Customer Reviews

The Murderer Vine (Hard Case Crime)

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4 star:		(3)
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Hiding out in Puerto Lagarto as the novel opens, our hero Joe Dunne begins a detailed confession to a traveling American priest. He has been hiding out for two years with no one to talk to and clearly is a bit lonely. Besides that, he has been watching the American in a clerical collar chasing butterflies with a net and thought it was funny. As the pages turn, he tells his story and explains how e got a job that was to set him up money wise pretty good as well as cause his exile far from home.

After handing a case that pushed the bounds, his name is passed on to an angry father by a client who really should have kept his big fat mouth firmly shut. The father is aware of some of the details of the other case and thinks that Joe Dunne could be willing to do what he wants done. It seems his boy was one of three men who went down to Mississippi to help with voter registration. His son, who was a good student at Harvard, along with two friends are now missing and presumed dead. Dad knows who did it thanks to another contact and Dad wants justice.

"'I know they're dead. I don't know what your political views are and I don't care. But I think you know what justice is. If it doesn't exist, then you make it. I want my boy's body. And I want justice."
"You mean revenge."
"I don't make any distinction. Shall we talk business?'"
(page 34)

Dad also knows that the legal system in 1970 Mississippi isn't going to do anything to the five that local gossip says were involved. He wants proof of their guilt and he wants justice.

Justice he is willing to pay for and justice of a kind that means Dunne will have to close his private investigation business, send his receptionist, Kirby, on her way and disappear. The father is willing to pay for finding the bodies of the victims, another higher amount for proof of the guilty and a still higher amount for their execution--no matter how many are ultimately guilty of the crime. Justice that he is wiling to pay for and will pay well for once he has the proof he needs of their guilt. Justice that can be bought at these prices and justice that Dunne is willing to deliver.

Like most releases from Hard Case Crime, this recent re-release is a dark atmospheric one. One knows from the opening page something went horribly wrong and the only real question as the pain filled narrative begins from Joe Dunne is exactly what went wrong. Everything and everyone is flawed in some fatal way and that certainly is the case here. Like many from this publisher, there is a certain inevitability in the read that means all the hard work, the meticulous planning of every last detail, in the end truly did not matter.

Joe Dunne is a complex character and as this slow moving novel tells the tale, a character that the reader begins to identify with more and more. A character, that while one knows is probably doomed, one that the reader pulls for all the way to the bitter end.

The novel is a read full of rich detailed characters, a time that wasn't the best in American history, and plenty of evil. It is a read that also makes one wonder just how much, if any, things have really changed.


Kevin R. Tipple (copyright) 2008

As I read more and more of Hard Case Crime's re-releases of old mysteries from decades past, I have noticed that in a certain way they are mostly similar in that they focus on crime. That, in itself, is not surprising (especially given the name of the publisher), but what is a little more so is where the focus isn't: on anything even vaguely political. The Murderer Vine by Shepard Rifkin, originally published in 1970, is an exception.

The politics in this case deal with the civil rights movement in the Deep South. Then three young men disappear while trying to register black voters, murder is the obvious conclusion to be arrived at and, of course, the fix is in to make sure no one is ever prosecuted for the crime. One of the victims, however, has a rich father, and he hires ex-cop-turned-private-eye Joe Dunne to find the bodies, determine who the killers are, and make sure they pay the ultimate price. Dunne has some ethics, but the hundreds of thousands of dollars his client offers overrides any moral concerns.

Dunne heads down to Mississippi along with his beautiful assistant Kirby, who not only offers cover, but as a native Southerner, can teach him the ways of Dixie. Figuring out who the killers are will require blending into small town Southern life and - against Dunne's better nature - adopting a bit of a racist nature.

Will he succeed? Well, the novel begins with Dunne hiding out in Latin America, telling his tale in the form of a confession to a visiting priest. He has committed some sort of crime to justify his hiding out here, but what it is - and how it was done - is the basis of the story.

The Murderer Vine is not the best in the Hard Case Crime series, but it is a decent book. The main flaw is that the first half is pretty slow moving, and it takes nearly a hundred pages (out of a 250 page book) for Dunne to finally get to his destination. Once he's there, however, things to pick up, and by the end, things really move. This one should not be your first choice in this series, but when you get to it, you won't be disappointed.

I've read every book in the HCC series to date, and this is definitely one of the best. The book's focus on racism in the South circa 1970 (when the book was originally written) was a surprise, especially for this genre. However, you'll still find a beautiful dame, a crooked cop, an evil mastermind, plenty of hardboiled characters and of course first person writing that prove that this book very much belongs in the Hard Case Crime canon. If you have seen the film Mississippi Burning (or are familiar with the events depicted in that film), this is a very different take on the subject of 3 missing civil rights workers. An enjoyable read.

