My Thoughts
Another book club pick, and I tore through this one. We voted between this, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (which I really want to read), and Skippy Dies. I’d seen Man Carrying Thing recommend Five Decembers, but none of the mysteries I’ve read before have ever really landed with me. I grew up watching the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes series with my mom and loved it, but when I finally read some of the stories later in life they didn’t have the same magic. I’ve tried some Agatha Christie as well (I also watched lots of Poirot with my mom as a kid), and I could barely make it through Death on the Nile. A couple years ago, I decided to give hardboiled detective fiction a shot when a friend recommended Red Harvest. I struggled with this one too - I couldn’t keep track of who was doing what and why it mattered. All I remember is that the Continental Op didn’t seem like a real person. I was expecting my experience with Five Decembers to be pretty much the same, but with the added fun of a few weeks of texting and a book club meeting about it.
Turns out I was so invested in this book that I devoured the entire thing in a few days. The pacing was great, with a good balance of narration and dialogue and short, propulsive chapters with endings that made it very hard to put this down. Unlike previous mystery novels I’ve read, I didn’t find myself struggling to figure out why the events on the page were significant and what they revealed. Also, unlike the brilliant and aristocratic Sherlock Holmes and Poirot, Joe McGrady is a regular guy (to some degree - he’s a decorated retired Army officer) who repeatedly emphasizes the importance of the invisible and boring work that solves cases. I think there are three different scenes in the book where he goes into a poorly-lit archives room by himself and stays up all night going through filing cabinets. Instead of outsmarting the bad guys, he wins in the end by having a well-calibrated moral compass and a willingness to work hard over a longer period than his adversaries. Compared to the other hardboiled detectives I’m familiar with, I liked reading about Joe McGrady more because he’s written as an actual human instead of a world-weary stoic who insists on being a lone wolf. McGrady has a girlfriend that he wants to spend more time with, and he has a pretty good partnership with his fellow detective Fred Ball. Instead of rolling my eyes at what an emotionless hardo he is, I empathized with him and wanted things to slow down and get under control for his sake.
I think most people would guess from the cover of this book that it takes place during WWII - it’s done in a midcentury pulp style, and the background of the scene portrayed is full of what appear to be airplanes dropping bombs. That’s accurate, but McGrady is a retired soldier who doesn’t play a direct role in the war. I can’t think of any other novels I’ve read that use WWII as a backdrop like this without it being the focus. To be honest, I’m not really that interested in war novels so I was relieved it’s written this way. The war has major adverse impacts on McGrady’s life, but he’s not some tough guy super soldier going around killing Japanese officers and saving the day. In the end, it turns out that even though the motive for the murders that propel the plot was much more significant in scale than we initially realize, McGrady’s impact on events is pretty specific to his immediate small circle. He solves the crime, kills the bad guy who might have been helping former Nazis hide after the war (this is implied, so I think we’re supposed to assume it’s true), and goes to live with Sachi in an extremely remote village. He didn’t play a crucial role in a major battle or an intelligence operation, just successfully got his own life back together after it was torn apart over multiple years during his investigation.
I really enjoyed this book! Before reading it, I would’ve put P(me liking a mystery novel set in WWII) around 0.2, so clearly I don’t know my tastes as well as I thought I did. It’s a good reminder for me to keep trying to be open-minded about what I read and to include more exploration across genres.
Favorite Quotes
“A series of bulbs clinked on, one after another, illuminating the length of the room. The bulb directly over McGrady was burned out.”
Miscellanea
I think every woman he interacts with in this book (Molly, Sachi, Kate) wants to sleep with him. He’s kind of like a sad James Bond.
It felt to me like a key way the author made Captain Beamer unlikable (before we learn about his true nature) was to contrast his civilian status with McGrady’s as a veteran officer. There are a few parts where other characters show McGrady more respect than they do Beamer, and it makes us think it’s Beamer’s shame at not having served that makes him treat McGrady so poorly.