Another Man in the Street by Cararyl Phillips

Published by ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux on January 7, 2025

Another Man in the Street is a story of migration that proceeds on multiple fronts. The character who links the others emigrated to England from the West Indies. Years later, he makes good on a vow by bringing his wife and son to England, but they might have been happier in Saint Kitts. Another significant character made his way to England after being released from a displacement center in Germany when the Second World War ended.

The primary protagonist is Victor Johnson. When he is almost 27, Vincent defies his father by moving to England with the hope of finding a job at a newspaper — an ambition sparked by his newspaper delivery job in Saint Kitts. Vincent leaves his wife Lorna behind but vows to send for her, as well as his son Leon.

On the voyage to England, the ship’s captain sets in motion a recurring theme of British resentment of colonials of color. The captain is convinced that the “coloureds” should remain in the colonies. “We make things all nice and easy for you, don’t we? Cheap passage to England, no questions asked. Loose women and lots of jobs. But have you any idea how many of you coloured scroungers are already in England? It’s the sixties now and we’re still letting you in.” Racist attitudes about immigrants pop up on other occasions but are underplayed. Perhaps that was a wise decision, although it prevents the divide between white and Black or between immigrants and British nationals from becoming a defining theme.

Victor gets a job “lifting and moving barrels” at a pub in Notting Hill where the owner calls him “Lucky” while letting him stay with the rats in the pub’s basement. A fair amount of attention is devoted to a barmaid named Molly who cheats on her boyfriend with a bartender, but it isn’t clear why she’s in the story. Perhaps her most important role is complaining about her discomfort at working with a “coloured” staff member.

Narration shifts to the point of view of the white bartender who is shagging Molly. The bartender is stealing liquor from the pub but allows the owner to believe that Victor is the thief. The bartender patronizes Victor when, on a lark, he asks Victor to take him to his “coloured hostel” where they can smoke some weed. These are a few examples of white entitlement that set the story’s tone. Shortly after Victor leaves his job, the white bartender gets his comeuppance, perhaps because of Victor, but any drama that arises out of that incident quickly dissipates.

Victor next works as a rent collector for Peter Feldman, who believes his Black tenants will be less inclined to dodge a Black rent collector. Peter came to England as a child to escape the Nazi persecution that destroyed his family. Like Victor, he feels himself an outsider in a society that doesn’t accept him without reservation.

Peter’s secretary Ruth has an extensive backstory that includes giving up a daughter for adoption at her parents’ insistence. Ruth eventually moves in with Peter for the convenience of living near her job. She is vaguely aware that Peter is Jewish, but “she didn’t really know what this meant, other than some people didn’t like them.” She doesn’t know why Peter won’t talk about his history. More distressing to her is Peter’s lack of interest in sex, although he never shares the history that might help her understand his circumstances.

After Victor makes good on his promise to bring Lorna and her son Leon to England, he grows disenchanted with Lorna’s nagging. Victor takes a liking to Ruth, who shares a residence with Peter, but neglects to tell her that he is living with Lorna and Leon. To meet her need for sex, she begins sleeping with Victor, only to discover that he already has a family.

Lorna narrates a brief chapter. Her grievance amounts to: “Some people just have sex, but you wondered if you might also discover love, so that sex and love might arrive like twins, but this didn’t happen. He simply sexed you.” When Victor finally abandons Lorna for Ruth, he is unapologetic. “No doubt he thought he could go further in this world with a white woman on his arm,” Lorna thinks, but it isn’t clear that Victor thinks about much about race at all.

Along with Lorna and Leon, the daughter Ruth gave away for adoption returns to the story to cause friction. Ruth struggles with the guilt of giving away her daughter while Victor remains estranged from Leon. The larger point seems to be that the lives of immigrants, like the lives of most people, take unpredictable turns and inspire harsh judgments by others. Immigrants are no less likely than long-term residents to live soap opera lives. Readers who enjoy stories of broken or breaking families will find much to like in Another Man in the Street.

