The Frontenac Mystery: François Mauriac (1933)

“Every human being has his peculiar form of suffering, the laws of which take shape in earliest youth.”

The Frontenac Mystery from François Mauriac is the second title I’ve read from this author, and now I’m committed to reading more. Another edition of this book is titled The Frontenacs which after reading the book, IMO is more appropriate. This is the story of the family bonds, the ‘mystery’ of the title,’  between the members of a gentry family who live in the Bordeaux area during the decades leading up to WWI. 

The novel opens 8 years after the death of Michel Frontenac who left behind his wife, Blanche and 5 young children: Jean-Louis, José, Danièle, Marie and Yves. Since the death of Michel, his brother, lawyer Xavier has become more involved in the lives of his sister-in- law and her children. He “renounced all his holdings” in the family estate in Bordeaux  and subsequently Blanche moved there with her children. Xavier, a bachelor visits every other week, and while he’s devoted to her children and to the memory of his dead brother, there’s an insurmountable barrier between Xavier and Blanche. She finds his lectures “extolling the splendours of sacrifice” “exasperating.” She’s very religious and is all too aware what her life will be moving forward. And, perhaps the most annoying thing of all is that “it was only in terms of the young Frontenacs that she existed for him at all.” This is one of the book’s major themes: the bonds between family, but also how individuals, some just connected to the family in various ways, sacrifice to the Pyre of the Frontenac name and property. While some of the sacrifices are meaningful, others are meaningless and are lost in the passage of time. 

This is not a tightly woven novel, and there exists a sort of gentle, ephemeral quality to the tale–languid days of childhood spent on the wonderful family estate as the Frontenacs grow up amidst the worries of a lonely, aging mother. The children are also under the watchful eye of their Uncle Xavier who keeps his mistress, Josefa stashed in another town. He keeps her hidden and imagines that his secret is unknown to anyone while in reality he’s a laughing stock for being so cheap with the poor woman who is part cook/cleaner/nurse/mistress and is devoted, even from a distance, to the Idea of the Frontenacs. But there are hints of something darker ahead–the slaughter of WWI awaits for one of the more adventurous Frontenac sons who longs for adventure, and then Blanche has constant anxiety about her children and a nagging worry about cancer. 

But all of them felt obscurely that, as the result of some singular favour shown by the gods, Time had stood still. Power had been given them to leave the train which nothing halts. In the very process of growing up, they could stand in the shallows of childhood, could dawdle while childhood slipped away forever.

The story concentrates on the 3 Frontenac boys–Jean-Louis, José, and Yves; the two girls “brood mares” are barely mentioned. Yves is a sickly child who manages, in early adulthood, to escape the yoke of Frontenac responsibility by hightailing it to Paris where he pursues a literary career, and a lot of his determination is seeded by Jean-Louis’ early entrapment in the family business. Jean-Louis, abandons his dream of an education in Philosophy and assumes the Frontenac harness, joining the family business and marrying a childhood sweetheart–a marriage which will ensure he’s cemented in place. It’s not an exciting life–it’s been chosen for him, but he shoulders the family burdens, consciously  turning away from an alternate future, while living variously through Yves. Mauriac explores maturation through the characters’ choices and how childhood may be linked forever to a physical place, such as the Frontenac estate, but childhood is also locked in time and can never be revisited.  The novel has a significant ending–the arrival of a motor car and the slaughter of WWI. If you like novels with a philosophical angle, then this may be for you.

Translated by Gerard Hopkins

Thanks  to Emma turning me onto Mauriac in the first place.

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Hill Girl: Charles Williams (1951)

As a fan of the crime novels of Charles Williams, I’ve reviewed a few for this site, and here they are, so far, in order of preference for anyone interested:

River Girl (1951)

Hell Hath No Fury (The Hot Spot) (1953)

Big City Girl (1951)

River Girl is the story of a corrupt, married small-town deputy sheriff who gets in over his head with a woman he meets in a remote cabin. This is a tense, desperate noir novel that somehow managed to beat out Hell Hath No Fury as my favourite Williams novel so far. Hell Hath no Fury is the story a criminal who drifts into a small town, takes a job as a car salesman and cases out the local bank with plans to steal the cash and split. The main character here makes the mistake of getting mixed up with not one–but two women: Gloria Harper, the boss’s bookkeeper and Dolly, the boss’s trashy wife. Big City Girl is the story of a family of poor sharecroppers. One of the sons is in prison and Joy, his trashy wife who’s addicted to the attention of men decides to leave the city and join the family on the cotton farm. Bad idea…

