Shamus Dust | Book Review
Shaums Dust opens in the early hours of Christmas morning, Private Detective Newman is awoken by a new client. A murder has taken place at one of Councilor Drake’s (a low-level governmental official) rental properties, and he wants to know what happened. Newman, an American ex-pat who stayed in London after fighting in WWII, takes the job and is set on a road filled with blackmail, fraud, ancient Roman ruins, extra-material affairs, lots of booze, more bodies, and so many head wounds I can’t believe our intrepid shamus (another name for a private dick which I hadn’t run across before) could stand much less solve a series of murders.
Shamus Dust is filled with top-notch writing. Janet Roger does an amazing job taking the reader to post-war London with its bombed-out buildings and seedy underbelly. Her descriptions pack a punch adding to this classic noir story and lending nuances that inform the reader of character motivations and past experiences.
Vehicle lights lit stripes along the wall and moved them clockwise around the room.
He had to be older than he looked, wore a shadow across his lip for a mustache, a pallor the gray putty of overworked glands and an air of unraveling surprise.
Fine dust drifted past the light on his desk, rising on the dry sourness your breathe in all police stations everywhere. They refine it out of passing falsehoods, routine evasions, threats and mean deceits.
Allyson looked standard legal fare: slim, medium height, boyish and dress for sixty-five, in a charcoal three-piece with a watchchain and a squadron necktie knotted with a pipe wrench until his shirt collar buckles. He had a soft, indoor pallor, ad skin and rimless spectacles, and the tight, careful accents that glide around the law in any language, in all places, at any time.
The path Newman cuts across the city could be used to map London. Having traveled around the area before, it was fun to see places I knew mentioned, their context changed to a cold, snowy, bombed-out place I probably wouldn’t recognize. The detail Rogers gives her novel doesn’t stop with mood and scenery. Even chess master Alexander Alekhine (1892-1946) makes an appearance in mention.
Rogers delivers a classic noir detective story with way more depth than the genre typically displays. The crimes are complicated, with multiple motives that made me scratch my head at times. There were so many red herrings and suspects that I admit to having trouble keeping track of what had taken place and who the players were. I found myself rereading passages over again to make sure I was navigating the plot correctly. Part of the reason for my confusion has to do with keeping the secondary characters from becoming jumbled. On multiple occasions, I stopped and searched for characters to see where they had previously been mentioned in order to remember who they were.
Just because something isn’t easy to read doesn’t me it isn’t effective or well-written. We become so used to being spoonfed information that when a book or movie comes along that actually asks us to think, we write it off as not worth our time or well done. I can see that happening to Shamus Dust. At times I was confused and had to backtrack, but each time I did, I was floored by Roger’s writing. She sets a mood that is gritty, raw, and unmistakably noir.
Another aspect of the novel that left me a tiny bit confused was Newman, an American, using British vocabulary. I know that a plaite is a braid and nail varnish is what we American call nail polish, and that a loudhailer is a megaphone, but I can’t imagine someone raised in the US using these British equivalents in a first-person internal narrative. Perhaps they would come up when speaking with a British person, but not to one’s self.
The narrative revolves quite a bit around an archaeologist named Garfield, who is murdered. Garfield is gay and involved with his assistant at the time of his death. In addition to his ongoing relationship with a much younger male assistant, Garfield occasionally paid for the company of male sex workers. Newman handles this information with the grace and maturity I didn’t expect from an ex-army man in the 1950s. Actually, everyone handles this aspect of the case with such anachronistic liberalism that I had to double-check the status of LGBTQ folks in London after the war. Sure enough, it was illegal to engage in non-heterosexual sex acts. It’s refreshing to see justice comes for those who would normally be seen as less than others and written off as living a high-risk lifestyle and getting what they deserved. It’s additionally refreshing to not have to slog through a narrative littered with pejorative name-calling that would have been the norm at the time the novel is set.
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