Victor begins to realize his ambition to be a journalist when he gets a gig writing for a paper that caters to immigrants from the West Indies, then takes a job writing for a serious paper as the voice of England’s coloured population. As a coloured journalist, Victor is only allowed to cover coloured stories. He at least has made progress toward his ultimate goal, but nothing is easy for Victor and the journalism gig is just another job that he won’t keep.

We follow Victor’s life to its conclusion, spending significant time with collateral characters along the way. The story has moments of insight into the varying experiences that migrants might experience, depending on the cause of their migration and their skin color. On the whole, however, the story lacks vigor. Any energy it builds dissipates as the focus shifts among characters.

To the extent that Cararyl Phillips attempts to find an overarching theme that draws the storylines together, the theme seems to dissipate before the novel cruises to its conclusion, leaving a collection of characters and their disparate stories that never quite cohere. Notwithstanding that criticism, the characters are fully drawn and provide interesting contrasts of migrant experiences in England during the decades that followed World War II. My sense is that the story could have been more carefully focused, but it always held my interest.

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Billy the Kid by Ryan C. Coleman

Published by Blackstone Publishing on October 15, 2024

Was Billy the Kid a people’s revolutionary hero or a murderer? Billy the Kid, a fictionalized account of his life, suggests that he was both.

The novel begins in 1877 when Henry “Kid” Antrium is seventeen. He has already learned a lesson that will govern his life: “No matter a man’s size, or lack thereof, there was one great equalizer: the gun.” Although Henry has mastered the art of shooting, he had been “making his living through thievery, relocating horses from the soldiers at nearby Fort Grant.”

Henry gets on the wrong side of Frank Cahill by breaking out of jail and having the arrogance to stay in Arizona. He saves himself from a lethal beating with his pistol, but Cahill’s death motivates a change of name and location.

In New Mexico, Henry has his first of many confrontations with Buck Morton. That encounter leads him to the Jesse Evans gang. Henry uses his credentials as a horse thief and killer to earn a position with the gang. He announces himself to the world as William H. “Billy” Bonney.

Much of the story takes place in Lincoln County, New Mexico. To the extent that the territory is governed at all, the government is corrupt. L.G. Murphy has made a nice living by selling and renting worthless land that he doesn’t actually own. Murphy enjoys the protection of the territorial governor, a presidential appointee who is under the thumb of Boss Catron, whose bank who holds mortgages on most of the property in New Mexico.

The Evans gang sells stolen horses to Murphy, who then sells them to a nearby Army post. Murphy knows the business is about to fall apart, but he keeps that fact from the partners who buy him out. His underhanded dealings lead to conflicts that become important to Billy’s story. Also important is Billy’s alliance with Alexander and Susan McSween, Murphy’s “sworn enemies.” The disparate power factions will inspire Billy to side with the underdog and kill anyone who seems unfit for a decent life, but what does that say about Billy’s decency?

Billy is clearly on the road to a shootout. The violence that ensues touches the good and bad about equally, although separating the good from the bad is challenging in a lawless territory, where the libertarian principles “might makes right” and “greed is good” control behavior.

We learn biographical details about Billy’s adoptive parents, his separation from his brother and their distant relationship, and a transgression that led to his first jail break and horse theft. These are presumably historically accurate and provide fodder for the way Ryan Coleman shapes Billy’s personality. Billy is motivated to gain wealth so he can give his brother a better life, but he evolves into a killer who has a fearless belief in immortality that inevitably dooms gunslingers.

Billy doesn’t appreciate the local press siding with the powerful forces that control New Mexico, but he’s hardly a paragon of nuanced thought. He occasionally frets about moral issues — particularly the exploitation of Indians, Mexicans, and working people by the wealthy and powerful — but gunslingers are shallow philosophers. Coleman probably gives Billy about as much personality as he actually had, which isn’t much. This isn’t the novel to read if you are looking for deep insights into the life of a gunfighter, although Billy’s life might not have been one that leads to deep insights.

Billy the Kid isn’t a literary achievement — it doesn’t rival Mary Doria Russell’s brilliant retelling of Doc Holliday’s legendary life — but it is nevertheless a fun tale.

