Mon 13 Sep 2010
Reviewed by Allen J. Hubin: HAROLD ADAMS – The Man Who Met the Train.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[3] Comments
Allen J. Hubin
HAROLD ADAMS – The Man Who Met the Train. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1988. Paperback reprint: 1989.
The latest of Harold Adams’ tales of Carl Wilcox and 1930s South Dakota is The Man Who Met the Train (1988). Wilcox is driving his Model T around the small towns of his area when he comes upon a car accident and rescues a survivor, a four-year-old girl.
He reports the accident to the police in Toquevllle, where the town’s judge hires him to look into the crash. This involves Carl with local muscle-bound youngsters, who take offense at him, with the town’s beauty, which enrages further inhabitants, and with the death a year earlier of Ellsworth Ellison.
Ellison was brilliant and continuously drunk; one day he walked into the side of a train and died. Now, as Wilcox stirs things up, nothing seems accidental any longer.
Evocative and engaging, as usual with this series.
Bibliographic Note: The Man Who Met the Train is the seventh of sixteen novels featuring itinerant handyman and incidental solver of crimes Carl Wilcox. The final one appeared in 1999. A complete list and cover images of many of them can be found on the Fantastic Fiction website.
September 13th, 2010 at 7:46 pm
These had a quiet power and a real feeling for the time and place. Remnants of that dusty Depression world could still be glimpsed when I was younger, and these books recalled that world for me.
I don’t think of any one book in the series, but over all my memories of it are more than favorable, with Wilcox one of the more memorable protagonists of that era of mystery writing.
September 13th, 2010 at 8:56 pm
I’ve been thinking about that myself.
I can think of a few one-shot detective or crime stories that take place during the depression (as opposed to the Prohibition era) or very short series, perhaps, but I have the feeling that the Wilcox books may be unique in that regard — both in terms of the length of the series and how clearly both time and place are depicted, as you say, David.
September 13th, 2010 at 9:29 pm
Most of the Depression era crime books tended to be one shots — grim portraits of despair like those by James M. Cain, Horace McCoy, Ross, Anderson, and Richard Hallas, so a series making use of that Depression era is unusual. There were quite a few series set in that time period, but they tend to ignore the Depression or keep it in the background.
And when I think of the Wilcox books the ones that I relate them too are those, something like Michael Chabon’s AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND KLAY, Tom Holt’s IT’S SUPERMAN, or E. L. Doctorow’s LOON LAKE — all of which strongly evoked the Depression era in the same way Adams does.
I’m not sure he ever got the credit he deserved in that area, because he really nails that era, never in a showy manner, but with small details and the way Carl Wilcox acts and reacts to the people around him.
Maybe we all should have been paying more attention.
You really wouldn’t have been surprised if Wilcox had run into Tom Joad or the outlaw lovers from THIEVES LIKE US or the doomed dance contestants from THEY SHOOT HORSES DON’T THEY. Pretty heady company for any series to keep.