Barbary Coast Ranger

The Evangelical Free Church? Does that mean there are no Evangelists inside (it’s Evangelical Free!)?

Or does it provide Evangelism at no charge? Religion confuses me sometimes.

Walking through the Marina, I was forced to seek shelter from the rain and, upon ducking into the nearest place of safety that just happened to have Trumer Pils on tap, took a couple minutes to write about it as the Deadfall of the week.

Very old school neon announcing you have arrived at the Horseshoe Tavern on Chestnut Street in San Francisco:

The logo (on the right, above) is not so old school as the neon. It’s well done but has a "see, I got a marketing degree" feel to it. I do give them points for putting the Pyramid into the logo: it’s under-rated as San Francisco land mark.

Consistent with both local pride and their trendy logo , there are a lot of good pictures up inside that show the construction and use of the Golden Gate Bridge.

I like pictures of the bridge, especially the "under construction" shots that are much more compelling to me than the "isn’t this pretty and iconic" side view that is packaged in a thousand different ways.

I actually wonder if these are here because they are part of the bar or if they put them in at the same time they came up with the new logo as some sort of marketing campaign. I didn’t see any pictures of the Pyramid, so maybe these are just bar pictures there for their own sake.

The Horseshoe interior is old school to match the neon outside: old wood, simple design, neon rimmed clock (the red circle over the door). I am a sucker for neon clocks: every good dive bar should have one.

The Horseshoe bucks the trend for Cow Hollow / Marina: it’s a basic bar with a couple big screens for sports and a pool table in the back.

Especially during the day, it skews older, more informal, and more regular friendly than a lot of the Marina bars do. Their motto is actually that they are "The ‘Non-Marina’ - Marina Bar. "

It’s too clean and nice, plus there aren’t enough tattoos, for it to be a real dive bar but by Marina standards it’s a rough and ready ‘be yourself in clothes/jewelry/watch that don’t cost more than most people’s first car" kind of place.

I was checking out the Tunnel Top bar when I realized that I was right next to the Maltese Falcon plaque.

Spoiler Alert: if you haven’t seen the Maltese Falcon, this plaque gives away a key plot point. No town packages and sells its past like San Francisco, even its imaginary past.

On approximately this spot Miles Archer, partner of Sam Spade, was done in by Brigid O’Shaugnessy

The "approximately" is due to Dashell Hammet’s spare writing style. In the book it just says the Archer was killed near “where Bush Street roofed Stockton before slipping downhill to Chinatown" and the alley is about the only secluded place thereabouts to kill someone in. (hat tip to travel writer
Janette Griffiths for this factoid)

Burritt Alley: it’s nondescript, but you could see getting shot there on a dark and foggy night.

By the Barbary Coast Ranger and the Class Factotum

She seems to really believe that she is going to get a couple poodles to eat an entire old woman over a couple days and that somehow this is going to attract less attention than simply faking a heart attack for a bed-ridden old lady.

Sister Carol Anne O’Marie has built quite a franchise with her Sister Mary Helen mysteries, most of which take place in San Francisco, which makes sense as that is the location of Mount St Francis College, where Sister Mary Helen lives and works. This is your basic “busybody old lady solves a crime that has only a remote connection to her” story, kind of the Catholic version of “Murder She Wrote.” All these murders with the X = the old lady and yet nobody ever suspects her of whacking anyone.

In “Death of an Angel,” there are two, two plots that merge into one. The first is of Elvis (yes, Elvis), who is raping and murdering old ladies who remind him of his mother. The second is of a 30something woman, Angelica, whose mother is a terror and who daydreams about her mother’s two standard poodles eating the dead mother’s body and indeed, stops feeding the dogs and makes plans to leave town just so this might come to pass.

Spoilers ahead, but they save you the trouble of reading “Death of an Angel”

The unspoken convention of all “Murder She Wrote”-type stories is that the old lady solves the crime that the police would not have solved without her. This seems sensible, so I was a little surprised when Sister Mary Helen confronts a criminal who the police are already tailing and who would have been arrested shortly anyway. It’s actually a good thing the police were there because Sister Mary Helen probably would have been whacked if the police hadn’t busted down the door.

