Citizen Phillips & Co.

Creator of Ivan Monk, that fine crime writer Gary Phillips -- who is doing a serial called Citizen Kang at The Nation -- is the best person in the world to put together this sharp collection of new stories about the link between crime and politics. He might not have invented Eliot Spitzer or the Mayor of Detroit, but he could have.

Phillips's own contribution to this timely anthology is a thing of beauty. "Rudy Garza broke a shoelace as he tied one of his Botticellis," begins Swift Boats for Jesus, a wonderful tale of crooked cops, bent politicians, warring gang leaders and assorted hustlers like Garza, all doing their worst to protect their own part of the Los Angeles dream.

John Shannon, Mike Davis, Twist Phelan and Sujata Massey are among the other topnotch collaborators. Shannon, whose newest Jack Liffey book, The Devils of Bakersfield, is due out from Pegasus at any minute, has a story about the real price of illegal immigration, called The Legend of Bayboy and the Mexican Surfer. Davis, best known for his non-fiction, (City of Quartz is arguably the best political history of Los Angeles) offers Negative Nixons, a jaunty look at the reviled ex-President. Phelan, certainly the fittest member of our original Suicide Club, has a wise and funny story about a 40ish female Secret Service agent. And Massey shows that Iraqi politics are as vicious as the homegrown version in The Mayor's Movie.

I hope that Phillips has remembered to send Barack Obama a copy of Politics Noir.

Death and Geocaching in the Upper Peninsula

I never had the chance to work for Henry Kisor during the 28 years he was book editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, but I heard enough about him from friends like Gary Dretzka and David Montgomery to make me wish I had. Luckily for us all, his retirement has turned into a fiction feast set in a part of the world I knew nothing about -- Michigan's Upper Peninsula, where Steve Martinez is deputy sheriff of a place called Porcupine City.

A Lakota Sioux orphan raised by white Methodists in upstate New York, Martinez drifted into Porcupine City after the first Gulf War, the one some misbegotten soul named Desert Storm, and felt immediately at home. He likes the Yoopers (residents of the Upper Peninsula) and especially the Porkies, the Porcupine City folk whose welfare and protection is largely his job -- now that the entrenched sheriff, Eli Garrow, has decided to spend less and less of his time in the office except on payday. Garrow has also appointed his wife as jail matron and taken the police department's new snowmobile as a personal plaything. But, as Steve tells us, "Those peccadilloes have been long forgotten... while such niggardly nest feathering could cost a politician an election, it's not worth an indictment."

That's why Martinez has decided to run for sheriff himself, driving his boss crazy. A shy man ("I still retain an Indian tendency to hide my light under a bushel," Martinez says), he nevertheless feels that Porkies deserve a better lawman. And despite the fact that a couple of his recent cases have made headlines (Season's Revenge and A Venture into Murder tell those stories), Steve's election is no sure thing. For one thing, there is his obviously Native American face: most locals can't tell the difference between him and the Ojibwes whose casinos and benefits are a source of irritation.

CACHE OF CORPSES begins with the discovery in what was known as the Dying Room of the local Poor Farm (by two young police officers looking for a place to have sex) of a headless, handless human body sealed in a plastic bag marked with an incomprehensible bar code. With his best friend and campaign manager, State Trooper Alex Kolehmainen, Martinez tries to solve the case before it becomes cold. Then, a smart, cocky 12-year-old Ojibwe boy being fostered by Steve's almost-too-good-to-be true lady friend (secretly wealthy, beautiful, mature, adept at research) takes one look at the bar code and decides that they should try it backwards.

The story becomes more complicated when a popular Internet sport called geocaching makes an appearance. "Geocaching is the outdoor sport in which people hide treasures, mark their locations with GPS receivers, then post the coordinates on the Internet — and other players read the postings and hunt the treasures with their own GPSes," says Kisor on his blog. "TeamObbie1, a husband-and-wife pair in Northern Virginia, stashed a copy of Cache of Corpses at the geographic location N 39 02.700 W 077 30.115, which happens to be a public library in Loudoun County. It was an 'event cache,' a meeting of the Northern Virginia Geocaching Organization, at which TeamObbie1 'released' the book into the wild. At the event another cacher found the book and took it home, then posted his discovery on Geocaching.com. When he’s finished reading it, he’ll take the book to another event cache for someone else to read and pass on, posting the coordinates of the event. The new reader in turn will pass the book on and post new coordinates."

Where else can you learn about this stuff -- or find out what an "Open Wedding" is? (See page 47 for details.) Kisor, who lives in Evanston, must get up to Michigan often enough in his own light plane to soak himself in its unique environment and habits. And did I mention that he also knows how to tell a great mystery story with style and grace?

The Fabulous Fredric Brown

For those of you who don't read the Chicago Tribune's Book Section, now packaged in the Saturday paper, here's a piece I did last week which you might find interesting.

