4 new crime novels full of menace

If you’re going to write about seedy underbellies and weird subcultures, follow the road map that Scott Phillips laid out: Make it funny, make it crude, make it memorable. That’s what he’s been doing since his acclaimed 2000 debut, “The Ice Harvest.”

“The devil raises up his own people” (Soho Crime, 368 pp., $27.95) is his latest novel, centered on photographer Bill Ogden, first seen in “Cottonwood,” set on the Kansas frontier in 1872.

Now, more than four decades removed from his “Cottonwood” business, he lives in Los Angeles, still able to work (and score), albeit more slowly. His granddaughter, Flavia, who just murdered her husband in Kansas (“I recently caved in Albert’s skull,” she says), has taken on partner/successor duties in his photography studio.

Both are swept up in the orbit of the “blue film” industry – milder in 1916, to be sure, but still prone to violence – where they encounter a lively, sharp cast of villains and con men, from a movie star named Magnolia Sweetspire to a mousy postal inspector named Melvin de Kamp.

Phillips always strikes a delightfully dryly comic pose, but beneath his dark humor lies a steely emotional core. “The Devil Raises His Own” is a wacky affair, but it’s also a gripping exploration of chosen families, broken homes and desperate dreams.

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Morgan Richter’s novel is full of unexpected twists.

Hollywood junk also plays an important role in Morgan Richter’s films. “The Gap” (Knopf, 292 pp., $28), a wild ride in a novel that never quite goes in the direction expected.

Jenny St. John has been haunting the fringes of the film industry for a while now, ever since her supposed big break—the lead role in an independent film called “The Divide”—fell away. She can only make so much money scamming people as a psychic life coach.

Then Serge Grumet, who directed the film she hoped to star in, turns up dead and his ex-wife, Genevieve, disappears. The problem is that the police think Jenny is Gena because they look remarkably alike. When she was shown a photo of Gena, Jenny felt “that shock of recognition that you get when you come across a photo of yourself that you didn’t know existed.”

As she is drawn into her doppelganger’s world, a world filled with other go-getters and schemers and—apparently—a murderer, Jenny understands that their resemblance has a biological connection, if only she can figure out what it is.

Richter, an industry veteran and pop culture critic, writes with the energy of a freshly charged battery, full of bright sparks, quick wit, and vibrant colors. Even though I didn’t believe every plot twist, I found Jenny to be devilishly fun company.

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The opening line of Snowden Wright’s “The Queen City Detective Agency” (Morrow, 270 pp., $30) sets the tone right away: “On New Year’s Day 1985, Turnip Coogan, facing a 20-year life sentence for first-degree murder, decided he’d have to be as dumb as a post to stay out of prison, and his mother hadn’t raised a post.”

Turnip, a small-time mob boss from Dixie, is found dead shortly afterward, just before the small town of Meridian, Mississippi—Queen City—is overrun by people who make crime their business, and people who want it.

After Coogan falls from a roof, his mother hires Clementine Baldwin, owner of the Queen City Detective Agency, to find his killer. Clementine is capable and confident, her skin thickened by too many instances of everyday racism, but as the case takes unexpected and disturbing directions, she discovers the price of digging Queen City’s skeletons from their hiding places.

Wright writes sentences that beg to be quoted. He has clearly studied the pacing and syntax of hard-boiled fiction. And yet, as enjoyable as this book was, I wished it were more in tune with itself than with the rhythms of an entire genre.

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Jules Clement’s latest novel; the first four have been reissued.

Finally, The Mysteries of Jamie Harrison with Jules Clement, published between 1995 and 2000, were recommended to me in my bookselling years more than 20 years ago, but it wasn’t until their republication — and the publication of a fifth, “The River View” (334 pp., Counterpoint, $28) — that I read them all in one sitting.

Over the course of the series, Jules goes from being a doctoral student and archaeologist on the East Coast to the sheriff of Blue Deer, Montana — the position once held by his father, who was murdered when Jules was a teenager. “Perhaps Jules chose archaeology because it was the perfect profession for confronting the enormity and inevitability of death,” Harrison writes, “but when it came to his father’s death, he wanted nothing of the past.”

When the new book opens in 1997, Jules, married with a young child, has quit his job at the sheriff’s office and is working as a PI. He also dabbles in archaeology, unraveling the mysteries of ancient bones—even his father’s—as he tries to make peace with Blue Deer and forge a new path.

I wonder what he’ll be up to in 2024, and I hope Harrison catches readers up on the present soon.