Sister Carol Anne, have you watched TV recently?

That’s not the only huh? moment in this book. It starts out with such a moment: two veteran policemen are shot by a suspect they have been following but no one but the two cops (one shot dead and one into a coma for the whole book) know who the suspect is. Who has time to fill out reports or even discuss suspects with another cop when you can charge off into the dark and get shot? Anyone who has seen a police show or movie knows that you’re supposed to call into dispatch when you leave the car and start following a suspected rapist/murderer.

Coincidence, thy name is “Death of an Angel”

But wait, there’s more. Two completely independent killers just happen to live in the same neighborhood and the climax of the book comes when Elvis, completely out of the blue, decides to kill Angelica. Elvis has one specific target throughout the book: older red-headed women who are alone (and this isn’t just a choice, it’s a deep seated psychological compulsion – see “rapist/murderer killing women who remind him of his mother”) and then he suddenly decides that he is going to attack a young blonde woman in front of witnesses.

Angelica, the other killer, just happens to work with Sister Mary Helen and has been targeted as one of Sister’s friendly improvement projects. Sister Mary Helen, both killers and the cops all arrive at the same house at the same time in one gigantic coincidence (except for the cops, who were there on purpose because they had identified one killer with regular, boring police work and were following him and would have solved everything anyway).

At least coincidence isn’t silly

I could kind of buy the old lady killer psycho motivation: it’s classic TV movie psychobabble motivation, so OK but the other killer is a real stretch. Angelica suddenly goes from a milquetoast, unable to stand up for herself in the smallest way, to a plotting, raving psycho whose murder plan is not only disgusting but ridiculous. She seems to really believe that she is going to get a couple poodles to eat an entire old woman over a couple days and that somehow this is going to attract less attention than simply faking a heart attack for an old, bed ridden woman. This girl seems to not only have gone psycho, but also to have gone really, really stupid, although one has to admire the efficiency of her plan – she gets rid of the horrible mother and probably the nasty dogs at the same time.

What can “Death of an Angel” teach us?

The book has a couple helpful messages. One PSA is that over-controlling parents raise psychotic monster killers. I suspect that either I am blissfully unaware of how many psycho killers are roaming the streets or that the psychology behind this is questionable. Also, Elvis seems to be completely aware of exactly what his condition is and how he got it and that he is, in reality, just acting out killing his own mother over and over: aren’t you supposed to be cured when you get this kind of insight?

The book’s other PSA is how much it sucks to be fat, and not just for the fat person. Evidently being really fat is also quite the burden on the sensibilities of others and thus is grounds for highly judgmental intrusions into your personal life by well-meaning nuns who don’t really know you very well. I took a quick look at the reviews of this book on Amazon and saw all the comments about how mean the book was towards fat people and wrote them off as over sensitive and overwrought reviewers, but yow. Sister Mary Helen really piles it on in the “fat people suck” department.

Yet Sister Carol Anne O’Marie is laughing her way to the bank

“Death of an Angel” is part of a series of at least ten books. How can it be so bad and yet be part of such a large series? (Ratings for the books in the series range from two to five stars out of five on Amazon, with “Death of an Angel” getting three and a half stars.) Part of the problem is what you see in a lot book series: the author gets bored with the crime solving and starts to take you through character arcs. A huge part of “Death of an Angel” examines the life and feelings of the wife of one of the detectives who was shot. This wife is a detective herself and a recurring character in the series, so we get to find out all about her life, and her mother in law, none of which has anything at all to do with the plot.

The other reason for the popularity of the books is that the basic set up for the series is pretty good. I expected to hate the main character, but Sister Mary Helen is an interesting detective. The handling of her faith as a very important part of her life but without becoming preachy was very well done. The “good cop - bad cop” team the sister keeps bumping into on the San Francisco PD also seem like good stock characters. I can see how Sister Carol Anne O’Marie could crank out a few easy reading novels with this premise that were entertaining reads, but a) I can’t help but think this book will hurt the franchise and b) not unlike the Sharon McCone book reviewed earlier, it almost seems like a mediocre TV series in novel form

What about San Francisco?

