Night Dogs by
Kent Anderson
pbk out November 98
(Arrow)
NIGHT DOGS is a strange mongrel of a book. An episodic, slightly meandering account of the day-to-day life of an unstable street cop, the writing is top-notch and the characters memorable, but the book has an oddly anachronistic flavour about it. With its 1975 setting and often cliched references to Vietnam, the novel too often feels
like something that has been sitting on a shelf for twenty years waiting for a publisher. This seems unlikely, given that Anderson has a previous novel to his credit and is a manifestly big talent,
but this out-of-time sense, combined with severe overlength weaken what might otherwise have been one of the best procedural reads in many years.
Set, rather unusually, in Portland, Oregon, NIGHT DOGS simply but powerfully chronicles the generally petty, yet not undramatic events
which occupy the lives of cops on the beat. The point-of-view character, Hanson, is a Vietnam Vet who can't shake the war and who
holds onto a tenuous sense of normality only through the authority bequeathed him by his badge. He has no real friends, even on the
force, other than his partner, and he seems more tolerant of Hanson than fond of him. Hanson does know the difficult streets that he
works, however, and for all his tough-guy actions and surface racism, demonstrates a respect for the people in his purview - evils and innocents alike - struggling to survive.
Although Anderson tries to impose a loose structure over the material - notably, a half-realized plot about a superior's efforts
to do Hanson in - there is insufficient narrative force to carry the book's five hundred-plus pages. A sub-plot, concerning a war buddy
of Hanson's on the wrong side of the law, is also lazily conceived, and suffers the most from the much too familiar flashbacks and discussions about Vietnam. Been there, done that, seen the Memorial. And yet, so strong is Anderson's ability to get underneath his characters, that the book remains compelling and memorable. Anderson
has no qualms about painting ugly portraits of his people. It's often difficult, if not impossible, to get into a book in which so many characters are unappealing, but Anderson has that rare ability
to make even unsympathetic characters engaging. The book is reminiscent of the brilliant television series HOMICIDE: LIFE ON THE STREET in that regard, and one can imagine Anderson writing a great episode of the show. NIGHT DOGS comes with a foreword from James Crumley, and it's not
hard to see what appealed to Crumley in this material. It suffers from some of the same deficiencies as does Crumley's writing - the
Vietnam obsession, intermittent excesses of macho - but it also contains the grace and depth of some of Crumley's best writing. NIGHT DOGS is not without its failings, but it is a book that deserves to be read. I would happily pick-up anything else Kent Anderson writes.
(
Jay Russell
- one of the greatest talents the horror industry has produced for some time… (Black Tears))
Night Dogs by
Kent Anderson