Herbie's
Game (Junior Bender #4) by
Timothy Hallinan (Soho Crime, July 2014, 400 pages, $25.00/12.99)
jumped up and grabbed me in the first two or three pages and kept me
with the story and the character all the way through, leaving me
hungering for more. I will surely read back in Hallinan's absorbing
series, as I eagerly anticipate #5, and have already ordered his
newest release in the Poke Rafferty series, with which I'm also
unfamiliar. Hallinan has come up with an engaging character based on
a unique premise that delivers strong situations, weird and
attractive subsidiary characters, and situations usually encountered
from the “other” side. How so? Well, Junior Bender is a burglar.
His clients all live on the edges of society participating in their
own criminal activities with enthusiasm and professional elan.
Herbie's
Game opens with Bender in
the midst of a burglary as he carefully enters, assesses, and, just
as he's about to quit, finds a box containing two mysterious pieces
of jewelry, one a Cartier broach familiar to him, and the other a
small construction of strange beauty that he can't quite identify.
This seems strange as we learn that his greatest asset is his fine
eye for quality. “Ever since my mentor Herbie Mott taught me the
rules of burglary, I've practically salivated at the sound of
something rattling in a small box” thinks Bender, as he hear's a
car returning, pockets the box, and quietly leaves by the rear door
just as the homeowner returns.
Soon the reader is
led into Bender's strange world of killers, fences, fortune tellers,
thieves, and other underworld characters, many of whom have figured
in his life and share a bond with him. He discovers that his friend
and mentor, Herbie Mott, has died under extreme stress while being
tortured to reveal...something. Coping with a deep sense of loss at
the demise of a man he considers to be a surrogate father, the man
who taught him all he knows about his “business,” Bender begins
to trace a chain of messages leading to a contract murder through a
series of “disconnections.” Each disconnect is carefully
designed to build a wall of intermediary steps between the person who
initiated the contract and the killer who carried it out. Along the
way the reader meets a variety of people living on the “other”
side of the law. We quickly come to see them as complex, lively,
scary, and even likable people who transcend the cardboard cutout
villains populating much crime fiction. They're articulate and funny
as well as dangerous. Bender is a sharp judge of the human condition,
making many trenchant observations that stop the reader in
mid-paragraph to consider the idea and the language used to describe
it. This is a sign of really good writing.
We soon meet
Bender's ex-wife Kathy and his teenage daughter, the precocious Rina.
Kathy describes Bender's appeal as lying in his “decency,” a
quality the reader sees quite easily, too. He operates within a moral
compass guiding his approach to his outlaw profession. He's an acute
observer of the human condition while not making conventional moral
judgments about his professional colleagues. The fact that they rob,
kill, and deceive doesn't bother Bender if they adhere to the rules
of the game as taught by Herbie, even if Herbie didn't quite adhere
to them himself.
Timothy Hallinan
Timothy Hallinann lives about half of
each year in Southeast Asia and the other half in California. He
wrote songs and sang in a rock band while in college, and many of his
songs were recorded by by well-known artists who included the
platinum-selling group Bread. He began writing books while enjoying
a successful career in the television industry. Over the past
fourteen years he has been responsible for a number of well-reviewed
novels and a nonfiction book on Charles Dickens. For years he has
taught a course on “Finishing the Novel” with remarkable results
– more than half his students complete their first novel and go on
to a second, and several have been, or are about to be, published.
Tim currently maintains a house in Santa Monica, California, and
apartments in Bangkok, Thailand; and Phnom Penh, Cambodia. He is
lucky enough to be married to Munyin Choy-Hallinan.
(profile from
Hallinan's web site). Hallinan has developed three successful
series arcs. They seem to run their course after six books. Keep an
eye out for the concurrent Poke Rafferty series set in Bangkok and, I
hope, some more Junior Bender novels.
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