Taste of Ashes

The Taste of Ashes is Howard Browne's tribute to Ross MacDonald. Like MacDonald's Lew Archer series, the core solution to the book's mystery lies hidden behind deceit, human foibles, and family wealth. This book is almost indistinguishable from Blue Money or The Dalton Case, both featuring Archer. That's really not a critique at all. Those are fine, fine books. Browne puts the solution to the mystery right in front of the reader at several points in the book, but manages to maintain the suspense until the end. He's captured mid century Middle America very well. There's a strong sense of place in the book. His description ipof imprisonment and maltreatment by the police in the city where the books unfolds are particularly strong. Browne wrote other books with Paul Pine as the protagonist, but for my money, this is the best one he ever did. Too bad Hollywood lured him away from book writing and into writing over 100 TV scripts. it would have been great to see how he would have developed.

Mind, it tends to be overrated by a certain sort of mystery fan always willing to praise the obscure (and this is a fairly obscure book, you have to have some real knowledge of mystery and hardboiled fiction before you'll hear of it) over the well-known. Still, Browne's last attempt at writing a Chandler-style novel mostly gets it down pat -- suffering only because nobody could really inject the Chandler style novel with the poetry that, uh, Chandler could. Another way to say it is that it's prosaically told, for the most part, which doesn't make it awful by any means but doesn't make it great, either. One interesting thought is that this is the true missing link between Chandler and prime-era Ross Macdonald -- the novel feels, in some sections, like a Lew Archer book.

The 4th Paul Pine novel, Browne only wrote this because his editor made him, according to his foreword. And he seems tired of the genre. But far from making this a bad novel, Browne's discomfort gives "T of A"" an unusual self-awareness which heaps on the cynicism and lonely pointlessness of the detective profession without ever crossing into parody or the coy, snide post-modernism that PI writers add today. Browne subtly deconstructs some of the genre's cliches in a Kafka-esque way, as Pine takes on the efficient bureaucracy of a well-to-do, outwardly very clean town near Chicago. In most PI novels, everyone is rude; Browne shows how people can be just as uncooperative to an investigation seeking the truth when theyre college-educated and friendly.When Pine picks up a "plaster," or tail, his 1st-person narrative says, "How quaint." Passages like that stand out; Pine has seen it all before, again and again. He's so world-weary he's doggedly energetic. He so much didn't want the case an acquaintance's wife asked him to pursue, that eventually he took it because he couldn't quit thinking about it.T of A messes with genre conventions in ways it would be criminal to further reveal: Suffice it to say archetypes such as the good daughter, the bad daughter, a corrupt town, cops, an old rich invalid, and a hot-pants wife are all dealt with in fine fashion. Yet one of the most interesting characters is a little girl Pine meets in the first chapter, a girl who figures into the plot frighteningly. Along the way he has to solve the murders of an heir nobody liked, a man who was not the good husband his wife (nor Pine) thought he was, and a woman who knew too much. The whole town is against him, except for one reporter, but eventually he turns against Pine, too. There are no easy answers in this novel, and the questions aren't ones anybody wants asked.T of A is not necessarily more enjoyable than the other three Pine novels, although it is strictly a finer piece of work, with more characterization, so it achieves more real relevance in its sad poignancy. This is a slower, longer novel than the first three Pines, but never is dull. As with many of the best mysteries of this school, Pine rarely uncovers anything himself, instead serving as a catalyst to get people to reveal their misdeeds merely by his going around trying to uncover them, surviving long enough to put together the pieces. And there are a lot of pieces of shattered lives in this troubled town when everything is brought to light, with Pine doing what he can to soften the blow for nearly everyone but himself and the few remaining scraps of his idealism. Pine had broad, broad shoulders, living by a code of honor he may not even have believed in anymore, but stubbornly upholding its tenets just the same. Very like Marlowe, especially toward Chandler's end, a piercing view into humanity's bitter foibles.At his best, Browne is not as good as Chandler at his best. But of all the thousands of hard-boiled