Books
Catalina Eddy

by Daniel Pyne
Blue Rider Press, March 2017, $28

This muscular “novel in three decades” is sure to bring comparisons to Ariel Winter’s ballsy 2012 valentine to crime fiction, The Twenty-Year Death, and with good reason. It is an equally ambitious, deliberately literary, loosely connected trilogy that desperately wants to say something about us now by mining crime fiction’s past. But where Winter’s opus strived to mimic the stylistic nuances of three definitive voices of crime fiction from three consecutive decades (Simenon in the ’30s, Chandler in the ’40s, and Thompson in the ’50s), Pyne plays it looser, both stylistically and chronologically.

Not that Pyne isn’t after big noir game. We’re meant to take the Catalina Eddy of the title, a real-life weather phenomenon alternately known as the “June gloom” that occurs along the SoCal coast, as a darkly ominous metaphor for the stream of corruption and greed that runs all through the book.

“The Big Empty” takes place in Los Angeles mostly in June 1954, and deliberately echoes Chandler, right down to its title. The hero is Ryan Lovely, a Hollywood private eye who nurses his regrets, both personal and professional, like multiple bruises. He stubbornly inserts himself into the murder investigation of his ex (who left him for his best friend). Lovely knows solving the case won’t really solve anything, but maybe “somebody gets saved.” That’s about all he can hope for, and all he can offer his cop buddy who urges him to drop the case, which turns out to be more sad and painful—not to mention dangerous—than either counted on. It becomes a toxic miasma of Cold War fearmongering, dirty secrets, and even filthier politics, ending in as bitter and heartrending a conclusion as anything Chandler himself could have conjured.

But surprisingly, somebody does get saved (at least temporarily): Gil Kirby, the young boy whom Lovely sought to protect, returns in “Losertown,” set in June 1987 San Diego. Gil, now grown up, is a mid-level federal prosecutor being forced by his ambitious new boss, Sabrina Colter, a ruthless young Reaganite appointee with no discernible soul, to compel a long-retired former weed dealer turned successful (and legit) small business owner to become an informant against a rising Mexican drug cartel.

Finally, in “Portuguese Bend,” we fast-forward up the coast to June 2016 Long Beach, where Riley McCluggage, a wheelchair-bound homicide cop facing possibly her last days on the job, and obsessive crime scene shutterbug Finn Miller team up to crack the murder of one Charlie Ko, a twentysomething salesman who everyone thinks was killed by his wife Willa, a young Marine Gunnery Sergeant who offers only a thousand yard stare to their questions (and may—or may not—be Gil Kirby’s daughter).

These are not happy stories. They don’t end well. The innocent suffer and the good are double-crossed. Lives are broken, and lovers betrayed. People die. And very rarely, despite Lovely’s fondest hopes, does anybody truly get “saved.” The author’s metaphoric description of the eponymous eddy as “bleak, gray, indefatigable, cycling through the same wretched human crimes and calamities over and over again” sounds like a death sentence. But then he injects so much hot and messy humanity and empathy into his characters that they become heroic, despite themselves, simply by getting up each morning.

Rise again.

Kevin Burton Smith
Teri Duerr
5684
Pyne
March 2017
catalina-eddy
28
Blue Rider Press