As for San Francisco flavor, it’s not bad but it’s not particularly good either. There are just enough descriptions of streets and neighborhoods to move the story along, but there’s not much local insight or any feeling that this couldn’t be set in any similarly-sized town with no loss.

By The Barbary Coast Ranger and The Class Factotum

Everybody smokes all the time. At one point, Douglas offers Mitchum a cigarette while Mitchum is still smoking his last one.

Jeff Bailey, played by Robert Mitchum, has put his past behind him, or so he thinks until his past finds him one day in the small California town where he is living a peaceful life, running a gas station and occasionally necking with a pretty girl.

Through a series of flashbacks, we learn that Kirk Douglas had sent Mitchum to Mexico to find the woman (Jane Greer) who had taken his heart and his money ($40,000, which was a lot back then). Mitchum finds the girl, she says she never took the money, they fall in love and return to California, one of Douglas’ guys finds them, Greer shoots the guy and leaves Mitchum to bury the body, but forgets her bankbook, which is how he learns she had indeed taken the cash. Greer returns to Douglas and everything is cool.

Except now, in the gas-station era, Douglas wants Mitchum to do another job for him, which pretty much leads us to a completely separate story with another woman who of course is a femme fatale because aren’t they all in this kind of flick? Suffice it to say that I had a hard time keeping up with the new plot. You would be well advised to get the Cliff Notes and follow along during the show.

Robert Mitchum was smoking hot

There are some distractions that may not have been so noticeable to a 1947 audience.

• Everybody smokes all the time. At one point, Douglas offers Mitchum a cigarette while Mitchum is still smoking his last one.
• They wear trenchcoats a lot, including while standing around in the Sierra Mountains in what appears to be very nice weather.
• The men wear suits all the time, which is how it used to be back in the day when 14-year-old girls didn’t wear tight pants saying “Juicy” across the butt. At one point, Mitchum is in a Mexican town, complaining that it is the hottest place he’s ever been – as he’s wearing a suit, including the tie. Dude. Take off the tie!
• Speaking of which, what is with the short wide ties? It’s always a bad sign when what was once a fashion rage is now only worn by clowns, although we of the time of the pants that bag to the knees perhaps are not in a position to judge.

Is all the good dialogue Out of the Past?

One of the reasons to watch this kind of movie is to hear sharp, witty repartee and to see smart actors (that didn’t used to be an oxymoron) playing smart characters. As in all good detective movies, pretty much everyone in the movie, good or bad, is pretty smart. It is refreshing when compared to so many movies over the last few years where the plot depends on the villain doing something incredibly stupid in order to wrap things up. And lines like these are a movie-line-quoter’s dream:

Kathie Moffat: Oh, Jeff, I don’t want to die!
Jeff Bailey: Neither do I, baby, but if I have to I’m gonna die last.

Kathie Moffat: Oh Jeff, you ought to have killed me for what I did a moment ago.
Jeff Bailey: There’s time.

Another reason is to see an intricate plot (hey, a plot at all), although sometimes that can be carried a little too far. “Out of the Past” has all the biggies: money, murder, double crossing and then the inevitable revenge, and especially the femme fatale. The plot is tight and interesting but a little opaque at times. Essentially you see the plot through Mitchum’s character, so things that aren’t all that clear to him aren’t all that clear to you, though the overall plot line hangs together well if you give the movie the benefit of the doubt on the characters’ motivations.

The movie is also well acted, though that’s easier when portraying strong guys who don’t show much emotion, as all of the main male characters do (or don’t). Mitchum’s dry delivery serves him well and Douglas is all smiles and sociopathy as the gambler/nemesis. Douglas’ gunsel is also well played: the quintessential second banana smart enough to get away with murder but who knows deep down, he’s not smart enough to be #1. The femme fatale is a tougher role and Greer does well, though her motivations are never really clear: she’s an odd mix of sentiment and sociopath, an independent risk taker and co-dependent victim.