With these three books, there’s a common theme: women are trouble–even if they don’t mean to be which is certainly true in the case of Doris, the woman hiding in the cabin discovered by deputy sheriff Marshall. Big City Girl and Hell Hath No Fury feature femme fatales who use men and sex to further their aims–although Hell Hath No Fury’s Dolly (played by a sultry, very naughty Virginia Madsen in the 1990 film version) wins hands down in the Evil department.  And that brings me back to Hill Girl (1951) the first novel Charles Williams published. Williams saw three of his novels published that year: Hill Girl, Big City Girl, and River Girl so I’m wondering if he had a backlog of manuscripts when he was finally picked up by Gold Medal.

Then take a look at these vintage covers which certainly reinforce the idea that women are evil seductresses, but Williams is a much more sophisticated thinker than that. In his world, women, some women, use their looks and sex to move ahead in society–men after all, have the power, the wealth, and the career choices, so women use other means to gain control.

The Hill Girl of the title is a bootlegger’s daughter named Angelina, and that name seems a little ironic the first few times we see Angelina with her long honey-coloured blonde hair, more or less dressed in rags that do little to cover her figure. She’s bad-tempered, unhappy and more importantly, as we see as the plot plays out, she’s jail-bait or even worse … shotgun bait. But let’s back up a little. Hill Girl is the story of sexual obsession, two very different brothers, Lee and Bob, and the woman who comes between them. Yes, you guessed it … Angelina.

Bob, the younger son, moves back to his family’s hometown to take over and run his deceased grandfather’s farm. You’d think, initially, at least, that Bob is the black sheep of the family since the eldest son, Lee, who’s married and lives in the family home, inherited everything from his father who was known somewhat dauntingly as The Major. As the story unfolds, the ‘good son’ and the ‘bad son’ designations shift around, and we see that Bob, the younger brother, although he fought with his father and was persona non gratis in his father’s home, is actually the ‘good’ son while Lee, who inherited his entire father’s estate worth around $30,000 (Bob was left $1) and married a wonderful, kind woman named Mary, is the bad seed. He’s just smooth enough to hide his rottenness.

The book opens with Bob’s return and his auspicious, as it turns out, meeting with bootlegger Sam Harley who lives along Black Creek bottom. Then failed pro-boxer Bob returns to the family home which is now owned by Lee. Brief homecoming over, Lee drags Bob out to get some moonshine from Sam, but his real reason for going to Sam’s is Angelina. Lee lusts after the bootlegger’s daughter and there is a very tense scene with Lee bound and determined to have Angelina in spite of the threat of Sam’s shotgun. The roles of the brothers are very quickly delineated. Lee is hellbent on pursing Angelina and Bob, the only brother with a conscience, is determined to save him from being shot….

Lee, of course eventually gets his way with Angelina, and in some rather crude descriptions reveals how little he values Angelina, and as it turns out, how little he understands her. While Williams creates some fascinating female characters in his books, Angelina is the weakest-drawn character here, first she’s bad, bad, bad, and then she turns into a completely different person. Angelina first appears to be a savage, surly, empty-headed teen nymphet who is Trouble, “a sex crime looking for somebody to happen to,”  but later Williams moves in on this character with generous sympathy, so we that we are now supposed to see Angelina as kind and naïve. Cooped up on the farm and kept as unpaid labour she longed for simple items such as shoes or a dress that fits, and her rebellious, self-destructive behaviour is aimed at her father and loathing of her life more than anything else. So Angelina as ‘bad,’ vanishes. While the character shift isn’t convincing, Williams shows how women are forced to operate in a world dominated by men, so there are some interesting observations on the subject of how men treat women as though they’re owned like any other possession. Here’s a scene in which Angelina wants to get her hair bobbed–something forbidden by her father:

“You’ll like hell do what you please,” I started, and then caught myself and shut up. After all, it was her hair, and Sam Harley had been telling her she couldn’t cut it all these years and trying to browbeat her, and look where he had wound up in her eyes. You couldn’t get anywhere by trying to bully her. She didn’t bully worth a damn. You might get your way if you overpowered her, but it wouldn’t be worth what you lost in the process.

