“He comes out here and a tan cab is heading west. He’s wearing a double-breasted coat. He’s just had dinner with William Klein, a lawyer for the Shubert brothers, and a showgirl named Sally Ritz. He tips his hat, climbs in the cab — and that’s it.”—Novelist Peter Quinn, describing the last sighting of New York judge Joseph Crater, quoted in Alan Feuer, “Judge Is Still Missing, but Novel Tracks Him Down,” The New York Times, August 5, 2010
Eighty years ago today, Judge Joseph Crater, in the midst of the world’s greatest metropolis, went missing—and, despite screaming headlines and every kind of tip, plausible or not, his fate has never been determined. Except for Jimmy Hoffa and Amelia Earhart, he remains possibly the most famous missing person of the 20th century (though, because the judge’s celebrity did not extend beyond the New York area, fewer people are likely to know anything about his case today).
If you want to find a plausible solution to this decades-old enigma—not to mention insight into not one, but two historical eras—you can’t do better than Peter Quinn’s The Man Who Never Returned.
For a long time, I wondered why there hadn’t been more Irish-American heroes in the hardboiled-detective genre. After all, what other ethnic group approaches Irish-Americans in the way they whip out wiseguy one-liners, regard authority with instinctive distrust, and believe strongly that the past is a continuing force that constantly weighs us down?
Quinn must have wondered, too, because he created Fintan Dunne, the protagonist of his last novel, Hour of the Cat—a character worthy to stand beside Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, Lew Archer, and other immortals in the American mystery genre.
That novel dealt with eugenics, a homegrown experiment in racist science that, in effect, served as a dry run for the Holocaust. It was set in 1938, in an America on the brink of another world war--a dark time indeed.
Dunne returns 17 years later, a quarter century after the disappearance of Crater. That perspective allows Quinn a window into two dark eras: the Great Depression and the mid-1950s, when America began to indulge its consumerist tastes even as it experienced the Red Scare.
The keys to a fine mystery, if you ask me, are misdirection and believability. You need misdirection in order to keep the reader guessing, but you can’t make the solution to the puzzle so surprising that it defies belief and logic. The tricky thing is that, indulged too far in one direction, the two are often incompatible.
Quinn adeptly handles this, and in a way that recalls one of his liteary heroes, James Joyce. The great Irish novelist once said that, if Dublin were one day destroyed, he hoped it could be reconstructed brick by brick by a reading of his work.
That same sense of verisimilitude underlies Quinn’s novel. You sense that he knows every building, every historical event, and every person that figures in his plot.
And why not? The man is not only, in his words, a “lapsed historian,” but also—as the son of a judge and congressman, former speechwriter for New York governors Carey and Cuomo, and recipient of Crater case files not looked at in years—someone who writes with unparalleled authority about Gotham past and present.
I could keep going on and on about the sharp characterization, ear for dialogue, smooth writing, swift narrative pacing, and sure sense of the past that Quinn displays on every page. But why don’t you just go to a bookstore, open up the novel, and start reading? You’ll want to buy it before the end of a single paragraph.
(While you’re at it, take a look at Quinn's marvelous blog, “New York Paddy.” He doesn’t put enough on it for my tastes, but then again, when you turn out mysteries this good, there is plenty of compensation to go around.)
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