The film is very noir, as a good film noir should be. All of the main characters screw up mightily and (SPOILER) in the end they all die for their mistakes. Even in the final shot of the movie the last great gesture is a hurtful lie told for a greater good. A perfect movie? No, but a good one both as a stand-alone flick and as an important milestone in film noir development.

Does Mitchum ever get to San Francisco?

Only a small part of the movie takes place in San Francisco. There is one great shot looking down a hill towards the bay but other than that you see very little of the town except for the entrances and exits to buildings. The shots of Lake Tahoe are actually more interesting, so while this is officially a “filmed in San Francisco” movie, it is not a big pleasure for aficionados of views of the city.

Speaking of which, for film noir an awful lot of this movie takes place outdoors in small town and Lake Tahoe shots around the Sierras. It’s a good reminder that this is a seminal film noir flick: before the conventions had been established.

Amazon reviewers give this movie five stars.

By The Barbary Coast Ranger and The Class Factotum

She leaves an expensive briefcase full of stuff out on the seat of her car in plain view in the mission. Of course it gets stolen, of course. Like she thought her stuff would be safe because she’s, you know, down with The People?

Sharon McCone is a private investigator who runs into trouble when one of her employees, a bad girl gone good, Julia Rafael, is accused of stealing a credit card from a prominent politician, Alex Aguilar, who could be the first Hispanic San Francisco mayor if people will just get out of his way, and of too much online shopping. When McCone digs into the issue, she discovers that there are some bad people out there who want to hurt other people, including and mainly her.

Is Marcia Muller writing for TV?

There is nothing wrong with writing for TV, but when you are writing a book, you have the time and space to flesh out the characters and scenes without relying on stereotypes. Muller uses a lot of shortcuts when the long cut would have been better:

• The characters are straight from central casting: the friendly old Jewish lawyer, the good cop/bad cop duo, the gruff but good-hearted pawn shop owner, the colorful street informant, the helpful Mexican park ranger, the archetypical Hispanic bad guy who could have been modeled on the guy who sneered, “I don’t have to show you any stinkin’ badges!”
• McCone has offices and services she could never afford in real life (like the unbelievable apartment in Friends that would have cost $5,000 a month but was rented by a coffee shop waitress and a largely unemployed cook/waitress). She’s half owner of an airplane, and she and her life partner (some might call him a “boyfriend”) also have a ranch and vacation place by the shore. She’s so busy bitching about tax cuts for the rich that she doesn’t notice that she is rich.
• When McCone needs a sketch artist, she just happens to know a graphic designer who just happens to have just bought the same kind of software used for police sketches, who just happens to be free at that very moment, and just happens to have the perfect demeanor for dealing with a battered witness.
• She sneaks into a suspect’s house at night, in a bad neighborhood, by herself, but forgets to turn off her cell phone, which rings. Cute on the small screen, but unbelievably stupid in real life and in a book.

“The Dangerous Hour” must be meant ironically, or, Dude, where’s my detective?

It’s not detective work, it’s mystery tourism. McCone doesn’t actually have to do any detecting or put herself in danger, except self-imposed danger like leaving her phone on when she is breaking into the suspect’s house. She just shows up and people immediately start vomiting useful information to her, regardless of the amount of time they are taking off work to do so. (See “SF Values Alert” below.) It is very TV show and looks pretty shallow. McCone makes Sarah Woolson, another rich girl turned Nancy Drew, look like Sherlock Holmes.

Look at all these great coincidences:
• She randomly chooses a place to meet a guy that just happens to be near a key location which slips her mind until she walks by it, by chance, where coincidentally a door has been left open (even though the place has closed), where, by chance, she runs into exactly the right woman to talk to who instantly agrees to spy on a guy for McCone even though she has never seen/met/heard of McCone before and she knows the guy professionally.
• She goes out to check on an “accidental death” at a state park and the kindly Mexican ranger stops work, drives her all around the park, gives her the name and description of a witness to the “accident” as well as compelling information that it wasn’t an accident at all and then gives her a prescription drug bottle with the missing witness’s name and pharmacy address on it. Do we just assume the cops never even talked to the ranger, who was the one who found the body?
• She goes to confront one of the key bad guys at night and, upon hearing her approaching in the darkness (in a building that has many other people in it!), the bad guy assumes she is his confederate and literally starts yelling a self-incriminating speech into the darkness.
• In the climax of the book, the bad guy, who has consistently been one step ahead of McCone and has been clever and resourceful, knows exactly what trick McCone is playing (and McCone knows that the bad guy knows) but he falls for the trick anyway, even though it means years more, maybe even life, in prison for him.