This is a remarkably sensual novel with descriptions of physicality–the nature of uncontrollable sexual desire but also the joy of working hard and enjoying nature.

The days are long in April, longer in May, and longer still in June, but they are never long enough. They begin with dew on the grass and the long-legged shadows of sunrise and end with whipoorwills calling in the darkening bottoms and swallows circling and diving at dusk. And all day long, through the hot sweaty  hours, the work goes on.

With Lee’s crude descriptions of Angelina’s sexual appetites, the book was no doubt ahead of its time, but now it seems dated. Stylistically, Hill Girl seems a lot less smooth than River Girl; it seems to be a much earlier novel even though they were both published in 1951. Back to that question of manuscript backlog. Definitely not the author’s best work, but fans will want to read this–although copies are not cheap.

Nate in Venice by Richard Russo

In the novella Nate in Venice, former English professor Nate, now in his 60s, is persuaded to take a tour of Italy by his semi-estranged brother Julian. First stop Venice where he joins the Biennale tour group “most of whom, like Nate, hail from central Massachusetts.” We know, almost immediately, that something has gone wrong in Nate’s life when we learn that he worries “his social skills may have atrophied after so many months of self-imposed solitude.” If the tour is supposed to help with Nate’s depression, it’s not working. The tour group members are a sorry lot, and “a few appear fit enough, but others strike him as medical emergencies waiting to happen.” One couple is “extremely elderly” and very fragile while others have to stop and rest every few feet and appear to be “heart-attack candidates.” But things begin to look promising when Nate spies another member of the tour, Rene, an attractive older woman who has an air of fragility and anxiety. Interesting that Nate’s drawn to a woman who’s so obviously damaged while he overlooks the much more confident Evelyn:

The general impression she conveys is of a woman who once upon a time cared about how she presented herself to men but work up one morning, said fuck it, and was immediately happier.

Nate, a lifelong bachelor, isn’t smooth with women, so it’s not too surprising that Nate’s older brother, salesman Julian swoops in and takes over Rene. This move, probably inspired by deeply-rooted sibling rivalry, is a repeat of history as far as these two brothers are concerned. While Julian’s invitation to Nate seems both unusual and unexpected, the minute the two brothers meet at the airport, all their troubled history floats to the surface:

Amazing, Nate thought. Thirty seconds into their first face-to-face conversation in years, and he already wanted to strangle the man.

There are many clues about trouble in Nate’s recent past along with hints that there’s some disgrace connected to his retirement. Accompanying this is Nate’s fundamental fear and preoccupying thought that he took the wrong path in life and that he should never have been a professor in the first place.

Say this for Julian, a career salesman: he’s lived the life he meant to live. He’s sold cars, time shares, stocks, television advertising. Indeed, people are always impressed by the wide range of things Julian has sold, but as he always explains, selling is selling. It’s all about knowing people better than they know themselves. Figure out who they are and that they really want and they’re yours. Julian always makes a fist when he says this, as if inviting people to imagine themselves in his grasp. Knowledge is power, he maintains (though apparently not the kind of knowledge that leads one to a Ph.D. in English). Julian claims his head is full of the kind of algorithms Google would pay millions for. In Nate’s opinion, it isn’t just algorithms Julian’s full of. And he disagrees that his brother can sell anything. He’s known Julian a long time, and he’s only ever sold one thing: Julian.

Nate is a self-confessed “career bachelor,” but he’s happy to admit that “his true love has always been Jane Austen.” There’s a back story on both of those admissions, and that back story leaks out gradually over the course of the novella as the scandal concerning Nate’s career emerges.

This novella, one of those kindle singles, is a story of life’s disappointments, and it offers a Richard Russo short read in about 90 minutes. While it’s not as satisfying as his novels, Nate in Venice offers a sample of the author’s style. Some sharp observations of academic life emerge in these pages, but this is not Straight Man— one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. Nate is a bit of a depressive hence the medication he takes, and while many of us would consider Nate’s life successful, he still isn’t convinced that he took the correct career path, and it’s as though his decision to stick with academia somehow left part of Nate behind. It’s of those the road-not-taken scenarios. Most of us don’t end up with the sort of life we imagined in our youth, but in Nate’s case, there’s an emptiness and a general lack of involvement as he failed to engage in his own choices.

