On a night of rain and darkness, Fox Olson’s white Thunderbird might have hit the top of that slope too fast. It had certainly hit the bottom too fast.
More than plot, character, setting or theme, the PI novel is about voice. Style. From Raymond Chandler to Samantha Jayne Allen, what draws me in more than anything is a writer’s language, tone, dialogue, jargon, cadence. Those words don’t often come up in discussions of thrillers or locked room mysteries, but they’re central to PI fiction. To paraphrase William Goldman, all you really have is your main character and their view of the world, expressed through the language they use.
As I get older and pickier about what to read, it comes down to voice. How does this character and this author approach the world?
Crumley, Mosley, Grafton, Parker, Paretsky and Burke are all careful stylists. As is Joseph Hansen. Fadeout, the first of Hansen’s novels featuring insurance investigator Dave Brandstetter, is a PI novel with nary a false note. Hansen’s descriptions are superb: there’s a world-weariness to them that’s both familiar to PI fiction and appropriate to the situation. Yet notes of wistfulness, sympathy, nostalgia and poetry stand out in almost any paragraph.
Here a minor character is listening to a hi-fi tape recording of a man presumed dead:
A girl in blue sat at a big, sleek, clean-lined desk. Her hands were on the keys of a new electric typewriter but they were still. She was sitting with her face turned up, listening, wearing the same rapt expression as the old Daffodil waitress. Only her eyes were shut and she was young and her face was like a flower with rain blessing it. Had been, for an instant. Then Mrs. Olson shut the door, crossed the room and struck a switch and the voice slurred and died. The girl opened her eyes, startled blue.
A few paragraphs later:
The girl blinked at her, then gave a little so what shrug, got up and took from a corner closet a white raincoat. Wasting no time, she put it on while she walked to the door. She threw Dave a small smile, gave Thorne Olson a look that might have meant anything or nothing, then went out and shut the door. They heard her feet go fast and young down the outside stairs.
Description describes the describer as much or more than the described. Brandstetter is in his forties and his view of the girl is colored by the gulf in age between them, and an unspoken envy of the carefree way she attacks the world. And yet a sympathy and appreciation, too. At least in my reading.
The plot of Fadeout follows the disappearance of Fox Olson, a sort of small-town Will Rogers whose car is found smashed at the bottom of a gully. There’s no body, and a family eager for a big insurance payout. Enter Brandstetter to find out if Olson is alive, and if so, why he faked his own death.
Olson, it turns out, was a frustrated literary novelist, whose success on the radio as a peddler of folk songs and Minnie Pearl-style stories belies Olson’s sense of himself. There’s also a friend he lost in the war, who Olson might have been romantically involved with.
Brandstetter is an openly gay detective, mourning the death from cancer of his longtime lover Rod. As such, he’s the ideal person to see through Olson’s public persona. Better minds than mine have written about Brandstetter’s homosexuality, which doesn’t explain him, but neither is it unimportant. The description of Dave’s courtship of Rod and the aftermath of Rod’s death is particularly devastating.
In twenty years you could say and do a lot you wish you hadn’t. In twenty years you could store up a lot of regrets. And then, when it was too late, when there was no one left to say “I’m sorry” to, “I didn’t mean it” to, you could stop sleeping for regret, stop eating, talking, working, for regret. You could stop wanting to live. You could want to die for regret.
It was only remembering the good times that kept you from taking the knife from the kitchen drawer and, holding it so, tightly in your fist, on the bed, naked to no purpose except that that was how you came into the world and how your best moments in the world had been spent—holding it so, roll onto the blade, slowly, so that it slid like love between your ribs and into that stupidly pumping muscle in your chest that kept you regretting.
The good memories stopped you.
Fadeout is about as perfect a 160-page PI novel as you could ask for. The characters are truly rendered and Brandstetter is a fascinating take on the archetype—and a terrific voice. Hansen, who died twenty years ago this November, received a lifetime achievement award from the Private Eye Writers of America in 1992. Soho has reissued the Brandstetter series in nice trade paperbacks. They’re worth picking up.
Naben Ruthnum has written bestselling thrillers under the pen name Nathan Ripley, as well as award-winning literary fiction, YA and horror. His latest is The Grimmer, currently nominated for an Aurora Award.
Since Naben recommended Hansen’s work to me, I reached out to him for his thoughts on Fadeout and the Brandstetter series.
I’ve read the first three Brandstetter books now, and more than most detective novels, they seem built out of conversations and encounters. In each, Dave is dealing with an explanation for a death that doesn’t suit his sense of reality, or his insurance company’s interests. He addresses the questions he can’t answer to people who don’t necessarily want to talk to him, and the beginnings of each of the three books are built of an accrual of these small scenes, silting in Dave’s own life and pain by suggestion until he goes home again and the novel takes on further dimension before the interrogations continue.
In Fadeout, Dave is asking questions about the death of Fox Olson because it’s his job, yes, but also because he has unanswerable questions about the death of his partner. As with my other favourite detective Dave, Robicheaux, you get the sense that without a quest, or succession of quests, the man will eventually find himself in a room with only himself to interrogate, and unable to find the answers: why am I here? What am I for?
With clear plotting and cases that follow their own internal logic, Hansen gives Dave Brandstetter’s irresolution, questing, and need a deeper poignancy: he can reach resolution in a case, but not anywhere else in his life. Sam points out Hansen’s incredible prose, vision, and specificity above—as with James Lee Burke and John D. MacDonald, so much about locking into the world of these novels depends on whether you jibe with the way the character sees the world, and the writing that makes that seeing tactile. I think that the Brandstetter books are in the special class of series where once you’ve read the first twenty pages, you’re either out or fairly sure you’ll be reading the whole thing. There are authors like this, too, and for me, Hansen has become one of them. When was the last time you put down a PI novel and decided that you’d better buy some of this guy’s poetry? Pretty good.