering disdain for the untidy quality of what we can without sentimentality describe as “ordinary life.” Reality is messy rather than tidy.

If that strikes you as a mere slogan (faintly reminiscent, perhaps, of the Dude’s musings in The Big Lebowski), one too readily subject to misuse, I can’t take the time now to explain why I see it differently (and of course, like any truth, it can be misused); I bring it up here because it is exemplified, in one way or another, by much of the fiction I relish.

Consider the career of one of my favorite contemporary novelists, Peter Abrahams, who will turn 76 later this month. His first novel, The Fury of Rachel Monette, was published in 1980, and he went on to write many more: novels of suspense, crime fiction, unfailingly interesting books (some with a dark cast) all bearing a family resemblance to one another and yet resisting any formula. Stephen King was (and still is) a fan, providing generous endorsements; Joyce Carol Oates contributed a long, appreciative, if in some ways misleading review essay to The New Yorker in 2005, occasioned by the publication of Oblivion.

But Abrahams’ career took an unexpected turn. In 2008, writing under the pen name Spencer Quinn, he inaugurated a series of novels narrated by a dog, Chet, recounting the adventures of the Arizona-based Little Detective Agency, consisting of Chet and his partner, Bernie Little. These books offer the best account of friendship I’ve encountered anywhere in contemporary fiction, but they achieve much more as well; if you are a fan of Viktor Shklovsky, if you are a reader who loves to study the way storytelling works, you have a feast to look forward to. The fourteenth novel in the series, Up on the Wooftop, is scheduled for publication this fall. As if that weren’t enough, there have been other books along the way—fiction for kids, for instance, and an excellent standalone novel, The Right Side, published under the name of Spencer Quinn.

Now he has added yet another new flavor: with Mrs. Plansky’s Revenge (scheduled for publication in July), he will introduce a new series featuring “a recent widow in her seventies, . . . settling into retirement in Florida while dealing with her ninety-eight-year-old father and fielding requests for money from her beloved children and grandchildren.” But her quotidian existence is disrupted by the rudest of shocks: a scammer drains every bit of her savings. Instead of giving up, she decides to fight back, a resolve that leads her to “a small village in Romania”!

Imagine embarking on a new series in your mid-seventies! I have to admit (I’m just turning 75) that I find this immensely encouraging, and—having read the novel in bound galleys—I can assure you that the author’s hand has lost none of its cunning. Reality is messy indeed, sometimes grimly so, sometimes happily, most often in between.

On another front, I am celebrating the news that Toya Wolfe’s debut novel, Last Summer on State Street, published a year ago by William Morrow, has won the second annual $25,000 Pattis Family Foundation Chicago Book Award. “One of the worst tendencies of current fiction,” I wrote last December, reporting for First Things on my Year in Reading for 2022,

is the impulse to ramp everything up, as if fearing that only thus can readers be persuaded to pay attention. (And this applies not only to fiction itself but to the “discourse” surrounding it, in reviews, essays, prize-citations, and so on.) By contrast, Last Summer on State Street, written by a woman who grew up in Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes, trusts the tale and trusts the reader. Years ago, I read (in manuscript) a short story by Toya Wolfe from which this novel grew. To see the finished book was a great joy. Check it out, and you’ll see why.

Among the books I’m looking forward to reading this summer are Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s short novel Kappa, translated from the Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda and Allison Markin Powell; Bernardo Zannoni’s novel My Stupid Intentions, translated from the Italian by Alex Andriesse; and Rachel Howzell Hall’s What Never Happened. And coming on Kindle next week is Rhys Dylan’s A Body of Water, the eighth novel in his police procedural series set in Wales.

Though it hasn’t been that long since Wendy and I re-watched Murder, My Sweet (with its terrific cast), we just might revisit it again soon. And a reread of Chandler’s canonical novels (not including the sadly diminished work from his last years) will also be due fairly soon, though probably not until next year. I’ll let you know in due course.