Dead Man’s Dance by Robert Ferrigno

Abstract

92 Western American Literature their fellow islanders. Population influx brings a contradiction: as much as islanders want to stick together, they tend to distinguish between natives and those who are newly arrived, between those who belong and those who wish to belong, between those whose island this is and those whose it is not. This sense of community available to islanders is severe­ ly challenged in an era of satellite dishes, the Chunnel, and high-speed catamaran ferries—the universe is made up of very different stories in 1996 than was the case in 1956. Jack Hodgins wants his readers to reflect upon the difference, and to extend the analysis beyond Vancouver Island to culture at large. As an edge-walker of the continent he shows us how preposterously our culture has become tangled in the century’s and the center’s glitter. Hodgins reconstructs the island, the coast, and the region as a com­ munity—of flesh and blood, and of narrative—in order to challenge its portrayal as a frontier ordained to supply the center with raw materials, consumers, and rustic movie sets. In “The Lepers’ Squint,” a short story that first appeared in 1978, Hodgins had an aspiring Irish writer point out to a visiting North American novelist the inevitable commodification of the region. “Some day,” she said, “they will have converted all our histo­ ry into restaurants and bars like this one, just as I will have converted it all into fiction.” She explained that “this place” existed for her because a great regional writer “made it real. He and others, in their stories.” Hodgins’s narrative project has long been to make his region real. His superior achievement in The Macken Charm is to manifest that region in place and time as direct comment upon the contemporary Western world. JOEL MARTINEAU University of British Columbia Dead Man’s Dance. By Robert Ferrigno. (NewYork: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1995. 384 pages, $23.95.) This is Ferrigno’s third novel, and with it he continues the adventures of his investigative reporter Quinn, whom he introduced in Cheshire Moon. (Oddly enough, the dust jacket does not mention that the new book is a sequel, but touts it as by the “author of The Horse Latitudes,” his first novel, in which Quinn did not appear.) Following the pattern made famil­ iar by Robert B. Parker, Tony Hillerman, and others, Ferringo is con­ structing an evolving biography of his hero that frames the murder mys­ tery solved in each novel. Reviews 93 Quinn maintains a troubled relationship with his ex-wife and adoring daughter, loses (apparently) the photographer girlfriend who saved his life in Cheshire Moon, and drifts toward an affair with a young Chicana deputy district attorney. As with many contemporary soft-boiled detec­ tives (Parker’s Spenser is the dominant model), Quinn’s physical tough­ ness and truculence mask a fragile sensibility. He weeps—at least once too often in this book, I felt—and even blushes. Quinn’s investigation leads him through the familiar crime-story landscape of southern California, which Ferrigno evokes with skill and nervous energy. His narratives always have unexpected pleasures, odd twists and turns, and sometimes subtle allusions, as in his riff on Joyce Carol Oates’s story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” in chapter twenty-two. Ferrigno’s crime fiction always reminds us of the long interrelationship of detection and the Gothic, which runs back as far as Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Here Ferrigno evokes an unheimlich chill as Quinn’s investigations into a series of murders in the present lead him into the secrets of his own family’s past. The conclusion of Dead Man’s Dance suggests a sequel that will take us to Paris: the turf of Raymond Chandler and Ross McDonald exchanged for that of Inspector Dupin. CHARLES L. CROW Bowling Green State University The Devil’s Hatband. By Robert O. Greer. (New York: Mysterious Press, 1996. 336 pages, $21.95.) Rebellious and beautiful eco-terrorist Brenda Mathison, expatriate daughter of a federal judge from back East, is found murdered in Colorado, strangled to death with barbed wire. (The Devil’s...