Customer Reviews

Deadfall: A Nameless Detective Mystery

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When I first started reading mysteries many years ago, I ran through every book by some of the classic authors who became my first favorites. This left me empty handed and searching for new authors, and a long-ago co-worker recommended Bill Pronzini's "Nameless Detective" novels. Early on, I read many of these books, whenever I could find one at a used bookstore. More recently, I have added missing titles to my collection through Amazon. As with some other contemporary authors of light, credible detective fiction I enjoy, I began to ration the books that were left, returning to the series only so often, to save the remaining books for enjoyment over time. This has consequences. As years go by, your perceptions change, and your reaction to the series may change, too. And you get more and more of a basis for comparison.

The opinion I formed from reading the Nameless Detective series over the years was that the books could be weak on plot and veer into melodramatic "action" endings. But they were usually a pleasure to read due to their characterizations, dialogue, descriptions of varied California locales, attention to detail, deadpan humor, cranky commentaries on modern life, and smooth, easy writing style, yet purposeful mood. The lead character was low-key, competent, and serious-minded. He was part slob and, despite being beaten down by reality, part romantic. His creator regularly had fun with the character, humbling him with embarrassing or bad-luck situations. And Pronzini tested him, putting him through the ringer of traumatic experiences.

Several years ago, I returned to the "Nameless" series after an extended absence, made longer by having to slog through the almost unreadable non-"Nameless" Pronzini-Muller "historical" detective novel Beyond The Grave. Jumping enthusiastically into two of the later "Nameless" books, Sentinels and Illusions, that I had found on Amazon, I left each book having to agree with those reviewers on this site who were disappointed with the book. I turned for solace to one of the early books in the series, Undercurrent, but was disappointed in other ways. My next choice was a middle book, Deadfall.

In Deadfall, Nameless is on a night-time stake-out for repo work when he hears a shooting in a house up the street. He comes upon the bloody victim just in time to hear some mumbled dying words. Upset by the incident and wanting to get involved, Nameless is approached and hired to investigate by the dead man's gay partner. The plot soon thickens: the victim's brother, an art collector, had died suddenly only a few months before, falling from a cliff behind his luxury home, leaving behind an apparently predatory, promiscuous widow and the drugged-out pair of his boat-dwelling daughter and her muscle-headed "poet" boyfriend. Further muddying the waters are a lost, pricey snuff box, various well-heeled but shady art aficionados, and a missing Mexican delivery man who may have witnessed the fall and, after a somewhat contrived delay, wanted to sell his information.

After the overwrought, social-issues-oriented Sentinels and Illusions, and the thin, style-over-substance Undercurrent, I was hoping for a good, straight-ahead mystery story. But this one was slack, uninvolving, and betrayed signs of formula writing. The material and treatment seemed better suited to a short story. The characters, their interactions with Nameless, and the art angle were all too cursory to be interesting, with the possible exceptions of an especially slimy art dealer and maybe initially the dissipated young couple. Helped only marginally by at least some legwork and a few interesting descriptions of place, the story developed too slowly, opaquely, and aimlessly, only to have the thin, unimpressive clues come together too abruptly and arbitrarily at the end, through page after page of the detective talking to himself. The solution is so simplistic and haphazard as to be meaningless. Then events are overtaken by an even more disappointing deus ex machina. Robbed of a chance to see any of the main culprits at their most vivid during the course of the book, the reader does not even get to enjoy a final confrontation with them. A subplot about Nameless' girlfriend's ex-husband, now a televangelist's minion who disavows their divorce, came off as heavy-handed, caricatured, and distracting, not clever or humorous.

With so little accomplished over the course of the book, the late scene in which Nameless fell into danger, and the trying physical descriptions and brooding thoughts that followed, felt weak, incompetent, and perfunctory, a formula device to make the events of the book more personal and to end on some larger, ponderous theme (not adequately developed through the story itself, which began with Nameless fretting about how mundane his work was): "What mattered was that a lot of people were dead - nasty people but people just the same. Dead people. That was the crux of everything. My life, my job, was full of dead people; my memory and my dreams were full of dead people. How many more could I bury in my own private graveyard? Not many. Maybe none. I was too old, too tired; I now longer had the resistance or the resiliency to deal with so much ugliness. All I wanted, now, was peace, quiet, freedom from the sordid side of mankind. I kept thinking about retirement....It might work. It might....I kept thinking about retiring." Like the book overall, I did not find this to be very entertaining or effective.

One consolation of reading a disappointing book is being able to read thoughtful reviews of it by others. This helps crystallize your own ideas, pinpoint what it was about the book that felt so unsatisfying, and come to terms with that reaction. Unfortunately, Pronzini's work draws only a handful or less of reviews on this site. Some are good. But no help at all are "reviews" that have the appearance of being written by someone more interested in reviewing as many books as possible as quickly as possible to inflate the reviewer's "ranking" than in devoting the necessary care and attention to any of them and that: merely describe the story superficially without any critical analysis or real insight; confidently treat it as effective and affecting without any serious attempt to explain why through reasoning of any depth at all; fail to grapple with the book's problems or with the book as a whole instead of fixating on one special-interest aspect of it that happens to be a hobby-horse for the reviewer (a so-called "noir" writing style, which the reviewer does not even bother to discuss); and reflexively, indiscriminately gush and hand out five-star ratings of virtually anything Pronzini wrote. None of this is fair to readers or to Pronzini's best work, nor helpful to any serious discussion of the individual books.

