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This is a heavy burden to lay upon a first novelist, and normally it would be only fair and sensible to ignore this blurb, as all others. But since it is so insistent that this time they've got the true and genuine article, unlike all those other new Chandlers who have been proclaimed by excitable publishers over the decades, it seemed only reasonable to subject Wessel and his vessel to some standard Chandler tests.
1. Is the plot impossibly complicated? Chandler is said to have admitted that in his first novel, The Big Sleep, he couldn't account for all the dead bodies. His ways of crime were so labyrinthine that he couldn't track back through his own maze. It's a standard of bewilderment most crime novelists have happily adopted since.
As has Wessel, who passes this test with all A's. This Far, No Further is set in Chicago of the '90s, though for criminal complexity it might as easily be Chandler's Los Angeles of the 1930s.
The action -- a word advisedly used -- revolves around Stephen Rosenberg, a plastic surgeon who in his off hours likes to engage in sadomasochistic, not to say psychotic, sex, usually involving multiple partners, including his wife, Elenya, whom he abuses. This leads in ways none too clear to murders of varying degrees of gruesomeness. Elenya flees to the private detectives, and the bodies begin to pile up.
2. Is the hero noble? Chandler's private detective, Philip Marlowe, was a private detective who went down the mean streets, a man who was himself not mean. A knight, in short, as is Wessel's hero, Harding, who has to take jobs under the counter because he's lost his license for having killed a man (who thoroughly deserved it).
Harding (no first name) bears many resemblances to Marlowe, though Marlowe lived better -- Harding pigs in like a college sophomore. In fact, for all Harding's fortysomething years and hazardous life, there is a sense that he hasn't fully matured. A typical Baby Boomer? Or is it that Marlowe knew exactly who he was: his own man? Harding is less sure. In any case, part of him belongs to Alison, one tough -- and whimsical and sardonic -- cookie, whereas Marlowe was pretty much a loner.
Harding also gets beat up more often, and more savagely, than Marlowe did. After one these poundings, he resembles nothing so much as Beetle Bailey left in a crumpled heap at the feet of Sarge.
3. Does the hero converse, especially with himself, chiefly through wisecracks? Does he indeed! For example, Harding muses about a lush lawyer named Frost: "Frost is drinking orange juice without the vodka. He probably just found out it comes that way." In this Wessel is a bit more democratic than Chandler, for whom the police were all pudding-headed oafs incapable of a subtle or ironic thought. Wessel gives some of his best lines to a Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern pair of detectives named Reilly and Keegan. "I'm working Homicide, Harding," Reilly says. "You seem to be mostly alive. For now, anyway. If you turn up dead later maybe I can talk to you."
4. Is the society sleazy and corrupt? Well, now, we've come a long way, baby, and it's all been downhill. There is over Harding's world a patina of cruelty and despair (not unusual in crime novels these days, it must be said) that never colored Marlowe's, however cynical he might have been. It's as if advances in electronic and chemical technology have increased not only our ability to destroy ourselves and others, but our willingness to do so. Maybe the Luddites had a point.
There are other tests, but enough. Is it Chandler? No, it's Wessel. Chandler did things with the language that no one, not even the cleverest in his legion of parodists, can ever touch, and Wessel has done some things Chandler never thought of.
Thus, the foregoing isn't meant to disparage the book or discourage you from reading what is an exceptional example of its type. It's the way these things are done, and when they're done well, as they are here, that's what satisfies. In that sense it's no more or less "realistic" than Penrod or A Date with Judy. Can you explain with precision everything that's going on in Faulkner's The Hamlet?
©1996, ProMotion, inc.