Memorial Day by Harry Shannon
Five Star Press, 2004
trade hardcover
For those of you who have read Shannons previous novels,
Night of the Beast and Night of the Werewolf, it will come as
no surprise that his latest novel crackles with the same brittle dialogue and
muscular prose hes been honing over the past few years. What might
surprise you is that Memorial Day isnt a horror novel at
least, not in the commercial/marketing sense.
Memorial Day is very much a noir mystery novel,
and with only a few minor bumps along the way, Shannon makes the kind of smooth
transition between genres that most writers can only dream about. Reading like
a cross between Larry McMurtrys The Last Picture Show and Raymond
Chandlers The Little Sister, the novel tells the story of psychologist/television
celebrity Mick Callahan, who, as the novel opens, has hit rock bottom thanks
to booze, drugs, women, and his own out of control ego. With nothing left and
nowhere to go, he accepts a job hosting a radio talk show in his home town of
Dry Wells, Nevada. One of the callers to whom he speaks one night is murdered,
and Mickwho made his reputation on television partly by investigative
reportingtakes it upon himself to track down the murderer.
Fairly straightforward, traditional mystery elements, yes,
but what makes Memorial Day stand apart from the majority of first mystery
novels is Shannons unflinching, lean, and unsentimental portrayal not
only of Callahan, but of all the characters who populate Dry Wells. Not only
is Callahan trying to get his life back on track, not only is he dealing with
a truckload of guilt carried over from his previous life, not only does he make
enemies out of seemingly most of Dry Wells population, but hes also
dealing with memories of his own abusive childhood that are being brought to
the surface as his investigation uncovers tawdry secret after tawdry secret.
These are a lot of character elements to deal with in a
novel; that Shannon not only grapples with these elements but resolves
them and does so in a tight 266 pages but he also draws fully
three-dimensional characterizations for everyone in Dry Wells that Callahan
comes into contact with. No easy feat, and one cannot help but applaud Shannons
craftsmanship.
Which is not to say that everything is on solid ground;
there are times when a line of dialogue comes off as self-consciously noir-ish ("You might as well paint a target on your forehead", "This towns
got a lot of dirty little secrets", "You move, you die" etc.),
one very important clue is delivered in too-obvious manner, and in the final
third of novel, Callahan suffers one brutal beating after another, only to quickly
recover and come back for more.
But these are, in the end, minor quibbles that do not adversely
affect the overall strength and readability of Memorial Day; at best,
they reduce a **** novel to ***1/2.
With Memorial Day, Shannon has made a strong and
memorable mystery debut. Mick Callahan has the makings of a fascinating series
character in the traditional of Ed Gormans Sam McCain or Andrew Vachss
Burke. Personally, I think its high time we had a new series character
like Callahan, and a new mystery writer as skillful as Shannon. Even if mystery
is not your usual cup of tea, I still highly recommend Memorial Day.