What San Francisco is Sharon McCone/Marcia Muller living in?

This is more TV San Francisco. Don’t try this at home.

• McCone’s neighbor offers to give her cat two shots a day for $20/month. Pet sitters charge a minimum is $20/hour, more for shots.
• She leaves an expensive briefcase full of stuff out on the seat of her car in plain view in the mission. Of course it gets stolen, of course. Like she thought her stuff would be safe because she’s, you know, down with The People?
• She runs a small detective agency but has an office with killer views of the Bay, hires two very expensive lawyers without even thinking about it, and pulls a detective off a billable case and hires detectives from other agencies to backfill. The cash flow implications of all this are staggering. This is a book about a business by someone who has obviously never run a business or even worked in one.

San Francisco Values alert, or, how to know the writer is a liberal

• Muller incorporates every buzzword/concept loved by leftists: unions, sweatshops, recycling, life partner, battered women, nonprofit, tattoos, piercings, low-income housing, native people, underfunded reservation schools – no, I am not making that up, working poor, environmental preservation, etc., etc., etc.
• When listing the issues facing the Mission district, which has drug and crime problems, a large illegal immigrant population, bad schools, etc., the first problem for the neighborhood she lists is “gentrification.” This is followed a couple paragraphs later with a gratuitous plug for unions.
• She actually stops the book and goes on a tirade about the standard liberal laundry list: tax cuts for the rich, the Iraq war, and on and on and on , even though it has nothing to do with the plot.
• To be fair, Muller breaks the cardinal rule of San Francisco Values detective stories by having the bad guys be people who would vote Democrat. Bravo!
• In a city where the homeless get paid for being homeless, what’s so bad about someone taking work time to talk to a detective?

But does the story really take place in San Francisco?

The San Francisco coverage of the book isn’t bad. There are lots of asides about neighborhoods, bars, clubs, the fog, and the difference in countryside and weather as you drive north into Marin. The observations seem true but also superficial. Again, it is like you are seeing a TV show San Francisco with a few well-chosen views but little real understanding of the city.

Amazon readers give this book four out of five stars.

The Tunnel Top really shouldn’t be the deadfall of the week because it is actually a pretty nice lounge in disguise.

I went by it when I was getting some shoes repaired down on Stockton. I saw the sign and thought it looked like a good deadfall of the week candidate so I went in.

The Tunnel Top’s sign is nestled comfortably under the much larger, and better maintained, sign for The Green Door Massage parlor on Stockton. By the way, the shoe repair guy next to the Green Door is really good.

A better view of how cheap and divey the sign is . . . and this is the unbroken side!

The Tunnel Top Bar: On Bush St on top of the Stockton Tunnel

The Tunnel Top looks pretty divey: the sign is old and broken on one side and the front looks old and worn.

This is deceptive: it’s actually a pretty cool and modern lounge with DJs pretty much every night.

The mix of people is interesting: some drifting in from Chinatown, some from the FiDi, some from Union Square and some just purely random.

It’s not really a dive or a deadfall for a couple reasons:

1. Doesn’t open till 5 PM. A dive realizes that some people can’t wait till five to drink
2. The interior decor is actually nice and yes it is decor, not just a bunch of crap that has accumulated over the years
3. DJs
4. Restrooms are not disgusting

The service is good too. It’s one of those places where the bartender doesn’t seem to be paying attention but then is suddenly in front of you the moment you are taking the last sip of beer from your glass.

This is a big ass chandelier made of old beer bottles impaled on metal spikes with a light in the middle. It is very cool, better than the picture captures. This is the view of it from the second floor, which is why you are actually looking down on it.

