Solomon's Vineyard

"This is a great novel. A wild novel. It’s a little like Red Harvest in that it has some similar properties: a detective is coming to town to clean it up. The book was originally published in the UK because it was too risky for the US. It came out in 1941 in the UK, but wasn’t published in its original form here until the 1980s. It begins with the narrator introducing the novel: Listen. This is a wild one. Maybe the wildest yet. It’s got everything but an abortion and a tornado. I ain’t saying it’s true. Neither of us, brother, is asking you to believe it. You can lug it across to the rental library right now and tell the dame you want your goddamn nickel back. We don’t care. All HE done was write it down like I told it, and I don’t guarantee nothing. That pretty much says what you need to know. It deals with a corrupt town, illegal activity, a perverse cult, a cesspool of criminality. I don’t want to give too much away, because the pleasure of the book is in discovering what this cult is all about. But the set-up is that the cult leader, Solomon, died five years earlier, and every year his corpse is presented to a bride and the bride disappears. Craven discovers that the young woman he has been hired to find was picked to be this year’s bride. So there’s an urgency to it, to go in and rescue her. It’s one of the wildest detective novels, but it holds up very well today. In Solomon’s Vineyard , the detective assumes the name Karl Craven—great name—and he’s like if Hammett’s Op was mixed with Mickey Spillane’s famous detective Mike Hammer. He’s a much larger, beefier, but still morally ambiguous character who, during the course of the novel, does find out how far he’s willing to go. When he passes up a small fortune in cash and diamonds, he realizes he’s not willing to be a thief, but otherwise he will do anything to get the job done. But then you have Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe, who is a white knight. He’s very different in that sense. And then you have Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels, which are technically police procedurals, following police methods. So there is a range within American detective fiction, but I tend to focus on the PI fiction."