Spade & Archer, The Prequel to Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, by Joe Gores; a Vintage Crime/Black Lizard trade paperback.  337 pgs., $15.00, ISBN: 978-0-307-27706-0.  Release date: March 9, 2010.

        Joe Gores must have been channeling Dashiell Hammett when he wrote this “prequel”, with permission from Hammett’s estate. The feel, the dialogue and prose are immediately recognizable; it’s as if Hammett himself were directing Gores’ hand. But then, Gores knows of what he writes.  He was a former detective himself, and winner of three Edgar Awards, author of sixteen other novels, including Hammett, which won Japan’s Falcon Award.

        The story takes place in 1921, seven years before Sam Spade will solve the famous case of the Maltese Falcon.  He sets up his own detective agency in San Francisco and invites Miles Archer to join him as a partner, then gets even with Archer for stealing his girlfriend while he was off fighting in World War I, by sleeping with Archer’s wife.

        Spade is hired by a prominent banker to find his young son.  As he uses his contacts to track down the kid, Spade ends up on the San Anselmo, a ship recently arrived from Australia via Honolulu.  He finds evidence that the boy could be aboard as a stowaway, but before he can confirm this, he is thrust into a maelstrom concerning the heist of gold sovereigns from the ship, and encounters a diabolical villain that will menace him for years.  Inept cops, smugglers and thieves, treachery, unrequited love and revenge, are all part of this fast-paced story, with enough red herrings to choke a cat.

        Highly recommended.

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Tooth and Claw, by Nigel McCrery; Pantheon Books. Hardcover, 310 pgs., $25.95. ISBN: 978-0-307-37702-9.  Release date: February 23, 2010.

        Nigel McCrery returns with his third Lapslie mystery.  Detective Chief Inspector Mark Lapslie has been working at home for a year, trying to get his synaesthesia, a rare neurological disorder that causes his brain to crosswire his sense of sound and taste, under control.  His former partner, Emma Bradbury, arrives to tell him he has been summoned back to duty in search of the murderer of a well-known television reporter, who has been brutally murdered.  No sooner do they begin the investigation when Lapslie’s affliction returns with a vengeance—and another person is killed, a man found dead from an explosion set off at a commuter train station.

women and robbing them of their assets, this murderer deliberately kills at random, in grotesqueand terrifying ways, while creating animal models of his crimes.

        But the second murder yields a clue—a drumming beat that Lapslie had picked up at the first murder site—and soon another: a spot of purple-colored urine found by investigators on the roof of the station.  Now Lapslie believes that the two murders may have been committed by the same person.

        Using the forensics team’s analysis and his skewed senses, Lapslie closes in on the killer, just as the killer starts to close in on Emma Bradbury.

        A grisly end, but worth the read.

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Nineteen Eighty-Three, Book Four of the Red Riding Quartet, by David Peace; a Vintage Crime/Black Lizard trade paperback.  $15.00.  405 pgs. ISBN: 978-0-307-45513-0.  Release date: February 9, 2010.

        David Peace is the author of the Red Riding Quartet, Tokyo Year Zero, and Occupied City.  He was chosen as one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists, and has received several fiction awards.  The “Quartet,” acclaimed by critics as “masterful,” and “a tour de force of crime fiction,” has been adapted to a series of films by IFC Films that debuted February 5, 2010.

        Peace’s sordid and gritty Nineteen Eighty-Three has three separate narrators and an experimental narrative style that is annoyingly repetitive, profanity-laced, and generally incoherent.  The story takes place in Yorkshire, England.  Hazel Atkins, a ten-year old has disappeared on her way home from school.  A corrupt cop has been assigned to the case; a local street thug knows too much; and an honest lawyer is trying to appeal the conviction of a young man sentenced for killing another young girl, Clare Kemplay, several years before.

        If you like reading fragments—

        One—

        word—

        sentences—

        followed by—

        Fu—fu—fu—fu—fu—fu—

        and other such—

        devices—

        until the narratives blur—

        into one voice—

        one voice one voice one voice

        not three—

        read the novel.

Otherwise, maybe the films will make more sense.

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Disclosure:  The publishers provided complimentary copies for review.