Thu 25 Nov 2010
Reviewed by Barry Gardner: JOHN STRALEY – The Curious Eat Themselves.
Posted by Steve under Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Characters , Reviews[7] Comments
JOHN STRALEY – The Curious Eat Themselves. Cecil Younger #2. Soho Press, hardcover, September 1993. Bantam, paperback, June 1995. Soho Crime, trade paperback, July 2006.
I didn’t read the first Alaskan mystery by John Straley, The Woman Who Married a Bear; it was a conscious avoidance, though I no longer remember why. It sold enough copies that I must have been one of the very few who didn’t, and now he’s written another.
Straley lives in Alaska, is an investigator for the Public Defender and has his own private investigation business; a pretty good set of qualifications.
Cecil Younger is an on-again, off-again drunk, an ex-public defender, and a private investigator. He lives in Ketchikan, Alaska, has an autistic roommate, and his erratic life just took a turn for the worse. His ex-girlfriend had sent a friend to him, who wanted him to track down evidence of her rape by some employees of a big mining concern. Now she’s been fished out of the water with her throat cut. He’s immediately warned off the case by a high ranking official, and old friend of his family. And his roommate’s Labrador has died.
Straley’s book reminds me a little of James Crumley with the alcoholic lead, and the anti-business/environmental orientation, and the flair for describing the wilderness. That’s as far as the comparison goes, because Younger isn’t a macho character, and Straley’s prose hasn’t quite the power of Crumley’s.
It’s good prose, though, and he obviously has a real feel for the Alaskan country about which he writes. He’s a better plotter than Crumley, too.
Aside from the exotic locale, the story itself isn’t that different from many other hardboiled private detective stories, but it’s well told, and the various characters are interesting. A few of the business and government people are a tad one-dimensional, but at least you don’t need a scorecard to tell the villains.
There’s a third in the series already, and I like this one enough that I’ll probably read it. I might even go back and read the first.
The Cecil Younger series —
1. The Woman Who Married a Bear (1992)
2. The Curious Eat Themselves (1993)
3. The Music of What Happens (1996)
4. Death and the Language of Happiness (1997)
5. The Angels Will Not Care (1998)
6. Cold Water Burning (2001)
Editorial Comment: Barry seems to have jumped the gun on the forthcoming appearance of the third book. His review was written in 1993, but the third book didn’t appear until 1996.
November 25th, 2010 at 1:39 am
I’ve not read any of the books in this series, I’m embarrassed to say, and I can’t even come up with a good reason why.
One possibility, though, is that there were simply too many PI novels in the early 1990s to keep up with, and in my case, Straley’s books were among those I didn’t manage to.
There were books by Stephen Greenleaf, Jonathan Valin, Arthur Lyons, James Crumley, Bill Pronzini, William Tapply, Jeremiah Healy, Robert B. Parker, Linda Barnes, Sara Paretsky, Linda Barnes, and many others whose names I’m sure are not coming to me now.
Those were heady times.
November 25th, 2010 at 9:37 am
I feel pretty much the same way, Steve. I never read them either and don’t know why. I have read several other Alaska-set series, by Dana Stabenow, Stan Jones, and Marcia Simpson to name three, yet haven’t read Straley or Sue Henry, to name two others.
November 25th, 2010 at 1:01 pm
Good grief Steve, you didn’t mention Loren Estleman who is still writing the Amos Walker, private eye series, over 20 of them. Just published is the Amos Walker short story collection, which I have to get.
November 25th, 2010 at 2:07 pm
Good grief is right, Walker. Mental fuzz, that’s my only explanation. Add Estleman to the list. I have the new short story collection, but haven’t started to tackle it yet.
It lists for $32.95, but you can get it for whopping discounts online. Is it worth it? Actually it has more than 30 stories in something like 600 pages, so yes, I think so.
Jeff
I’ve read both Stabenow and Sue Henry in that list of authors with Alaskan settings, but not the others. Although I am doing my best to keep such thoughts at bay, I am starting to realize that there are some authors I will never get to.
November 26th, 2010 at 9:14 am
I have the Estleman volume from the library and it is massive indeed. Of course I’ve read a lot of the stories previously, including the 10 in his earlier Walker collection, but at 32 stories and 635 pages it is worth having.
November 26th, 2010 at 10:36 am
The early Straley books are excellent. Cecil’s roommate was my favorite character (very personal reasons attached to this). I think Straley ran out of steam and ideas around the fourth book. The fifth is run-of-the-mill in my opinion. And I can’t even remember anything about the last one and I remember I didn’t really like it.
He’s written an unusual novel published a few years ago that is an action thriller in the noir mode (not really a detective novel), THE BIG BOTH WAYS, which deals with the burgeoning American Communist movement in the 1930s. Set once again in Alaska.
Straley was not the first mystery writer to use Alaska as a setting – that distinction goes to Eunice Mays Boyd who created Millard Smyth, a grocery store owner/amateur sleuth and wrote three books featuring him: Murder Breaks Trail (1943), Doom in the Midnight Sun (1944), and Murder Wears Mukluks (1945) – immortalized as a Dell mapback with a gruesome skull in a parka.
December 15th, 2010 at 1:32 am
I have read all of Straley’s books – The Big Both Ways, the Cecil stories, and the recent book of poetry. I like everything he writes. Sometimes I open up one of the Cecil stories again and read a few pages at random. I’m cheered up in an introspective rainy sort of way: Life can be be really awful and sometimes it isn’t even my fault but things might get better and in the meantime, I’ll appreciate any goodness I can find in this universe.