Judith Sullivan is a writer in Leeds, originally from Baltimore. She is working on a crime series set in Paris. Fluent in French, she’s pretty good with English and has conversational Italian and German. She is working to develop her Yorkshire speak.
There is prescient and there is prescient. And then there is this novella by crime writer Candy Denman.
It landed on my doorstep in March and had I not been expecting it I might have thought it was put together in a week. But it was not and it sure reads like Denman gave it plenty of TLC.
Set in San Francisco in the midst of a modern-day flu outbreak which confines individuals to their homes and piles dead all over the place, When Love’s 71 pages pack a serious punch. Part of City’s nostalgia novella series, the book offers up a plot inspired by the film of Graham Greene’s The Third Man. Yes, that one, with the Ferris Wheel and the zither music.
The story in When Love is deceptively simple. Not particularly successful science journalist Joe Hames is dispatched from the East Coast to the West to report on the epidemic’s effects. He is eager to make the trip as his onetime girlfriend Cassie Lowell now works in Frisco in distribution for a pharmaceutical company. Like Holly Martins in the original, Hames will discover a city in the grip of medical emergency and also suffering such ills as greed, corruption and dishonesty.
The scattershot newspaperman never gets to reunite with Lowell in person as her corpse soon turns up at the morgue. Hames rightly suspects the hit-and-run that killed his erstwhile lover was no fluke but a poorly-concealed murder. And so just as Greene’s Martins sifts through the grime and muck of Vienna, our man Hames uses his reporting skills to uncover the grime and muck left by nasty corporations and individual miscreants in modern-day California. The plot is dark and twisty and sad, just like the noir-est of noir-fiction should be. Even with the compact length, the book allows us an entry into Hames’s character and values and his character has a notable story arc.
When Love is part of City Fiction’s Novella Nostalgia series, which has also featured homages to Breakfast at Tiffany’s and to Twelve Angry Men. I’ve not read the others but Denman’s book has most of the attributes crime-fiction fans seek – tautness, discomfort, world-weariness and that one we all so need now – a sense there is a glimmer of hope. Somewhere.
