PHILIP GOUREVITCH'S COLD CASE: A Forgotten Friday Entry

In February 1970, Frankie Koehler, who'd been in and out of jails since he was 15, got into a fight with Pete McGinn and his friend Richie Glennon at McGinn's bar, Channel Seven, on New York's West Side. McGinn, who'd been on Koehler's case for knocking up the wife of a mutual friend who himself was in prison, beat Koehler badly, then went home. Koehler left, came back to Channel Seven with a gun, and with Glennon went to McGinn's apartment, ostensibly to settle things like gentlemen. There he proceeded to kill both men, wounded McGinn's uncle Charlie, and left McGinn's girlfriend unharmed. Then Frankie Koehler disappeared.

Twenty years later, Andy Rosenzweig, a career cop now chief of investigators for the Manhattan DA, had a flash of memory triggered by his knowing Glennon when he was a boy, and discovered that the murders had been declared cleared because Koehler was presumed dead. But finding no evidence for that presumption, Rosenzweig began looking for Koehler again, re-opening the case on his own time before it became official. Eventually, old fashioned police work paid off, and in a Grand Central Station scene worthy of a 1940s film noir, an armed and dangerous Koehler was arrested without a fight. 'If you've got witnesses, I'm fucked,' he said. They did, and he was.

Philip Gourevitch's true crime book was originally written as an article for the New Yorker, and it reads like it, the understated style unmistakeable in the way it takes the city for granted. This is not necessarily a bad thing; Joseph Mitchell, perhaps its finest exponent, used it to brilliant effect in Joe Gould's Secret, but also in the pieces collected in The Bottom Of The Harbor, to build a metaphor for a city that was disappearing as he watched, but before most observers were aware of its fade. And this in many ways is Gourevitch's theme, because the city was composed of people like Koehler, McGinn, and Glennon, and cops like Rosenzweig, and they are people who maybe don't exist any longer, or who exist with different, less firmly entrenched values.

He also writes well; the book reads at times like a piece of fiction, like a character study in short fiction. But the style I described above as understated could also be classified as detached, and sometimes, just as Koehler or Rosenzweig threaten to leap off the page, they seem to lose a dimension, becoming somewhat ethereal. And I'm half convinced this is deliberate, because what A Cold Case is really about is the shadowy New York that no longer exists, the smoky world of revenge and force that Koehler (seen at the right in 1962, when he was paroled, and eight years before killing two men; the inset photo is Rosenzweig as a beat cop, in the late 1960s) and to a lesser extent Rosenzweig, grew up in. It's about the codes of conduct for the men who populated the novels of David Goodis, or Day Keene, or Harry Whittington, about what happens to them as times change. And its about how just a bit of that morality from the Fifties survived in at least one cop who wouldn't let a case get closed when it wasn't. Murders like the ones Koehler committed seem to be more commonplace these days, they happen for perhaps less reason, and the killers don't, like Koehler, express a sort of sociopathic slight regret, for one of the murders, some three decades later when they are caught.

A Cold Case by Philip Gourevitch
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001, ISBN 0374125139

MARK MILLS' WHALEBOAT HOUSE: A Forgotten Friday Entry

I'm not sure if, strictly speaking, The Whaleboat House qualifies as a forgotten book--after all it won the CWA Silver Dagger for best debut, and his second novel, The Savage Garden, was a Richard & Judy finalist, but as he had managed to slip under my crime-reviewing radar, I thought I'd revisit it, to see if it deserved its award. And I'm pleased I to say, it probably did, though it's also fair to ask how many award winning books have since been retitled by their publishers? Maybe they assumed a British audience wouldn't figure out it was a place name, and certainly wouldn't know how to pronounce Amagansett (it would come out Uh-MAG-an-set). But the original title was Amagansett (see below left) when it was published in 2004 (and it's a place name, pronounced AM-a-gan-set, just like it looks) but perhaps that name looked too serious for a Dagger winner. Even under its new title (which I confess actually works better) it's had two different paperback editions, the first pitching it more as a crime story, as befits a Dagger winner, the second positing it as a sort of historical piece of serious fiction, dirty realism set in the immediate post war, with a romantic twinge, as befits a Richard & Judy nominee (see below right). The problem with the latter approach is that although Mills writes well, and his period setting is drawn well and intriguingly, the story is, at heart, a mystery, and a tale of revenge.

It's notable too for its setting, the immediate postwar fishing community of Amagansett, before the huge boom in the Hamptons, when fishermen still plied their trade in New York's waters (see Joseph Mitchell's exquisite collection, The Bottom Of The Harbor, for a brilliantly realised picture of that industry from the same era). Conrad Labarde is the descendant of Basque fishermen, and works the waters from his shack on the ocean side of Long Island, along with his friend Rollo, the somewhat dimwitted scion of the area's oldest fishing family. It's Rollo who's brought the whalehouse to Conrad's property: and the second title is a far better one for this book; along Amagansett is the setting, it is the whalehouse that sees the story.

Conrad and Rollo bring up the body of Lillian Wallace, one of the wealthy population who visit the area on summer weekends. But Conrad has his own history with Lillian, and knowing the presumed suicide is a murder, he investigates alongside Tom Hollis, a disgraced former New York cop now deputy chief in the small town. The investigation, of course, visits the areas where cultures clash, while Hollis, whose own investigation is directed, as it were, by a few dropped words from Conrad, also discovers ways around his own problems. As well as Lillian's death, Conrad is also haunted by his experiences in the war, where he was an assassin, and somehow blessed with luck while those around him died.

This is a lot to pack into a relatively small package, but Mills does it well. You might say it's too much, that the Hollis and Labrade backstories are slightly too melodramatic, but I think that what is also going on here is a bit of homage from a British novelist to the great novels of the early twentieth century: not just Joseph Conrad, which is signaled pretty obviously, or Fitzgerald's Gatsby, which of course is the classic novel of a Hamptons hit and run leading to more serious crimes. There are echoes of Hemingway, and Steinbeck too, and maybe even a little John O'Hara. It's as if Mills is simply touching those familiar soft spots, and it wouldn't work if he hadn't made his own characters so real, real enough to carry the story through. Its denouement is, like the backstories, somewhat melodramatic, and certainly we see it coming because we've seen it before, but it is handled well, and resolved honestly. As I said, Mills writes very well, and writes his American scenes and characters as well as any Anglo-Irish writer since John Connolly. The fact that he can make his period story resonate with echoes of great novels while still keeping the suspense compelling suggests the Daggers, and maybe even Richard & Judy, were right.

The Whaleboat House by Mark Mills
Harper Perennial 2005 £6.99 ISBN 0007161921