REVIEW
PI’s, Drinking Habits and
other Miscellaneous Character Flaws:
A look at John Straley’s Cecil Younger, George Pelecanos’ Nick Stefanos and Gerry Byrne’s Hayden Aachen
Traditional PI’s (in books I hasten to add!) often have character flaws which make them inaccessible to others on a personal or emotional level. The image of a hard-drinking, hard-living, down-on-his-luck loner has become somewhat of a cliché. This tragically flawed but romantic hero is attractive - he certainly sells books. It’s not a formula that’s about to be dumped with the onset of the "new man" and the more "enlightened" ‘90’s. But this particular model of the hard-boiled PI is changing to accommodate new attitudes to life in the 90’s, and we’ve recently been hearing from a number of relatively new writers with vastly different approaches to this basic theme.

The Woman Who Married A Bear
Gollancz Pbk £4.99 (0 575 60053 5)
and
The Curious Eat Themselves
by John Straley
Gollancz £15.99 (0 575 06128 6)
John Straley’s first novel, The Woman Who Married A Bear, is set in Sitka, Alaska. A Tlingit bear-tracking guide has been killed, and the murderer jailed. But the victim’s elderly mother doubts the official version of events and hires Cecil Younger to investigate the two year old case. On Younger’s first sign of interest there’s an attempted murder and Younger commits himself to finding out the truth behind the rumours surrounding the case.
Cecil Younger is an ex-public defender’s clerk, now turned PI. He’s an alcoholic who has lost his girlfriend ("the woman who used to love me") and is ostracised by many in the town where he lives. The fact that his late father "The Judge" was a powerful figure in the community and his sister a successful law school professor, doesn’t exactly endear him to many: "I don’t think of myself as a disappointment to my family, but everyone I come into contact with does".
He drinks heavily (anything from apple wine mixed with grain alcohol, to Mexican Beer, Jack Daniel’s and Kentucky bourbon), suffers partial blackouts and is unreliable and maudlin as a consequence. If he could just change his habits he could get his old girlfriend back and gain a bit of respect. But he can’t. he knows full well what he is doing, where he is heading, but he also knows that it would be too hard for him to change.
He has remarkable self-insight: "My father told me that the first rule of unhappiness is that you can accept the way things are, or change. As long as you live drunk or with an acceptable daily level of unhappiness, you can avoid this rule altogether. But some people find that no matter what they do, unhappiness is cumulative. Some people mistreat their lovers and stay drunk so they can live the exclusive romance that’s found in memory and cheap sentiment."
Cecil’s life is not totally barren of personal relationships. He lives with Toddy, a young boy whose mental age has not quite caught up with reality, and their friendship is one steadying factor in Cecil’s otherwise unpredictable life.
The Woman Who Married a Bear opens on a cold bleak Alaskan day with Cecil waiting on a park bench, sharing the company of a raven who’s perched on the back, "cackling like a fiend". He’s mislaid his credit card but can’t remember whether he’s lost it or has lent it to someone. He’s carrying a book which he leaves on the bench when he’s due to keep his appointment with Mrs Victor, the dead man’s mother. "No one steals books, and poetry is particularly safe". After the meeting, on passing the bench he decides to leave the book because he’s got too much to carry "It wouldn’t be a problem. I had once left Mind and Nature on that same bench for a week and no one disturbed it. It was just a little damp and the corners were frayed where it looked like a raven had been turning the pages." In such pictures, the quality of Straley’s writing shines through, his ability to transport the reader to the here and now of the story and to feel the lives of the characters is impressive.
The influence of Alaskan culture and peoples is strong in Straley’s writing. The language and beliefs are subtly poetic and filled with strange symbolism. The dark, compelling stature and beauty of the Alaskan landscape envelops you in its spell as you’re drawn into an unusual, but all too human, tale of passion and murder. The story is primarily one of a love-affair with Alaska and its peoples, and the overwhelming passions that it can inspire in both the indigenous people and outsiders.
This first novel by Straley is illuminating in its insights into the lives of the characters, the plot is gripping, thought-provoking and surprising. Cecil Younger is one of the most attractive PI’s I have met in a while. A real treat.
In Straley’s second novel, The Curious Eat Themselves (see Review), we find an on-the-way-to-reform Cecil, trying to give up the drink. It remains to be seen how far he succeeds, but things don’t look too good when one morning, sitting at the bar he comments: "Drunks don’t drink in the daylight. I ordered a cognac. Drunks don’t drink cognac." Which sadly, says it all.