The Tunnel Top is a very open space with second floor seating around the edges of the building. This view is looking through the surprisingly large front second floor windows out onto Bush St.

By The Barbary Coast Ranger and The Class Factotum

But there aren’t any manly punches, no, no, no. Instead Bone(r) grabs Jordan by the lapels and pins him up against a wall, presumably ripping Jordan’s bodice in the process.

Yet another noir novel written by a San Francisco liberal. In Bill Prozini’s The Crimes of Jordan Wise, the white people are all immoral (criminals, adulterers, bad tippers); the black guy is dignified. He has great dignity. Oh, did I mention he was dignified? And black? The black guy is the only good (and dignified) person in the book. Everyone else is repugnant, including the protagonist, which is one of the reasons it’s so hard to plow through this story.

Why read The Crimes of Jordan Wise?

I am reviewing it only because it supposedly takes place in San Francisco. If, however, you did a “search and replace” on the manuscript and changed every “San Francisco” to “Dallas” you might not even notice unless you caught the reference to “driving to Marin.”

Here’s a quick plot summary: boring man Jordan Wise meets exciting woman who wants nothing to do with him because he’s boring. He figures out the perfect crime, asks her if she’s in, she says yes, he commits the crime, they move to the Virgin Islands, and he learns to sail. Then the woman shows that she was bad all along (and white!), so Jordan has to commit two more perfect crimes.

In the meantime, Jordan has met the dignified, good black guy who becomes his soulmate as they sail the ocean together (this is the part of the book that reminded me of Moby Dick: a whole lot of technical baloney about sailing that I skipped). The black guy leaves when he is unwittingly involved in crime #3 and Jordan is sad because the black guy was his One True Love. The end.

Stink, stank, stunk: The problems with Jordan Wise

This book has three parts. The first, nominally set in San Francisco, is about how Jordan became a boring accountant and the first of his crimes. Boring Jordan, boring material. Most of the this part could easily have been replaced by a paragraph saying, “I was an unpopular high school nerd, good at math, so I became a boring accountant, good at math. Then I met a bad woman . . . ”

Jordan describes crime #1 with the steady, monotonous, uninspired but thorough methodology you would expect of an accountant. Is the crime plausible? Sure. Is it fun to read about? No.

The second part of the book, in the Virgin Islands, is much more alive, pretty much as the main character is. In contrast to his non-descriptions of San Francisco, Jordan describes the island and sailing in “rushing and interesting” (BCR’s words)/”excruciating” (CF’s word) detail: the landscape, the communities of the island, and especially the joy of sailing and the sea.

The third and final part of the book is supposed to be interesting because Jordan commits his final two “perfect” crimes (which even a character in the book points out were not “perfect” so much as “lucky” and, in fact, weren’t perfect anyway in that they destroyed Jordan’s life). The last two crimes suffer the same problem as the first. A boring methodical criminal is like a boring methodical airplane pilot: effective in real life but not fun to read about.

I said “Bone(r)”

There are two more problems with the book, one a pet peeve of mine and the other apparently a hilarious gaffe. (Or is it? Cue SF liberal subtext here.)

The pet peeve is that Jordan’s ability to plot and execute “perfect crimes” is supposedly because of his skill at math and reducing planning his crimes to “equations.” This sounds good unless you know anything about math, in which case you realize that nothing Jordan is doing has anything to do with math and, as the character himself admits late in the book, the crimes are more like project management exercises. The whole “equations” thing is a ridiculous pretension to appeal to the math snobs who read crime novels and probably to the writer’s professor friends who also know nothing about math or any other kind of honest work, for that matter.

The unintentional hilarity comes in the second half of the book as the homosexual subtext between Jordan and the dignified black guy gets thicker and more powerful (if you catch my drift, wink, wink, nudge, nudge). Part of the fun is that the other man is called “Bone!” You might as well call him “Boner” so that you can get a good laugh out of bad lines like, “There was no substitute for Bone(r)” and, “I really missed Bone(r).”

Jordan goes on and on about how self aware he is but who never quite realizes that his sexual problems with women (which existed from his teenage years!) reappear at the same time he meets Bone(r) and escalate to full scale impotence with women as his “friendship” with Bone(r) grows.