As one reviewer already stated, this is not a political novel. This is not a novel about the civil rights movement in the South in the 1960s. The fact is Joe Dunne is a unique private detective, someone who is willing to be hired to stop bad things from happening to good people by decidedly evil people. He'll allow himself to be hired out to destroy a drug ringleader in a high school in order to save the high school from a drug infestation. He will also allow himself to be a hired killer if it means killing the murderers of three innocent young men (who were civil rights protestors) in the South in the 1960s and he will be handsomely rewarded for his efforts.

It's the voice of Joe Dunne who here confidently carries the novel away. The private-eye palaver employed by this detective's voice is confident, riveting, convincing, and ultimately soothing. He even makes literary comparisons between himself and other, more famous private-eyes in pulp fiction, and, decidedly, Joe Dunne comes out smelling sweeter than the roses he opts to buy his gorgeous assistant, Kirby (before she gets knocked off at the novel's conclusion ) - and has more charm than those more handsome pulp detectives who like to wear shoulder holsters instead of the hip holster he wears.

While some reviewers have stated that the novel makes a long wind-up before the plot is pitched, I noticed no problem at all in that the reader early on learns and knows he or she is in the presence of an extremely skilled and highly confident P.I. Much of the first half of the novel involves the sheer joy to be obtained when witnessing a pro prepare his job - like watching a master violinist's final rehearsal before his debut performance.

What is peculiar is that the reader barely notices how "coincidental" it is that this job is executed without a hitch. There are no mistakes before the job or during the job - none that he knows of nor none that he can clearly surmise once the job is done. Joe Dunne plans to find and murder the five men who killed those three young men and he does find and murder them by plot's end, and he does not get caught, and he does collect his pay. The drama at this plot-point is merely the suspense of how much time will it take to complete this "crime."

Only near the near-end of the novel does the reader learn, and only through the death of his assistant, Kirby, that somewhere along the line, Joe Dunne must have done something to mess things up - but no one learns exactly where, when or how.

Joe Dunne is the man who played to win, but it cost him a broken heart in the end.

The reader is left wanting more of Joe Dunne and more by Shepard Rifkin.

Shepard Rifkin's The Murderer Vine (originally 1970) ably demonstrates how the moral ambiguity of the noir story can be translated to a (relatively) contemporary setting. Mr. Rifkin's story is a fictionalized revenge tale based on the real life murders of three civil rights workers in 1964.

In Rifkin's book, the three boys (New England college kids, out to do some good) disappear under similar circumstances. They go to Mississippi on a voter registration drive, make some noise, get arrested and then - upon being let out of jail - are never seen again. Joe Dunne, a New York City private eye, is retained by the father of one of the missing boys. The client knows that a) his boy is dead, b) the "authorities" of the small town are clearly responsible (if not directly so) and c) he'll never see justice in the courts. The result comes down to d) hiring Dunne as an assassin. Dunne is meant to find convincing evidence and, if he succeeds, to carry out brutal justice.

Joe Dunne isn't normally a contract killer, but the vast sums of money involved make things quite appealing to him. He accepts, and then immediately hits the first hurdle: he'll never be accepted in small town Mississippi. Fortunately, his (lovely) secretary Kirby is on hand. She's a good Southern girl, up in NYC to break into acting. Dunne's reluctant to get her involved, but she's eager, willing and - when it comes down to it - the only way. With Kirby posing as his wife, Dunne can break into Mississippi society and start nosing around.

The book's set-up is almost perfect, and the rest of The Murderer Vine does a good job delivering on this initial promise. Dunne has to do a lot of wrestling in Mississippi - almost all of it with himself. He's drawn to Kirby, but knows that he's putting her in danger - and the closer they become, the worse it'll be for her. He's attracted to the semi-idyllic small town as well, where, superficially at least, everyone is happy & loving, surrounded by white picket fences and neighborly support. He even likes the local sheriff, despite knowing he's a murderer. This appeal makes it easy for Dunne to find acceptance - and makes it all the more painful when the brutal reality of the town's racist underbelly comes to the surface. Dunne's not exactly a liberal (even for 1970), but the senseless and horrific murders of the town's African-American population turn his stomach.

The book builds to its explosive conclusion. Will Dunne willingly kill a handful of people? Is it for justice or for money? What will Kirby think of him? And what will he think of himself? Mr. Rifkin never gives his protagonist (or the reader) an easy way out. Dunne's final actions - and the results of those actions - are both unsettling and karmically appropriate.

The Murderer Vine, like Zero Cool, is let down slightly by a framing device that strips the book of many of its suspenseful elements. Given Dunne's situation at the start of the book, a great deal of The Murderer Vine is spent waiting for (as opposed to anticipating) certain disastrous aspects of the ending. Otherwise, the book is ruthless in its unsettling ambiguity.

