5.0 out of 5 stars
I am a kid again, December 29, 2001
I am a kid again when I read Robert Skinner, which is why I truly recommend
Pale Shadow, the fifth novel in his crime series featuring Wesley Farrell of New
Orleans. I'm breathless and at the edge of my seat as a gunman "reached down
and jacked a cartridge into the breech of his .45. The metallic clash was like the
crack of doom in the dim room."
I am a longtime devotee of Wesley Farrell, a professional gambler, a nightclub
owner on Basin Street, and (by nature) an alley cat given to prowling the mean
streets of New Orleans. This time out, Farrell seeks to help out an old friend
Luiz Martinez whose mother is dying of lung cancer in El Paso.
Farrell and Martinez go back a long ways, back to Prohibition when both worked
with rum-runners. Martinez was "a Texan by birth, a mixture of Mexican, Indian
and Negro that they called mestizo in Old Mexico." Even then Farrell respected
Martinez: "He had the kind of brains that criminals rarely have, the kind that keep
you out of alive, out of jail, and with enough money to last beyond the next
week." Martinez is a guy whose ex-girlfriends shed tears when they remember
how good they used to have it together.
Farrell learned enough in his night work that he began smuggling liquor on his
own. In the dozen times since then that he had seen Martinez, his friend "had
had some kind of new racket, and had been doing well with it."
What Farrell doesn't know is Martinez has stolen a perfect set of counterfeit
plates and the bad guys are after his buddy. Martinez, on the other hand,
knows the score. Going to the cops meant time behind bars. Returning the
plates was an admission of defeat and submission to execution. "All that was
left was to make war."
The situation Farrell has stumbled into -- a band of counterfeiters out to kill the
renegade Martinez -- can leave Farrell and his buddy as roadkill. Farrell's fight
to save his friend is tooth and claw to the bittersweet end.
Farrell has to find his friend before the evildoers do. Dixie Ray Chavez, the
hired killer out to beat Farrell, tells his bosses, "Martinez has three friends in
New Orleans. I'm bettin' he'll go to one of `em for help, sooner or later." Who
gets there first gets to shoot first.
Chavez is one mean dude. He tortures one friend of Martinez "with a hot iron `til
her heart gave out." On another victim, "it looked as though skin had been
flayed from her." Dixie Ray Chavez is a tuning fork for other bad guys to home
in on. He "liked to think of himself as a bullet who stayed on course until the job
was done." Chavez plans to be there before Farrell and gone before the
Treasury agents stumble in.
Farrell and Pale Shadow are fun for all Farrell's secrets, the most important
being that he is Creole and passing for white in a racist society. His next best
secret is his close relationship with his father, Frank Casey, a red-headed Irish
cop ready to retire from the New Orleans Police department.
Skinner has written four previous Wesley Farrell novels and four nonfiction
books about the hard--boiled detective tradition. He is actually a well-respected
academic at Xavier University in New Orleans.
Pale Shadow takes place during September, 1940, in New Orleans, when the
Negro Detective Squad covered the crimes the white guys won't and backed off
the "white" cases. A time for riverboat gambling. A time when "a well-dressed
man with a slick line of jive" can go a long way.
The counterfeiters are pros: "The engraving technique is so good that the
Bureau of Engraving and Printing is jealous. And the paper is good enough to
fool ninety-seven percent of the people who touch it."
No all cops in Pale Shadow are good guys, either, which surprises no one who
knows New Orleans and its histories. "If there had existed in Detective Matty
Paret even a scintilla of honesty, he might have been an outstanding detective.
He was intelligent, thoughtful, and even possessed a certain shrewd insight into
the foibles of his fellow man. Had he liked money a little less and hard work
more, he'd have been a sergeant already."
I envelope myself in this mythical past of crooked cops, honest robbers and the
gray people who slide between them like a sharpened knife edge. I luxuriate in
the world I am too young to have ever been a party to, a world I most likely
would never have survived within, a world that helps me deal the real, everyday
villains on the front page and the cable headlines.
