QUIET DEPARTURES: A POEM FROM EBERHARD WEBER'S JAZZ

Today the three-disc box set of Eberhard Weber's Colours albums Yellow Fields, Silent Feet, Little Movements) arrived; my sister's birthday gift to me reached me on siblings day, a contrivance which appears to have arisen in the interweb of its own time-wasting accord. By a not very eerie coincidence (as I ordered the disc myself) I'd been reworking another of the poems I'd done inspired by tunes from jazz records, Weber's Quiet Departures, which comes off his 1979 album Fluid Rustle, the same time frame as when I saw Colours at the Round House in Camden.

I can't figure out when I first jotted down a few lines based on it, but I think I drew a little on New Haven's Union Station. I know I did a big revision after reading Steve Hamilton's novel Let It Burn -- but this version has been rewritten almost completely, and it heads in a different direction than where I thought it was going in either of those first two incarnations.....and I took a final walk around it this afternoon while Charlie Mariano worked out on Yellow Fields in the background.

QUIET DEPARTURES

                               (for Eberhard Weber & Steve Hamilton)

This building used to be

A station. Now shattered

Mosaic of faded brick

Broken glass, disjointed

Frames. It is still. Life

Clings to ruin, frozen

Boards with stops unmade,

Dead shadow whistles,

Lost scents of steam, echoes

Of hydraulic brakes over

Farewell tears. We hear

Noises of departure fill

The concourse with silence.

It is the sound of a dry sea

Trapped inside an empty shell.

STEVE HAMILTON'S LET IT BURN

It's the end of summer in Paradise. Paradise, Michigan, that is, on the Upper Peninsula, and Alex McKnight is anticipating another long and cold winter when he gets a call from Detroit, telling him a killer he helped catch, just days before the shootout where his partner was killed and he took the bullet that is still lodged inside him, is about to be released from prison.

It was a hot summer in Detroit, and Alex was still adjusting to being a cop, after his baseball career peaked in the high minor leagues. Darryl King confessed to the murder of Elana Paige, a young black man who'd killed a robbed a wealthy white housewife who was doing a photography course at Wayne State. And although he doesn't really intend to, Alex finds himself drawn back to the city, and to that summer, and finds that the case was perhaps not as open and shut as he'd thought it was at the time.

Steve Hamilton weaves the two stories together—the summer Alex lost Franklin his partner was also when he began to lose his wife as well—and does it well, mostly because this is a story about the city of Detroit as well. It is a catalogue of loss, of the way a city can suffer from exhaustion and become a shell of itself, and the people who once coped with it in its decline can become shells of themselves as well. It's never overdone; in fact, if anything the landscapes are sketched in very sparingly, and the intimate details of Alex's own loss are more hinted at than described in their agonies. But that helps it all work, as the basic plot, the resolving of the injustice done Darryl King, becomes a torturous maze which Alex, in that stubborn way he's exhibited previously, plugs away at until the path through finally appears.

Sadly, there appears to be no path for Detroit, nor to undo or redo the past. Perhaps Paradise, is, in the end, simply where we find shelter, where we can insulate ourselves against the cold of loss, and the loss of things we love.

Let It Burn by Steve Hamilton

Orion £18.99 ISBN 9781409140771

This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

STEVE HAMILTON VISITS MISERY BAY

After his Edgar-winning standalone novel, The Lock Artist, (see my review here) Steve Hamilton returns to the familiar ground of Michigan's Upper Peninsula and Alex McKnight, his reluctant detective. For Hamilton it's not quite the retreat it is for McKnight; most of the series has involved Alex escaping, healing or both in the loneliness of the winter landscape, and Misery Bay is no exception. Still unable to re-enter his own cabin where he's lost his last girlfriend, he's wintering in a ramshackle guest cabin, rebuilding it around him (Hamilton's ability to extend and refresh the metaphor has been remarkable over the eight McKnight books). Then his old adversary, Sault Ste. Marie police chief Maven, comes to him asking for help. Maven's former state police partner has lost his son, a suicide who hanged himself at Misery Bay, and Maven wants Alex to at least answer the father's questions about why he did it, and who he was.

Of course, this turns out to be the first in a series of suicides and murders of former state policemen and their children, which throws Alex into the middle of an unofficial investigation, caught between the FBI on one side, and the notoriously bull-headed Maven on the other.

As serial killer books go, this one is somewhat slim; Hamilton frames the methodology, but the motive is slow to unravel. The killer himself is revealed in a nice twist which seems to justify all those long hours of introspection Alex spend driving his plow-equipped truck along the deserted and ruler-straight roads of Michigan. But interestingly, the victims are the real focus here, and while McKnight and the FBI search frantically for the link that might lead them to the killer, we see any number of lives with little hope or promise—a bleakness that reflects not just the landscape but the dead or abandoned character of the towns themselves. in that sense, and with so many cop characters, it reminded me a bit of Hamilton's first stand-alone, Night Work (link to that review here)

There's some good writing here, and Hamilton is at his best when the personal emptiness and the darkness of the setting coincide. And it seems that northern Michigan is overflowing with ominous place names, so there will never be a shortage of titles! There are moments of hope, however, as if the story itself were an Objibwa sweat tent. If character is indeed action, Hamilton's McKnight is one of the best.

Misery Bay by Steve Hamilton
Orion £12.99 ISBN 9780752897103

This review will appear also at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

STEVE HAMILTON'S LOCK ARTIST

When Michael was eight he managed to escape a murderous rampage by his father. Ten years later, he has never spoken since, and is adept at only two things, drawing and picking locks. It's that latter skill which leads him into a life of crime, and which makes The Lock Artist such a compelling read.

Steve Hamilton switched gears after writing seven novels about Alex McKnight, set in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The thriller Night Work, about a probation officer in upstate New York, had some similarities to his series novels, particularly in the cold loneliness that seems to pervade his characters, but it went in different directions. He's moved in another direction with this one, and in one sense he's put together a caper novel with a series of robberies whose executions and malfunctions would do Donald Westlake proud. The detail of lock picking and safe-cracking is fascinating and convincing, and the sense of anonymity around professional thieves fits perfectly with his character's needs.

Almost too perfectly, because The Lock Artist is another book in which Hamilton puts the alone in stand-alone. Michael is literally closed off from the world around, and the real question in the book is not whether or not he gets caught, or gets killed, or even gets the girl. It's whether anyone, including himself, will be able to pick the lock on his silence, and free the boy who's underneath. This is not a rhetorical question, and the way Hamilton has structured the book, which is told through multiple flashbacks and being narrated from a prison cell is challenging, because it closes off some story options while keeping many of Michael's options open. And much as I am inclined to like characters named Michael who come from Milfords (this one's in Michigan, not Connecticut, but still) Hamilton never gets too soft or sentimental, although there is the sense, in the budding comic strip relationship he has with his girl, that he is indeed a different character from the one whose survival instincts seem pretty well honed.

The Lock Artist works as a thriller, and it works as an interesting character study in which Hamilton plays against the type for a cool technician of thievery. The novel seemed to slip between the cracks when it was published here in June; it deserves more attention, and I recommend you read it and see why.

The Lock Artist by Steve Hamilton
Orion £18.99 ISBN 9780752891958

STEVE HAMILTON DOES SOME NIGHT WORK

My review of Steve Hamilton's first stand-alone, Night Work, has been posted at Crime Time, and you can find it here. Hamilton's Alex McKnight series was very good, and my interview with him about that series was published in my American Eye column at Shots, which you can find here.