Got the book in the mail. Bit dog-eared. Some bored postal inspector had slashed open the bag, read the first 20 pages eating Cheetos and tinned anchovies. Still, gave it a look. Not bad. Kind of liked it, actually.

That first paragraph is my own pallid pastiche of the writing style on display in Ed Lynskey’s THE DIRT-BROWN DERBY. Lynskey delivers short, sharp bursts of sentences that practically assault the reader. Sometimes, he seems so excited to keep the story moving that he’ll leave out extra words like articles, conjunctions and prepositions. With this style, and his seedy, tough-guy PI main character Frank Johnson, we have a lovely and gritty, contemporary noir story.

And it’s a fair one. Johnson is called into Virginia horse country to investigate the death of a young girl. The police believe it was an unfortunate riding accident that killed the girl, but her mother is convinced it was murder. After a short time on scene, an actual honest-to-goodness homicide does occur. Pierre, the stable hand who may have been shacking up with the dead girl, is found with a .25 bullet-shaped hole in his heart.

Johnson has to confront a town full of nasty folks, including slack-jawed rapists, an incomprehensibly angry sheriff and a slightly batty client in order to get to the truth. And he does this all in a very enjoyable, tough, wisecracking way. There are some negatives: vignettes that seem unrelated to anything let alone the storyline, the odd title, the especially irrelevant jacket design of a mass of fox hunters, the occasional lack of polish in the threads of the plot. Sometimes, the story clogs due to its own special clipped style.

But Lynskey’s book is just different from most modern mysteries. Its style, setting and characters all seem like they’re from another time, out of place in today’s world. That doesn’t make the book any less worthwhile; in fact, this sets it apart from the run-of-the-mill tedious mysteries that fill up the shelves at your local Borders. Lynskey and Mundania Press (yes, that’s really the publisher’s name) should be thanked for coming out with something so different. Do so by buying and reading the book. –Mark Rose

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