Crime & Punishment?
LENZNER, STEVE
Crime & Punishment? Bill James's unconventional mystery novels BY STEVE LENZNER Bill James is the most unconventional detective novelist now writing. In fact, it's almost a misnomer to file his...
...The Harpur and Iles series began in 1985 with You'd Better Believe It and now numbers nineteen novels—few of Steve Lenzner is a fellow at the New Citizenship Project...
...In the shorthand of Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles— ruthless, arrogant, brilliant, amoral, and vain...
...Yet whereas Wolfe's is a detached philosophic genius, Iles's is a brilliance that maintains an unsteady border with madness...
...In the series's first novel, You'd Better Believe It, James unambiguously called attention to the moral ambiguity inherent in policing: Despite his sympathy for the ordinary desire for moral clarity, Harpur "had to carry on all the same [his work in gray areas...
...All 19 novels display James's considerable literary virtues, not the least of which is his mastery of the art of understatement...
...Still, Iles appears in a much less appealing light in Naked at the Window...
...Everyone had multiple identities, and it follows that you should prefer one of these to another...
...But they do not always occur at the beginning, nor are they always solved by the end...
...Surely, we've had enough deaths, Colin, Desmond...
...Harpur, reasonably enough, responds, "I heard he had a lot going for him...
...Though it is not the first novel in which the actions of Harpur and Iles yield no results, it is the first in which their activity is not directed towards the prevention or unraveling of a specific crime or the apprehension or incapacitation of a specific criminal...
...Naked at the Window's real protagonist, or at least its central figure, is James's favorite villain, "Panicking" Ralph Ember, a character who figures prominently in more than half of the series's books...
...The chief says, "Luckily, we'll be there to prevent anyone killing anyone...
...In In Good Hands Harpur makes a valiant effort to adhere to the maxim that one should not speak ill of the dead: "Not a kindly man, but he once told me he would only strike a pregnant woman more than three months on, when it's safer, and I accepted that...
...The situation becomes all the more dire when the upstarts who offed Barney return to the scene of the crime and add Beau to their list of victims—just to let Ember know that they plan to fill the vacancy created by Barney's death, a shotgun wedding appropriate to the new millennium...
...If I may, I'll cite the rings, Col...
...James altogether lacks the taste and impulse of a reformer—he has no "agenda" other than to describe things as he sees them—and is a better novelist for it...
...Even by his exceptionally minimalist standards, James's latest, Naked at the Window, is a detective story lacking detection...
...Iles was only able to operate his intelligent, murky variants of that ideal as long as he knew Mark Lane's authentic dream remained intact, as dream...
...That's long-term planning, the mark of the highest management potential...
...Indeed, Harpur and Iles are imperfectly aware of what crimes are committed over the novel's course, and they devote precious little energy to sorting them out...
...Great detective fiction is still being written in our time—even if, in Bill James's hands, it's not exactly detective fiction anymore...
...Rather, in Bill James's world, the reader is made witness to the chronic disproportion between the means necessary to fight crime (especially the use of informants or "grasses") and the willingness of the courts and the public to tolerate such means...
...Consider this exchange from Kill Me...
...after one son is killed in a post-office raid, the boy's brother and mother—Webb's favorite wife—seek solace by turning wholeheartedly to church and vicar: "So, religion was doing filthy damage to one of his fami-lies—probably the one he thought most of—which was not what religion should be about at all, clearly...
...That indifference, however, ends at the point at which the upheavals in the drugscape threaten the stability of their patch: stability, that is, insofar as Iles's unofficial policy of tolerating a decently restrained drug trade in return for peace on the streets is threatened ("the Government was definitely more or less in favor of reducing street bloodshed the last time I heard...
...Ember is "headstrong when not pulped by fright," a drug magnate, aspiring civic pillar (with frequent letters to the press on worthy topics), ladies' man, devoted husband and father, etc...
...Admirable...
...Prescience is it called...
...Four of the books conclude with the killing of a villain—and the reader is left with identifying the leading suspects (on both sides of the law...
...Iles congratulates Colin Harpur for his ingenuity in Protection thus: I ought to apologize, Col...
...Midway through the novel's central chapter, Harpur's talented undergraduate girlfriend Denise manages to work Plato into their conversation...
...Mrs...
...The protagonists' relative indiffer-ence—a more-or-less benign neglect —is due in large part to the fact that the crimes are an intramural affair between competing narcotics entrepreneurs...
...to which Iles replies: "Oh, I'm sure you won't expect me to answer that off the top of my head, sir...
...The rings [you planted]—magnificent...
...James treats his characteristic themes —the tension between the just and the legal, the critique of moralism, and the vagaries of identity—in a manner certain to disappoint partisans of all stripes...
...Killings, to be sure, take place in every Harpur and Iles novel...
...You don't need to return to Rex Stout, Agatha Christie, or Arthur Conan Doyle...