As a main character, Nate is problematic: mired in depression, he’s not very appealing, and then there’s his almost complete disengagement from his own life–until the one moment he reached out…. The ending seemed a little too arranged–although at the same time, questions about Julian remain unresolved.

Bluff City Pawn by Stephen Schottenfeld

About a fifth of the way into Stephen Schottenfeld’s debut novel, Bluff City Pawn,  Memphis pawn shop owner Huddy Marr tells a simple story concerning Jenks, Huddy’s predecessor, and it’s a story that says a great deal about the process that makes the pawn shop business work for the customers and the owner:

So Huddy tells a story about Jenks. About a customer with a TV, and Jenks would give him twenty-five dollars and when the man picked up the TV, he’d give Jenks back thirty. “Sometimes, the man would bring his thirty in a month, sometimes a week, sometimes just a couple days. This man’s carrying his TV in and out of the store for years, Jenks making five dollars, five dollars. So one day, the man comes in empty-handed, depressed, and Jenks asks him what’s wrong. ‘My TV broke,” the man said, ‘and now I don’t have anything to loan on.’ So Jenks walks over to the TV shelf and grabs a set and gives it free. ‘Here,’ he says, ‘now you can loan on this.’ “

That story gives a great sense of the author’s tone and style, but it’s also indicative of the experience you’ll have when you sink into the pawn shop world created here. This is the world of the haves and the have-nots, and to Huddy’s down on their luck customers, Huddy is both a savior and a devil–the man with the cash. But Huddy, with a new baby arrived, is a bottom feeder in the pawn shop world, trading on low-end products and making a buck here and there. Renting from his much more successful older brother Joe, Huddy barely makes ends meet, and scenes of Huddy’s would-be customers emphasize the desperation involved in both ends of the transactions. With two-thirds of the customers “forfeiting on their loans,” the average loan just forty dollars, a robbery of the liquor store next door, a blood bank moving in and the general decline of the neighbourhood, Huddy scouts out Liberty Pawn with its excellent location, high-end merchandise, better tools and “bigger stones.” Coming up with the cash to buy this business is impossible, but then Huddy is offered the deal of a lifetime when a gun collector dies and his wealthy widow offers  to sell the entire collection to Huddy. 

Huddy knows that getting that gun collection will yield a high return profit–especially since the gun collector’s widow, a woman from an old money family, doesn’t seem to realize the value of the rarer guns. Huddy cannot afford to buy the collection, but knows he has to move fast on the deal before the family looks elsewhere for the sale, so he goes to the only person he knows who has money, his brother, building contractor Joe.

Joe laughs. “Sure I’m rich. But it would help if someone paid me to do more than fix a door or window. That’s all anyone’s doing. Everybody else in a bind puts me in a bind.”

“But you got your money diversified. Nobody wants a door or window, you just get it somewhere else, right?”

“Multiple streams of income,” Joe says, as if he were confiding life’s secret. ” ‘cept they’re all drying up. Six months ago, people were calling for everything. This one fella, lives on a dead-end street with the street named after him. He pays me to turn his garage into  a bar, and then he pays me again to build him a garage next to the bar. People were spending like they could never spend all they had … What I’m saying, Huddy is right now I don’t have room for bad ideas.”

To Huddy, buying and selling the guns will allow him to move to the next level in life; he and Joe just have to “hit it right.” In addition to contractor Joe and pawn shop owner, Huddy, there’s a third brother, the black sheep of the family, Harlan. With all of the brothers involved in one form or another in the gun collection, it’s just a matter of time before the old family dynamics emerge with trouble right behind. Huddy wants the deal to work so badly, and for a while it seems as though the plan is working, but add impatience, lack of caution and greed to the mix, and the deal goes south.

Bluff City Pawn starts slowly as Huddy’s working life is described, and since I love books that give me a sense of worlds that would otherwise remain impenetrable to me, I appreciated all the details of Huddy & his customers surrounded by pawnshop detritus–evidence of a shifting civilization and its discarded televisions. Here’s Huddy reading about a pawnshop bust:

The pawnshop bust has moved off the front page, and Huddy checks to see if it’s buried elsewhere. It’s gone. Fast Pawn over on Winchester, only open a year, which means to Huddy they were criminal from day one. It’s been over a year since a pawnshop got busted, that one over on Park, where the guy got in so deep and stupid he was giving orders: You think you can get me computers, stereos, jewelry? And then before that the shop near the tool plant, where the owner had employees from the plant stealing from the factory, and you’d walk in there and see shelves and shelves of brand-new industrial tools. These stories happening just often enough to make people think every pawnshop has a truck parked out back doing these midnight deals.