Wesley Farrell is a questionable hero in the same way that the 1930 and 1940
movies celebrated questionable heroes with actors like Humphrey Bogart, Dick
Powell, and Bob Mitchum. Skinner writes, "Farrell moved silently through the
crowd, his eyes glowing in that peculiar way from the shadow of his hat brim.
Occasionally somebody felt the feral quality emanating from him and stepped to
the side, hurriedly dragging a companion from Farrell's path." Locals whisper
his name when he passes.
Wes Farrell has that classic tenuous relationship with the cops, too. He has
some friends, but even his friends suspect there's much wisdom percolating
behind his mulatto features.
Yes, Wesley Farrell is biracial. So few writers are multicultural, and yet this
world grows more so every day. True cities like New Orleans have always been
multicultural -- although that phrase is still rings new to the city and the world --
and yet Farrell is not part of that 1940s racist past. In the real 1940s Farrell's
story would have been played out as another Example of the Tragic Mulatto, or
worse the Tragic Half-breed. (Think of Paul Newman playing Elmore Leonard's
Hombre; a man so marginalized, he isn't allowed a name until after he dies
saving all the whites.)
Farrell passes for white, and many call him "the great white hope, Wes Farrell,
who reaches down to help all the poor, helpless niggers in distress." Farrell
generally pulls off the masquerade, but not all the times. "Men never asked him
why he did the things he did. It was always the women who tried to understand,
who wanted an explanation for why he behaved in ways that were inexplicable in
a white man."
Skinner gives these denizens of New Orleans the wonderful names that 1940s
crime novels thrive upon: Wisteroa Mullins, Little Head Lucas, cheap thugs
named Tink and Rojo, Margaret "Jelly" Wilde, Marcel Aristide and Theron
Oswald.
I love this world where bodyguards and bouncers can be murdered silently in the
night, this frontier of hard-boiled and noir. Where cons talk of "dumb twists,"
cons mumble about `ofays," where only four aces always win.
A world that of course includes classic femme fatales: "She was tall, maybe
five-seven, with a lean, high-breasted figure and velvety skin the color of hark
honey." She has a devastating effect on men, too. Even men hard as rock get
goofy; "he had the insane urge to race around the room on all fours while he
barked the lyrics to `Jingle Bells.'"
These are dangerous women. One of Skinner's gloriously described femmes
owns and operates Sparrow's Joint, a most curious night club down along the
riverfront warehouses. "Her sallow skin and bold, handsome features were
those of a Jew or an Arab, Farrell had never known which." Sparrow tells
Farrell, "I'll simply tell you to be careful. The other side of the world is on fire
now, but evil energy is in the air even here."
Skinner doesn't over-furnish the 1940s. We get just enough to locate us in that
special time and place. A man might wear "a carefully trimmed mustache" and
"a stylish Wilton fedora tipped over his right ear." Another has a collarless shirt
and thick glasses made of window glass. A neon sign has the colorful shape of
"a top-hatted crawdish leaning negligently against a martini glass." Drinkers
toss down rye highballs in juke joints. Where men keep bottles of whiskey and
Colt .38 Supers in their suitcases.
Pale Shadow unfolds like a movie, and I love watching as "Farrell moved
through the noise and destruction like a hot wind, his rage and blood lust blotting
out all but the faceless shadow that retreated down toward the opposite end of
the building. His gun jumped in his hand until the hammer fell on an empty
chamber."
I love the town that Skinner loves. New Orleans is a border town between the
races. More complex than a love affair, and more shifting than standing on
quicksand. "The center of New Orleans was beating like a healthy heart, and
the death of a Negro woman in Gentilly meant little or nothing to the teeming life
of Rampart Street." Meanwhile, at the bordello, one can hear the bells at Holy
Ghost Catholic Church. We may want to visit Maxwell's Chicken Shack on
Derbigny Street or the Sassafrass Lounge for an matinee drink.
Pale Shadow is great fun. It's fun to watch how Skinner makes sure all the
interested parties keep abreast of exposition. Pale S
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