Steam heat and cold ground

In our roundup of the best new mysteries, a hip-hopper sells his soul to the devil, an abortion goes wrong in late-'60s Chicago, and a Minnesota sheriff's detective can't find her shifty cop husband.

By Charles Taylor

Feb 26, 2004 |

"Dirty South"
By Ace Atkins
304 pages
William Morrow
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It's clear by now that Ace Atkins' mysteries featuring blues history professor Nick Travers are all, in their way, ghost stories. Music has its own ectoplasm in these books. Sometimes those emanations come from the rare blues recordings Nick plays on his cassette deck. Most of the time, though, the vibrations the music leaves behind are in the places where those legendary and forgotten musicians played, in the lives of the people who knew them -- and they are not always a force for good. Atkins has kept faith with the idea that art has the power to take over our lives, turn it upside down, and shake it to pieces.

Atkins' first novel, "Crossroad Blues," found Nick lost in the mystery surrounding the death of Robert Johnson. Another part of Johnson's legend, the story of the blues guitarist selling his soul at the crossroads, reverberates through the fourth Nick Travers mystery, the terrifically titled "Dirty South." The focus here is on hip-hop, with Nick, a one-time pro football player, helping out an old teammate who has made a killing as a hip-hop impresario. Nick's buddy is in debt to some very bad men and is trying to hold on to his new meal ticket, a 15-year-old millionaire rapper named Alias.

The prickly, implied idea behind "Dirty South" is that, except for an older generation of black people (and mostly Southern blacks at that), blues has become almost entirely of interest only to white folks, fans and archivists and academics like Nick himself. To the kids and young adults hooked on hip-hop, the blues is as antiquated as a tub washing machine with a wringer on top. Atkins doesn't berate Alias or the hip-hop fans who turn up in the book for ignoring their heritage; he realizes that's an old duffer's game.

What makes "Dirty South" so potent is Atkins' suggestion that hip-hoppers who've never heard of Robert Johnson may be living out part of his legacy: In the world of "Dirty South" there's always a devil waiting at the crossroads to tempt these kids into selling their souls. (The plethora of posthumous releases in the hip-hop racks of the record store bear out Atkins' implied contention that the most profitable rapper is a dead one.) The sting of the book is that instead of gaining the chops Johnson did, they are trading away what made their music special. "You like seein' your face off buses and bein' thug-lipped over Times Square and it's cool," says Alias at one point, "but somehow you feel like you losin' you. Your rhymes not comin' out the way you feel. The beats you hear sound like someone openin' up a tin can."

The mystery Atkins sets up here is good, solidly constructed as his mysteries always are. But what works its way under your skin is Atkins' peculiar combination of realism and eeriness. The raggedy assassin who sets off after Nick is a walking bad dream, and he materializes and disappears with the insidiousness of a truly evil spirit. As a writer, Atkins knows how to walk fine lines with perfect balance; his books are compassionate, hard and richly atmospheric in a way that never overshadows narrative. As much as anyone else writing, he escapes the sentimentality that bedevils hard-boiled fiction. The end of "Dirty South" finds Nick settled in a way that suggests, if not the end of his journey, at least some well-earned peace. You'd have to be a piker to begrudge Nick that -- but I really hope "Dirty South" isn't his final appearance in print.

"Stone Cribs"
By Kris Nelscott
323 pages
St. Martin's Minotaur
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With "Stone Cribs," her fourth Smokey Dalton mystery, Kris Nelscott can lay claim to the strongest series of detective novels now being written by an American author. "Stone Cribs" picks up where the previous book, "Thin Walls," left off, in 1969 Chicago. Beginning with her first book, "A Dangerous Road," set in Memphis a few months before the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Nelscott has been detailing the racial politics of those years.

Here, she ventures into the sexual politics of the years before Roe vs. Wade. Smokey comes home to his Chicago apartment one night to find a woman bleeding to death from a botched abortion in his neighbor Marvella's apartment. He and his girlfriend Laura rush her to the hospital and encounter a doctor who will not intervene to save the woman's life until she names the doctor who operated on her.

That's the kind of detail that makes 35 years ago seem like the Dark Ages. (And with the Bush administration doing what it can to set back abortion rights, with John Ashcroft subpoenaing the names of women who've undergone partial-birth abortions, it's an age we're about to plunge right back into.) As in the previous Smokey Dalton books, Nelscott's method is to make the distance of that past seem immediate.

Next Page: Is Stuart M. Kaminsky's skeezy Florida process-server hero ever going to be able to afford an apartment?

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