Facing the Fear of Flying

a review by

Tim Trask

In his third Alex Rasmussen detective story, Goofy Foot, David Daniel told a tale of trouble in a town called "Standish," a fictional place in the neighborhood of America's home town, Plymouth.  In The Marble Kite, his fourth, Daniel has Rasmussen back on the mean streets of Lowell, MA, birthplace to a surprising number of celebrities whose names pop up in these texts like bad guys in an FBI shooting gallery. Lowell is also the birthplace of one real artist--Jack Kerouac--whose ghost lurks in shadows Kerouac himself spent much of his life trying to escape. Most of Lowell's residents seem unaware of Kerouac's presence as they toil and scheme through their daily lives, but Rasmussen carries Kerouac along with another erstwhile visitor to Lowell--Edgar Allan Poe.  Since Poe is credited with inventing the detective story, his presence, even if it's just for a stop at The Worthen for a casual lunch, provides some heft.

Even the title of the book suggests gravity, and one's first thought might be that a marble kite will never fly, but about eighty-five pages into the book, we learn (if we haven't guessed already) that "flying the marble kite" is a euphemism considerably more grim than the Salvation Army's "Promoted to Glory" or even than a more familiar generic one that also appears:  The Big Sleep.    

The story begins with Rasmussen attending a traveling carnival on his fourth date with a comely widow named Phoebe.  He's just about to impress her with a feat of strength at the old sledgehammer game when a scream wrecks his hammer swing and sets the mystery going.  A woman has been murdered, and the cops are both quick to round up the usual suspect--the victim's fiancé, a carnival barker named Troy Pepper--and eager to close the case.

Rasmussen is a PI who knows his genre.  He doesn't worry about the fact that he's a small operator in a city whose glory was over before the last century began.  He doesn't think about how he could sell more books for his creator were he to move to, say, Chicago or LA.  Like Hester Prynne, he stays in the place of his shame, the place where he was kicked off the police force, and ekes out a living playing bit parts for insurance companies while waiting for the better roles that come rarely to a small river city like Lowell, which has a national park, thanks to Paul Tsongas, and is home to some of the world's refugees and natives who, unlike Kerouac, Bette Davis, and Ed McMahon, never escaped the city's gravitational pull.  The badge of infamy Rasmussen wears is neither visible nor scarlet, but everyone knows it's there, and not a day goes by that he isn't reminded of it.  Alex Rasmussen is doing penance, and while I recall that earlier books have given the details of his supposed crime, I can't remember exactly what it was.  It doesn't seem to matter much.  His daily reality is that he's indelibly marked, and lesser characters abound who are always reminding him.  Even the geography of Lowell seems to conspire against Rasmussen, so he has to fight this public taint wherever he goes.

After love and death, perhaps the third great theme of literature is reality versus illusion, and that theme is really the central focus of any detective story.  Compared to what we call "great" literature, detective novels can't compete in the arenas of love and death.  Great love is out of the question in a world without trust, and in these stories, death is far too casual an event to attain tragic heights.  But when it comes to illusion and reality, detective stories have every bit as much to teach us as any other genre.  There's the public eye and the private I, and the job of that private self is to expose the weakness of the public view.  The public vision tends to be class bound, prejudiced, and in the service of the status quo.  Rare people like Spade, Holmes, Dupin, and Rasmussen protect all of us by exposing sources of evil that the public vision, including especially the police force hired to protect the middle class, sometimes seeks to hide.

In this story, Troy Pepper is pretty much a failure who has been given a third or fourth chance and doesn't seem to care whether or not he goes down.  All the evidence points to him, and the worst bit is that he won't even speak in his own defense.  He's no OJ Simpson, and his lawyer, the guy who hires Rasmussen to do some digging, is no Johnny Cochran (RIP).  This lawyer, a guy named Fred Meecham, eventually gives up on the suspect, abandoning both him and Rasmussen as the dangers become palpable to all concerned.  

Remember the case Perry Mason lost?  Neither do I, but before you try to guess what happens late in Daniel's complicated raveling called The Marble Kite, keep that possibility in mind.  The twists in the late stages of this book are more numerous than those at a sock hop in 1959.  Both Rasmussen and the reader are fed illusion after illusion, and the real story seems to defy explanation right up to the end of this latest book by David Daniel.

In any case, you won't regret the pleasurable few hours you spend eagerly flipping the pages to see how it finally shakes down.  Will Phoebe have what it takes to stand by her beleaguered hero?  Will she be replaced by a promising young cop named Jill Loftis?  Will Pop Sonders lose his carnival to a corporate takeover by a couple of gangsters?  Will Rasmussen finally have to fire the sawed-off shotgun that first appeared in Goofy Foot?

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