Blood and Mascara - Colin Krainin
I received a free review copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.
If you're familiar with my work in RPGs, and particularly the art direction of my game A Dungeon Game, you'll be entirely unsurprised that the cover art of this book attracted me immediately. Over the past year I've also discovered that I really, really enjoy crime thrillers, so once I read the description I knew I had to read this.
Here's the blurb:
Iris is watching Bronze. Bronze is following Carolyn. Carolyn is sleeping with Billy. Now Billy is dead and a killer is coming for them all.
Washington, DC, 1997:
A city stumbling toward recovery after a decade of violence, drugs, AIDS, and exodus. Bronze Goldberg—a soft-boiled private detective in a hard-boiled world—scrapes out a living stalking the steps of cheating spouses while bearing the trauma of the past like an open wound. But his latest assignment, surveilling the indiscretions of a stunning femme fatale, has entangled him in the murder of an up-and-coming congressman and made him the target of an unstoppable assassin. Meanwhile, the spiraling chaos of Bronze’s dangerous adventures has attracted the obsessive attention of his landlord, Iris Margaryan, a brilliant romance novelist who may hold the missing piece in the puzzle of Bronze’s fatal past. Can Bronze survive long enough to reach the ultimate truth?
A gripping noir mystery—both intensely provocative and darkly thrilling—Blood and Mascara descends into the depths of the human soul before exploding in an ending too shocking to ever forget.
The book starts slowly, taking its time to build the mood and introduce us to Bronze and the way he sees the world. The writing treads a very delicate line in trying to establish a grimy, noir-ish voice. For the most part I enjoyed the prose, but there were times when it threatened to tip into being overwritten and feeling like a pastiche of the genre rather than a sincere attempt at hard-boiled pulp fiction.
Thankfully this propensity towards over-writing mostly rears its head when Bronze is alone and contemplative, which most often occurs at the begininng of the novel. Once he starts to interact with other characters and take action the prose becomes a little more subdued and workman-like, and in the process it becomes much more assured and less self conscious. That's very much to the book's benefit.
What lets everything down a little is Krainin's approach to developing the mystery, which relies largely on simply not telling the reader the things the characters already know. Our cast talk in cryptic riddles, referring to events and information that they all know about but we haven't been told about yet, always talking around the point and never addressing things directly so that the reader is left feeling like we're constantly struggling to keep up. The information we're lacking is usually revealed sooner rather than later, which is one consolation, but this occlusion of context happens so regularly that I began to grow frustrated with it very quickly. Thankfully this is a problem reserved largely for the opening chapters of the book, and it begins to fall away once the pace picks up.
Another minor frustration is that the most compelling character in the book is one who's given the least page time. Iris is out protagonist's landlady, a successful romance writer who's trying to reinvent her career by writing in other genres and having a hard time of it. From the first page of her first chapter I wanted to spend more time with her, and as I got further into the book I longed for her chapters more and more. I would have happily read a novel entirely about Iris. The prose in Iris' chapters is much more relaxed, much less stylised than the rest of the novel, and as a result her voice is much clearer. The rest of the novel is well written but wants to be sure you're paying attention to how well written it is; with Iris, the words on the page melt away and it becomes a joy to spend time with her.
It's in these chapters, too, where the book seems to have the most fun with genre. Where the rest of the book is a fairly standard noiry mystery, Iris' chapters peel back the layers of fiction to talk directly about the sort of story we're telling. I'm reminded in these sections of books like Auster's New York Trilogy, Bradbury's Death Is A Lonely Business, and even sections of Calvino's ...if on a winter's night a traveler, and I wondered partway through whether the narrative was going to take a metatextual turn. It never does, and while "the book didn't go in the direction that I wanted it to go in" is not a valid criticism, Iris' chapters definitely pointed in that direction and I was disappointed not to see any pay-off from them.
All in all I enjoyed this. Blood and Mascara is Krainin's first adult novel, and it's a promising if uneven debut. It's certainly not perfect, but I enjoyed it and will likely keep an eye out for the author's next work.