Lots of Lunch Meat

By John Skow

THE DEATH OF THE DETECTIVE

by MARK SMITH 596 pages. Knopf. $8.95.

At the outset, a wealthy and evil man named Farquarson lies dying in his mansion in Lake Forest, Ill. Years ago he railroaded his redundant wife into a mental institution, where she had a son by another inmate. Said inmate, a violent man named Helenowski, vowed deadly vengeance on the world. As the novel begins he has escaped and is busy killing people.

Farquarson telephones a middle-aged detective named Arnold Magnuson. A widower, full of regretful guilt and woe, Magnuson wants to atone for his life by catching the criminal. He roars about Chicago and its suburbs in an antique Duesenberg, arriving at the scene of murder after murder too late to do anything except get blood on his shoes. Over and over again, and very well, the author describes the Duesenberg, describes the rush of night driving, the murders, the blood and Magnuson's florid mental state.

Though the plot is like a Ross Macdonald garden of sin buried and retribution delayed, the book resembles a conventional detective story only when Mark Smith's whim turns to parody. Like the two dozen other fully drawn figures who crowd the story, Detective Magnuson seems something less than real, and neither the reader--nor the author--is sure just how seriously to take him.

Author Smith also offers two baroque subplots, one involving the lost identity of Mrs. Farquarson's son, now grown to adulthood and doubt, and the other an entirely self-contained gangster movie. They are irrelevant but great fun to read--a fragment of boozy conversation in a bar or a bedroom, a Polish picnic with a cast of thousands, a gangland execution in which the 400-lb. guest of honor is carted to a packinghouse and recycled as lunch meat.

Smith, 38, is an associate professor of English at the University of New Hampshire and the father of four daughters. His large and eccentric melodrama is marked by lavish skill at doing what novelists always need to do--write scenes, weave narrative threads, hatch and construct characters, see and smell and feel and describe. Good sentence piles upon good sentence until the novel sags and cracks. What it sorely needs is a blue pencil and an artistic point of view.

qed John Skow

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.