The Late Candidate, by Mike Phillips

Retrieved from: ILL from Mount Prospect PL
0312048661, 1990
Suggested by: The List
My Ratings: 9 Merit, 9 Interest, 9 Fun

I had read Phillips' first novel, Blood Rights, soon after it was released 15 years ago. I still clearly remember the impact it had on me, and I'm finally getting back to reading the rest of his books. They are formula mystery fiction, but the man can write!

One of the reason I think genre fiction is so popular (and fun) is that there are two types of people in these stories.

1. Some people you recognize immediately, either because they are 'you' or because you just feel comfortable around them--you know them. They're old friends from the moment you read about them. I'm thinking Kinsey Millhone (Grafton) here.
2. Then there are the folks that you don't know, probably don't want to know, but who are 'interesting' for some reason: bohemian, intense, scary...whatever. They are recognizable but they don't fit in the reader's calm, rational (hah!) life. Here I'm thinking of Matt Scudder (Block).

And of course, in mysteries, there are also Bad Guys. The reader knows there is a killer, presumably Bad and Evil--after all, even if the dead guy 'deserved it' someone had to pull the trigger or feed him arsenic. The Bad Guys wear a costume in which they look like 1s, or even like 2s, and they make the reader wonder which 1 (or 2) is just pretending to be normal.

That's the whole conceit. If you know who the bad guy is from page one, there's not much mystery, is there? (Having said that, there are some very good mysteries in which the reader sees the killer at the very beginning; those are less formulaic and much more tricky to write, I'd think.) So it's all about who is lying about what. And as we all know, we're all lying about something, so it becomes a matter of which lies/exaggerations/omissions are lethal.

The joy in reading Mike Phillips is that all the characters are both 1s and 2s, and many of them are capable of being Bad and Evil, even though most of them are quite courteous in a very British way.

The London in these books is not Tourist London. It's the mid-suburbs, not the edges of the city where the houses and gardens are immense, but the 3rd or so ring around. These are villages that became "London" about a century or so ago, losing their character perhaps but not their layout and look. It's where successive generations of immigrants have come to settle before their upwardly mobile kids move elsewhere.

The story is about a local councilman found murdered in his car. His childhood friend begins to investigate the murder after a college-age boy is arrested on no evidence but skin color--the dead man is also black, and there are accusations that the police want to make it a black-on-black crime and sweep it under the rug.

The underlying theme of the book is cheating of every kind imaginable, from cheating on a spouse/lover to financial fiddles. It's complicated and dense and somewhat claustrophobic. These are not characters I'm likely to meet in my suburban/rural midwestern American town, but they are real people who make thoughtless mistakes and have a deep personal history which doesn't necessarily revolve around the case in point. When I read about them, I can hear them in my head, arguing and living and talking.