“Bear Is Broken: A Leo Maxwell Mystery”
Author: Lachlan Smith
Publisher: The Mysterious Press: An imprint of Grove/Atlantic
Pages: 256
Price: $24.00 (Cloth)
Since the early years of John Grisham, It has become a commonplace that attorneys write legal thrillers. Nothing new there. But few can have been as fully prepared for the job as Lachlan Smith.
Smith took a BA and MA at Stanford, where he was a Richard Scowcroft Fellow in the prestigious Wallace Stegner Writing Program, and followed these up with an MFA in fiction writing from Cornell.
THEN Smith decided on a career in law and graduated from UC Berkeley in 2009.
When his wife landed a job on the faculty at UA, Smith, a native Minnesotan, moved to Tuscaloosa. One of the streets in “Bear Is Broken” is Pinehurst Road, an homage, perhaps.
His training as a writer of literary fiction was first-rate and extensive, but it didn’t stick. Smith preferred genre fiction, more plot driven than literary fiction and rich in “atmospherics,” which in Smith’s case meant the atmospherics of California, especially San Francisco, the Bay Area, which he had fallen in love with personally and which is the spawning ground of many great detective/crime novels, most notably “The Maltese Falcon” (1929)by Dashiell Hammett with its unforgettable hero, the tough guy Sam Spade.
“Bear Is Broken,” partaking of the noir tradition, is set all over San Francisco: in seedy neighborhoods such as the Mission District, in the fog, at Seal Rock, and at the gated Presidio Terrace.
Spade was no lawyer, but Smith’s hero Leo Maxwell is, just barely. His license to practice law is brand new. Unlike Hammett’s Spade or Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, Leo is not cynical or tough but he does drink way too much. In the opening scene of “Bear Is Broken,” Leo and his older brother Teddy are having lunch when a would-be assassin in Giants’ cap, sunglasses and a heavy sweatshirt walks in and shoots Teddy in the head. It all happened so fast no one is sure if the attacker was male or female.
The police arrive and in a startling scene Anderson, a spectacularly hard-boiled detective, lets Leo know he’s not all that sorry Teddy has been shot. In a wonderfully vulgar outburst he maligns the dimensions of Teddy’s manhood and tells Leo what he’d like to do on Teddy’s grave.
For Teddy is a defense attorney who represents, as Anderson puts it, “the scum of the earth” and with horrible regularity has embarrassed the police, often exposing their incompetence and slipshod methods and sometimes their corruption. The SFPD hate Teddy with special vigor. They think he’s crooked—withholds evidence, suborns perjury—and deserves to be locked up himself.
As Smith offered in an interview, the general public , TV watchers and readers, have turned against the Perry Masons of the world, whose clients were always virtuous and innocent, and now side solidly with the police and DAs, perhaps because of the cultural dominance of shows like “Law and Order,” “NCIS,” “Castle,” “Major Crimes,” you name it.
With his brother in a coma, Leo must go to work.
There is a pending case of wife beating Leo must finish up, giving what would have been Teddy’s closing argument.
There is also pending a writ of habeas corpus to get a new trial for Lawrence Maxwell, Teddy and Leo’s father, who is in San Quentin serving life for killing their mother. Is Lawrence innocent? No one had thought so.
And the police happen to see a body being thrown into a dumpster at Candlestick Park. It turns out to be a Stanford professor named Marovich who has been doing research into what most would consider bizarre sexual practices in the SF area and who has “made a career writing sociological papers about his sex life.” He has probably died from autoerotic asphyxiation.
So many dead bodies.
Leo inherits a hard-bitten secretary, the ex-hooker Tanya, and a tough private investigator named Car, and quickly becomes involved with enough femmes fatales to field a women’s softball team, including Teddy’s ex, Jeanie, and Christine Locke, Marovich’s graduate student, who is researching prostitution for her thesis.
It is an iron rule that reviewers not reveal the secrets of crime novel plots. No problem. There are so many twists and reversals in Smith’s plot I could hardly keep it straight enough to summarize it. Leo, a fairly callow youth, is half in love with several of the female suspects and keeps changing his mind about who the Prime Suspect might be. The murders of Leo’s mom, Professor Marovich, and “a small Asian woman with bleached-blonde hair” named Martha and the shooting of Teddy all might be connected.
Or not.
Suffice it to say this debut novel is very accomplished and in the future Leo Maxwell novels, which I understand are forthcoming, Smith might consider keeping it simpler and have the reader just as hooked.
This review was originally broadcast on Alabama Public Radio. Don Noble is host of the Alabama Public Television literary interview show “Bookmark” and the editor of “A State of Laughter: Comic Fiction from Alabama.”
