Ken Bruen weaves a dark homage to Billy Wilder’s classic movie “Sunset Boulevard” in “London Boulevard.” Instead of a two-bit screenwriter, the protagonist is jaded ex-con Mitchell who views the world through a scrim of movies, novels, poems, and song lyrics. The crumbling mansion he’s hired to repair is in the affluent Holland Park district of London. And Norma Desmond’s stand-in is a has-been star of the London stage, Lillian Palmer. She’s “an expensive sixty” and still glamorous. Theater posters and portraits of her in her heyday remind Mitchell of “a laid-back Lauren Bacall with ferocity.” The enigmatic Jordan - is he the great actress’s butler or something more? - reminds Mitchell of “Oddjob from the Bond movie.” In the background, associates from Mitchell’s sketchy past are nipping at his heels, eager to harness his powers of ruthless persuasion in the messy business of collecting overdue debts.
A trip down another dark boulevard
Bruen’s literary style is so intensely spare and telegraphic that some readers may find it distracting. Idiosyncratic line breaks give the narrative the feel of haiku (“Three years in prison, you lose/time/compassion/and the ability to be surprised”). And a little too often, Bruen uses the same pattern of delivering a deadpan one-two punch of thought and dialogue (“I had no idea, said,/‘I’ve no idea.’ ”).
For all the sparseness of the prose, Bruen delivers a cast of characters that are fully formed and utterly fascinating. Mitchell himself is a complicated bloke. While he’s capable of cold-blooded violence, he cares deeply for his sister Briony (“a true out-and-out nutter”) and falls hard for a good Irish girl.
Readers who like their noir pitch black will find this novel compulsively readable and horrifyingly funny, with an appropriately bleak and unexpected ending.
Katherine Hall Page’s 18 Faith Fairchild mysteries sit comfortably at the lighter end of the crime fiction spectrum. In “The Body in the Sleigh,” murder and mystery follow Faith to Sanpere Island off the coast of Maine. There, her family hopes to enjoy a much needed break while the Rev. Fairchild recovers from pancreatitis.
Page does a lovely job bringing to the page Sanpere at Christmas, Currier-and-Ives beauty festooned with goofy decorations including a tree “constructed of fifty lobster traps, trimmed with pot buoys and topped with a huge star.”
On Christmas Eve, Mary Bethany, a self-sufficient spinster who raises goats and makes delectable chevre, discovers a basket left in her warm barn. In the basket, surrounded by her beloved goats, is a baby. Tucked in with him is a note that contains this plea: “Keep him safe and raise him to be a good man. His name is Christopher.”