Still One Block West of the Light...

.... revisiting the melancholy but witty crime books of 

Terence Faherty

Deadstick  1991

Live To Regret  1992

The Lost Keats  1993

 

I first read these three books around the 2010s, and I can’t remember now where I came across them. I posted on Live To Regret on the blog in 2012 and can still remember finding this extraordinary picture to match the theme of drowned women – it is, astonishingly, a fashion illo by great blog favourite photographer Toni Frissell - that's when I first came across her, and I have used her photos frequently since. 

I also loved the line from the book that I picked out for the blogpost title: one block west of the light. (I see that I threatened to write a novel with that title – hasn’t happened yet)

I said then the books had ‘a dream-like feel and are full of ideas and emotion. But they are very readable, and they do have secrets, mysteries and solutions.’

I’ve just reread these three and enjoyed them very much. In The Lost Keats, Owen Keane is a seminarian in rural Indianapolis, ie training to be a Roman Catholic priest. As he is not a priest in the other books, it is not really a spoiler to say that he will not stay there much longer. The books are somewhat out of order – Lost Keats is set in 1973. In the other two I’ve read, Keane is a very small-scale private investigator, at first doing jobs for his best friend Harry, who is a lawyer with family money. There is quite a lot about his private life, and this is woven into the three books – and I’m guessing continues into the rest of the series.

Faherty has written a couple of series, a fair number of books, and although he was Edgar-nominated for Deadstick, he is very much under the radar. There is surprisingly little about him online – he has a website, and his crime short stories have appeared regularly in the magazines. He doesn’t seem to have new work out lately. But, a lot of his books are available for Kindle, and are not expensive.

I think many more people might enjoy his books, and I am certainly intending to read more – I am tempted by his Scott Elliott series, private eye mysteries set in post WW2 Hollywood.

The books I’ve read all have a nostalgic, melancholy air, and at the same time are witty and clever. Faherty is amazing at landscapes and atmosphere – the badlands of New Jersey in Deadstick have lingered in my mind. It’s a forested area, close to uninhabited, a place where a small plane came down many years before, and wasn’t found for a long time. On board were the son of a rich banking family, and a young woman, and they shouldn't have been there...Owen Keane goes exploring, and comes across one of the few people living there: a man who tells stories.

The Lost Keats has a real old-school McGuffin that you might be able to guess from the title – the possibility of an unknown sonnet by 19th C romantic poet John Keats (whose brother, astonishingly, emigrated to the United States). But what lives with me from the book is the picture of Indiana, a mid-West state that I have visited for a short time: you get a real picture of Keane driving round through the farmlands, and he explains a strange story of hemp being grown there in WW2, and various matters that result from that. He visits an old people’s home, a halfway house and a farm, and all are equally well-portrayed.

 

Indiana railroad picture – Flickr.

Indiana countryside – Library of Congress

The Library of Congress, one of my favourite resources, has the most incredible archive of photos, which – and this is not a complaint – is searchable, but not really organized. This means that it is hard to manoeuvre in there, but the treasures are many. I liked the picture of the railwayman, above, which I found on Flickr but came from the LOC. So I went to the LOC and searched on Indiana Railroad, and up came 450-odd pictures of railways and related items and people, most of which were either beautiful, or strange, or interesting, or nostalgic, or all of the above. I suppose I should add: that’s if you find railroads romantic, which I do. For example, this one - not related to the books except by mood, taken by Jack Delano in 1943.

You never know what you might find at the LOC, and I am very grateful to them, and particularly for the regular use of the words ‘no known restrictions’.