American Mystery Finds A New Voice On 'The Bohemian Highway'

Transcript

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

Our book critic Maureen Corrigan has a review of Sara Gran's new mystery novel, her second featuring post-punk private eye Claire DeWitt. The first won the Macavity Award from the group Mystery Writers International. Maureen says the new book, "Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway," offers a terrific mental getaway for the start of summer.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN, BYLINE: It's been a while since I've heard a distinctive new American voice in mystery fiction. That "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" dame seems to have put our homegrown, hardboiled detectives in the deep freeze. The mystery news of the past few years has chiefly come out of land of the midnight sun, dominated by the late Stieg Larsson and fellow Swedes Camilla Lackberg and Hakan Nesser, as well as Norwegians Anne Holt, Karin Fossum and Jo Nesbo.

Nothing against the Vikings, but when I began reading a new mystery by Brooklyn-born author Sara Gran and realized I had entered a fresh, fully realized noir world, I felt a rush of private-eye patriotic pride. "Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway" is the second novel in Gran's series featuring 40-ish bad girl detective Claire DeWitt.

Following in the gumshoe footsteps of Sam Spade, Claire lives in San Francisco, a city where she says the weather moved inside of you, and the chill was something you would take with you wherever you went, forever. The clammy weather is the least of the takeaways from this novel, nor is the plot particularly startling.

And old boyfriend of Claire's has been murdered in his house, and oddly, upon exiting the house, the killer locked the front door. Claire's investigation leads her to other unsolved cases: a disappearance of a friend on the New York subway decades ago, the theft of miniature horses from a ranch in Marin County.

All these cases are entertaining enough, but in the fine tradition of American hardboiled fiction - I'm thinking of classics like "The Big Sleep" and "The Maltese Falcon" - the crime here is just an excuse to jumpstart deeper, existential investigations. The world-weary hipster voice and the absurdist perspective of "Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway" are what really hold the susceptible reader spellbound. Think of the noir-infected novels of Paul Auster, or even the labyrinthine stories of Jorge Luis Borges.

Gran's narrative is an intricate one, where plotlines branch off, and the main investigation comes to a halt whenever Claire begins quoting from made-up books about sleuthing. Claire tells us that, as a teenager, her life was changed forever when she found an old library book on the art of detection written by a fictional French master detective, Jacques Silette. Silette, who's writings are excerpted throughout this mystery, speaks in tough-guy, oracular language, and so does Claire.

Here, for instance, is Claire stretched out sleepless on her couch, mulling over the murder of her ex-boyfriend: (Reading) It was only a case. Maybe that was all there was to life, one long case, only you kept switching roles: detective, witness, client, suspect. Then one day, I'd be the victim, instead of the detective or the client, and it would all be over. Then I'd finally have a day off.

Gran's off-road story takes us into dumpy music clubs, where indie bands with names like The Salingers play. She hops from the outer perimeter of the elite Bohemian Grove Club in California's Sonoma County, down to New York's lower eastside, where Claire misspent her youth. About being a teenager, Claire recalls: (Reading) It was a secret world you gained admittance to at 14 and left at 20, swearing never to repeat what you'd seen.

Even the most minor characters here make a sooty impression. Claire's visit to the murder victim's neighbor provides opportunity for wry social commentary. Claire says: (Reading) The neighbor's name was Freddy. Freddy was a white man, somewhere between 50 and a million, who seemed like the least happy person on earth.

When Freddy complains to Claire that he didn't hear a thing the night of the murder because the Mexicans and club kids who live in the neighborhood made too much noise, Claire tells us: (Reading) His kind - the cranky, middle-aged white men of the world - weren't exactly known for their silence. But I let it go.

As that jab suggests, neither Claire, nor apparently her creator suffer from the female disease of wanting to be liked by everybody. Jaded detective Claire snorts cocaine and Vicodin, and doesn't care who knows. All the while, she pushes on, searching for the truth about her ex-boyfriend's murder, even as she suspects that - as her mentor Silette once said - the only true thing is pain.

I don't particularly endorse Claire's choice of painkillers, but I do highly recommend her introspective, and yes, poetic mystery adventure.

GROSS: Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed "Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway" by Sara Gran. You can read an excerpt on our website, freshair.npr.org. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.