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Invisible Helix by Keigo Higashino

First published in Japan in 2021; published in translation by Minotaur Books on December 17, 2024

As American crime fiction once did, Japanese crime novels focus on mysteries that must be solved. Modern American crime novelists tend to focus on the elements of a thriller — fistfights, shootouts, chases — with less attention paid to unraveling a mystery. When American writers try to incorporate detection into their thrillers, they too often make a botch of it by favoring sensational reveals over credible puzzles.

Keigo Higashino has become one of crime fiction’s best mystery writers. His books move quickly but they aren’t action novels. Higashino writes traditional mysteries, planting clues that the reader will see in a different light after investigators piece them together.

Invisible Helix begins with a desperate mother who leaves her baby and a handmade doll at the gate of an orphanage. The baby’s father died during Hidemi Negishi’s pregnancy. Without the father’s income, Hidemi felt she had no choice but to give up the child.

In the present, Sonoka Shimauchi works in a flower shop. Her mother, Chizuko Shimauchi, was raised in the orphanage that later employed her. Chizuko raised Sonoka as a single mother. Chizuko met her best friend, children’s book author Nae Matsunaga, while working at the orphanage.

After Chizuko dies, Ryota Uetsuji comes to the flower shop to order floral arrangements for videos he’s shooting. Ryota begins to woo Sonoka and soon they are living together. When Ryota notices that Sonoka always sleeps next to a handmade doll, Sonoka explains that it belonged to her mother. If the doll seems like a Dickensian plot device, never expect the obvious from Higashino.

Things seem to be going well for Sonoka until Ryota begins to abuse her. When Ryota’s body is recovered from Tokyo Bay with a bullet hole in its back, Sonoka becomes the chief suspect. Sonoka promptly disappears with the help of a friend who knows that the police are coming for her. Sonoka’s disappearance hours before the police want to question her contributes to suspicion that she is a murderer.

The investigation of Ryota’s death falls to Chief Inspector Kusanagi, the co-protagonist of this series. He is assisted by his old friend, Professor Manabu Yukawa, whose ability to piece clues together until they form a solution earned him the nickname “Professor Galileo.”

One of Ryota’s most recent outgoing cellphone calls was to Hidemi Negishi, mama-san of a hostess bar known as VOWM. Kusanagi is assigned to interview Hidemi because he is “an aficionado of hostess clubs.” He brings Yukawa, who quickly discerns the true origin of the club’s name. A working knowledge of both Chinese and Japanese is required to figure it out. Fortunately for those of us who lack that knowledge, Yukawa explains how the odd name is relevant to the story.

As is customary in these books, Yukawa solves the mystery of Sonoka’s disappearance and of her husband’s murder in his own way, even if he has to go behind Kusanagi’s back to assure that his own version of justice is done. Yukawa even solves a mystery that changes his life, one that is tangentially related to the murder investigation. Maybe that’s a bit much, but the plot is otherwise nice and tidy, as a reader might expect of Japanese crime fiction.

Events unfold in ways that are different from those the reader will likely imagine. Higashino skillfully inspires erroneous conclusions about the identities of and relationships between key characters. The reader won’t learn the truth until the plot has twisted multiple times. Paragraph by paragraph, Higashino constructs the clever plot that his fans have come to expect.

Hostess clubs are an aspect of Japanese life that tend to fascinate Americans. The “Darwinian world of nightlife” in Japan isn’t explored in much depth, but it adds atmosphere to the story. The ending is in some respects a little sad, a bit touching, but the story is never marred by melodrama.

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Deadbeat by Adam Hamdy

Published by ‎ Atria Books on December 3, 2024

Crime and Punishment remains the greatest story about a murderer’s guilt. Adam Hamdy is no Dostoevsky, but Deadbeat takes an entertaining if over-the-top look at how guilt affects the life of a serial killer who learns that he might not have been murdering for a good cause.

Peyton Collard was a military engineer. He left the military for a civilian job so he could build a stable family. Unfortunately, he celebrated the job with too much alcohol, drove drunk, and killed nineteen-year-old Freya Prisco in a traffic accident. Collard went to prison for manslaughter, his wife left him, and he’s done nothing but accumulate debt since his release. Not to mention that Freya occasionally scolds him for killing her.

