2008-06-24 Diablerie

Mosley's latest novel is a New York-based murder-mystery that tells the story of a middle-aged senior computer programmer (as the author himself once was) who is profoundly alienated despite the outward appearance of a contented family life; a man with a troubled past and a possible history of alcohol-related violence. When a Russian woman from his past turns up unexpectedly, former sins come back to haunt him.

As a fan of the noir genre and of the writer himself I have to profess to a twinge of disappointment with this one. Whereas Easy Rawlins took me onto and under the streets of L.A., central character Ben Dibbuk doesn't manage to capture that same kind of atmosphere in New York. One of the reasons is the relative lack of anger at the prejudices that exist against African Americans, a central emotion throughout the Easy Rawlins series; it's conspicuous for its absence. There is also a degree of confusion as to how and why a bland, salary-man character such as Dibbuk would be married to a woman who runs a glamourous magazine, and how a man on such a modest salary would have the resources to pay for the considerable upkeep of a prostitute. More problematic is the question of whether the crime that Dibbuk thinks he might be accused of (in his past) has even a remote chance of ever going to trial. Ultimately it's a tale of morality, of a man which a damaged early background who seeks to mask those scars of parental abuse with a veneer of indifference. Throughout the tale there is an ever-growing sense of dread, a feeling that something terrible is about to happen, and while this sensation kept me turning the pages, when the last one was turned and the book itself closed, I felt another sense: one of anti-climax, and an inclination to ruffle back through the book to see if I had missed something. A page-turner, then, but the individual components fail to create a satisfactory whole.