Smutty books get a bad rap. That’s too bad because smut has keen insight into the temptations that ruin souls. The best of it is wisdom literature.
James Kestrel’s Five Decembers has both a smutty cover and a masterful story of evil and redemption. Like a blue moon, the book rises above the swamp of genre to achieve what most prudently dressed novels don’t: an artful rendering of how duty can save a person’s life.
Set in Honolulu, 1941, days before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Five Decembers follows Joe McGrady’s five-year investigation into a brutal double murder. The story advances like a detective novel—which it is—and turns into something more as McGrady, held prisoner for the length of the war (it’s a long story—432 pages in hard back), struggles to come to terms with what has happened to his home, his investigation, his life.
McGrady’s investigation takes him across the world and through the years. Crime scenes, autopsies, stake outs, shoot outs, Nazis, kidnappings, interrogations, sex, nukes, traitors, love letters, longing, whorehouses, passport offices, and more pile up on every page. It’s a police procedural, a war story, a cultural history, a thriller, a romance, a tourist’s guide to Honolulu. It’s everything. It’s too much. But so what? This book is awesome.
So’s the writing. Kestrel’s lean prose and cinematic eye makes an impossible story seem probable, even likely. Unlike imitators who pull on the skin of noir masters and shamble along in horrid pastiches, Kestrel inhabits a vintage style with naturalness and ease. Had he been writing in the 1930’s, he’d be remembered alongside Chandler and Hammett.
Maybe that’s saying too much, but I don’t think so. The literati who wrote off Chandler a hundred years ago would have poo-pooed Kestrel, and it’s the same kind of reader who today wouldn’t pick up Five Decembers because of its toxically masculine cover. (For people who don’t know, toxically masculine cover art is a key selling point of titles published by Hard Case Crime. Tawdry, skanky hand-painted covers of lewd, trashy men and women throw back to better days when book jackets were more than bolded typeface on decorative backgrounds.)
Five Decembers is a convincing period piece. By the third chapter, you can almost hear the big bands blaring goodbye to soldiers sailing to their death in the Pacific Theatre. The feel of the time and place alone make it a classic. But that’s not why this book should be treated as a classic. The real reason why Five Decembers deserves a second read—and no doubt one of the reasons it won the Edgar Award for Best Novel—rests in how it handles the theme du jour: identity.
Identity politics wreck everything, especially literature. Wander through a bookstore in 2022 and you’ll find piles of new books about people whose identities were covered, uncovered, discovered, or recovered through some trauma. The worst of these morality tales try to validate identity politics. It’s a Herculean task. Like black holes, identity politics flatten all nuance, all facets, and all dimensions of a person and turn everybody into cut-out characters. Novelists who flirt with the unforgiving politics of identity should expect to see the roundness of their characters ironed flat. Gravity will crush them. Escape is impossible.
But Kestrel pulls it off in Five Decembers. He blows up the black hole and releases all that fire. Joe McGrady loses his identity, but by the end of the novel, he’s cut with so many facets he’s sparkling.
McGrady’s made complex—and real—by his desire to fulfill his duty. It’s what makes him a more-than-Hollywood hero. He never quits his commitment to bring justice to the murdered. They will get what they are owed, and so will the killers, and by the book’s tense final chapter, McGrady will ask for what is owed to him, the interminable searcher.
Five Decembers, like many books in Hard Case Crime’s catalogue, repeats old wisdom about what’s worth reading. Just because something’s important and reviewed in the right journals, doesn’t mean it’s good. Just because something’s smutty looking, doesn’t mean it’s bad.
It might, in fact, be very good.
P.S. James Kestrel’s real name is Jonathan Moore. A lawyer by day, Moore has six other books to his name. Lots to read until the next Kestrel release.
Robert Grant Price is a university and college lecturer and writer. Expressed is an occasional mailing of essays, stories, and reviews.