In some ways Daniel Judson’s THE VIOLET HOUR is a throwback to the paperback original crime stories of the 1950s and ‘60s. The protagonist is Caleb Rakowski, a young guy who works under the counter as an uncertified automobile mechanic. His past includes a big brother and father who were killed in what the cops insist was a drug deal gone bad. It was and it wasn’t. The drugs were for a family member who needed them desperately; their use would have been in no way recreational.
Now Cal lives in a squalid little apartment above the garage in which he works alongside his only friend: a man he doesn’t know well, but knows less well than he thinks he does. Living with Cal is Heather, a woman twice his age for whom he once worked in a restaurant. The extent of their physical relationship is left hazy, but they do care for each other.
Heather is on the lam from her brutal husband, a man well-heeled enough to do what it takes in order to track her down. One night, she finds out that hubby is throwing an orgy nearby, and one of the girls he’s rented for the night is Heather’s sister, Amanda. Cal volunteers to rescue her, not thinking that a homing device might be attached to his car.
This seems like a perfectly okay plot for these characters in this kind of book, but Judson muddies the water by including a stone-cold hired assassin who is on the trail of Cal’s mechanic buddy for crimes long past, a crooked FBI agent and a Russian goon built like the Kremlin. It’s almost as if Judson set out to write an old-fashioned noir thriller and then decided that he needed to juice it up and modernize it.
Cal is the knight errant in tarnished armor, as they used to say. He’s a 21st-century Travis McGee living in a garage instead of a houseboat. He’s the rescuer of damsels in distress, the man’s-gotta-do-what-a-man’s-gotta-do little guy who just keeps on comin’ in a world full of power and money — none if it his.
And maybe that whole retro thing is good enough for most readers, but the fact is that so much of each character’s backstory is closed off from us, it’s hard to care about these guys as real people — as clichéd characters from noir crime fiction, sure, but as living people, not so much. We still read those old, dark thrillers not just for the tough-guy elements, but for the fact that they were peopled by characters with histories and problems with which we could identify. The best noir writers didn’t produce novels — they wrote biographies.
That said, THE VIOLET HOUR certainly isn’t a bad book, or an unreadable one. In fact, you’ll probably run through it pretty quickly. But you won’t set it down when you finish and think about it. You’ll set it down and immediately reach for the next one on the stack. —Doug Bentin
