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CITY OF DRAGONS
by Kelli Stanley
Minotaur Books, February 2010
352 pages
$24.99
ISBN: 0312603606


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Kelli Stanley appears to be a very ambitious historical time-traveller. Her debut novel, NOX DORMIENDA, was a noir thriller set in Roman Britain in the first century. This, also a noir fiction, takes place some 2000 years later in San Francisco, just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor would finally propel the United States into the Second World War. On the face of it, California, 1940, would seem to make more sense for a hard-boiled protagonist than Londinium, but then again, Stanley has taken on some formidable competition of the likes of Chandler, Hammett, and, especially in her case, Cornell Woolrich.

Her protagonist is hard-as-nails Miranda Corbie, thirty-three years old and an emotional train wreck looking for somewhere spectacularly to explode. She comes by her anger and her angst legitimately. Her father, a drunken English professor, abandoned her early; her stepmother might have learned parenting skills from Matilda Wormwood's mum and dad with an assist from the Brothers Grimm. She did a stint in Spain on the Republican side, where she witnessed the death of her lover, then home to San Francisco where she became, in turn, an escort working for a service supplying female companionship by the hour, an assistant in a detective agency specializing in divorce cases, and finally now a licenced private eye on her own. That's a lot for thirty-three years, even for someone who was conceived before the ground had stopped shaking in the 1906 earthquake.

Miranda's been working security at the San Francisco Fair on the newly-built Treasure Island, but that's not open at the moment so she is at loose ends. In the middle of the Rice Bowl Party, a Chinese New Year's celebration designed to raise funds for Chinese war relief, a Japanese numbers runner is shot dead virtually at her feet. When she is told by the cops to forget about it (look what the Japs are doing in China), she is outraged and embarks on an investigation that will lead her into the underside of San Francisco that the tourists seldom see.

CITY OF DRAGONS is evidently intended as the first in a series and it is a promising start. There are some problems, however. Miranda may be one tough broad, but she's one unlikeable one as well - subtle as a bag of bricks, humourless, and with an attitude that could shatter glass. Every cigarette she smokes is recorded as are the brands she lights up, and since this is 1940, you can imagine just how many times matches are struck. Though this is written in the third person, it is Miranda's voice that dominates and it is pitched very high. This is my major complaint - the tone does not vary, there is no variation in pitch, and after several hundred pages of staccato sentence structure, relieved only by outbursts of self-pity, I felt quite exhausted.

Certainly, Stanley's attempt to invent a noir heroine on the model of the great American private eyes of the thirties and forties is both inventive and ambitious. But if she hopes that Miranda Corbie can hold her own on the same stage as Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade, her creator should try dialling it all back a little. After all, those guys knew when to keep their mouths shut.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, February 2010

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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