Book Review

Comfort Noir by David Boyne Copyright 2002 All Rights Reserved A review of The Dark Side, by David J. Sherman ISBN 1-932-30651-X Available direct from David J. Sherman's website: http://www.davidjsherman.com Read our interview with David J. Sherman

There is comfort food, and there is comfort fiction.

For some, comfort fiction is whatever is on television—and everything that is on television.

For others, it takes a bit more to send those endorphins dancing through their bloodstream in a happy conga line.

They need to read.

Among readers, one of the most popular cuisines du comfort is the detective novel. Within that modern and varied cuisine the reader can choose from a vast array of sub-cuisines.

The Dark Side, by David J. Sherman, is an entree prepared in the hard-boiled Los Angeles detective style.

As is typical with this cuisine of comfort fiction, what may be lacking in presentation, is made up for in flavor.

The Dark Side is Sherman's first novel, and the first in a series that will feature his hero-detective, Jack Murphy.

Murphy is a newcomer to Los Angeles, a refugee from a painful past that happened "back east"—a place where so many things happen to swell the population of California. In the long tradition of California's immigrants, Murphy goes West to heal thyself, and while at it, re-invent thyself.

California, the "do over" state.

"Mr. Murphy, I need you to find my little girl."

That's the hook that opens the novel. And for fans of detective fiction, it's like the first bite of their beloved comfort food—whether fried eggs, bacon and grits, or General Tso's chicken straight from the take-out container chased by a beer—they know what they're going to get, and they know they're going to like getting it.

Murphy is a laconic, chain-smoking, coffee-guzzling, loner detective who never "puts" his cigarettes out, but "smashes" them in ashtrays or "grinds" them under his heel on sidewalks.

His office is small, non-descript, and has windows he stares from to ponder a plot-twist and watch the rain (it rains a lot in LA-Noir). Most importantly, Murphy's office comes with the requisite furnishing: a raven-haired, supremely competent yet femininely vulnerable and temperamental hottie secretary who is not so secretly in lust with her boss.

The Maguffin? The missing teenaged girl. Was she kidnapped? Did she runaway from her comfortable upper-middle class home, Ăback east'? Is she dead? Alive but trapped by child-porn-film-making-white-slavers? Did I mention that she's gorgeous? None of this matters: it's all about the journey. Readers get to travel the streets and alleys, the seedy bungalows and the seedier mansions. We get to go where uncouth slobs film fifteen-year-old girls in pornographic pantomimes. We get to throw ourselves to the sidewalk to avoid Uzi-powered drive by shootings.

Los Angeles is a rough town. No, really. Jack Murphy methodically fulfills the obligations of the hard-boiled private eye in a rough town, ethically refusing to be bought off his case; willingly getting into the car (limousine, of course; this is LA!) of two goons he knows mean him no good; and helplessly taking the beating that will allow him to open the next chapter with the time-honored scene of waking up in the hospital with a cracked cranium, the battered body of an NFL running back on Monday morning, and that raven-haired secretary gazing lovingly, worriedly, into his unfocused eyes.

The plot is a straightforward connect the dots to go from point A to point Z. But there are minor characters to fill the spaces between the dots. Like Arturo, the Latino ex-con who once upon a time saved Jack Murphy's life (details in a future installment of the series?) and is gainfully employed by Murphy in the dual role of muscle and male-bonding sidekick. He is also the only person who can get away with calling detective Murphy, "Holmes".

Sensitive readers may experience a few hiccups as they gorge themselves, perhaps needing a chaser to swallow the scene in which, like an angel of deus ex machina, Arturo appears just in time to save Murphy from the bad guys—despite the time and place of Murphy's meeting with the bad guys having been kept from Arturo. Did Murphy's secretary know, and somehow tell Arturo to go hence and save their boss's' bacon? Details are not integrated in the plot or explained, post action, to the reader.But this is, after all, comfort fiction, and by then, we've turned the page for the next course of our big meal, our hiccup just a flavorful memory.

All the ingredients are present: cops, guns, confrontations, testosterone-driven repartee, and sex. Let's not forget the sex. While there is a curiously chaste "should we or shouldn't we" between Murphy and his hottie secretary, it is counter-pointed by the sleaze of street sex, back-room fellatio in private clubs, and porn-film studios in suburban homes where sleazy men film young girls in sexual intercourse with men smoking so much crack they are in danger of losing their erections and causing the inept film makers to improvise a solo masturbation scene for the girl.

It's in this setting that a large, bearded man who carries a gun but isn't competent in its use, who listens to Nine Inch Nails while expertly changing the sheets on the one bed used in all the porn films, whines aloud that he's a graduate of film school, and a "legitimate producer".

It seems that in LA-Noir, just as in LA-Real—everyone is struggling for legitimacy.

It's your choice. Dine on new episodes of Friends that taste like warmed-over reruns. Or gorge on The Dark Side—comfort noir, served LA style, circa 2002, with more than a dash of 1940s spice.

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I finished my cigarette and ground the butt into the pot of the fern that was attempting to overtake my balcony. Though much of the time I was wrong, I still had faith in my intuition. I had to. Intuition was a private eye’s most valuable possession. And my gut told me she was still alive, and still in Los Angeles, and Jenkins wound up dead because he was on the right track. I’d never been much in the religious department, but as I leaned over the balcony, I prayed. I prayed that I would find Carrie before I wound up like Jenkins did.

from The Dark Side
by David J. Sherman

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