The Devil's Own Rag Doll

It's 1943, the war is on, and Detroit is a steaming mass waiting to explode. Black-white hatred is coming to a boil when police detective Pete Caudill is tasked to bring home a white girl who's been dating black men. He finds the girl too late--she's not only been killed but left for him to find as if on display and soon finds himself in the middle of an attempt by white racists to incite a final race war. Caudill is used to thinking with his fist and not his mind. With his captain breathing down his neck, his partner scheming get-rich-quick schemes, his nephew caught up in the white suppremacy group, and a growing attachment to his brother's widow, Caudill has troubles all around him. If he could just give up, life would be easier. Unfortunately for him, he might not be much of a thinker but he's even less of a quiter. Author Mitchell Bartoy creates vivid images of wartime Detroit. Hatred and heat linger and those me who remain, after so many have been called into war, feel as if they are only the lame, the halt. Caudill makes an interesting and archetypal character, moving forward like nemesis even as plots unfold around him, using him and his reputation. The ploters think they have Caudill's number, can use him as they use so many others. But at some level, Caudill is a decent man. THE DEVIL'S OWN RAG DOLL is a highly promising first novel. Parts of it read a little writerly, as if Bartoy were trying too hard to create his mood, but overall it's a fine mystery/thriller.

I cannot wait to read the next book in the Caudill series. 'Devil's Own Rag Doll' is a terrific and fast paced read with far more depth than the seemingly de rigeur critical appellations of 'noir' and 'hard-boiled' indicate. The opening scene leads one to believe that we are in an interestingly set (Detroit, the Arsenal of Democracy)yet all too familar Spillane-like story. Yet, within a few pages of the first scene, we find the plot and the protaganist have far more depth than we could have imagined. This slow and satisfying revelation is very neatly done and carries the reader right through to the end. I put the book down wanting more-more of this story-more explanation and perhaps resolution but also more of the main character and his emergent understanding of himself and his world (Caudill is going to be one great detective). I only gave this four stars (!) because I think we were short-shrifted a bit on the causality of things and on the evocation of the Arsenal of Democoracy in 1943. I admit, I am a Detroit native, and was hoping for a Caleb Carr-Alienist-New York City-in-the-1890's like portrayal of my home town in its most exciting era. This is a great read. Starving fans of Max Collin's Nate Heller will enjoy it quite a bit, I believe.

This is a deep and complex book--big and mean and ambitious. On the one hand, it is a classic noir tale with a byzantine plot in which each exposure of wickedness leads toward yet another, darker revelation of perfidy. Its maimed and hardened protagonist, Detective Pete Caudill, discovers in Detroit, in the days immediately preceding the riots of 1943, a realm of lies and half-truths, corruption and conspiracy, that bleakly echoes the carnage and horror of the larger world in the midst of World War II. It is with the one-eyed Pete, initially the classic second element of a good cop/bad cop team, that we journey from damnation to redemption. The professional reviewers cited here seem, in many ways, to have missed the point. This book moves far beyond your average police procedural. This is a novel about evil, about blasted souls in a blasted universe, and about the journey of one man through darkness into tremulous light. If the rhetoric of the paragraph preceding seems more suited to Milton than Chandler, this is intentional. What sets Bartoy apart from most writers in this genre is his willingness to grapple seriously and effectively with issues of profound moral resonance. Racism, corruption, sex, love, family, murder, incest: these may seem, on the one hand, what we would anticipate in the noir, but we should remember that the reason for the noir's endurance is precisely its confrontation with these elements that are the engines as well of Biblical narrative and Greek tragedy. And they are all here, in this book, in the midst of a gripping mystery that vividly and accurately evokes a cultural and urban landscape vastly different from the one that exists today. As we follow our flawed, literally half-blind hero through a society of both glittering prosperity and bleakest poverty, we experience a growing dread that only catastrophe can lead to some sort of even tentative salvation. PUBLISHERS' WEEKLY's reviewer, in particular, seems at sea when trying to deal with the book's conclusion. A spectacular collision, a race riot, beatings and blood--it is hard to see how this can be "maudlin." But perhaps the commentator merely has his Marys confused. Buy it. Read it. It's a kick in the gut.