Down By The River Where The Dead Men Go
by George Pelecanos
Serpent’s Tail Pbk Mask Noir £8.99 (1 85242 529 6)
In George Pelecanos’ Down By The River Where The Dead Men Go, the approach to life as an alcoholic PI is entirely different. Here we have Nick Stefanos out on his third caper. The real ‘hero’ of this story is the alcohol. It triumphs over human frailty and mistakes are made. In fact, by Nick’s own admission, the whole sorry episode would never have happened, he wouldn’t have lost his girl, his friend Jack LaDuke wouldn’t have had to suffer the tragic consequences, and Nick’s own life wouldn’t have been ruined, if only Nick hadn’t found himself crashed-out in a pool of vomit, semi-conscious, down by the river where a dead man went!
The trouble was, Nick in his drunken stupor, witnessed the murder. He finds the body of a young black boy floating in the river the following morning and decides that he has to have a go at finding the murderer/s.
The story follows a sequence of increasingly drink and/or drug induced action. The theme is a nineties theme, sexual abuse of young boys, pimping and child pornography, but the action is firmly grounded in the "Die Hard" (I, II and II!) tradition.
Nick Stefanos’ world is one of seedy, late-opening bars, alcohol, sex, drugs and cynicism. It’s a world where the height of comradeship involves getting plastered on a bottle of bourbon and rounding off the evening by urinating up against a wall in some rank, darkened alleyway before stumbling off to pass out.
Stefanos is an alcoholic. Most things that happen to him revolve around this fact. In some ways Nick’s character brings out the realities of alcoholism: an inability to sustain relationships - friends are pushed away because the only important thing is the bottle - the despair, lack of motivation and inability to re-build a life, and the physical humiliations that accompany it all ring true. Interestingly, ‘though, the alcoholism hasn’t affected Nick’s sexual performance, which is slightly odd, but after all, this is fiction!
The only problem with all of this is that the alcohol appears to cloud Nick’s judgement. Now this may be true to life, but I wouldn’t have thought it the best recommendation for a PI! A car with a noisy exhaust isn’t the ideal vehicle to use when you’re on a stake out of a lair of violent criminals. And breaking into a warehouse full of said criminals who are most likely armed to their teeth, when you haven’t got a gun yourself, doesn’t appeal either!
But Nick triumphs over these improbabilities, not to live and love another day, but more likely to drink himself to death. Very black, very violent!

Ruby by Gerry Byrne
Gollancz £15.99 (0 575 062145 2)
With the final book, Ruby, we change tack altogether. Gerry Byrne takes a refreshingly new approach to life as a PI, and this time the setting is the streets of Soho, London.
Hayden Aachen is starting up her own Management Consultancy. Until now she’s been working as a social worker but has become increasingly worn down by the emotional stress and futility of dealing with other people’s lives and problems. What bliss to be merely responsible for advising clients on management issues.
But when she turns up at her new office on her first day to find her old friend Evian (rhymes with deviant) has picked the lock and has a problem of her own that she wants Hayden to look into, Hayden can feel the insidious weight of trouble settling in. A friend of Evian’s is worried about a young call girl, Ruby, who’s gone missing, and after outright refusal and further shows of resistance, Hayden weakens and is given a ring as a clue to the girl’s disappearance. Hayden’s empathy for those who have been handed the dirty end of the stick of life (including herself, as is often the case), drives her on into an investigation which nearly tips her over the edge.
Hayden’s friends are not exactly the sort you’d meet everyday. For example, Evian is a transvestite and a likeable character who originally comes from a mining village on the Notts/Yorkshire border. She keeps her "blow" in an empty tampax dispenser in her handbag and earns her way by "clipping" (posing as a prostitute, taking the money and running), a dangerous game, but as she points out, no more dangerous than prostitution itself. Byrne has a good ear for dialogue and some of the stories told by Evian are hilarious. Imagine Evian being able to pull off the clipping con with the same bloke twice - and he believes her!! Hayden herself has a personal demon in her life to contend with. Not, in this case, a problem with alcohol, but something just as dark and soul-destroying. The story revolves to quite a large extent around this "secret" of Hayden’s so it’s not wise for me to say much more. Suffice it to say that Hayden’s problem is her torment and is in a real sense tragic.
Gerry Byrne paints an unusual picture of life on the streets as a PI. There’s a strongly authentic feel to all of the characters, including Hayden herself. This approach is in sharp contrast to fictional PI’s where problems such as alcoholism are often seen through a romantic haze, strongly reminiscent of the ‘60’s R&B romantic myth where the young blues player lives hard and dies young.
Although Ruby is often funny, the danger and tragedy of life on Soho’s streets is not made light of. The authenticity of the writing reflects Gerry Byrne’s own background as a worker in a safe house in Soho. All too often you come across "interesting" characters thrown into a plot to add colour or to show that the author is up to speed on the "in" themes of the times. With "Ruby" you feel that Hayden is part of the world she lives in, the characters are colourful but she belongs with and has compassion for them. In this way the writing reminded me of Robert Campbell’s "La-La Land" series of Tony Fennelly’s Matty Sinclair novels.
Ruby is a joy to read, it has humour, plot, substance and above all is well written, sensitive and entertaining at the same time. I certainly hope this will be the first of many by Gerry Byrne.