"Private Midnight"
(Reviewed by Leland Cheuk MAR 14, 2009)
“All the smells and feels of Wetworld came back. Sailors and cradle robbers—the girls appearing like hastily planted flowers. Runaways from Spokane…rebel daughters from some Main Street in the Midwest. Strippers past their use-by-date trying to hide their wrinkles.
Then out of the blue neon one summer night, there’d suddenly be this lap dance mirage. A new twilight-blonde mink with jackknife legs and marzipan boots—eyes like bits of bashed-in mirror. I slipped the peculiar card in my pocket and turned on the ignition, feeling like I’d been asleep for a hundred years.
Still, some things never change. Mondays are such damn lonely days.”
This is the razor-sharp, world-weary voice of Detective Birch Ritter, the narrator of Kris Saknussemm’s crime-noir thriller Private Midnight. The book is a departure for Saknussemm, whose first novel, Zanesville, was a metafictional amusement park jam packed with would-be Messiahs, omnipotent corporations and lots and lots of explosions. Private Midnight is a character-driven piece of genre fiction that has much more depth than other books in the category, sparked by Saknussemm’s lean sentences and crystalline observations of a debauched Los Angeles.
The novel starts off like many noir thrillers. Ritter investigates the suicide of a real estate magnate, who evidently doused his Mercedes with gasoline and blew himself up after leaving his estate to his trophy wife and disinheriting his grown children. During the investigation, Ritter is introduced to a beautiful and mysterious woman named Genevieve Wyvern who seems to know his past better than she should. All sounds pretty familiar at this point. Could be an episode of CSI or Law and Order. But Saknussemm, true to his genre-subverting reputation, doesn’t let the reader off so easy.
The suicide investigation turns out to be a launching pad into a surreal, sexy, and at times grotesque world of bondage and hyperreality as well as an exploration into Ritter’s shadowy past. Ritter can’t stay away from Wyvern and soon, she is implicated in a larger conspiracy that makes the Los Angeles criminal underworld look like Disneyland.
While the plot never quite takes off, hinting rather than resolving Wyvern’s role in the central premise of the book, it’s Ritter’s rich backstory and character development combined with Saknussemm’s muscular prose that carries Private Midnight, even for readers who can’t quite stomach the kinky sex. With his trademark capriciousness restrained and his imagination disciplined and purposeful, Saknussemm has delivered his most mature work of fiction to date.
- Amazon readers rating:
from 4 reviews
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Bibliography: (with links to Amazon.com)
- Zanesville (October 2005)
- Private Midnight (March 2009)
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Book Marks:
- Official website for the Kris Zaknussemm
- MostlyFiction.com review of Zanesville
- Vampire Books review of Private Midnight
- Largehearthed Boy note on Private Midnight
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About the Author:
Kris Saknussemm grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area but has for a long time lived abroad, in the Pacific Islands and Australia. A painter and sculptor as well as a writer, his fiction and poetry have appeared in such publications as The Hudson Review, The Boston Review, The Antioch Review, New Letters and ZYZZYVA.
He has been a resident at the MacDowell Colony and is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
He divides his time between a rural property in the old goldfields region outside Melbourne and the West Coast of America.
