Thu 22 Dec 2016
EARL EMERSON РCatfish Caf̩. Ballantine, hardcover, August 1998; paperback reprint, September 1999.
This is number eleven in a series of what is so far fourteen books chronicling the cases of Seattle-based PI Thomas Black. The most recent is Two Miles of Darkness from 2015. It’s a good series. I read the first three when they first came out, but I regret to say I’ve been rather hit-and-miss with them from that point on.
In Catfish Café Emerson does something I think is rather daring. The case that he takes on is that of finding the daughter of his former partner on the police force; she’s gone missing after leaving the scene of an automobile accident, leaving the body of a dead man behind.
What is something out of the ordinary about this is that Luther Little, the girl’s father, is black, and in order to solve the case, Black has to maneuver his way through all kinds of secrets accumulated over the years by Luther’s very extended family. Not the kind of job a PI likes to do in general, but Black is white, and it takes a special knack on his part to make any kind of headway into prying the secrets loose.
There are wives and former lovers, daughters, sons and stepsons, fathers, uncles and cousins, a spunky grandmother, boy friends and more. The family is not poor, but neither are they well off. Many of them have problems. Some have prison records; the daughter Black is looking for has had a life on the streets.
To his credit, Emerson describes this family in detail well enough to convince me. The book is a long one, so it does seem to sag a little in the middle, but it’s also a complicated and interesting one. The ending also manages to gather up all the loose ends in satisfactory fashion, if not entirely happily to all of the various members of Luther’s family.
December 22nd, 2016 at 4:52 pm
I read and enjoyed the first six or seven books in the series which was really character based in a newer setting (Seattle). The series started off at paperback originals, then after a couple of books moved to hardcover. He had a sort of friend/girl friend that they spent several books deciding whether they were more than friends, which kind of drug on, but the stories were well done.
It looks like there is a decent gap in the series, and I believe Createspace which has published his last two books is Amazon’s self publishing arm.
In real life he was (and maybe still is) a fireman, and he wrote another series about a fireman.
Met him a couple of times at signings and he seemed like a pretty interesting guy.
December 22nd, 2016 at 10:21 pm
David P
Yes, there was an eleven year gap between this one and the next, which was CAPE DISAPPOINTMENT, published by Ballantine in 2009. The most recent two were published by Createspace, as you say, coming out in 2013 and 2015. Createspace also did the paperback edition of CAPE, which explains why I really didn’t know about it until now.
December 22nd, 2016 at 11:37 pm
I also enjoyed the first books until he took a break from the series and lost interest
December 23rd, 2016 at 1:46 am
I may have to drop in again, though most modern eyes leave me a bit cold. I don’t know if I burned out or it was too much of a good thing.
December 23rd, 2016 at 6:42 am
I’d recommend the first of Emerson’s books about his firefighter detective Mac Fontana, “Black Hearts and Slow Dancing” (1988).
December 23rd, 2016 at 3:10 pm
There were only five entries in Emerson’s Mac Fontana series; they came out between 1988 and 1996. The idea of a firefighter detective has never appealed to me, so I haven’t read any of them. If I ever read one, though, it makes sense to read the first one first.