This is almost the last of Payback Press's prints of the works of Clarence Cooper (Norton's Oldschoolbooks have been doing the same thing in the USA) who died in poverty in 1978, having been a newspaper editor in the 1950s who dropped into crime through his heroin addiction. Both of these short novels were published as paperback originals (though never in Britain), in 1961 and 1960 respectively, one of them bought by Harlan Ellison.
Payback Press and Oldschoolbooks have rediscovered many black writers of the period, and their editors agree they have little in common. Certainly, these two books have nothing like the black humour and the structure of Chester Himes' Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones police procedurals. In fact, Cooper is a much more noir-ish writer, possibly closer to John D. MacDonald in his CAPE FEAR early days or David Goodis. Conversely, neither of these books is obviously the work of a black author.
THE SYNDICATE seems to feature no obvious black characters, unless everyone in it is black and Cooper does not feel the need to explicitly tell us. It tells the story of a hit-man sent to a mob-run town on the north Californian coast to recover a stolen fortune for the mob boss. Andy Sorrell is a torn character whose mind is being invaded by recollections of his dear dead wife while his body responds in pulp fashion to the dolls of the town. He threatens and burgles his way around town, while in turn being beaten up, lied to and double-crossed. At the end he discovers he has been subject to an even bigger double-(triple?) cross than he could have realised.
WEED is a much more elaborate work, and shows the interplay of a number of characters who feed on each other, and in turn wreck each other's lives. Here the characters are both black and white - the whites mainly the policemen of a small mid-west town. Ned Land is trying to make a go of running a jazz record shop, but "this thing: Boo, Reefer, Weed, Pot, Gangster" has him in its thrall. And another thing: Coral. And Coral has a man who works at the meat market. And Burris, her man, has a relationship with Detective Cullen, and although Cullen frequents Mama's whorehouse he will never allow a criminal to escape.
Cooper must have recognised the destructive side in himself. He transferred it to his characters in horrible and honest detail.
This is D. M. Greenwood's eighth mystery featuring her detective, Deaconess Theodora Braithwaite. David Michael Anthony is on his third or fourth, and there are yet more authors out there describing the tribulations of the Church of England. Given that so many of those authors actually have jobs in the Church and therefore they must sometimes intersect with real life I wonder why the Church bothers to struggle on when it has so many toxins poisoning its body from within.
One reason must be that the Church is not like this, and A GRAVE DISTURBANCE suggests some reasons why. Although set in the present day a lot of the world is described as somehow the 1950s turning into the 1960s. The whole plot revolves around the ownership of land, where some has already been used for a by-pass and now more might be wanted for a supermarket. The land in turn might be owned by the gypsy family who have squatter rights, or by Giltchrist Cathedral, or by the Diocese (these last two things are not the same). But it is on the Cathedral scaffolding that gypsy Mick Lee steps on a sawn-through plank and falls to his death. Lee is the second member of his family to die unhappily - his brother was run down by the brother of Assistant (Lay) Diocesan Secretary, said brother now serving time for the offence.
Meanwhile graves in the churchyard at Gainshurst are being desecrated. Perhaps because the youth of the parish have no youth club.
And Theodora Braithwaite has been asked to stay with her friend Susan Tye because, as Mrs Tye explains of her husband, "Reggie's being blackmailed" and Reggie Tye is Provost of the Cathedral. Reggie's regular withdrawals from his Post Office savings book might explain the poor food offered to Theodora.
Although the church infant school uses Microsoft word processors and the latest BMWs park in the Cathedral close, the attitudes are forty years out of date, and characters comment on it ("Post Office savings book"? not National Savings, for instance), presumably because Greenwood is trying to avoid charges of anachronism. Similarly, an old fashioned haberdasher asks first for "twenty three shillings and sixpence in proper money" and then for "as we have to say nowadays, one pound seventeen and a half pence", although the decimal half-penny went out of circulation in 1985. Now, the haberdasher's shop becomes central to the denouement, and it may be that this is a clue that the owner's mind stopped a decade ago, but it is lost amidst the other historical detritus.
In the 1960s Miss Marple discovered that St Mary Mead had grown housing estates. 1998 is really too late to discover them again.
James Maw's third novel moves from Oxford through Texas to Venezuela and the borders of Peru. That's a long way. As one of his two heroes comes from a comprehensive school in south London ("South London" Maw calls it), you might guess that the other has the money. True, Mills Clearwater is in Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, but his father is a millionaire now running as the next US President.
Mills has had an unhappy upbringing in a J. D. Salinger-ish way (though still achieving that scholarship), but his father asks him to return to the States so that the photographers recording the campaign can get their family shots. Jude goes with him as his one friend, encouraged by the relatives. And then Mills can take no more and he heads for South America.
Mills lands in Caracas at a bad time: the new Archbishop is shot on the tarmac while waiting to greet the Papal Envoy. All new arrivals being rushed through the terminal, Mills finds himself in the city centre with no time to have thought of his plans, and so is caught up in the anti-government riots sparked by the assassination. His naivety leads to some unfortunate photographs being taken, and Mills having to take refuge.
It is while Mills is in hiding that he has his experience: the image of the Chaplin look-alike Dr Hernandez, a long-dead figure regarded by the common people as a saint. This in turn inspires Mills in his attempt to pass the time by visiting Dr Hernandez's shrine in the mountains.
With his rescue his journey across country and up river begins: heart of darkness here he comes, with Jude paid to follow him. And some other people following, too.
Drugs, drug barons, radical priests, Amazonian Indians, Mills meets them all. Some of them help him on his way. You might wonder why, but Mills is so screwed up that he does not. And that is before he has his vision of how Dr Hernandez (who is to Venezuelans what Evita is to Argentineans) died many years before.
If I have recounted this with little enthusiasm it is because I did not feel it. As the story moves to its conclusion you, reader, might have already guessed that it is something found in a Graham Greene novel. Unfortunately, while Mills does not become a saint, neither does Jude Cornelius. It seems a waste of a book of this length that so little comes of it.