...Perhaps only in James's world does being almost worthy of trust make one a paragon of rectitude...
...With Naked at the Window, James provides his clearest account of the value of "the ideal" for policing...
...That was how you fashioned a land fit for those with consciences to live in...
...In the short term, she wants protection: "Ralph can be extreme, Harpur, if he's pushed...
...Ember's supply difficulties coincide with, and are complicated by, Margaret Ember's decision to leave him...
...Though James has an unusual gift for creating memorable and sympathetic villains (while never letting you forget that they are villains), his singular triumph is the portrayal of "the harsh, long-life alliance" of his series's two protagonists...
...Yet James has nothing in common with the many writers whose calculated inoffensiveness is the only thing that recommends them...
...Only in the series' fourth novel, Protection, is one led to believe that detection of a sort will lead to murder convictions...
...If one wills the end of policing, for example, one must make allowances for the fact that "you can't be on the side of good effectively without a tidy armoury of dirty tricks...
...Yet James's novels are the product of an astringent lack of sentimentality that sees the attempt to buck necessity as foolhardy—an invitation to pain, if not disaster...
...In fact, it's almost a misnomer to file his "Harpur & Iles" series under "detective fiction," for one finds little in them of what typically passes for fictional detection...
...Similarly, the "ideal" of policing— represented by the chief constable's firm moral principles—doesn't actually exist in practice but must exist in theory as an object of aspiration: "Buried in the ACC's brilliantly contradictory assessment [of the chief's function] lay a statement of what policing would be if it could but it couldn't...
...In good Socratic manner, Harpur summarizes her account of Plato on "the Ideal form" by turning it into a question: "You mean it's higher quality because it doesn't actually exist...
...Similarly, one is well advised to learn early that a healthy, if not necessarily happy, marriage is one born of moderate expectations...
...Ember recalled something from his university foundation course, a line by Descartes: 'I think, therefore I am.' It had not gone down well with the lecturer when Ralph suggested it should be: 'I think, therefore I'd like to be someone else.'" The novel begins with Ember and "Beau" Derek, his radiantly unhandsome assistant, making their regular pilgrimage to the home of bulk supplier Barney Coss...
...Upon arrival they discover the bloody slaughter of Barney and his associates...
...His sympathy for imaginative policing is unlikely to win him many friends in the ACLU, and his "assumption that love and sex will go their own way and that we had better recognize it" will not endear him to friends of traditional morality...
...When I do my textbook on policing methods, the key chapter will be: Think jury, think jury, think blind and bent British juries and make sure you bring them something no fat QC [Queen's Counsel] can jinx...
...Divorce must have been inevitable...
...James allows Iles's flawed, admirable brilliance to reveal itself spontaneously, in speech and with characteristic results...
...which bear much resemblance to the conventional detective novel or police procedural...
...By force of character, wit, and mind, Iles makes himself the focus of any scene he's in...
...Though never a model of self-restraint, the Iles of this latest novel is too consistently feverish, one who reacts—and overreacts—to others even more than he induces others to react to him...
...That ideal is the necessary standard against which all compromises with necessity must be measured...
...In In Good Hands he writes, "You could say Harpur sat on the ACC's right hand, except when the ACC was using the right hand and probably his left as well to assist law and order in secret, brilliantly jungle ways...
...Readers who have never encountered James (and Iles) before would therefore be well advised to start with such novels as Halo Parade, The Detective is Dead, and Pay Days...
...A variant on this point is memorably captured in the "Brade and Jenkins" detective series written by James under the pen name of "David Craig": "Mair used to tell Jenkins that she and her husband had believed in complete openness with each other...
...and his "whole glorious soul devoted to the destruction of crookedness"— "the detective is dead...
...Take Detective Chief Superintendent Harpur—clever, resourceful, persistent, and a study in studied ambiguity ("ultimately was a location Harpur always tried to skirt...
...And that exception is brought about by the planting of incriminating material: detection as the art of manufacturing evidence to prove what one already knows...
...Unable to put up any longer with Ralph's participation in the drug trade, she approaches Harpur with a twofold request...
...That business about your not being first division...
...Or consider the point of view of Doug Webb, the villain from Gospel...
...Ember believes Harpur could successfully do so because "Ralph almost trusts you...
...Haven't we...
...Long term, she wants him to persuade Ralph to quit "what he calls business...
...Especially noteworthy is the figure of Iles, the only character in mystery fiction to come within hailing distance of Nero Wolfe in terms of his ability to combine superior intellect and amorality—in the service of justice...
...Webb is such a good family man that he has two...
...The sight makes Ember momentarily sympathetic to his wife Margaret's entreaties that he go strictly legitimate: "It could certainly be argued that a man well-placed in a commercial occupation should not be confronted with bodies on this scale out of the blue...
Vol. 8 • June 2003 • No. 41
