HOW TO HUG A BEAR

One brilliant writer I know who used to be a major sports columnist keeps telling me he has two novels in mind. This is someone who wrote four smart, densely literate columns a week at a minimum of 1,000 words each, for years. Try it some time, it ain't easy. After Rupert Murdoch bought the paper he worked for, he decamped to Hollywood and became a top TV writer-producer. But he has yet to write those novels. When I ask him why, he says it's because novels are the toughest test of literary merit.

Which brings me to Henry Kisor, another writer I know, whose first mystery novel, "Season's Revenge," is just out. I finished reading it the other night in one pleasurable gulp, and I have to agree that even a genre novel is some kind of test -- maybe the toughest test.

Kisor has been good before. As a journalist he's been a Pulitzer Prize finalist in criticism. As a non-fiction author, he's written "Zephyr: Tracking a Dream Across America" and "Flight of the Gin Fizz: Midlife at 4,500 Feet." I especially loved his memoir, "What's That Pig Outdoors?," about how he grew up deaf with hearing parents and how he made both his life and career in the hearing world.

Modest to a fault, he recently told an interviewer: "The tools of a mystery writer are very much like those of a journalist except that journalists of course can't invent things, while mystery writers must."

For "Season's Revenge," about the murder of an eccentric millionaire in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Kisor invented an unusual mystery-novel hero: Deputy Sheriff Steve Martinez, who shares something of the author's outsider status. He's a man caught between cultural identities. Martinez isn't deaf, but he is a Native American of Lakota descent who was adopted by white missionaries and who grew up in a white world. Martinez doesn't usually think of himself as Native American until he's reminded by others, largely because of his looks and their prejudices.

Kisor's development of that theme in Martinez's dual sense of himself, along with the rich detail he brings to the story, sets "Season's Revenge" apart. It not only creates the sort of suspense that kept me turning pages, it paints an authentic portrait of life in rural America. Kisor also inserted the subplot of a budding romance, rather deftly handling the sex, and entertained me with a lot of natural lore about bears in the northern woods (especially whether a bear can be used as a murder weapon).

In fact, there are so many colorful characters living in fictional Porcupine County that I didn't want to let them go. I wished I could stick around after the mystery was solved just to see what happens to them. Apparently Kisor had the same idea. He says he's planning a series of Porcupine County mystery novels with Martinez at the heart of them and is already onto the next one.

October 28, 2003 1:29 AM |

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Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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