“Chase Harlem” is a charming, engaging debut novel, the first in what will surely be a successful series. Successful crime novels, I think, have some basic components. One of these is setting. Classic noir novels are urban, originally in foggy places like the waterfront of San Francisco. Brown’s private eye operates in New Orleans. It is a wonder more novels aren’t set there.
The city has style, color, restaurants and bars, classy and seedy. The sidewalks are awash in the smells of chicory and beignets and the sounds of jazz. There are citizens of many backgrounds, colors and accents and although it is a party town, God knows, it is also a mildly dangerous place where you want to pay attention to your surroundings.
A new crime novel profits from a new kind of detective and Chase Harlem, private investigator, is a marvelous creation. She is a small woman, teaches self-defense classes and always carries a little pistol. Chase lives in a 360-square-foot apartment so small her bedroom and shower are on a little balcony and her “office,” a desk and two chairs, is under the stairs.
Chase has no car, barely makes enough money to pay her rent, and has been fired from the FBI where she was a successful profiler until a case went tragically, traumatically wrong and she sank into depression and became an alcoholic. We learn her secret in bits. Chase also keeps a ferret named Louis – after Louis Armstrong. The ferret appears in many scenes, like it or not.
A good crime novel needs a strong opening scene. Chase Harlem is confronted on the sidewalk by a man she has been investigating for embezzlement. A former bodybuilder, he wields what she calls a “ridiculously small” knife. Instead of using her “years of self-defense training to disarm… and incapacitate him,” Chase simply “tased him in the neck.” “He landed on the hot asphalt in a convulsing heap, smelling slightly of burnt flesh and mostly of urine.”
She then goes home to find waiting for her a mysterious man, in a gray hoodie, who turns out to be a priest, who hires her to investigate a double homicide. At a Halloween masquerade party the LSU star quarterback was murdered and his girlfriend died that same night, presumably from a drug overdose. The backup quarterback, Jeremy Lackey, who would now be a big “Name, Image, Likeness” winner, has been arrested and the priest is positive Lackey, his son, is innocent. (He explains he had not always been a priest.)
Although she normally avoids cases involving violence, Chase investigates with the help of her policeman friend Matt Burke, her Cajun ex-con boyfriend Deuce and an odd ensemble of friends and neighbors. We follow her through frat parties, five-star hotels, dive bars with the world’s best po’ boys, all the while getting a backstage tour of a lot of New Orleans.
