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Cheap as Beasts

par Jon Wilson

Séries: Declan Colette (1)

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Like most soldiers, Declan Colette lost his fair share in the war--in his case a sailor, drowned off Iwo Jima. Since then he's been scratching out a living as a cut-rate PI, drinking too much, and flirting with danger. Then a girl arranges to consult him, only to be murdered en route, and the cops tag Colette as their prime suspect. To save his neck he'll need to find the real killer, a quest that pits him against a rival detective firm, a dangerously rich family, and a desperate foe whose murdering ways started back during the war. Could this be the case he's been waiting for? Catching the killer could make his reputation. Failing, could cost him his life. Either way: win-win.… (plus d'informations)
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Declan Colette is a private investigator in post-World War Two LA. When a young woman is killed on her way to an appointment with him, he comes under suspicion. To extricate himself, he must solve the mystery of her death, while entangling himself with a powerful family, obstructive police, resentful rivals and local gangsters. And a redhead. But the redhead is male.

This is the setup for Cheap as Beasts. It’s classic noir in the Chandler vein and yet it isn’t. It faces the eternal challenge for the genre novel – give us what we know, what we want, but give us something surprising, moving, new. And for me this book really does.

Everything about it is subtle. The prose is clever and laconic. The characters are all fluent in subtext. Colette has the obligatory world-weary take on the world. People may think they can take him in, but he’ll work out what’s going on. When he quotes Shakespeare he doesn’t stop to explain it. You’ll get it. Or you can look it up. (I had to look it up.)

It’s clear that, whatever Colette is telling you, there’s a lot more he’s keeping back. Colette’s ironic detachment comes, you sense, from a feeling that he’s living in a world he no longer believes in.

The book takes on themes that are controversial or ambiguous or sublimated in Chandler. When Colette sees a black lawn jockey, an image taken from Chandler’s The High Window (okay, I had to look that up too), he thinks of the humiliation of the black servant who has to polish it. It’s the same world, but from a different perspective.

Ideas of masculinity are questioned. Men judge each other, not only on their words or their strength, but on their war record. Colette’s sexuality is acknowledged, with varying degrees of acceptance – as long as he can pass those other tests.

World War Two and its aftermath are at the heart of this story. The man Colette loved was killed in the war. Clubs and bars are renamed to conceal their Japanese ownership. The case Colette is investigating turns in on itself, testing family alliances against wartime bonds. War and loss subtly suffuse everything.

Chandler himself wrote about how he struggled against the constraints of genre. This book, in turn, takes on Chandler and creates something new.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley.

This review first appeared on The Next Best Book Blog
http://thenextbestbookblog.blogspot.c... ( )
  KateVane | Feb 14, 2015 |
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Like most soldiers, Declan Colette lost his fair share in the war--in his case a sailor, drowned off Iwo Jima. Since then he's been scratching out a living as a cut-rate PI, drinking too much, and flirting with danger. Then a girl arranges to consult him, only to be murdered en route, and the cops tag Colette as their prime suspect. To save his neck he'll need to find the real killer, a quest that pits him against a rival detective firm, a dangerously rich family, and a desperate foe whose murdering ways started back during the war. Could this be the case he's been waiting for? Catching the killer could make his reputation. Failing, could cost him his life. Either way: win-win.

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