Customer Reviews

Illusions: A "Nameless Detective" Novel

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Long before Nameless and Eberhardt were partners, Spade and Archer were. Even though Sam Spade didn't have much respect for Archer, he knew that you had to avenge your partner's killer. In a similar way, Eberhardt's suicide hits Nameless hard. They haven't spoken for years, but they had been friends and partners for many years before that. What has happened to Eberhardt to make him want to kill himself? Nameless has to know. What he learns shocks him to the core, and makes him realize that he didn't know his old partner so well after all.

While this is going on, Ira Erskine hires Nameless to find his ex-wife. Their young son is dying of leukemia and wants to see his mother before he dies. Something about Erskine bothers Nameless's assistant, Tamara Corbin, but Nameless takes the case anyway. He quickly locates the ex-wife and lets Erskine know where to find her. Soon, Nameless has a second jolt when Erskine ends up dead while cleaning his gun. What really happened?

In both cases, Nameless realizes that he has been very naive . . . and that his naiveté has been dangerous to others. Although he cannot right the wrongs, he has to find out what really happened. The answers make him sick to the deepest part of his soul. And he has to decide what to do with the unpleasant truth.

This is an outstanding book which stands on its own, but you will enjoy it more if you read Dragonfire, Shackles, Quarry and Hardcase first.

As I finished reading the book, I also began to wonder where my rosy views about others hide a darker truth. This book can change your whole outlook on life.

Perhaps I read too many Pronzini's too quickly. For some reason Illusions was just not that great of a read in my opinion. I felt like Pronzini was kind of just offering up a half-baked effort and in my opinion it kind of fell a little flat.

First of all this book centers around morality. This morality is a shady sort that is ambiguous, and in the end both cases here are not as difficult to digest as the author would like to make out. I found myself thinking that the two mysteries here were not really up to par with the other Nameless books in this series. The tales did not force Nameless to undergo change in anything other than a superficial level. Also, the suspense level never really ramped up at all, this was more of a case of going through the motions.

I think that Pronzini's Nameless is one of the better PI's out there in the world of literature. I have enjoyed several of these books, especially the later ones (which is unusual in serial pulp). But as with any long running series, the author is bound to produce efforts not quite up to others, and I think that this is one of those.

Over the years, I have read many of Bill Pronzini's "Nameless Detective" novels, whenever I could find one at a used bookstore. More recently, Amazon has allowed me to add some of the missing titles to my collection. I have long thought of Pronzini as a skilled storyteller and my favorite among a group of able writers of light, straight, credible detective fiction which includes his wife Marcia Muller and Sue Grafton.

Although sometimes weak on plot and veering at times into melodramatic action, Pronzini's characterizations, dialogue, descriptions of varied California locales, attention to detail, deadpan humor, and smooth, easy writing style almost always make his "Nameless Detective" books a pleasure to read. "Nameless" is low-key, competent, and serious-minded, part slob and part romantic. Pronzini regularly has fun with the character by humbling him with embarrassing or bad-luck situations and tests it by putting him through the ringer of traumatic experiences.

Illusions marries a story about Nameless's ex-friend/partner Eberhardt killing himself (alluded to at very end of Sentinels, the prior book in the series) with a story about a (soon-to-be-dead) client who tells Nameless a sympathetic story and asks him to find the client's estranged wife. The plot entails unsettling discoveries about the characters and involves battered women. After a talky ending testing his wife's conventions about law and justice, Nameless wrestles with what, if anything, to share with the police about what he has learned on the two cases, and ends the book proclaiming the death to all of his illusions.

Pronzini's skills as a story teller are on display to some extent, and the detective story shows some careful attention to detail. But the detection comes off as somewhat contrived, belated busy work in a story in which the two main plot lines are fairly shallow and do not work very well together. The "double substitution" plot point used in the book is confusing and not very effective. The characters are largely unmemorable, and Nameless's new assistant, Tamara Corbin, put to good use in Sentinels, fades into insignificance here. The book's description of the client's interactions with his ex-wife goes to a melodramatic, maudlin, morbid extreme, rather than being persuasively effective.

The pretensions to a grand theme fall a bit flat because neither of the two plot lines is effectively developed. And the book itself skimps on recognizing the implications of Nameless's actions -- he not only considers withholding theories from the police but also physical evidence that would affect their ability to solve the cases for themselves (witness the jury duty "stub" that Nameless "pockets").

The book is solid enough work by an old hand to round up to a three-star rating. But overall, I agree with another reviewer that there is something of a slack feel and hollow ring to the book's two story lines, that they do not gel with each other into an effective whole, and that they do not adequately support the momentous theme sounded at the end. To lavish, as some supposed reviewers appear to have done, a reflexive five-star rating on this book based on its general writing style or fondness for the series overall would be lazy and sloppy, and, more importantly, would not give a fair impression of Pronzini's best work.

A suicide always leaves lingering questions with those left behind and evokes deep feelings of guilt. So is the case with Eberhardt, Nameless's ex-partner, who commited suicide. Nameless is plagued by guilt and goes on an obsessive quest to find the answer as to "why" Eberhardt did it. What drove him to the edge?

While pursuing this question Nameless deals with an accidental death or suicide of a former client. His search for answers to that killing leads him into the realms of abuse and the question of whether justice is really ever served by revealing an interpretive truth. Are the victims sometimes the guilty ones even though they have been miserably abused? Is justice a cut and dried formula that we mete out indiscriminately without regard to the circumstances? Come and join Nameless on this painful quest as he attempts to get answers. This is Pronzini at his best in story telling.

I've never understood why Pronzini's "Nameless" series isn't more acclaimed - many of the books are out of print.