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Terminal Avenue
by Jim Christy
Exstasis Editions, 2002
Reviewed by Aidan Baker
Terminal Avenue is the third installment in Jim
Christy's Vancouver
Trilogy, featuring the tough-talking,
ever-quip-ready, acerbic detective
Gene Castle, and revisiting the hardboiled style of
such classic pulp
writers as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammet.
Castle is very much a Sam
Spade-esque private detective; ambiguously amoral,
down-and-out, tenuously
tolerated by the cops, friends with hobos, whores,
and every bartender in
town. People start getting killed on page 17 of
Terminal Avenue and of
course Castle is implicated in the murder. So the
case begins. And Castle
finds himself caught-up in a net of international
intrigue as he searches
the gritty underground of 1940s Vancouver for the
missing daughter of a
Nazi
resistance leader, staking out brothels and
speakeasies, liasoning with
spies of varying loyalties, and dodging the fists
and/or bullets of
various
parties out to silence him.
Terminal Avenue is a good mystery, fast-paced,
entertaining, and gritty.
It doesn't really compare to Chandler and Hammet,
though. The writing is not
as
crisp or taut -- the prose should be as acerbic as
the book's main
character -- and Christy seems a little too fond of
the over-wrought
similes
or mixed metaphors that don't quite succeed. For
example, this passage
about
Castle's alarm clock:
He had gotten two steps closer to the bed when the
old Russian alarm clock
sounded. He thought of it as Russion because it was
shaped like a
cobblestone a young hot head in St. Petersburg might
have picked up and
thrown at a cossack during the Revolution. And it
always went off like The
Rites of Spring. (p9)
A stylistic flourish, yes, helps establish Castle's character, thought
process, presumably, but a lot of words (mis)spent on
unnecessary
information. It could have been done more concisely
and effectively (not
to
mention the error in the title of the Stravinsky
piece). There are several
such passages, which usually serve more to slow the
pace of the text than
enhance the mood. There are also sections wherein the
point-of-view
suddenly
changes or characters start having conversations with
themselves in third
person. Stylistic flourishes, again, but more often
than not these
sections
come off as awkward or unwieldy.
These are nit-picking concerns, admittedly. Which
leads to my biggest
problem with Terminal Avenue: I don't know what
Christy's intent is. As
such, I am uncertain on what level to judge it. If
his intent was simply
to
write an entertaining mystery novel, then above
concerns can remain in the
realm of nit-picking and this review can be over. If
his intent was more
than that, than said nit-pickings are symptomatic of
larger issues.
Of course not everything has to be deep and
meaningful. Yet the book
jacket
claims that Terminal Avenue
can be read as pure entertainment, as pastiche, as
social commentary, as
popular history, and as an existential literary work
containing the
disillusioned romanticism of classic hardboiled
fiction.
No doubt these words are the publisher's, not
Christy's, but, as social
commentary, Terminal Avenue isn't especially saying
anything new; Nazis
and
pedophiles are bad, yes, we know. As pastiche or homage, the quality of
the
prose doesn't really live up to the original
hardboiled writers. Nor are
Christy's modernizations of the genre -- more
explicit sex, more graphic
violence -- particularly an improvement (some things
are indeed better
left
to the imagination). Existential literary work? Not
really; not reflective
or philosophical enough. Popular history, perhaps;
entertainment, sure. I
wouldn't call Terminal Avenue a mindless read, but if
you are looking for
more than entertainment, I'm not sure you'll find it
with this book. Not
that there's anything wrong with entertainment...
Aidan Baker is a Toronto writer and
musician.
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