Sun 3 Sep 2017
A Mystery Review by David Vineyard: CRAIG McDONALD – One True Sentence.
Posted by Steve under Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Characters , Reviews[16] Comments
CRAIG McDONALD – One True Sentence. Minotaur Books, hardcover, February 2011. Betimes Books, softcover, revised edition, August 2014.
The year is 1924 and expatriate Hector Lassiter, one of the “Lost Generation,†is in Paris writing when on a dark night he hears a scream as he walks in the snow on the Pont Neuf bridge.
He doesn’t see anything that night, but soon enough, he and his friend Ernest Hemingway are up to their necks against a bizarre Nihilists cult called Nada, led by a mutilated man in a black mask calling himself Nobodaddy (from William Blake) who seem to be murdering off the editor publishers of impoverished little small press magazine of the type common in Paris at the time, and eventually playing at detectives under the direction of Gertrude Stein, a fact complicated when Lassiter is also drafted by Commissaire Aristide Simon as an agent of the police.
One True Sentence is a historical thriller in the nine-book series by Edgar and Anthony award nominee Craig McDonald featuring Hector Lassiter, a crime writer who made his debut in 2007’s Head Games (set in 1957). Now the series has been reissued by Betimes Books in internal chronological order, beginning with One True Sentence. (See below.)
Lassiter is an attractive protagonist (literally, he looks like William Holden), whose life covers much of American history in the 20th century. Here, amidst poseurs, literary icons, painters, poets, Dadaists, Surrealists, and a cold Paris winter he meets and falls in love with the dark mysterious Blinke Devlin, who also writes mystery novels of the locked room kind, under a male pseudonym, and has other mysteries to hide; Molly Wilder, a beautiful poet with a possibly fatal crush on him; Phillipe her painter boyfriend who involved her with the Nada movement; and the rather nasty Estelle Quartermain, an English mystery writer and expert on poisons.
One theme running through the book is that almost no one is exactly who they claim to be, leaving Hector stumbling through a maze of aliases, lies, secrets, and puzzles, each arising as another has been seemingly solved.
One True Sentence is a sexy, fast-paced mystery that generates more than a little suspense and includes appropriately bitchy portraits of actual figures of the era including Aleister Crowley, Ford Maddox Ford, William Carlos Williams, Sylvia Beach, and others.
There is more going on here than just a fine evocation of Paris in that era, though. This is also a funny, tricky, horrifying, sexy, and ultimately involving mystery with enough twists and turns to delight any fan of the Golden Age puzzle school, and a protagonist of the two-fisted hard boiled type who even writes for Black Mask.
Each book stands alone, but characters, both major and minor weave in and out of the rest of the series and the four books of McDonald’s Chris Lyon series which is also tied to the Lassiter books.
The background is smartly sketched in, the characters witty and interesting, the action moves fast, the hero and various heroines aren’t eunuchs or virgins without the sex being overly graphic, and the more preposterous elements of the books are done with such sense of fun that only a grouch could really complain.
I’m looking forward to exploring more of the century with Hector Lassiter. The books are literate without being literary, funny without being silly, and smart without shouting out loud at you how clever they are. Any one of those would be reason to read most books.
The Hector Lassiter series —
1. One True Sentence (2011)
2. Forever’s Just Pretend (2014)
3. Toros & Torsos (2008)
4. The Great Pretender (2014)
5. Roll the Credits (2014)
6. The Running Kind (2014)
7. Head Games (2007)
8. Print the Legend (2010)
9. Death in the Face (2015)
10. Three Chords & The Truth (2016)
The Chris Lyon series —
1. Parts Unknown (2012)
2. Carnival Noir (2013)
3. Cabal (2013)
4. Angels of Darkness (2013)
September 3rd, 2017 at 2:04 am
An author and a series I just learned abut tonight, thanks to you, David. I’ve just ordered an inexpensive copy of this one from Amazon, and after this review, I’m looking forward to it.
September 3rd, 2017 at 7:58 am
What Steve said. Somehow this series totally passed under my radar. I know a lot of people who dislike reading novels that incorporate real people into the plot, but I’m not one of them. If it’s done well and it is a person I’m interested in (Hemingway definitely makes that list), why not?
