Queenpin -- Megan Abbott

It’s taken me a while to get around to reading this book, but I’m certainly glad I did. Many of you have probably already read QUEENPIN, Megan Abbott’s third novel. For those who haven’t, it’s the story of a young woman (whose real name we never learn, unless I just missed it somehow), who’s working as a bookkeeper in a sleazy, mob-connected strip joint when she becomes the protégé of an older woman who has spent twenty years working for organized crime as a courier and money launderer. Our narrator takes to the work with a minimum of fuss or mental anguish and becomes good at it, but then, wouldn’t you know it, she meets the wrong guy – a handsome gambler who always seems to be just one bet away from the big score – and Things Go to Hell.

When you just read the bare bones of that plot, it’s easy to say that QUEENPIN is something of a gimmick book: taking a standard, Gold Medal-type noir plot and inverting it so that the protagonist is female instead of male. Funny thing is, when you actually read the book you don’t really get that sense at all because Abbott is so good at creating characters and dragging you along with them as things get worse and worse. The setting of this one isn’t quite as well defined as it is in her other two novels; maybe it’s set in the Fifties, like DIE A LITTLE and THE SONG IS YOU, or maybe it’s the early Sixties, but either way it’s emphatically Not Now. The world of race tracks and night clubs through which the narrator moves is vividly rendered, and the dialogue that could have sounded like a parody of that era comes across as real and natural.

What it comes down to is that Megan Abbott is just a damned fine writer. Short, fast, and mean, like good noir fiction is supposed to be, QUEENPIN is her best book yet, and it’s easily one of the best novels I’ve read this year. (And as usual with her books, it has a great cover.)

The Song is You -- Megan Abbott

In discussing the slam-bang pace of Gil Brewer’s THE VENGEFUL VIRGIN the other day, I mentioned that some authors prefer to take a more deliberate approach. Megan Abbott falls into that category. Her stories unfold at a leisurely, nuanced pace, rich with characterization and detail and plot twists. Her excellent second novel, THE SONG IS YOU, strikes a near-perfect balance between those elements.

This book was inspired by the real-life disappearance of actress Jean Spangler in 1949, and historical characters appear throughout the story, interacting with Abbott’s fictional creations as her protagonist, movie publicist Gil “Hop” Hopkins, tries to find out what really happened to Spangler. Hop finds more than he bargained for, including connections between his own life and that of the missing woman that he never dreamed existed. His search is that of the classic hardboiled hero looking for the truth, even though he knows he may not like what he finds. Many of the scenes strike the same chords as the classic black-and-white film noirs; you can almost see the rain glistening on the streets and hear a saxophone wailing. Yet Abbott manages to put her own distinct spin on the proceedings, so that she’s not just imitating what has gone before. The fact that she’s one of the best in the business at structuring sentences certainly helps.

At times in Abbott’s first novel, DIE A LITTLE, I thought she went a little overboard with the period trappings, but that’s not the case here. The plot in THE SONG IS YOU took a couple of twists I wasn’t expecting and one major one that I was. But even though I anticipated the ending, it was still very effectively done. As good as DIE A LITTLE is -- and it’s very good -- THE SONG IS YOU is better all around. I recommend it highly.

And I’m really looking forward to reading Abbott’s new one, QUEENPIN.

Die a Little -- Megan Abbott

I really think that you have to be in the right mood for a book, that sometimes no matter what the author does, a story or a style isn’t going to resonate with this particular reader at this particular moment. Which brings me to Megan Abbott’s debut novel, DIE A LITTLE. Having heard a lot of good things about this book, I gave it a try months ago, read about twenty pages, didn’t care for it, and put it back on the shelf. But something kept telling me that this is the sort of book I usually like, so I gave it another try, and I’m glad I did. This time I raced right through it and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Set in Los Angeles in the mid-Fifties, it’s the story of schoolteacher Lora King and her brother Bill, who’s a detective for the district attorney’s office. Lora and Bill are very close -- too close for siblings, some reviewers said, but I’m not sure I agree with that. I think Abbott is just capturing a different era, a time when adult siblings could live together with no hint of sexual suspicion and, indeed, nothing improper going on. But either way, the ties between Lora and Bill are strong enough so that when Bill falls in love with and marries a woman named Alice Steele, you know that change in the status quo is going cause some serious repercussions. And by the end of the book, boy, does it, as Lora starts investigating Alice’s background and discovers a lot of dark and dangerous secrets that lead to people doing things they thought they never could, resulting in a fusion of domestic drama and noir crime novel that works really well.

Lora narrates this book in the present tense, a style I usually don’t care for, but between this book and Sara Gruen’s WATER FOR ELEPHANTS I’m starting to like it a little better. I still think the story is awfully slow to develop and the first half of the book is too laden with period details, but once Abbott has everything established the second half goes by at a much faster pace, galloping along to an ending that’s not really surprising but still quite effective.

After starting this book and not liking it, I also picked up Abbott’s second novel, THE SONG IS YOU (couldn’t resist the cover), but didn’t get very far in it, either. After reading DIE A LITTLE, though, I’ll definitely be giving THE SONG IS YOU a second chance, too.