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When the newspaper runs an article on Cage's remarks, everyone assumes that he has started his own investigation, which of course he eventually does. The book starts very slowly, with a lot of different characters and quandaries to introduce -- an unusually large number for a mystery -- and Iles is not good at catching a reader's interest in any low-key way. It's enough to make you suspect that at the heart of any mystery there's a very bad conventional novel struggling to get out.

But Iles is quite good -- if a bit redundant -- when the action picks up. Where earlier you felt forced to trudge and trudge across a sodden field, you are now flying head over heels down a steep slope, words slipping past you, over and under, around and about. Characters pop in and out; possible explanations come into focus, blur, then come back into focus; facts repeatedly regroup. What actually may be struggling to get out here is a book that's about a hundred pages shorter.

Fictional rewrites of true-to-life situations pose obvious difficulties. For one thing, it's easy to lose the suspense. The "Innuendo" twist is a fair answer to the problem of how to provide the requisite surprise at the end of a relatively well-traveled path. "The Quiet Game," however, is another matter. The real Natchez murder is still officially unsolved, but there has never been any doubt that it was racially motivated. Iles' little sleight of hand makes race play only an indirect role in the killing. This solution is not surprising, only annoying; to leave race on the front burner would not have changed the plot complications a bit -- believe me, I'm giving nothing away -- and it seems sacrilegious to rewrite history this way. Wharlest Jackson, after all, was a real martyr to a real cause, and to minimize that martyrdom, even in part, is simply not an interesting turn of the screw.

A footnote: These two media-savvy authors expect a similar level of saturation in their readers. Both briefly offer up a possible parent-child incest scenario; Iles, the more flat-footed, even refers to "Chinatown," while Cage talks himself into the theory. But such incest has so saturated popular culture that it is now nothing more than another expectation to overturn, and both writers have fun teasing us with it.

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One of the least satisfying entries in "The Best American Mystery Stories 1999" is the most topical: Joseph Hansen's "Survival," in which a private investigator reminiscent of the precancerous Marlboro Man stumbles upon a white supremacist group living in the woods of Northern California. There are no surprises, just a contrast between what is supposed to be a "real" Westerner and these narrow-minded zealots.

But most of the stories in this collection, which was guest-edited by police proceduralist Ed McBain, are very fine indeed. I have always liked short mystery stories for their purity: At their best, they are distilled plot. A standout here is Tom Franklin's "Poachers." In this thick slice of Southern Gothic, the brooding gloom of the woods never obscures the narrative itself. I didn't even mind the graduates of the Elmore Leonard School for Hip Hit Men who populate Lawrence Block's "Heller's Last Refuge," Jeffrey Deaver's "Wrong Time, Wrong Place" and Victor Gischler's "Hitting Rufus" -- though these characters are so articulate, levelheaded and genial that it's hard to imagine mystery stories based any less on real life.
salon.com | Dec. 3, 1999

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