I want to say some things about Bill Crider’s work,
especially as what seems likely to be the final book is about to arrive.
I first discovered Bill in the nmid-1990s, so I am sort of a
late-comer. I was driving back from a
long day of meetings in Bloomington (IN), at Indiana University, to Chicago
where I lived at the time, and I stopped in Lafayette for dinner. There was a bookstore off the interstate which
sold only remaindered books, but, as I had nothing to read while I ate, I
stopped and bought a paperback mystery novel titled Shotgun Saturday Night. The
cover copy was intriguing, and the over photo was brilliant, and it was a buck. And the opening sentence: “Sheriff Dan
Rhodes knew it was going to be a bad day when Bert Ramsey brought in the arm
and laid it on the desk.” I had to force
myself to stop reading and get back in the car.
When I got home, I stayed up until I finished…which was a problem, as I
needed to get up and go to work the next morning.
I immediately began looking for
more, (Amazon was an immense help, even then), and discovered another series of
books (the Truman Smith PI books) and the earlier Dan Rhodes books (while Shotgun Saturday Night was only the second
book in the series, I didn’t discover it until maybe 1995, at which time there
were at least a half a dozen. And then I
found the Carl Burns books (of which there were three by then). And I was hooked—on Bill Crider and on his
books.
While the Dan Rhodes books make
up most of what he wrote (25 books over 33 years), there were enough of the
others to keep me busy (5 Truman Smith books, 4 Carl Burns, 3 Sally Burns, 2
with Willard Scott, 2 with Clyde Wilson, and 1 standalone—We’ll Always Have Murder, which I love). Given that the man had a full-time job as a
teacher and administrator, his ability to produce so much high-quality work is
pretty amazing. Clearly, the Dan Rhodes
books are the center of his work. I have
a deep fondness for the Carl Burns and Sally Good books, because they are set
on college campuses, and unlike many books in that sort of setting, he nails
the setting. They are good mysteries as
well, but I’m an academic, and to have the academic part of it so well done was
such a treat.
There is, I think, something of
a tendency to consider his books to tend toward the “cozy” (a term than does
not fit very well), because the continuing characters are pleasant, normal
people, living (mostly) normal lives.
They aren’t border-line depressives (which is how I tend to think of
Philip Marlowe) or eccentric geniuses (Nero Wolfe) or idealized fantasy heroes
(Spenser). But murder intrudes in their
lives, and they have to deal with it.
For Rhodes, it’s a job, for Smith, it’s sort of tangentially related to
his being a PI. But for Burns and Good,
murder is an intrusion into their lives…and threatens to upend or even
devastate their worlds.
But let’s focus on Dan Rhodes. He is not really an ordinary man. He’s smart, and passionately devoted to his
job (and his wife and his dogs). Doing
his job well is a driving force in his life, and maintaining an ordered world
is part of that. His co-workers (I
especially like Ruth Brady) are an integral part of that (and if Hack and
Lawton occasionally get on me nerves, they also get on his). For me, the whole series reads as an extended
morality tale. Death –violent death,
death as destroyer, not death as an inevitable part of live—threatens to destroy
the fabric of a community. But, at least
for now, that threat is forestalled, but not defeated.
And the Dan Rhodes books are funny as well, not in a
slapstick sense, but in the way that life is often funny. Wild boars, destructive as they are. Ostriches?
Yes, ostriches. Seepy Benton and
his enthusiasms. Hack (the dispatcher)
and Lawton (the jailer) who keep the sheriff’s office together (and who apparently
do not exist, except there. Jennifer
Loam who runs her own local, internet-based news service. And Ivy, who anchors Dan’s life (and tries,
not terribly successfully, to get him to eat sensibly—I’m with Dan on this
one).
What Crider did (as Arthur Conan Doyle did, and Rex Stout,
and Tony Hillerman, and a few others), and it’s a true and difficult
achievement, is to create a world real enough that we can understand it and see
ourselves inhabiting it, but is filled by a kind of magic, and so keeps us
coming back, over and over again.
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