 While Bluff City Pawn has elements of crime, this is primarily a tale of how we fail to understand money, how it’s made, where it all goes, and just how hard it is to move from one level of society to another. Huddy, who knows the pawn business well, sees desperate people living on the edge of poverty, trying to catch a break every day. He lives off of their failures, while Joe lives off of people’s success. To Joe, Huddy charging 20% interest sounds like a hell of a deal, but it’s 20% interest on stuff that is usually unclaimed. To Huddy, Joe with his lavish mcmansion, high maintenance third wife, and extravagant water feature must be rolling in green. Neither man understands the other’s position, the pressures, the restraints, the temptations, and that’s part of the problem. The rest of the problems occur simply because of impatience, carelessness and greed.

He can already hear the customers coming in, saying , “hey man, you’re taking fishtanks? I’ll get you a bigger one.” Give him a month, he could turn the place into an aquarium. It’d be the same way if he bought an accordion, a bowling ball, frozen steaks. Whatever he buys, the street  wants to bring him more. “Steaks, man, I can get you beautiful cuts. All packed up, ready to go.”

 Review copy.

A Cold Night for Alligators by Nick Crowe

A few weeks ago, I entered a book-give-away contest at Kevin’s blog, and to my astonishment, I won. Of the three books on offer, I grabbed A Cold Night for Alligators by first-time author, Canadian Nick Crowe. Some reviewers compared the book to the work of Carl Hiaasen. I can’t comment on that as I’ve never read any, but I can say that there’s a touch of Christopher Moore  and even Bill Fitzhugh. Chances are that if you like those writers, you’ll enjoy Crowe’s novel. So what is A Cold Night for Alligators? It’s part road trip, part buddy novel, and part mystery. Oh and part innocent Canadian abroad.

The novel’s narrator is Jasper, a twenty-six-year-old man who lives and fights with his girlfriend Kim in the house that used to belong to his parents. Jasper’s father is dead, his mother is in a nursing home, and Jasper’s only brother, Coleman disappeared one night 10 years earlier. Coleman began exhibiting mental problems during his teens and was building a spaceship in the back garden right before he disappeared. Coleman’s disappearance has nagged at Jasper for years as he feels partially responsible.

The novel starts off very strongly with an earnest and believable first person narration from  Jasper as he stands on the subway station on a Friday night waiting to catch the train home while listening to his workmate, Phil moaning about his woes:

It had been another riveting day at the office. I spent most of the day aimlessly searching the internet, reading in turn about Scrotum Smasher, a punk rock band from Northern Ontario who released one classic record in 1986 then promptly disbanded, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, an affliction caused by a slow-moving virus that destroys memory.

Ok, so we’ve established that Jasper is a slacker, and for that, I liked this open-minded, kind character very much. While Jasper listens with one ear, he’s thinking about his upcoming weekend and the inevitable arguments he’ll have with his long-term girlfriend, Kim. But those arguments never happen. Fate intervenes in the form of a loony and when Jasper wakes up from a coma 7 months later his life has changed. Not only is he horribly injured but his girlfriend has moved on and now lives with her new man, Donny …  in Jasper’s house.

Jasper, is a little uncomfortable (nothing more) with his girlfriend finding a new man while he’s in a coma. That, of course, would be bad enough, but that girlfriend ex “party-girl extraordinaire” now  “God-botherer” has moved her new man into Jasper’s parents’ home. She seems to be pushing the envelope of decent behaviour, and this also creates a very awkward situation when Jasper comes out of the coma. Again, Jasper seems to roll with it–it’s just not in his nature to hold a grudge or be angry. For these reasons, Jasper’s character is a little too good at times ( he notes that Donny “was being pretty good about the whole thing” and that illustrates how Jasper misses the point at several times throughout the story), but that seems to be the author’s intention.

Jasper has problems adjusting back to his life, but two things happen: he receives a phone call on his birthday from the Fort Myers area of Florida, and while no one speaks on the other end, Jasper is convinced the anonymous caller is his long-lost brother Coleman. Jasper and Coleman spent many childhood summers in Florida, and both boys grew up with a “lifelong love of the Sunshine State.” But then there’s a second phone call–this time from a Florida sheriff who says that a homeless man gave him this number. Jasper is first intrigued and then takes a fishing trip down to Florida with Donny and his hapless, burping friend, Duane (read: shit magnet) to see if he can trace Coleman.