Sixty years ago, a Chicago newspaper writer named Fredric Brown, a Gary, Indiana teenager who'd gotten a job on a Milwaukee paper as a proofreader and never looked back, won an Edgar Award for Best First Crime Novel from the Mystery Writers of America. His book was called THE FABULOUS CLIPJOINT, and it's still considered one of the best crime novels about Chicago ever written. Master crime writer and anthologist Bill Pronzini referred to it, in his 1001 Midnights, as "unquestionably more than just another hard-boiled detective tale."

CLIPJOINT does for the North End of the 1930s and 40s what Jim Thompson died for the scruffy towns of Texas and California, and what Dashiell Hammett did for San Francisco – preserve forever, like bugs in amber, the seedy pleasures of our shared pasts. "We walked north two blocks on the east side of Michigan Boulevard to the Allerton Hotel... The top floor was a very swanky cocktail bar. The windows were open and it was cool there. Up as high as that, the breeze was a cool breeze and not something out of a blast furnace. We took a table by a window on the south side, looking out toward the Loop...'Beautiful as hell,' I said. 'But it's a clipjoint...' "

Pick up THE FABULOUS CLIPJOINT and you won't be able to put it down until you've turned the last page. (Luckily, it's a short paperback.) In between moments of street poetry, it tells the story of Ed Hunter, an 18-year-old apprentice in the job printing house where his father, Wally, has worked as a master printer for many years. Wally likes to drink (as did Brown), mostly beer, but he never missed a day's work and followed a set route home.

One morning, though, Wally doesn't come home. A couple of cops arrive to tell the Hunters that his body has been found in an alley, along with a few broken beer bottles. He had been beaten to death – probably in a robbery or a drunken fight. Nobody saw or heard anything, and they seem to be saying they won't be spending much time on the case.

Ed is filled with sadness and rage. "I thought about Pop, and I wished I'd known him better. Oh, we'd got along all right, we'd got along swell, but it came to me now that it was too late how little I really knew him." Ed knows he has to find out what happened, but also that he can't do it by himself. So he goes to the old C&NW Madison Street Station and heads for Janesville, Wisconsin, where the J.C. Hobart Carnival is doing its business. At the carny, Ed looks up his Uncle Ambrose Hunter, a barker and roustabout who is the smartest man Ed has ever met. They head back to Chicago, and working as a team they pick up Wally's trail, bribe a friendly detective, act like tough guys (not easy for the boyish Ed or the short and tubby Am), meet a swell dame who loves Ed and lies to him, and actually solve the murder.

Brown wrote six more books about Ed and Am Hunter, now private detectives working in Chicago. The first four were collected in a handsome hardcover called HUNTER AND HUNTED, published in 2002 by Stewart Masters, a dedicated Brown enthusiast in Hermitage, PA. Volume 2, Masters promised, would finish the series. I've never been able to find Vol. 2 on the Internet, and Masters' website seems to have disappeared. In 1984, Dennis McMillan began to publish the ambitious 10-volume Fredric Brown Pulp Detective Series, collecting all the best of his previously-unreprinted work, mostly, but not exclusively, in the crime field. They don't seem to be in McMillan's current catalogue, but copies occasionally show up on rare book sites like ABE and Alibris.

"There are no rules. You can write a story, if you wish, with no conflict, no suspense, no beginning, middle or end. Of course, you have to be regarded as a genius to get away with it, and that's the hardest part -- convincing everybody you're a genius," Frederic Brown once said. He wrote hundreds of mysteries stories for all the famous pulp magazines; turned out even more classic science fiction tales, collected in such anthologies as Angels and Spaceships and Space on My Hands; wrote for the first year of Star Trek and other TV ventures; and had his novels turned into films in America (1958's Screaming Mimi) France (1972's L'Ibis Rouge, based on Brown's Knock Three One Two), Italy , Germany and Japan.

Why then has Fredric Brown avoided the iconic status of a Hammett or a Jim Thompson? Actually, as many critics have pointed out, Brown is far less a classic noir writer than Thompson; his stories are not nearly as dark and perverse, and his style is far more polished. "Brown was a craftsman plying his hard-boiled trade, whereas Thompson was an open wound bleeding on the page," one reviewer said.

Did he write too much? It was only 14 years before his death in 1972, age 65, that he could finally afford to give up the daily grind of newspaper work and nickel-a-word pulp fiction.

And part of the problem was Brown himself, a man who often told his wife he hated writing. Brown liked booze as much as he disliked the act of writing, and given his choice he'd prefer to sit in a bar or at home, drinking, playing his flute, and indulging in one of the dozens of other hobbies he enjoyed: chess, poker, and the works of Lewis Carroll.

Whatever the reason, enough good people put Brown on their must-read lists and then become evangelists to keep his name alive on the same high shelf as Hammett, Thompson, Ross Macdonald and other crime icons. Somewhere up in Literary Heaven, I hope he's looking down, sipping a beer, playing his flute, and smiling.