Undercurrent ebook

First Sentence: It was one of those jobs you take on when things are very lean.

"Nameless" is hired by a lovely young wife to find out whether her husband was being unfaithful. "Nameless" follows the husband to a hotel of cottages in Cypress Bay (Carmel), sees him meet with a bald man and return to his hotel room.

When, hours later, "Nameless" realizes the cottage may have a backdoor, he investigates and finds the husband has been murdered. An anomaly in the victim's possessions is an old pulp detective novel by a writer who lives in the area.

There are a lot of wonderful and fun things about reading books in this series. The story takes place in the days where many men still wore hats, smoking was common, no one had cell phones and you couldn't just look things up on the internet. The latter was really made apparent when the characters were trying to track down a copy of an old book and I think of how easy it is to do that these days. There is also an interesting commentary on the state of writers and publishers. The worry, during this time, was that television and computers would make writers of fiction and printed matter obsolete.

Pronzini, even in these early books, is a wonderful writer. His powers of descriptions add so much to his work. Although he renamed Carmel, I could envision exactly where the characters where. But more impressively, at one point he the fatigue that can overcome a detective while waiting for something to happen on a case. This particular story was not one of my favorite from Pronzini.

The plot felt overly contrived and unconvincing to me, but it was still very cleverly done and well written. Pronzini, particularly the "Nameless" series, is someone I always recommend.

Great mystery writer all his books are A1

Synopsis/blurb......
The Nameless detective is hired by a young wife to find out whether her husband has been having an affair. He trails the husband to a motel of cabins in a small village, sees him meet with a bald man and then return to his cabin. Hours later, Nameless realizes the cabin may have a backdoor; he investigates and finds the husband has been murdered!

The third instalment in this long-running series, which incidentally has its 38th episode, published this year; not counting a couple of volumes of short stories and two novellas. I should have caught up to Nemesis in about 3 years-time assuming I stick with the pace I have set at one a month. I can't imagine stopping as I'm enjoying myself too much with Nameless.
It's a fairly straightforward mystery. Nameless follows the husband of his client easily enough. When he discovers Walter Paige murdered. After explaining his connection to Paige, he manages to ingratiate himself into the investigation when finding a kindred spirit in Quartermain, Cypress Bay's chief of police.
Forensics indicates that Paige was with another woman shortly before he died. Part of Nameless' attraction I think is his decency and empathy for the wounded souls that cross his path during his investigations; in this case, Judith Paige his client, duped by her callous husband.
Nameless, an avid pulp magazine collector, when not sleuthing, has his curiosity piqued when amongst Paige's possession is a 20-year old mystery novel by a pulp fiction author, Russell Dancer; who Nameless is familiar with. Subsequent inquiries indicate Walter was previously known in the Cypress Bay area, where he socialised with Dancer and others, before disappearing from the scene, unknown to his circle to serve a four year jail-term.
Quartermain and Nameless keep digging into Paige's Cypress Bay past and get a break when the "bald man" starts a fire at Dancer's house and breaks into Nameless' hotel room and steals the book Paige was in possession of at the time of his death.
Interesting, enjoyable, entertaining............I'm going to have to find a dictionary of superlatives because I'm running out of adjectives to describe just how much I'm enjoying these books of Pronzini's without repeating myself.
I sometimes worry about recommending books to others, for fear that they don't derive the same amount of pleasure from a book that I have read and enjoyed. I would recommend that you try at least one of this author's books though.
On the basis that I scored the first 2 in the series a 5 from 5, we will shave his mark down to a 4, even though I found the book pretty faultless. I think it is important to keep him on his toes! At 70 we can't have him getting complacent.
4 from 5
I bought this copy on Amazon for my kindle pc reader thingy. Next month book 4 is Blowback.

By this, the 3rd book in Pronzini's classic "Nameless" detective series (which I recently began re-reading in order, you would expect the plots to have gotten better. Instead, I was distincly underwhelmed by the formulaic setting, plot and resolution of "Undercurrent" (especially since the first two in the series, The Snatch and The Vanished, were better than I remembered). Nameless is the stereotypical private eye, uncouth, unkempted, and cynical, and here nothing really changes. A client hires Nameless to follow her husband on one of his mysterious weekend trips, where she suspects her husband is cheating on her. When he turns up dead, Nameless must find out who did it, and if it's part of a larger plot taking place in the small California beach town.

Despite several interesting characters (including a washed up old pulp writer hack that Pronzini seems to have had a lot of fun bringing to life), nothing very interesting happens. Pronzini investigates the dead husband's past and finds some unsavory elements, as well as the fact he hung around several local people who have since tried to forget the murdered man, any one of which might have killed him. A couple more murders take place, but the reader is never really invested in the characters or the story. Nameless really does nothing the entire book but follow the chief of police around and comment on the investigation (a huge mistake on Pronzini's part, as PIs work best as lone wolf investigators, not as tag-along sidekicks). There is virtually no action. When the plot (which involves an old pulp novel and a crime planned using the book) is finally revealed, it's an interesting idea, but the crime is foiled so quickly and easily that it's a lot of build up for really no payoff.

This isn't a bad book, but it's not one of Bill's best, and a huge step down from the first two in the series.