Gumshoes Bookies and Suicides, review by Hugh Blanton

 

Detective Novel

by Craig Rodgers, 100 pages

Death of Print Books, $15.00

by Hugh Blanton

Readers of Craig Rodgers have come to expect having more questions than answers at the end of his books, and Detective Novel (Death of Print Books, 2025) is no exception. Rodgers's prose is sometimes compared to Cormac McCarthy or Don DeLillo, and while his style is indeed very similar to both, he writes without the peacocky vocabulary. He opens Detective Novel with a man on a rickety, aged bridge over a river removing his shoes and watch. He ensures there's no witnesses around and jumps (he didn't see the vagrant camped in the brush of the riverbank). The vagrant climbs up to the bridge, puts on his new shoes and watch, and returns to his camp. No body is discovered, the vagrant says nothing, and Calvin Lond is reported missing.

Detective Novel takes place in Oriel, a fictional town that has appeared in previous Rodgers books. A man sitting on a cot inside the building of the local newspaper, the Oriel Courant, reads the story of the missing Calvin Lond on his phone and gets an idea. (I suspect Rodgers is toying with us again with the name of the newspaper—Oriel Courant is also a popular wine from the Rhone Valley of France.) Linus heads out to the last known address of Lond and finds an estate sale taking place. (We aren't given Linus's last name. Or maybe we aren't given his first name. Rodgers leaves it up to us to guess.) Linus approaches the old man seated among the possessions scattered throughout the lawn and asks him what's going on. The old man asks Linus who he is, and we get more mystery added to the mystery: "Linus tells a lie, he says I am a journalist."

According to the National Missing Persons Coordination Center of Australia, people go missing for a variety of reasons—mental illness, miscommunication, misadventure, domestic violence, being a crime victim. (In Soviet Russia you probably could have added gulag to the list.) The Missing Persons Center of Los Angeles, California, a volunteer group that partners with law enforcement, has so many open cases they are closed to accepting new ones. (Their most recent case was in March of 2025.) In most common law jurisdictions a missing person can not be declared dead until after seven years have passed. Our Mr. Lond of the estate sale above obviously isn't waiting for the declaration of death in absentia. When Linus asks him if he's sure Calvin won't be coming back, he simply shrugs and says everything is for sale. One of the gawkers wandering through the yard asks the old man how much a stone carving costs. Old Mr. Lond answers, “It costs what you buy it for. There isn’t gonna be a going rate. It was a kind of trophy. An award.” The man thanks him, walks away with the stone, and gets in his car without paying. Linus notes the license plate.

In a May 2024 interview in Misery Tourism with Frank Peak, Rodgers said, "Pulp is fun. In theme and style, it's enjoyable to play with. I'm not really writing dime novels, but it's an inspiration. That toolkit does get pulled out or referenced a lot." Reporters in pulp fiction come from different molds—crime beat reporters, justice crusaders, sometimes they are even the criminals themselves. Linus doesn't seem to fit any of these molds (or maybe even be a reporter at all). He is living in the Oriel Courant's building until it was raided by police while he was out chasing down leads in his missing person case. In his search for answers he keeps coming across illegal sports betting and illegally staged fights. When he runs the tag of the estate sale shoplifter, the name Jeremy Red comes back. However, Red wasn't the grab-n-go bandit, it was Red's driver and lackey Dutch. Red's something like a memorabilia dealer, or a pawnbroker. Turns out the missing Calvin Lond was supposed to procure an antique Colt 1911 pistol from a museum for Red. Also turns out that it was the same pistol used to kill Red's grandfather many years ago.

As Linus trails people and keeps them under surveillance he sees them arguing with their bookies as they pay their bets off, and he comes up on an illegal fight being raided by police. Linus goes to visit a former reporter with the Oriel Courant, Lawrence Harvey, who is in an administrative cell in the local jail. He's told by the front desk clerk Harvey can no longer have visitors: “Oh hon. Okay. No. That man’s in big boy jail now.” More confused than ever, but thinking there's a connection between Harvey and the recent raid, Linus heads to Red's shop. Red, his driver Dutch, and the referee from the illegal fights are there. Red asks Linus if he's on board. On board for what? we wonder. Turns out Red's a little short on manpower and he wants Linus to come along with him on a raid—to get that antique gun from the museum. Linus the reporter is about to take center stage in his own story.

Hugh Blanton's latest book is Kentucky Outlaw. He can be reached on X @HughBlanton5.