Prison taught Collard to take a beating, but that seems to be his only life skill. Having not learned much of a lesson from his manslaughter vacation, Collard tries to drown his guilt with nightly drinking at a bar with Jim Steadman, another ex-con. As protagonists go, Collard is more self-destructive than most. Readers might nevertheless sympathize with him because he has the good grace to feel guilty. Unfortunately, he so often tells us about his guilt that I got tired of hearing it. Dostoevsky let the reader see how guilt was consuming Raskolnikov; Collard can’t stop narrating his guilty thoughts.

A small bundle of cash turns up in Collard’s mailbox with the address of a website. A recorded message on the website promises to pay Collard a lot more money if he murders a nightclub owner who is dealing drugs and generally being a bad guy.

“Would you kill a bad person if doing so would make the world a better place for someone you love?” A murder that improves the world is still murder, but Collard asks and answers the question from the perspective of desperation rather than morality. Desperate men, Collard believes, don’t have “the luxury of moral certainty.” Dismissing morality as a disposable luxury seems to be a widely held opinion in today’s America. That’s a topic a book club could discuss in the unlikely event its members choose to read Deadbeat.

Collard sets morality aside and commits the murder. He’s paid but is quickly beaten and robbed by thugs who were drinking in his favorite bar. He commits a second murder to recoup his loss, then a third to pay for a nice place where he can hide from the thugs while impressing his daughter. His benefactor tells him that the second victim launders money for the mob and his third is a priest who diddles children.

As is the vigilante way, Collard tells himself that his killings are righteous. The ghosts of his victims disagree. Unsurprisingly, Collard learns that the ghosts might have a legitimate beef with him. The realization that his victims might not have been as evil as he thought compounds his growing guilt.

Collard is something of a dolt for not realizing he’s being played, but he’s a desperate dolt and the line between desperation and greed is thin. He becomes a baffled dolt when the bodies of his victims are mutilated in the morgue, postmortem crimes he didn’t commit but that inspire the media to refer to the serial killer as the West Coast Ripper. He’s an even bigger dolt for not understanding that he will be blackmailed into continuing his murder spree by the person who financed it. Can people really be this stupid? Sure they can, but I found it hard to believe that Collard would not have thought this through before committing the first murder. The guy is an engineer, after all.

This setup establishes the mysteries that must be resolved before the story concludes. Who paid Collard to commit the murders? What ties the victims together? Why are the bodies of his victims being mutilated postmortem? How do the thugs track him to his new home and why are they certain that he has hidden bundles of cash?

I found it hard to warm up to Collard — he’s self-pitying and, well, he’s a serial killer — despite his frequent and sincere proclamations of love for his daughter, whose need for a supportive father supposedly motivates Collard’s crime spree. My favorite character is a clichéd hooker with a heart of gold who gives Collard comfort when no one else will. Her refusal to judge Collard (she carries guilt of her own for an act of self-defense) might support a book club discussion about the evil of judging others, but I’m not sure that general rule applies to serial killers.

The hooker joins Collard in bemoaning life’s unfairness; to her, fairness is “just a comforting lie that’s designed to stop people tearing each other apart with the unfairness of it all.” She also offers a form of absolution when she assures Collard that what he did “makes sense when seen through the lens of your life,” a perspective that “means you’re not a monster, because monsters walk alone.” I’m not sure the hooker makes these points credibly, but I give Hamdy credit for taking a chance with his effort to create a sympathetic serial killer.

Two unimaginative action scenes turn Collard into a Reacher-like superhero near the novel’s end. I suppose Hamdy couldn’t come up with anything better to achieve his desired outcome, but Collard’s sudden proficiency in armed combat was one of several plot twists that I didn’t buy. The answer to the novel’s biggest question — what connects the people Collard is instructed to kill — is clever but preposterous.

Identifying the person who pays Collard scads of money to commit the murders isn’t difficult (there aren’t a lot of wealthy characters), but the criminal scheme is a ridiculously complicated way to achieve the villain’s end. The bad guy’s plan requires Collard to behave repeatedly in exactly the way that the villain predicts. The scheme is so unlikely to succeed that nobody with any sense would implement it — but then, if the villain had any sense, we wouldn’t have a plot, would we?

