Hardcase by Bill Pronzini
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"The deputy was still alive: twitching a little now, moaning softly. [...] Shot once, in the back just above the right kidney. He'd lost a lot of blood already, the bright arterial kind."

I have recently reviewed Bill Pronzini's non-series novel The Other Side of Silence and quite liked it so I decided to return to his famous "Nameless Detective" series of which I had read two or three installments many years ago. Hardcase (1995) comes from about mid-period of the series and begins with a momentous event: the Narrator-Detective-Whose-Name-We-Will-Never-Learn-But-It-Is-Likely-Italian (let's call him ND) is marrying his girlfriend in San Francisco. The opening scenes are designed to be hilarious, but the comedic payoff is meager and the humor low-brow and quite cliché. Mercifully, the crime thread soon begins: a twenty-three-year-old woman, who works as a model, hires ND to find her real parents. She has just found out that she had been adopted.

The case takes ND to a small farm town near Lodi in Central Valley in California where he learns some gruesome facts from the past that are related to the case. We follow the interesting and fast plot through various places in the Bay Area and - for once - we have a somewhat believable dramatic twist towards the end. The Central Valley scenery is quite well captured.

The other thread of the plot focuses on ND attempting to hire a technology-savvy young assistant. Oh no, not another instance of the "teenager computer whiz" horrible cliché! But there is a cool angle on this. The assistant is a young female African-American student with attitude. The scene of their first meeting is realistic, well-written, and addresses issues of race so much better than the usual cloying, inept, and well-meant-but-counterproductive writing by authors like John Shannon.

While Hardcase is mainly an entertainment read it poses two serious questions. The first concerns the responsibilities of a private detective to their client. What obligation do they have to convey all gathered information to the client if - to the best of their judgment - the information will be harmful to the client? Do they have a right to "play God"? The second is perhaps a bit of my own personal peeve: were I adopted would I be so insistent on knowing who my biological parents were? I emphatically say "no" - does this make me not normal? Why do people need to know who their biological parents were?

There are shades of Ross Macdonald, one of my most favorite writers of all time, in Mr. Pronzini's novel. The prose, though, is not as accomplished as in best works by Macdonald: not as lyrical and not as economical. Still, the novel perfectly fits this website. It is a good read.

Three stars.


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