The road trip is peppered with bizarre characters, but that’s nothing to what awaits them in Florida. Here’s Jasper arriving at Aunt Val’s isolated ramshackle place which she shares with Rolly Lee–former front man for the Fort Myers band General Gator:

When we pulled in at the edge of the open area and parked the truck, I noticed a group of men behind the barn. An overweight man with a massively distended bare stomach and matchstick legs was throwing beer bottles while a rough, smoke-smeared artillery of men were taking aim and firing with slingshots and pellet guns. As we got out of the truck, I heard one pop and shatter. There was a chorus of whoops and cheers. I made a mental note that if I had to go looking for an extra truck part, not to do it barefoot.

“Jesus Christ,”  Duane said, “your uncle in a fucking militia or something? This is like Waco.”

Donny nodded. His mouth agape. “He really knows how to throw a cookout. There must be sixty people here.” Another ATV blazed into sight from the mud road and did a donut. Two men got off, beers already uncapped.

“Go man go,” Duane shouted. They nodded in our direction and spat as they went past.

A Cold Night for Alligators could be an incredibly dark novel if it were written from a different angle. But with Crowe’s gentle humour and quirky characters–all seen through Jasper’s wondering eyes–the novel is instead an amusing, light read. The plot sagged a bit in the middle and I had problems with the naiveté of one character whose name I can’t mention without giving away too much.

Can’t help but wonder how Floridians would see the book, but from my perspective, Crowe captured swamp culture perfectly.  It’s a world of its own. Try going off the beaten track in Florida (I’m not talking about the tourist traps) and see what you find. I’ve seen Water Moccasins ribboning through brackish water, alligators deceptively lazy at the side of the swamp, and on one dark starless night I walked through a field while the air was thick with thousands of shimmering fireflies. This geographical region is unique and mysterious. It’s one of the areas that leaves an imprint on the people who live there, and Nick Crowe captured my memories of the place perfectly.

Thanks Kevin!

The Brothers Rico by Simenon

Simenon is best remembered for his Inspector Maigret novels, but I am trying to work my way slowly through this prolific author’s more than 100 romans durs (hard novels). Although I am a rabid Simenon fan, I was a bit skeptical when I picked up The Brothers Rico as it’s atypical for its American setting and its focus on organised crime. 

Some of Simenon’s novels concern middle-class protagonists who are derailed by fate from their lives of boring bourgeois respectability. Cast adrift (sometimes physically, sometimes mentally), they frequently embark on a life of crime or sink into the bowels of a lurid underworld. These protagonists seem to be ‘nice’ respectable people simply because fate handed them certain cards, and some plots underscore the idea that these characters will take to a life of crime with zest if given the opportunity. So I was curious to see how Simenon wrote about characters who chose the Mafia as a way of life. What moral quibbling, I asked myself, could exist in these pages?

In The Brothers Rico, although the story is a change of pace for Simenon, the author makes it clear that he is the master of his multiple fictional worlds. This is a superb and deceptively simple novella that explores guilt, divided loyalties, the sticky depths of human behaviour, and the mercurial ability to lie to oneself.

The protagonist of The Brothers Rico is Eddie Rico. At 38, he’s the eldest of the three Rico boys, born and raised in Brooklyn by their widowed mother. Mamma Rico still lives in Brooklyn and runs a sweet shop. Years before, Eddie’s father was gunned down and killed by a bullet intended for Sid Kubik. Kubik is now a big man in the Organisation, and he’s acted as a benefactor to the Rico boys ever since they lost their father.

When the book begins, Eddie Rico is settled in Florida. He kids himself that he’s out of the Organisation, and while he’s out of the murkier side of their activities, in reality he manages their West Florida gambling operations. Eddie is a slick businessman. He’s never cheated, he’s never refused to do anything asked of him, and he’s been a good employee. In return, Eddie’s been amply rewarded. He has a  large house pretentiously called “Sea Breeze” located  “in the most fashionable part of Santa Clara between the lagoon and the sea.”  He runs a legitimate, profitable business, the West Coast Fruit Emporium. Eddie, called “boss”  by his employees and various tradesmen is a respected man, and he’s loved and cherished by his wife, Alice and three children. Eddie is a “fastidious man” and  he feeds his self-image by wearing only the most expensive clothes and pampering himself with twice weekly manicures and facial massages:

“He was no bigshot. he was never mentioned in the papers and only rarely talked about in the bars of New York, New Jersey or Chicago. But in his own territory he was boss. And every single night club paid up without a fuss.

