Life’s Work, Jonathan Valin
I read one or two of Valin’s mysteries featuring Cincinnati PI Harry Stoner back in the eighties. Stoner wasn’t enough of a wiseass for me, at the time, and I settled on Amos Walker and Thomas Kyd for my contemporary-PI fix (and on Travis McGee, for escape from the Michigan winters.)
I’m glad I second-guessed myself decades later and picked up Life’s Work. The only thing wrong with Valin was this twenty-something reader.
First thing about Stoner: He’s on the job from Page One, meaning there’s no time for any nonsense about his office locale, or his wacky uncle, or his colorful friends. Whatever the reader will divine about the character will come from Stoner’s interactions with the people he meets on the case.
Second thing about Stoner, and this is one I really like: He’s in it for the trouble. He likes trouble. In Life’s Work he binge drinks with professional football players and sleeps with a prostitute and drives a Pinto.
Trouble diverts the mind from thoughts of failure, and failure haunts this story and its characters.(The plot involves steroid abuse in professional sports…in 1986, the year the book was published. Nothing has changed.)
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2 comments:
Back in the late 80's and early 90's, when I was discovering hardboiled fiction and basically buying as many detective novels as I could afford, I got a couple of Valin's Stoner novels. I was careful, in my retentive fashion, to get the first book about the character, The Lime Pit.
But that one, and Extenuating Circumstances, still sit, dusty and unread, on my shelf to this day.
I'll have to do something about that.
Chris
Why not? Let me know what you think. I'm going to try another one myself.
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