In 1971, author Bill Pronzini was only 27 when he wrote The Snatch, building on a shorter and different version of the story that appeared in the May 1969 issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine under the same title. With the publication of The Snatch, one of detective fiction's great characters was born with full fledged power and authenticity. If you have not yet read the 25 plus Nameless Detective novels by Mr. Pronzini, you have a major treat ahead of you. Many of these are now out-of-print, so be sure to check your library for holdings in near-by cities.

The Nameless Detective is referred to that way because Mr. Pronzini never supplies a name until Twospot, several books prior in the series, when police lieutenant Frank Hastings tells what his poker playing friends call Nameless, employing a first name. But it's never acknowledged by Nameless that this is his name . . . so it's probably a nickname. That name is not then used again until much later in the series in Nightshades. In Double, fictional detective Sharon McCone supplies her own nickname for Nameless. You can learn about why Nameless has no name in an author's note in Case File, a collection of short stories that precedes this book in the series.

Mr. Pronzini presents a world in which people take evil actions to further selfish interests, and many innocents struggle because of that selfishness. The police and private investigators suffer along with the victims, for evil-doing has painful consequences for everyone. Mr. Pronzini's plots are complex, yet he provides plenty of clues to help you identify the evil-doer on your own. Despite the transparency of many of the early plots, he successfully uses plot complications to keep the action interesting and fresh. Beginning with Labyrinth, the plots became less simple. In many cases, there are locked room mysteries.

But the reason to read the books is because of the character development for the Nameless Detective. Nameless is a former police officer in San Francisco who collects pulp fiction about tough private detectives. Overcome by the evil he sees as a police officer and drawn to the complex imagery of the strong, silent hero who rights wrongs, Nameless tries to live that role as a private detective. But he has trouble getting clients, and operating as a one-man shop causes him to lead a lonely existence. In his personal life, his career keeps women at a distance. Beginning with Hoodwink, he has a love interest, Kerry Wade, who is the daughter of two ex-pulp authors. Like a medieval knight errant, he sticks to his vows and pursues doing the right thing . . . even when it doesn't pay. At the same time, he's very aware of art, culture and popular trends. And he doesn't like much of what he sees. He's also skeptical about technology, and doesn't want to become a snooper using electronic gadgets. He's a proud Italian in his 50's, could stand to lose some weight, and is really messy. So there's an element of Don Quixote here, too.

The books are also written in a more sophisticated version of the pulp fiction style, employing a better writing style and greater range through language and plot. The whole experience is like looking at an image in a series of mirrors that reflect into infinity.

These books are a must for those who love the noir style and the modern fans of tough detectives with a heart of gold like Spenser . . . and can live without the wise cracks and repartee. Beginning with Scattershot though, the books increasingly contain witty references to early mysteries and their characters.

Deadfall marks the end of the beginning of the Nameless Detective books. After Deadfall, his character makes a large change and the rest of the series shifts too. So if you are, like me, a fan of the early stories, you will treasure this last one.

Nameless and his partner, Eberhardt, have fallen on hard times. Nameless is now repossessing cars to make a buck. In the process of doing so, he hears a shot. He finds a lawyer, Leonard Purcell, dying . . . and one of Purcell's last words is "deadfall." Nameless has no idea what the word means. Nameless finds himself consoling Washburn's roommate and lover, Tom Washburn, when he returns home.

A week later, Washburn hires Nameless to look into the case. Then the dots begin to link up. Purcell's brother, Kenneth, had died in a fall from a cliff near his home a few months earlier. Washburn tells Nameless that he had accidentally overheard a telephone call intended for Leonard Purcell saying that the caller knew who Kenneth had been pushed off the cliff that night.

Soon, Nameless is meeting a particularly unpleasant group of Purcell relatives and acquaintances, including Kenneth's widow, Kenneth's daughter and her druggie boy friend, unscrupulous art collectors and dealers, and various hangers on. Before long, he sees the truth in the alleged "push" and does his own pushing to find out who did what to whom. The mystery becomes entangled in tragedy, not unlike Macbeth, and a dark tone pervades most of the tale.

Deadfall also contains a major subplot involving Kerry Wade's ex-husband, who now refers to himself as the Reverend Dunston. He has now become involved with a religious group which believes that divorce is meaningless, and the reverend wants to have Kerry come back to live with him. The solution involves a lot of common sense and nerve combined in a way that will probably bring more than a few chuckles from you.

As I read the book, I was reminded of the Biblical reminder that we reap what we sow.