None of them ever tried to welsh any more. He knew his figures too well. He never got mad, never uttered any threats. On the contrary, he always talked quietly, used as few words as possible, and everyone understood.”

There are vague rumblings that Eddie’s world is beginning to collapse. The book opens with blackbirds disturbing his sleep, and the very first warning comes that morning in a guarded letter from his mother. She wants to know if Eddie has seen either of his younger brothers, Gino or Tony. Gino is supposed to be in California, and Tony has simply disappeared. The letter hints that the whereabouts of the two youngest Rico brothers is connected to a Grand Jury investigation into the murder of underworld figure Carmine–a man who “stopped those five slugs of lead,” and Mamma Rico warns “there’s a rumour that someone’s been singing.”

Another event to break the pattern comes when Eddie gets the order to hide Brooklyn gangster, Curly Joe. Perhaps it’s not so odd that Eddie is asked to hide Joe, but it’s Joe’s derisive, disrespectful manner that begins to sound alarm bells in Eddie’s head. But the most alarming event in Eddie Rico’s day is the unannounced arrival of his brother, Gino. Gino tells Eddie that Tony has gone into hiding, swears the Organisation intends to kill Tony if they find him, and he asks Eddie to track Tony down and get him out of the country. Gino is evading the mob, and in his reluctance to trust Eddie, Gino is not particularly forthcoming with information. There’s a lingering suspicion between the brothers and Eddie’s first response is to curse his brothers’ stupidity:

“Eddie hated talking about such things. It was all very remote now, almost in another world. Deep down, he would have preferred not knowing. It is always dangerous to know too much. Why hadn’t his brothers gotten out like he had?”

With Gino’s departure, a net begins to close slowly over Eddie. It’s quite clear to the reader that the net was firmly around Eddie all these years, yet he was either oblivious of its existence or happily in self-denial. First, he is summoned to Miami where he meets Sid Kubik and his henchman Boston Phil. While Kubik’s demeanour is the almost the same as usual, that veneer of affected emotional attachment slips when he asks Eddie about his brothers and asks him to track down Tony….

The story presents Eddie Rico as a confident man whose self-assurance is gradually stripped away as the story unfolds. Eddie’s day begins with his self-congratulatory routines, and the dark uneasy undercurrents in his life are assuaged by his material wealth and the respect of his employees. This all shifts, and under orders to find his brother Tony, Eddie begins the hunt, exploiting his mother, and breaking her trust. The Rico brothers find themselves in the deadly position of divided loyalty. Is their duty to the Mafia, the family or to themselves? While Tony makes his stand quite clear, Gino and Eddie make different choices. The book successfully builds with tension and also illustrates a growing paranoia in Eddie. As the net tightens, every move he makes is anticipated, and he’s shadowed every step of the way. This, of course, underscores one of Simenon’s themes–the inability to escape one’s fate–even though his characters all too often create cages of their own making. As Rico searches for Tony, he runs into many old friends and acquaintances. Do they treat him with veiled contempt or is it Rico’s imagination? Perhaps Rico’s greatest humiliation is that in spite of his intelligence, his years of faithful service, his square dealing with the Organisation, he is still a little man who’ll do what it takes to protect his own skin.

Of particular note is the motif of a  mole on Eddie’s face which is mentioned frequently in the novel. Its presence disturbs Eddie but he mostly ignores it except when he cuts it during shaving, but the mole troubles him, niggling away like a conscience–an unpleasant reminder of morality.

It’s worth noting that the females in the book are presented quite differently from their cinematic counterparts. In the book, Eddie Rico selects an Italian wife who will understand and ask no questions, but in the 1957 film version, his wife is a hysterical shrew. While Tony’s wife is made of steel, the cinematic version is a clingy woman who faints when the going gets tough. Similarly, Mamma Rico is a canny old woman who knows what’s going down in Brooklyn, but the film presents her as an emotional woman who turns to religion in between tears.