I avoided reading this book for the longest time, and I'm not exactly sure why. It may have had something to do with its being inspired by the same true-life event that Mississippi Burning, a movie I did not enjoy, was based on. I've been very timely about reading and reviewing all the other Hard Case Crime novels either before or soon after their publication date, however, so the fact that The Murderer Vine sat fallow on my bookshelf for nine months was an anomaly indeed.

The completist in me (and the fact that HCC has never published a purely awful book) eventually forced me to pick it up this past January instead of skipping over it again in favor of yet another book. This was also in part because the topic of civil rights was very much in the press following the inauguration of President Obama. But, even so, I opened The Murderer Vine with a marked lack of enthusiasm.

I shouldn't have waited.

When private investigator Joe Dunne takes care of a local heroin dealer, a referral gets him another job: to kill the five people responsible for the disappearances of three local boys who went down to Mississippi to work for civil rights. Dunne heads down South undercover with his attractive and capable assistant Kirby Jamison as a dialectologist and his wife, on a case unlike any he's handled before. For one, it takes a lot of planning to avoid the worst-case scenario:

"I wrote [the plot] out briefly as if I were a writer writing a screen treatment for a cynical film producer who had a superb sense of film construction. I wrote it as if a very critical film reviewer were to look at it when it became a movie. But there would be a big difference ... between a lousy review and winding up dead somewhere on a lonely country road in northern Mississippi."

Dunne is surprised by the duplicitous nature of the stereotypically "hospitable" Southerners: smiling to your face (so as to be perceived as good Christian folk) while gossiping and worse behind your back. (It was that way in 1944 [the setting of the 1970 novel], and it was still that way in the mid-1990s when I left for the less outwardly pleasant but more honestly antisocial people of New England.)

Dunne stands out but manages to get in good with local blacks by not treating them as inferiors. Kirby, a Southern native herself, endears herself to the rest with her open and charming ways. Author Shepard Rifkin has a talent for transcribing Southern dialect so that it reads much like it really sounds. Especially rich is Rifkin's characterization of Dunne, a richly complex individual with conflicting desires and a strong moral compass. Rifkin nearly allows Dunne to get out of favor with us in his pursuit of "fitting in" during a scene on a bus. Luckily, Dunne and Kirby have such chemistry with each other that their scenes together are a joy to read.

On the surface, The Murderer Vine is a private eye novel much like the ones Dunne picks up at an airport ("At least I would have pleasure picking holes in the heroes.... The novels were unintentionally funny"), but more accurately it's about the P.I. himself much more than the case. Rifkin's skill at creating believable characters (some of the supporting cast are truly remarkable) and his use of setting and dialogue -- in short, his pure storytelling ability -- make up for the fairly thin mystery, and the gut-puncher of an ending only serves to make it unforgettable.

As a member of the Hard Case Crime book club I received THE MURDERER VINE in the mail six weeks ago and promptly put it on the shelf. I had a few books to read before I could get to it, even though I found the description on the back cover very engaging. It was an angle that I hadn't heard before- the father of a young man murdered while he helped fight for civil rights sounded pretty darned good to me.

I was even more excited when I finally got to reading it and found it was every bit as good as I'd hoped it would be. It's true that it takes some time to build things up and get the protagonist to Mississippi, but it's worth every word. This is the first book I've read by Shepard Rifkin and I was happy to discover that his technique of plotting was very effective. While the first half of the book sets up at a slower pace the second half takes off like a bat out of heck, ending not the way you expect but possibly the way it would really happen. There are several dangling subplots, but what's great about that is it leaves you guessing until the last page. Not every character you meet plays into the climax, but to me that just adds to the realism. Call 'em red herrings or rabbit trails, I don't care. It works well.

One other reviewer said that this was not one of the best Hard Case books. I disagree. I think it's one of my top five. Granted, there's a few I've yet to read but now the measuring rod is going to be a little higher. THE MURDERER VINE is definitely a favorite. I've described it in broad strokes to people, ranging in age from 17 to 65, and they are all interested in reading it. And while it does include some politically charged ideas it isn't a "political" book. It's an adventure/mystery that can be enjoyed by everyone, though some folks from the deep south may take slight offense at the broad brush used to describe the people in this particular town.

Suffice it to say that this is one of the better Hard Case Crimes I have read (in my top 5). Well written and plotted and has a morality to it as is common with the best of the genre.
I intend to see if I can find other books by this author (nothing listed on Amazon)

A great read, and a powerful message. HCC just keeps getting better. This is one of their best with plenty of hard-boiled noir action. You're read it in a couple of sits. It's that good. Rifkin is up there with the best of them. Buy it. Steal it. Whatever you do, read it.

Classic noir grabs you from the haunting preface and won't let go. Rifkin's style combines the lean punch of Hammett with the doomed fate of Thompson. Outstanding selection in Hard Case Crime series - hope they publish more Rifkin.