The artificially joyous ending is a gift to readers who insist on happy endings. Whether the protagonist deserves a happy ending is debatable, although forgiving readers who have sympathy for Collard might be pleased. Readers who think forgiveness should be accompanied by justice might be disappointed, although everyone has a different concept of justice, so it’s difficult to say whether readers will be satisfied with the outcome. I’m recommending the story because it entertains, not because I found it credible or was drawn to its muddled message.

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Gabriel's Moon by William Boyd

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on December 3, 2024

Gabriel’s Moon is the sort of book that Hitchcock would have filmed. It has a plot he favored — an innocent man is caught up in a cloak-and-dagger world, manipulated by people he thought he could trust until they try to kill him, forcing him to use his wits to survive.

The story takes place during the Cold War. It builds on evidence that President Eisenhower ordered the CIA to assassinate the Congo’s new Prime Minister because of his paranoid belief that Patrice Lumumba was too cozy with communists. The CIA has never been a friend of democracy.

Gabriel Dax is a London-based travel writer. He’s also something of a part-time spy. His brother Sefton works for the Foreign Office and, although they are not close (“both of them recognized their essential incompatibility”), Sefton occasionally asks Gabriel for a favor — hand delivering a small package to someone in Copenhagen, for example. Gabriel’s work, including a position with a leftwing magazine, gives him an excuse to travel, and he doesn’t mind earning extra money by performing clandestine tasks that seem reasonably safe.

Gabriel is working on a book about rivers, juxtaposing familiar waters like the Mississippi and unfamiliar (to the British anyway) locales like Hattiesburg. Rivers are a familiar metaphor for the flow of a life, and Gabriel recognizes that his own runs “underground, more like a sewer than a river.”

A writing assignment for the magazine takes him to Léopoldville, in the newly independent republic of the Congo, where an old friend from university is now the Minister of Health. He records an interview with Lumumba, who rambles a bit about Eisenhower’s plot to assassinate him, spearheaded by three names Gabriel doesn’t recognize. After Lumumba is murdered, the tape recordings prove to be more dangerous for Gabriel than any clandestine work he does for his brother.

Flying back from the Congo, Gabriel notices an attractive woman reading one of his travel books. After he encounters the woman again, he learns that their meetings are not a coincidence, that she — Faith Green — is also a spy. Soon he finds himself doing favors for her. Faith sends him to Spain to purchase drawings from an artist and deliver them to someone else. The "someone else" turns out to be Kit Caldwell, the CIA station chief in Madrid. The tasks pay well and Gabriel gets a buzz from working undercover.

As the story progresses, it becomes unclear whether Caldwell is a good guy or a bad guy, but Gabriel helps him when he seems to be in a pickle, perhaps because he senses that labels don’t matter in the shadowy world of espionage. Caldwell seems to be a decent person regardless of his ideology. The truth about Caldwell comes as something of a surprise, but there are bigger surprises to come. That’s one of the joys of spy novels; characters are so often not what they seem.

The story opens with a fire that burned down Gabriel’s childhood home. Gabriel has always lived with the belief that a candle in a moon-shaped nightlight in his room caused the fire. He has untrustworthy memories of seeing his mother on the kitchen floor and knowing that she was dead before he was rescued. His adult sessions with a therapist to treat his insomnia give the reader insight into his personality. Gabriel recovers important memories after following his therapist’s advice to learn more about the events surrounding his mother’s death, developing a critical story within the larger plot.

Gabriel’s personality evolves during his relationship with Faith, about whom he becomes a bit obsessive. Gabriel gains self-confidence as he overcomes obstacles, including near-death experiences, but is he sufficiently confident to deal honestly with his attraction to Faith? The question becomes moot when he discovers her true nature — and his own.

Ultimately, Gabriel’s Moon is about the birth and maturation of a spy. By the end, Gabriel would like to return to his life as a writer, but like joining the mob, once you enter the world of espionage, there’s no way to leave. Perhaps that means that Gabriel Dax will turn up again. As a spy novel fan, I can only hope that’s true, as William Boyd knows how to mix suspense, intrigue, and amgibuity, the key ingredients of a good spy thriller.

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