Songs Of Innocence

Charles Ardai, founder and editor of the absolutely wonderful Hard Case Crime book line, (and husband to fantasy author Naomi Novik, incidentally) has just about the most blatant pen-name in the history of ever: Richard Aleas. If you don’t understand why this is so, say the name out loud. It’s a fun little veneer of goofiness that contrasts nicely with some of the most painful crime fiction (or really just fiction at all) that I’ve ever read.

The new Songs of Innocence is a sequel to Little Girl Lost, which was one of Hard Case Crime’s first releases. That first book, even with its ending twist that I saw coming a mile away, was very, very good. It drew me in completely with a suspenseful and, for the genre, exceptionally personal story, all leading to a conclusion that did not bring things in the main character’s life back to status quo.

Songs of Innocence is better.

By the time this second book rolls around, the protagonist has merited the subtitle: “A John Blake Mystery,” but there’s no feeling of a series formula here. In fact, John Blake isn’t even a detective anymore. At the start of the book he’s working at Columbia University so that he can take free classes, specifically with the School of General Studies. On a quick sidenote, I found this particularly amusing, due to the fact that a literal day or two before picking up the book I actually got accepted to that selfsame one of Columbia’s schools.

Since I was a decade past college age, the courses I took were in the euphemistically named “School of General Studies,” the division Columbia reserves for middle-managers taking economics classes at night and empty-nesters looking to fill their afternoons with something more satisfying than Oprah. But some of the students in GS weren’t that far removed from their college years–they’d dropped out of college a few credits shy of graduating and after bumming around for a year or two were now ready to finish up. Dorrie was in this category.
- page 24

That last category is the closest to what I am as well. Naturally, because the school is being described in a noir novel it is, of course, played up in about as cynical and downbeat a way as possible. But we don’t come to Hard Case Crime to learn about colleges, we do so for dark, suspenseful crime yarns.

The earlier-mentioned Dorrie dies in what appears to be a suicide, but Blake has many reasons to suspect foul play, and so, against his better judgment, he tries to find the killer. He is still retired as a private detective, turning the whole thing into a sort of depressing mirror image to Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man (the only novel of that master’s that could be described as “light-hearted”). The story drags him through the sleazy world of New York City “massage” parlors, and even leads him afoul of Hungarian mobster Ardo, described thusly:

John, listen to me. Seriously. Cards on the table. You know how they ran all those stories in the papers ten years ago, how the Italian mob was getting outgunned by the Russians? And how the Russians were mean sons of bitches but they didn’t compare to the South Americans? And how even the South Americans were afraid of the Asians? Well, who do you think the Asians are scared of?”

“The Hungarians?”

“Fuck the Hungarians. They’re scared of Ardo.”
- page 89

Things go in a very definite downward spiral of violence until our hero finds himself on the run, and still trying to figure out what the hell happened. The ending that it all rushes to really is a shocking, disturbing, and genuinely surprising one. It shows that Ardai Aleas really isn’t afraid to go outside the basic conventions of the genre.

This is also showcased by how deep into Blake’s mind we get, which thankfully is never to the point where it feels like he’s just wallowing in sorrow for its own sake. He’s tortured, but in a way that really makes sense. And he’s never going “aw jeez, I’m so tortured, feel for me!”

It’s also worth noting that in Songs of Innocence we get a real hardboiled novel for the internet age. What I mean by that is that it doesn’t have a few “hey look, here are computers!” moments, but it also doesn’t spend all of its time on such things either. Basically cell phones, the internet, and other such modern things that we don’t normally see in Hard Case Crime books (for generally obvious reasons) show up about as much as they would, and with the relevance that they would, were these events to actually take place. It works very nicely, and it’s explained in just enough detail that hopefully it’ll still all make sense in 20, 30 years and so on.

You don’t need to have read Little Girl Lost to appreciate Songs of Innocence, although it probably wouldn’t hurt. Whenever events from the first book are important (and though the plots don’t connect, they often are) they’re explained very nicely, and the character of the lead is plenty clear here. All told, I would say that Songs of Innocence is the best Hard Case Crime offering that I’ve read in a very long time. It’s fast, suspenseful, profound, violent, witty, disturbing, and heartrending, all of which is packed together surprisingly well into a simple 256 pages. I suggest reading Little Girl Lost, but whether or not you do, read Songs of Innocence.

Well, if you don’t have a weak stomach, that is.