Mon 17 Aug 2020
Archived PI Mystery Review: FRED ZACKEL – Cinderalla After Midnight.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[7] Comments
FRED ZACKEL – Cinderella After Midnight. Michael Brennen #2. Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, hardcover, 1980. No paperback edition.
When private investigator Michael Brennen agrees to help find his client’s daughter, he thinks he’s working on a run-of-the-mill custody case. Instead, the trail leads him straight into the gritty, grimy pesthole of San Francisco’s notorious Tenderloin district.
One of the primary obligations of the California private eye novel has always seemed to involve the public display of some of the sorrier undersides of the once-proud California dream. Here we get an eyeful. We’re led from alley to gutter and back again, and just as we’ve begun to feel there’s no escape – and for most of the inhabitants of this noxious world there is not – the trail suddenly takes a surprising twist upward, into the light of day and into the inner offices of some of the state’s leading politicians and financial leaders.
Brennen’s client turns out to be a hooker, but at one time she was a call girl with powerful government connections. He spots the daughter in a porno film, one she made with a live-in lesbian lover. The mother is murdered, the girl is kidnapped, and the underground revolution is blamed – but we know better. Big Business and Big Government are both involved – the twin Boogie Men that may grab us all yet.
The story is steeped in sour sex and melancholia. There is little to blow away the pervading gloom. The plot is wonderfully convoluted, a mystery addict’s delight, but its grip on the reader never wholly takes hold. Why this should be so is not entirely clear. There may be cause for beginning to wonder whether, just maybe, a message like this one might not have been a measure too much for its limited means of conveyance to handle.
Rating: B
The Michael Brennen series —
Cocaine and Blue Eyes (1978)
Cinderella After Midnight (1980)
August 17th, 2020 at 6:14 pm
Chandler and Hammett both often wrote about that place where the underbelly met high society. It is one of the most pervasive themes in hard-boiled literature, either the tough man or woman who drag themselves up from the bottom and want to keep it quiet or the slumming rich person caught in a downward spiral.
You may have hit the nail on the head with the phrase “sour sex and melancholia.”
Not knowing anything about the author I can’t say, but this sort of book often fails because the writer really has only second hand experience of these worlds. Chandler’s language was authentic as was his experience in bars, Hammett was probably the most authentic of hard-boiled writers, but both men wrote from an earned dystopian view, darkness seen and experienced, not just imagined.
The American John Gardner wrote about a trend he found tiresome among young writers of an unearned dystopian view he called DisPollyanna. I wonder if the darkness in this one perhaps was the result of that unearned darkness, a false hard-boiled point of view?
August 17th, 2020 at 6:17 pm
You make some good observations, David. I do not know the answer to your last question, but of all the reviews I have posted here of books I no longer remember, this is the one I’d like to re-read the most.
August 17th, 2020 at 7:12 pm
I’ve just discovered that I misspelled Michael Brennen’s name all these years, since corrected. Kevin Burton Smith’s entry on him is interesting:
https://thrillingdetective.wordpress.com/2020/04/27/michael-brennen/
Apparently Ross Macdonald was something of a mentor to Zackel, suggesting the former was also more of a model to him than either Hammett or Chandler.
I also learned that Zackel has written some other crime fiction, including a few PI novels too recent to be included in Hubin:
“Besides the Brennen books, he’s responsible for Murder in Wakiki, a novel which sparked the author’s fascination with Hawaiian culture. He’s also written a few P.I. standalones, including Tough Town Cold City (2010), which introduced another San Francisco private eye, Frank Pasnow, and The Girl Under the Bridge (2020), with muckruking journalist Frank Corso. Zackel’s short story collections include The Bicycles Were Gravestones and Creepier Than a Whorehouse Kiss.”
August 17th, 2020 at 8:15 pm
He’s an interesting guy. I met him through Bill Crider at a Bouchercon (Raleigh, I think), and he was also in St. Petersburg (again, my memory is not perfect). He and his wife joined a group of us (former DAPA-EM mostly) for dinner.
August 17th, 2020 at 8:48 pm
One of the bigger regrets in my life is not being able to get to more Bouchercons and other mystery get-togethers. I always enjoyed the ones I did get to, but they number less than the fingers on one hand. Not counting the thumb.
August 27th, 2020 at 12:39 pm
I remember the first one, Cocaine and Blue Eyes, getting a decent amount of buzz, and always wondered what happened to the fellow. It seems that he moved on to teaching, only returning steadily to writing around 2010. I’m curious as to why he stopped for so long.
I’m also morbidly curious to see the movie based on his first book, starring OJ Simpson.
August 27th, 2020 at 1:28 pm
I remember watching the movie, but to tell you the truth, Simpson was a far better football player than he was an actor, and all I remember about it was wondering why they took what I assumed was a good book and wasted it like that.