There’s also the contrast between the women Jordan meets, who are all awful, and Bone(r), who is portrayed as strong, wise, fierce and independent (not to mention large and black). Even the fight Jordan and Bone(r) finally have is hilarious: Jordan is bringing Bone(r) fresh coffee (i.e., something a traditional wife might do for a husband) when the fight starts. But there aren’t any manly punches, no, no, no. Instead Bone(r) grabs Jordan by the lapels and pins him up against a wall, presumably ripping Jordan’s bodice in the process.

Hell, Jordan is even an androgynous name! It’s almost like Prozini is sticking this stuff in the book as a private joke on the readers who had to plow through this uninspired monolog.

It got 4 stars on amazon, but I sure don’t know how.

By The Barbary Coast Ranger and The Class Factotum

Who is Sarah Woolson?

Sarah Woolson is the indulged daughter of a rich lawyer and a mother who coulda been a contender had she not been so oppressed by The Man. (Sarah is shocked, shocked! to learn that her mother wanted to be a writer but gave it all up for marriage.) Sarah, however, is determined not to let society stop her from being one of the first female lawyers in 1880s San Francisco, so, with his tacit approval, she uses her dad’s power to get what she wants.

She wrangles a job with a prestigious law firm, where the most handsome, contrary man falls for her (no, this is not a spoiler – anyone who has ever read a romance novel knows that the first dark, brooding, handsome man that the female protagonist meets and dislikes is going to be The One), and where she solves a big mystery, thus freeing from suspicion the widow who had to take a lover because her husband abused her. The End.

Do we care about her?

Murder on Nob Hill, the first in Shirley Tallman’s Sarah Woolson series (currently three novels), is a fun read. It follows the keep-moving rule: there are no lengthy reflections or “let’s stop the whole plot and have an emotional interlude” type baloney. Instead, there’s a minor confrontation every few pages and at least one serious plot development per chapter.

The speed with which the characters are established and the plot gets moving is especially admirable. Unlike Sheldon Siegel’s book, Final Verdict, Tallman’s characters are actually likeable, even though her politics do get in the way: of course the “humorless” brother, with the “dull and extraordinarily narrow mind” and the “thin, brittle” wife is a conservative! And the physician brother is noble and impoverished because he insists on treating patients who cannot pay. Where, oh where, is universal health insurance?

Ye Olde Murder Club

The story is an old San Francisco analog of the Women’s Murder Club: there’s a lawyer (Sarah), a journalist (her brother Samuel) and a cop, though, as befitting less enlightened times, the rest of the club are all men. This is done reasonably smoothly as part of the plot and sets up well for future books in the series. Will she pick up a coroner?

The plot reveals itself smoothly as the story goes along. I actually figured things out before Sarah did, but only a little before so I felt good about it without being annoyed that Sarah wasn’t putting things together. I did have the reader’s advantage: I can ask myself why any particular character would be in the book when he doesn’t seem to be advancing the plot. Surprise! He is essential to the plot!

There is one major plot misstep: an extended foray into Chinatown that ultimately seems both needlessly contrived and largely pointless except as far as it sets characters up for sequels. (And describes 19th-century San Francisco: Tallman gives a very good feel for old San Francisco: not just the street names but also the transitions between the neighborhoods.) Will we see Li Yang again? He, who represents both the power in the Chinese community and the lack of power of the Chinese with respect to the Evil White Men who cheated him?

Proto-feminist Sarah Woolson

There’s a definite feminist undercurrent to the book: Sarah would have been one of the first, though not the first, female lawyers in San Francisco. This is a legitimate part of the story, but Tallman overplays her hand and the railing against assorted injustices and prejudices does go on at times. Is noticeable but it does not overwhelm the book and overall it is quite readable.

