Thu 30 Dec 2021
An Archived Mystery Review by Barry Gardner: ARCHER MAYOR – The Dark Root.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[10] Comments
ARCHER MAYOR – The Dark Root. Joe Gunther #6. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1995; paperback, 1996.
Mayor is one of the best of the latest wave of writers, to my eye. I thought so from his first book, Open Season, and I thought that his last, Fruits of the Poisonous Tree, was his best to date. He’s overdue for an award in my opinion.
An Asian family is brutalized, and won’t talk to the police. A local gangster is tortured, then killed. What began as an Asian-style “home invasion” is becoming a town invasion, and Lieutenant Joe Gunther of the Brattleboro, Vermont police finds himself immersed in a form of crime and gang warfare new to him. Other deaths follow, and Joe must join forces with much larger agencies to find the killers.
This was in one sense and perhaps the primary one a police procedural, and a damned good one, maybe even superb. I haven’t read a more realistic-seeming description of a large-scale, multi-jurisdiction operation. It’s also a portrait of how Asian gangs operate in this country, and again, a very realistic seeming one. (I’m often amused by reviewers, myself unfortunately included, who use the stand-alone “realistic” in contexts in which they haven’t the foggiest idea of what reality consists of.)
Where Mayor’s last book dealt heavily with Gunther and his lover’s emotions — while at the same time also being an excellent procedural — this is the story of a hunt, and the “personal” material is kept to a very proper minimum. Mayor is a fine narrative storyteller, and his pacing here is excellent. Of the male writers to appear in the last few years, I’d place him second only to Connelly, and not that far back.
December 30th, 2021 at 7:37 pm
Sounds like a book I’d like to read. But I might have never picked this up in a bookshop because the cover seems more suited to a fantasy novel or a historical whodunit.
A quick look around tells me there are 34 entries in the series since 1988, about one every year. Has anyone here read and have an opinion on the series as a whole?
December 30th, 2021 at 7:56 pm
My count, or rather that of Fantastic Fiction, is 33 novels and two shot stories. It’s quite a list.
As for recommendations, I’ve had to say this before when it’s come up, and nothing has changed. Back when Mayor started writing, I’d stopped reading police procedurals altogether, and when I saw his books in Borders, I decided to pass on them. And by the time it dawned on me that he had some staying power, and maybe I’d done something dumb, I just haven’t been able to jump into gear and get started on them.
I’ll have to leave other comments to others.
December 30th, 2021 at 8:27 pm
I read Mayor early, strayed, but should come back. The writing is excellent.
December 30th, 2021 at 9:56 pm
Gangs are definitely still a ‘thing’ in the inner city. Black, middle-eastern, Latin-American, Slav. They still cut up rough.
December 30th, 2021 at 10:00 pm
Some years ago, I gave my father some paperbacks by Archer Mayor but he never was much of a fiction reader and I don’t think he ever read them. He was a through-and-through Vermonter though, and when he died a couple years ago, we brought him home to be buried in the tiny cemetery overlooking the hills and village where he had grown up. I thought he might have gotten a kick out of the Mayor novels, recognizing names of places he knew—his mother who moved to the big city of Battleboro, now 12,000 people, in the late 1950s and lived on Main Street—but I also wondered if he would find the characters alien to him.
I have read a handful of the Mayor novels and plan to read more, but I am hyper-critical of them because I am looking to match my Vermont experience once remove, since I grew up in Massachusetts, to the Mayor books and I have not made that match yet ( however, books by Robert Parker put me right back into the Bay State, for example. ) When the “Newhart†television show set in Vermont was broadcast in the 1980s, often when I would meet someone, the person would try to rib me by asking, “Where is your other brother Daryl.†While probably the whole schtick of the three brothers on the “Newhart†show, Larry, Daryl and Daryl, was made up by some Los Angeles writer who never had stepped a foot in Vermont, I would explain that actually having two brothers with the same name had a whole lot of Vermont sense to it. I would use as an example Guy, the best friend of my grandfather, who died in a wrestling match with a bear that he went to finish the bear off with a hunting knife after shooting and wounding it—my grandfather died that is, not his friend. Without the least bit of irony as though it were the most natural thing in the world, my father explained that Guy’s parents gave all their children three letter names so they would know how to spell the names of their children. To me, naming two children with the same name Daryl made a world of sense since the parents would have to learn how to spell one name for both of them.
I will have to read more of the Mayor books to see if he ever got it down writing about these Vermonters who are backwoods smart but not wise with words and letters.
December 30th, 2021 at 10:03 pm
I have to agree with just about all that Barry said in the review. Maybe the most consistent well written series out there now.
Mayor has managed to keep things fresh by moving Joe’s job from local cop to a cop that has the whole state to roam around, plus shifting the emphasis from the personal (early rape of his girlfriend) to the mystery. Also has a group of officers that take larger or smaller parts depending on the crime and area of the state the crime happened in. Best part of his books are his characters, which act like real people.
He must do his research also, as one book had a minor part where the character goes to PA to check on the background of a suspect, minor part of the story, and he had the neighborhoods and area nailed as if he lived here.
Well worth reading, would recommend him highly.
December 30th, 2021 at 11:13 pm
Thanks, gents. If anyone is interested in starting the Joe Gunther series, these comments are going to be very useful.
December 31st, 2021 at 7:51 am
Sai S, yes, I’ve read them from the beginning, have read all of them and I have just the latest one to read. David pretty much said what I’d say too, other than to add when one book came to New York, he got that right too. By moving each book to a different area of Vermont, he has kept it fresh, and he has allowed his characters to evolve over the course of the series. He has brought in a couple of new, younger characters in recent books too, with mixed results (IMHO) but to generally good effect.
January 1st, 2022 at 4:19 am
Jeff, David,
Thanks for the detailed replies. Sounds like I’ll be checking him out sometime.
January 6th, 2022 at 12:17 pm
I have been reading the series since its inception and it is one of the best crime series around.I would rank Mayor up at the top, right up there with K C Constantine, John Sandford, and Craig Johnson. Joe is a character who continues to develop both personally and professionally and Mayor has provided a large cast of interesting officers to serve with him and who all get their due share of page time and developing lives over the course of the series. First class effort all around.