September 3rd, 2017 at 12:55 pm
Jeff said, “I know a lot of people who dislike reading novels that incorporate real people into the plot…”
and I’m one of them. There are novels which are the exceptions, though, and I decided that I was willing to pay $7.67 including postage to give this one a try.
September 3rd, 2017 at 12:51 pm
Thanks, David, for a review that covers every base on what a good review should be. Helpful. Informative. I’m tracking this one down.
September 3rd, 2017 at 1:04 pm
Here’s something that’s puzzling me just a little, not a lot, but
When catching up with a series like this, in which the books in published order do not match up with chronological time line of the character involved
Which is the better way to read them, in order as punished, or as Betimes Books seems to have reprinted them, in internal chronological order?
September 3rd, 2017 at 3:39 pm
David: Thank you so much for such a thoughtful and comprehensive review and summation of the novel.
Steve: I fully embrace and helped set the Betimes’ publication sequence. Because the series was entirely plotted as a unit, on first publication, acquiring editors cherry picked books, resulting in a fairly arbitrary sequence the first time around.
September 3rd, 2017 at 4:13 pm
Craig
Good to hear from you. I’m happy to say then, on author’s advice, that I’ll be starting with the one I should be. (I wish now I’d bought a copy that would have paid you something. From now on, I will!)
September 3rd, 2017 at 4:31 pm
Not surprised Mr. McDonald was reading.
He has posted some behind the book stories at J. Kingston Pierce’s blog Rap Sheet.
http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/search/label/Craig%20McDonald
Then there is his active website.
http://craigmcdonaldbooks.blogspot.com
September 3rd, 2017 at 6:37 pm
Thanks for the links, Michael. More evidence that I’ve just not been paying attention. I stop by the Rap Sheet blog at least a couple of times a week, and I still don’t remember reading about the series.
September 3rd, 2017 at 11:43 pm
Another thing worth noting the voice manages to change and mature subtly as the series moves forward, so the Lassiter of the later books has both matured, and views the world through the appropriate lens of the time.
There are more of these historical mysteries it seems every day, and not all with many famous “guests”, but overall I’ve been impressed with it as a vital sub genre especially those set in the period from roughly 1900 to 1960.
And this is one of the better ones.
September 4th, 2017 at 9:33 am
Informative review!
I’ve never heard of any real-life “Nada movement”. Is this made up for the novel? Or is it a typo for Dada?
September 4th, 2017 at 2:33 pm
From an online interview with Craig McDonald:
https://venetianvase.co.uk/2016/02/27/an-interview-with-craig-mcdonald-the-hector-lassiter-series/
Interviewer: Yes, that is interesting because the first Hector novel chronologically is One True Sentence with the Lost Generation, and you might think that some of those writers are a bit lost themselves. The antagonists in that novel are called Nadaists, and you tend to have these quite sinister and villainous and deplorable people gathered round ideologies or aesthetic movements: Nadaists or Surrealists or even the Mafia in The Running Kind is a kind of law unto itself. It has its own rules and codes. Is it partly send up, or do you find there’s something genuinely menacing about these kind of aesthetic movements?
McDonald: I would say it’s more send up than anything else. I’m more fascinated by the idea of groups of people doing things with insidious intent because I think that’s far more skin-crawling than the lone wolf, aberrational villain or antagonist. I set certain private goals for myself across the series, and a lot of it was directed towards looking at the movements in art through Modernism and Dadaism which is really what nada is in a sense. It’s a very nihilistic kind of philosophy moving into Surrealism.
September 4th, 2017 at 10:55 am
Like most of you, I hadn’t heard of Craig McDonald’s historical mystery series before reading David’s excellent review. Now, I’ll start tracking down copies. “Real” characters appearing in novels don’t bother me.
September 4th, 2017 at 1:40 pm
This is one of those series that it doesn’t really matter where you start it. Just start reading the first one you come across. If you like it, you’re going to read them all again sometime in the future anyway.
September 4th, 2017 at 9:05 pm
It sounds as if Nadaism is made up for the novel. A kind of spoof on real-life art movements of the era.
September 5th, 2017 at 4:13 am
15. Mike, it is a real movement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadaism