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This novel confirms that out of the many New Orleans mystery writers Greg Herren is indeed one to watch. He has two different private investigator series: the Chanse MacLeod series, which now consists of five novels, and the Scotty Bradley series, of which this is the fourth. So far the two private investigators have not crossed paths (though the long-suffering NOPD Detective Venus Cassanova and her partner Blaine Tujague show up in both). Each series is narrated by its respective detective, both are dark, but because of the differences in personality the Scotty Bradley series seems more light-hearted. Scotty is ebullient, boisterous, bolstered by his being psychic, under the protection of the Goddess (as he addresses her), in a committed relationship, and supported by his parents and two siblings — unlike the more dour MacLeod, a loner who fled his home. Each of the four novels occurs in a very tight time period during a New Orleans gay holiday: Southern Decadence, Halloween, Mardi Gras, and now the Gay Easter Parade. The first three novels deal entirely with issues relevant to the Crescent City, though the third one introduces international machinations. The present one, albeit set entirely in the city, concerns solely international intrigue. In 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War, three American soldiers ended up somehow in the (fictional) Himalayan theocracy of Pleshiwar. There they stole a sacred blue sapphire, the Eye of Kali, from a temple to the goddess. Whoever restores the stone will earn the unbounded gratitude of the Pleshiwarian government, a matter of no little importance to international stability since it turns out that the country possesses massive deposits of uranium of "a particular geological purity [that] can easily be enriched." All the evidence leads several groups searching for the stone to conclude that one of the soldiers has taken it to New Orleans for safe-keeping. The plot — the theft of a sacred jewel that has been hidden away — is lifted, of course, from Wilkie Collins's THE MOONSTONE (1868), famously praised by T.S. Eliot as "the first and greatest of English detective novels." One of the joys of Herren's work is his fondness of referencing earlier literature. One of his novels opens with an homage to du Maurier's REBECCA; another uses Tennessee Williams's dramatic probing to clear up a murder, SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER, for Herren's own ends. To give the wink to his readers here, the soldier who brings the jewel to New Orleans is named Benjamin Moon. And one of the persons in search of the jewel (a point that fans could easily miss since he is a recurring character) is named Colin. Scotty comes to realize that not only does he know who Moon is, but that he may in fact have in his possession the key to where the jewel is hidden: a set of ingenious riddles left him by the murdered man to solve. Many other searchers, friendly and murderous, come to the same conclusion. The body count mounts, and the detective's own family and friends fall into danger. Scotty's partner is away until almost the end, and he no longer trusts a former confident, so he works largely alone. The tension also mounts. But Scotty's psychic gift, which deserted him after personal and natural betrayals (the latter in the form of Katrina), returns, and the education of Scotty's heart moves to a new level of understanding. By the way, regardless of Scotty's belief in a goddess, the "voodoo" involved in the case has nothing to do with a cult; rather the alliterative title seems more akin to Cole Porter's lyric "Do do that voodoo that you do so well." Like all good novels, this one may be read on its own. But since Scotty's story evokes stronger emotions in readers than do those of most fictional detectives, I would advise a new reader to search out the earlier novels and read them in order. RTE has reviewed all three: BOURBON STREET BLUES (2003), the extraordinarily well-crafted JACKSON SQUARE JAZZ (2004), and the heart-wrenching MARDI GRAS MAMBO (2006). One can follow Scotty's rather unconventional love life and his growth from a somewhat callow, unfocused hedonist to a more mature hedonist (the term is not necessarily negative) who begins to accept responsibilities and obligations of all kinds. I am being deliberately vague about what happens to Scotty on the personal level in this novel because the plot twists here are more surprising for readers of the whole series than are the plot twists in the jewel case itself. Herren has been very open in his blogs about the reasons behind the four-year hiatus between the third and the fourth novels. Hurricane Katrina, following hard on a horrible mugging that Herren's partner suffered and a vicious attack from the religious right over the author's proposed appearance in Virginia, threw his personal and literary life off course. When he informed Kensington, his publisher for the Scotty Bradley series, that he would not be able to deliver the next manuscript on deadline, the press's marketing division advised dropping the series on the bizarre grounds that fans would lose interest in the interval. (Chandler once went six years between novels; Christie went ten in her Miss Marple series.) Possibly for that reason, Herren felt compelled to begin the present novel with a long "Preamble" that sums up the first three novels. I would advise readers old and new to skip it until they finish the novel and begin instead with page 27. Everything one needs to know is in the novel proper. § Drewey Wayne Gunn, Professor Emeritus at Texas A&M University-Kingsville, is author of THE GAY MALE SLEUTH IN PRINT AND FILM (2005) and editor of THE GOLDEN AGE OF GAY FICTION (2009), a collection of essays, including his own "Down These Queer Streets a Man Must Go," and a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and a Benjamin Franklin Award.
Reviewed by Drewey Wayne Gunn, May 2010
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