Betrayers

As BOOKGASM aficionados may have noticed, I am a fan of pulp fiction — the real pulp fiction, the stuff that first saw print in the pages of the magazines that colored newsstands and magazine kiosks during the first half of the last century.

I’ve never met another person who has the same love of that stuff that I have, which is one of the reasons I took to Bill Pronzini’s Nameless Detective when I first read about the character, lo, all those long years ago. Nameless loved the pulps and usually had a few of them in the glove compartment of his car so he’d have something to read on long stakeouts.

In BETRAYERS, Nameless makes but one reference to the pulps when he compares his career in investigating both professional and amateur criminals to a short pulp story by John D. MacDonald called “I Always Get the Cuties” (available in the Ed Gorman-edited THE SECOND BLACK LIZARD ANTHOLOGY OF CRIME FICTION, a book you must own).

But the fact that Nameless isn’t as obsessed by pulps as he used to be is another reason I still like him. He’s grown over the years from being a lone P.I. to having a partner, and now, to having two of them. Tamara Corbin is his agency’s computer whiz kid, and Jake Runyon is an ex-cop from Seattle still mourning the death of his wife. Both of them have cases of their own in this outing; Tamara is tracking down a con man with whom she had a brief fling, while Jake is looking for a bail jumper.

Nameless is investigating mysterious — no, make that stupid — events in and around the home of an elderly woman whose property, someone thinks, is of more value than she is. One night, she even wakes up to find the ghost of her late husband in her bedroom, only it’s obviously some living prankster wearing a sheet.

More significantly, Nameless’ adopted daughter, 13-year old Emily, has brought a small tin canister full of cocaine home from school and refuses to tell her parents where she got it. Nameless and his wife, Kerry, respect Emily’s promise that she wouldn’t reveal the owner’s identity, but they know they have to find out, and the search takes Nameless someplace he’s never been before. And never wants to visit again.

As interesting as Tamara and Jake are, it’s Nameless’ first-person narration that attracts us most. He’s the guy we know best; he’s the guy we want to know better.

He’s always been a bit of a grouch and his assessments of the characters in his cases have never been more biting. Here he is on a couple he has to interview in a bar:

“I slid out of the booth and left the two of them sucking beer and rubbing on each other again. Once [sic] of those perfect matches, Doyle and Melanie, that you know exist but fortunately seldom encounter. Four tiny brain cells, drunk or sober, united against the world.”

And here he is again on the world in general:

“Another small mind at work. Half-wits and knaves, fools and assholes — more of each than ever before, proliferating like weeds in what had started out as a pristine garden. It’s a hell of a world we live in, I thought. A hell of a mess we’re making of the garden.”

But Pronzini also writes with the pen of a poet. Here’s Nameless musing on a long-lost amusement park, like the one I remember from San Antonio in the 1950s, also called Playland:

“Some exciting place when you were young and full of piss and vinegar. Attractions galore. Laughing Sal, the gap-toothed, red-haired plaster icon at the entrance, whose cackling mechanical laugh scared the hell out of generations of little kids. Shooting galleries. Sideshow lures that included a two-headed duckling and a radiation-deformed carp. The Fun House with its moveable sidewalks and ‘spinning wheel’ and mirror maze. The creaky old Big Dipper roller coaster, the Whip, the Aeroplane Swing, the Dodg-’Em cars, and other rides.”

As mysteries, three of the cases in this novel are not barn-burners, but the story of Emily and the tin of cocaine packs an emotional wallop any writer would be proud to generate. And, of course, it’s Pronzini, so every sentence is worth reading.

You can never make too much of things like this, but the author once admitted that every time he sees Nameless in his mind, he sees himself. Maybe that’s why when Nameless’ first name was finally revealed a few books ago, it turned out to be “Bill.” If we ever learn his surname, what do you want to bet it’s Italian and ends with an “i”? —Doug Bentin

Buy it at Amazon.

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