Mon 20 Jul 2015
JONATHAN VALIN – Dead Letter. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1981. Avon, paperback, 1982. Dell paperback, 1994.
The focus in this, the third adventure of Cincinnati private eye Harry Stoner, is academia, and the scurrilous sort of in-fighting and backstabbing that it is rumored goes on in such circles. As one of the characters puts it on page 197, “They don’t make very good human beings, scholars. They don’t have it in them to care for anything but themselves and their work.”
I could argue the point, I think, but hardly with 100 per-cent conviction. The fact remains that this case of Harry Stoner’s is at once his most confusing and his most involving. Neither his client, a professor who believes his Marxist-environmentalist daughter has stolen a secret government document from him, nor the daughter herself are quite what Stoner takes them at first to be.
Professor Daryl Lovingwell loves his daughter Sarah, or so he says. After his death, Stoner discovers an immense hatred between the two, and yet, although he had liked his client, with Kate gone (the library cop Stoner had become so involved with in Final Notice), the inevitable begins to happen between Sarah and himself.
In a number of ways, this case is a tough one for Stoner to fathom, and even more so for the reader. Characterizations are deliberately murky, sketched from a multitude of conflicting viewpoints. The entire affair is filled with a moral ambiguity almost unnatural for a detective story.
And so this is unlikely to be everyone’s favorite Harry Stoner novel — there is not much here to brighten the overall gloom. If it should come to it, however, a second reading will reveal how tightly structured this tale actually is. While it may not have been totally visible the first time, above all what it will demonstrate is that as an author, Jonathan Valin knows exactly what it is that he’s up to.
Rating: A minus.
July 21st, 2015 at 10:11 pm
I truly admired this and the early Stoner books then suddenly for no reason I can explain Valin and several writers dropped off my radar — mostly pi writers too. By the time the purge was over Pronzini, Healy, Greenleaf, Michael and Max Allan Collins, Paretsky, and Crumley were all that were still standing. I still can’t quite explain what happened.
July 21st, 2015 at 10:44 pm
I think that some authors simply run out of things to say more quickly than others.
I didn’t much care for Valin’s NATURAL CAUSES, for example, the one in which Stoner goes to Hollywood and gets involved in a case involving a head writer for a daytime soap opera. It may have been interesting to Valin, but not to me. It really took Stoner out of his natural Cincinnati-based environment, and it didn’t work for me at all.
But I should add that that was Valin’s fifth Stoner book, out of eleven. Eleven books in 15 years is not a bad record, but like you, David, I didn’t keep up with them all the way to the end.
July 22nd, 2015 at 3:31 pm
It’s interesting that you didn’t enjoy Natural Causes, as I am pretty sure that Valin was a writer for the soaps for many years, so he should have had an insiders knowledge. I thought he did a nice job with the series, as it was one of the few that I continued to follow to the end of the series.
July 22nd, 2015 at 6:35 pm
I think the fact that Valin did write for the soaps was a good part of the reason I didn’t care for the book. He wanted to use his experience as background for the book, but I wasn’t interested, and Stoner seemed way out of place.
July 22nd, 2015 at 7:42 pm
Re a NATURAL CAUSES I remember thinking it would have been better without Stoner. W.T. Ballard wrote a couple of books about television (notably one based on his experience writing DICK TRACY) but wisely didn’t put Bill Lennox in any of them or make them mysteries
July 24th, 2015 at 7:53 pm
Though this may be a weaker entry in the Stoner series, I think they are all worth reading. I certainly enjoyed them all, and have been considering re-reading them.
July 24th, 2015 at 8:03 pm
By “weaker entry” I assume you’re referring to NATURAL CAUSES, Richard. I haven’t read DEAD LETTER in 32 years (!!), but back then, I thought it was one of the good ones.
July 25th, 2015 at 10:52 am
I’ve read about half of Valin’s books. I pick them up whenever I run across them–which is a rare event now. The early books were more satisfying than the later ones. Back in the 1990s, I showed up at EYECON to announce the death of the Private Eye novel. The crowd was hostile to my pronouncement. But I think Time has decided the question in my favor.
July 25th, 2015 at 12:55 pm
George
Well in one sense you were wrong, since there are far too many PI novels still being published to keep track of, and I’m doing my best to try. But in terms of bestsellers, or even midlist sellers, I think you may be right. The real money comes with serial killers and high-tech thrillers, not the lowly PI.
July 25th, 2015 at 6:14 pm
Thanks, Steve, for moving the misplaced comment and sussing out my meaning.