I am a great lover of detective fiction: Murder mysteries, missing persons cases, whodunits. And as far as I’m concerned, the more noir the better. Right now I’m reading one of the “Leonid McGill” mysteries of the great black author Walter Mosely. I’ve already read the complete canon of his “Easy Rawlins” series, so this transition seems only natural to me.
Come to think of it, an awful lot of mystery writers seem to have multiple protagonists. Les Roberts did his “Milan Jacovich” series set in Cleveland, and his (less famous) “Saxon” series set in L.A. James Lee Burke has the Louisiana detective “Dave Robicheaux,” along with his Montana counterpart “Hackberry Holland.” Michael Connelly has his Mickey Haller “Lincoln Lawyer” series, and his private eye Hieronymous “Harry” Bosch series – though, to be fair, in that case, the two men are half-brothers and tend to pop up from time to time in each others’ stories.
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A noir writer like Robert Crais really has only one “series,” but two main characters, so it often ends up feeling like two different series. There’s mild-mannered detective Elvis Cole, plus his mysterious and violent side-kick, Joe Pike. That same dual-protagonist theme pervades the iconic work of Tony Hillerman. His legendary Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn of the Navajo Tribal Police is paired with Sgt. Jim Chee, a sometime traditional healer and live-in boyfriend of Bernadette “Bernie” Manuelito, with Chee following along as second fiddle in both cases. Once Hillerman died, his daughter Anne took over writing the series. Leaphorn then faded off into retirement and Bernie took over center stage, with Chee forever relegated to the side-kick role. There are worse fates in life I guess.
About the only modern American mystery writers I can think of with purely single protagonists are both women. The first is Nevada Barr, who did a series of National Park themed mysteries featuring Park Ranger Anna Pigeon. The other is Sue Grafton, who wrote the alphabet-themed “A is for Alibi,” “B is for Burglar,” and so forth, all featuring the wisecracking Santa-Theresa-based detective Kinsey Millhone. Sadly for Millhone and for us all, Grafton died recently. That left her one novel shy of a perfect 26-novel hat trick. “Z is for…” will remain forever unwritten I suppose.
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The other thing about most successful writers is the “divides his-or-her time…” phenomenon. Read the blurb on any book jacket, and there you will find, down near the end of the telegraphic details of the writer’s biography, a statement that goes something like this: “The author divides her time between her Manhattan brownstone and the rustic country inn she runs with her paramour in the wilds of Vermont.” Or, “The author, his wife, their five children, and their two golden retrievers divide their time between their surf-side cabana on the white sands of Florida’s Gulf Coast, and their working sheep ranch on the windswept plains of Wyoming.” I defy you to find even one of these that says “The author lives in only one place – Baltimore – and likes it well enough not to live anywhere else, not even in the icy death-grip of winter!”
Go on. Prove me wrong. I dare ya.
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The writer of this blog divides his time between two condos: One’s on a golf course tucked behind the red rocks of Roxborough in far southwest Denver. The other’s just across a railroad bridge from downtown Sacramento, hard by the levee, under cerulean California skies. Hey, neither one of ’em is Nirvana, but neither one is all that noir either. I like to call ’em both home.
