Hard-boiled crime is an American genre born and bred, characterized by gritty surroundings, stripped-down prose and cynical, struggling heroes. Its predominantly male world was pioneered by Dashiell Hammett and refined by Raymond Chandler.
Although the current practitioners are not exclusively male, nor are all the best works set in L.A., novels by the likes of Michael Connelly, James Ellroy and Walter Mosely stand as proof that the streets of that city remain fertile with inspiration.
“Ghosttown,” Mercedes Lambert’s final novel, is a fine addition to the hard-boiled genre in general and the L.A. subsection in particular. Written in a first-person style that brings the reader into the narrative, it is the third novel to feature attorney Whitney Logan.
Logan grew up on the East Coast amid plenty of money. She stayed in L.A. after finishing law school, wanting only to be a good criminal lawyer and “serve the people.” She’s avoided corporate practice, hoping, as so many do in L.A., to make good on her dreams.
Things have not gone as she’d hoped. Instead of working for the Public Defender’s Office, she’s trying to keep up rent on an office of her own “on a rapidly deteriorating stretch of Hollywood Boulevard.” Her landlord is “Harvey Kaplan, formerly one of the best criminal attorneys Los Angeles ever saw, now a burnt-out pothead involved in a dubious sect of religious geeks.” Lupe Ramos, an ex-prostitute, is her secretary.
Business is not good. She says, “I’ve done everything I could think of to find clients. Court appointments, overflow from other lawyers, fliers in English and Spanish in the area surrounding my office. Everything but stand on corners myself.”
But she’s also a woman who allows herself few excuses: “I don’t believe in psychotherapy. I believe in running, working out with weights, tae kwan do. I believe God is an accountant. I believe that with a good pair of designer sunglasses and an expensive pair of black high heels you can go anywhere in the world.”
She receives a rare but needed call from a court clerk. The case is a drunk- and-disorderly charge against Tony Red Wolf, stemming from a fight involving a woman, Shirley Yellowbird. Logan will take the few bucks the case will generate; she figures it’s open-and-shut. She bargains a plea based on sketchy police evidence, and wins her client’s release from jail.
And that’s that, until an excess of alcohol wakes her in the middle of the night. She checks her office voice mail and finds two garbled messages from Red Wolf. She is able to decipher that he is asking her to meet him at the San Gabriel Mission, in the San Gabriel Valley, a place that is “like a shallow bowl into which this hodgepodge of people have been tossed and the whites are trying to float, like crackers, on top of a messy stew.”
She finds Red Wolf, and he leads her to Yellowbird, whose dismembered body is stuffed in a trash can in the mission parking lot. The once-closed case springs open into something much larger. The obvious suspect is Red Wolf, and representing him in a murder trial could finally jump-start Logan’s lagging career. But he maintains his innocence, pointing to a different and credible suspect.
Logan is loath to believe him, but her investigation seems to back up his story. As she seeks the truth, she is pulled into a Native American L.A. she had never imagined. Red Wolf knows things he shouldn’t, and has a way of showing up unexpectedly and in places he shouldn’t. It is almost as though he isn’t fully human, but that cannot, of course, be the case.
Mercedes Lambert is the pen name of Douglas Anne Munson, who died in 2003. Her first novel, “El Niño” (Viking 1990 and later published as the paperback “Hostile Witness”), is a brutally raw masterpiece. “Ghosttown” is preceded by “Dogtown” (Viking, 1991) and “Soultown” (Viking, 1996). Reasons for Viking’s rejection of the “Ghosttown” manuscript are alluded to by the author’s literary executor, Lucas Crown, in an afterword. It is possible the ending was a contributing factor. It comes screaming upon increasing twists and tension to an abrupt explosion of a finale. Magic or madness, readers are left to decide.
Munson/Lambert has an exceptional gift for bringing readers into the realities of her characters and their streets. Whitney Logan grows over the arc of the three novels, becoming outwardly tougher as she battles the demons crime brings to its fighters as well as its victims.
It is hard to argue with author Michael Connelly when he writes, in the introduction to “Ghosttown,” that “All novels, no matter what the genre or subject, live or die with their characters. … I think in this case, it is the characters who will stand well as the author’s epitaph and who will open up those gates. Douglas Anne Munson may be gone too soon, but she wrote characters that will never die.”
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer who reviews books for The Denver Post and Buzz in the ‘Burbs.
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FICTION
Ghosttown
By Mercedes Lambert
$25.95