The San Francisco Style of Mystery, or, You have to break a few eggs

Although some of the politics and feminism of the book are both natural for the book and reasonably well handled, the overall amount of politics seems a little much at times. How much of it is on purpose and how much is the author’s Bay-Area liberalism subconsciously creeping into the story? Murder on Nob Hill is a prize example of the San Francisco School of mystery writing. Consider the parallels between Sarah and a liberal San Francisco baby boomer:

• born to privilege
• indulged by her parents
• has savior of victims complex
• depends on societal conventions to protect her while flouting those same conventions to pursue her ‘just cause’
• all of her lies, deceits, etc., are fine because they are for the greater good but the same things from other people are reprehensible
• is not just a feminist but also worries about minority rights, open spaces, and so on and so on

The book has other predilections consistent with current San Francisco liberal values:

• conservative politicians are portrayed as stupid and/or corrupt (there’s even a cheap shot at ‘family values’ politicians that is particularly jarring) while crusading journalists and lawyers are the good guys
• its a stretch but arguably the root of all the bad things that happen is lack of universal health care
• there’s lots of hand wringing about how the killer was driven to his crimes by rich white guys

Despite having Tallman’s politics shoved down my throat, I liked this book. I cared about what happened to the characters, even if they annoyed me occasionally, and liked the descriptions of the social habits of how San Francisco used to be. I will definitely read more of the series.

Amazon reviewers give Murder on Nob Hill 4.5 stars out of five.

by The Barbary Coast Ranger and The Class Factotum

the other rich white people are similarly depraved. So they deserve what’s coming to them.

Final Verdict is the fourth in Sheldon Siegel’s Michael Daly series. A basketball player fallen on hard times because he got caught up in a crime ten years ago has been accused of murder (of a rich white Silicon Valley guy), but says he didn’t do it. He asks Mike Daly to defend him – again – and Daly, against his ex-wife’s (also his law partner) wishes, does so, partly because the defendant is dying of liver disease.

Want me to save you some trouble? Stop reading right now if you don’t want the end spoiled.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The bad corporate lawyer did it.

Not that you couldn’t have guessed from following the San Francisco Rules of Mystery Writing. How do we know the lawyer did it?

1. He’s rich.
2. He’s white.
3. He undoubtedly votes Republican.
4. Did I mention he’s rich and white?

The guy who gets whacked is also rich and white. And a drug-addicted whoremonger. (Or is a monger one who sells the product, as in a fishmonger? One wonders, but one does not go to dictionary.com to get the answer.) And the other rich white people are similarly depraved. So they deserve what’s coming to them.

The street people, however, are All Good. We know they are Noble and have been Unjustly Deprived of What is Theirs by The Man. How do we know this? Because they are

1. Vets and
2. Speak perfect standard English.

Sheldon Siegel, heal thyself

The irony in all of this is that Siegel, whose Daly wears his class envy as a chip on his shoulder, himself lives in Marin, which is not exactly a low-rent district. (No Wal-Marts for us, please! We don’t want Those People around.) He must not spend a lot of time around really poor people or even ordinary public defenders, because even with all his stereotyping (the black detective of course has a “melodious,” “lyrical” baritone), he can’t get it right. He accuses one of the Rich White characters of wearing custom-made khakis as opposed to his own off the rack from Macy’s pants. Right. Because Macy’s is where all the poor people shop. (See Wal-Mart reference above.)

The biggest problem with this book, however, is not that the dialogue and characterizations are clichéd and dull or that Siegel ignores facts (does San Francisco really have the most “highly-educated homeless people in the country?” Are 50% of the homeless really vets?); it’s that once we know who did it, Siegel does the literary equivalent of this cartoon

by jumping from who did it to “The End” without explaining much in between. To some extent this makes sense in book about a defense attorney: his job is over when his client is cleared and after that he has only academic interest in the murder being solved. Still, from the point of view of the mystery aficionado, it’s not very satisfying.

The writing about San Francisco is gritty, but not forced. The descriptions of streets, places, and near by towns feel authentic. The court room scenes also feel very real. All of this makes sense, since Sheldon Siegel is a practicing attorney in San Francisco, like his characters, although by their standard he would be the bad guy, as he is in corporate and securities law, and has probably never litigated a murder case in his life.

Amazingly, this book gets 4.5 stars out of five on amazon.com.