Move Along, Brooding Vietnam-Veteran Detectives
You've been replaced by a brooding Iraq war vet
by Mike Taylor
Military service in Vietnam gave the 1970s some memorable detectives: Magnum, P.I.; Dave Robicheaux; Spenser. (OK, so Spenser is actually a veteran of the Korean War, but as he never ages in Robert B. Parker's 734 or so books, readers have always tended to assume he fought in Vietnam; otherwise he would be older than John McCain.) Even Rambo, in both David Morrell's novel and the assorted Stallone vehicles, was a character cut from similar war-torn cloth—an honest but damaged man seeking truth and honor in a world that crushes both.
So it is not only natural but inevitable that America's Vietnam-like adventure in Iraq is producing a new breed of fictional crime solvers. One of the first—and still the best—detectives in this evolving trend is John Ceepak, a former MP in Iraq who's making his fourth appearance in Chris Grabenstein's Hell Hole (St. Martin's Minotaur, 304 pp., $24.95). Like the previous Ceepak novels, the title comes from a decrepit amusement park ride in the fictional Jersey shore town of Sea Haven Township, a dead ringer for Bruce Springsteen's Asbury Park. The abandoned ride in this case is one of those big cylinders that spin people in a dizzy circle, pressing them into the wall so that the floor can drop out beneath them. The ride becomes not only the setting of a climactic scene but also a metaphor for the mental state of many returning veterans.
Ceepak is a ramrod-straight detective on the resort town's otherwise somewhat relaxed police force. His beer-swilling Watson is Danny Boyle, who in the course of responding to a complaint about a drunken party visits a crime scene: a public men's room with a dead soldier, an apparent suicide. Boyle senses something hinky about the scene and shoots a cell phone photo that enables his boss to wrest the case from an inept state investigator. While Ceepak brilliantly ferrets out the truth, Boyle gets all the laughs. And for a darkly serious mystery, there are an awful lot of laughs.
Chris Grabenstein spent almost 20 years writing comedic advertising copy (he invented the Trojan Man) and was once in a Greenwich Village improvisational troupe with Bruce Willis. Boyle's voice is a fast-paced, present-tense rant, somewhere between a comedy club act and a 30-second condom spot. Here's Boyle describing a soldier at a loud party: "He's like a side of beef inside an army green T-shirt. His jaw is as squared off as his cap. I think he has head muscles." Such a style is good for several laughs per page, but the lightness of Boyle's voice is balanced by the seriousness of his brooding Iraqi vet mentor.
If only Tom Selleck could play 30 again.
Chris Grabenstein appears at Davis-Kidd Booksellers at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 26.
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