Sunday, February 17, 2019

Bill Crider: An Appreciation


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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