Readers Up #41: Saratoga Headhunter

Well, here we are again.

Here is New York's Capital Region in the midst of the Saratoga meet, and also the midst of a stormy, fiery, uncertain summer. The American Northeast has been beset with poor air quality from Canadian wildfires, interspersed with flooding across the hill counties, leavened only by sunny humidity I haven't felt since leaving Florida. Climate change, the great equalizer! At least the steady mix of sun and rain has exploded every tree, hedge, and vine into glorious deep-July color.

Summer is Saratoga's busiest season, and also mine. Public libraries are a year-round business, much like racing; the summer brings an intense slate of youth programming that mirrors the beehive of betting, boozing, and behatted gossip currently taking place in the Spa. In my work-drained summer stupor, I admit I've mostly been paying attention to Toga via Charles Simon's very good newsletter, Going In Circles (as Twitter draws an X across the drain, I hope newsletters will finally get the interest they deserve. Ask me about my favorite newsletters! Dave, please send a newsletter at your convenience!!). However, a serendipitous item in one of my neighborhood's free bookshelves provided a rainy afternoon's amusing read and a meandering road north, emotionally: Saratoga Headhunter by Stephen Dobyns, the third entry into the author's Charlie Bradshaw series of detective novels.

I'm a little cursed where American detective novels are concerned, as one of my close friends is a private investigator and I now know more than I would have ever expected about modern investigatory work. Hint: it's not glamorous and doesn't make for sexy detective fiction. However, Saratoga Headhunter gets around this by being set in a completely opaque year--Dobyns gives few clues in terms of technology or culture as to just when our man Charlie is going about his hapless business. And it is hapless! Everything is always coming up Millhouse for Mr. Bradshaw. A former Saratoga police officer, he appears to have bumbled his way into private investigation a few books back without much backstory or display of skill spent to explain why, for new readers. His mother is an inveterate gambler, his best friend and co-detective a horny hot mess with a cat named Moshe (Victor Plotz, you're my favorite and you have never done anything wrong). He's driving someone else's milk route as a favor (fun fact: Toga-area farms like King Brothers Dairy still do home milk delivery). His girl inexplicably wears leotards to her bartending job. Worst of all, a former jockey he doesn't even like shows up to crash on the couch in the wake of a race-fixing scandal, and gets murdered to boot. Since Charlie is mobbed up--that is, he swims at the Y with an Italian restaurant owner--assorted clueless cops and Feds like him for the murder. Naturally, Charlie has to clear his name.

The book is larded with references sure to charm local readers--Caroline Street pubs, Congress Park ducks, a Glens Falls dentist, the harness track. It's also intriguingly constructed. Despite its setting and set-up, there are vanishingly few Thoroughbred details, and no live jockeys. Dobyns, an Iowa Workshop grad, seems unconcerned with pace; I suppose he's in good company there. Three-quarters of the book is from Charlie's perspective, and then chapters from Victor's begin popping up with no warning. A curious motif of Jesse James facts is sprinkled throughout, apparently to frame Charlie's worldview, which bears no resemblance to outlaw masculinity. Nor is Dobyns a prose stylist of note, although he's taught at Syracuse University, Sarah Lawrence, and other colleges you've heard of. The exposition is heavy, the action understated, with murders, car bombings, and handcuffings all described dispassionately and in as few sentences as possible. Published in 1985, the character names bear a distinctive late-century ugliness: Rodger Pease, Maximum Tubbs, Willis Stitt. The sentences are workmanlike, until they're not. The descriptions of Saratoga environs on the cusp of autumn are especially beguiling, and made me homesick--not for the sweat and pound of a track town in its season, but for its silence afterward.
 

[Charlie] expected that beneath her calm, she was something of a fanatic: the kind of person who in another life would have been a martyr or poet.

I did feel extremely called out by this minor character, Artemis, a horse dancer who makes up a character in her head and then dresses to fit the bit. At any rate, if you stumble upon a Charlie Bradshaw mystery in your neighborhood free bookshelf, might as well! A small, undemanding paperback is just the thing to read between races at the paddock fence. 

Now for a different sort of small, undemanding paperback. If you follow me on Twitter (don't bother) or Instagram (slightly more life left in this boy, I suspect), you might be aware that I had a book out this month. Little Nothing is the story of a Weird Horse Girl and her long-suffering seamstress girlfriend, assorted carnivorous water horses, and some Confederates. It's a novella-length entry in my continuing love letter to the beautiful, violent, complicated, worthy state that made me. Since it begins with a horse race and its protagonist is a jockey, among other horsey pursuits, it's more in line with this newsletter's concerns than Saratoga Headhunter (sorry, Stephen). Maybe someday I will do an interview with myself about it. You can order a copy from the publisher or IndieBound, if you have an indie bookstore you like to support. And you can get a free peek at the first three chapters right here!

If you're in town for the Spa meeting, you can find me and my cover illustrator at Schenectady's Open Door Bookstore on Sunday 8/20 for a signing. Jay Street and the Sunday Greenmarket are great pre-gaming for a Sunday at the races. However you're spending your summer, wherever you're placing your money, may the air be clear and the horses and riders come home safe.

Yours along the Mohawk,
Diana