The
Last Refuge: A Tale of Money and Murder in the Hamptons, by
Chris Knopf.
The Permanent Press, 289 pp., $26.
The good news,
the publishers say, is that Chris Knopf’s
The Last Refuge will not be the last of Sam Acquillo, the
50-ish, hard-drinking, ex-amateur boxer, and MIT-trained ex-engineer,
now loner and reluctant hero of Knopf’s noir first novel.
The better news is that this tale of “money and murder
in the Hamptons” is sexy—witty, understated, sensual,
mischievous, and fun, and boasting a Bogart-like protagonist
who attracts women,
elicits the admiration of men, and has proved his humanity
by having adopted Eddie, an affectionate mixed breed, with
whom he enjoys
one-way sardonic conversations. That Sam has emerged likable,
if ornery, is amazing (even to him), considering his childhood
(“My
dad wasn’t a nice guy. He was a real bastard actually
. . . an active racist, like all the people of [his] generation”;
his decision to walk away from a powerful and lucrative position
as a division head because his company’s lack of ethics
sickened him; and his subsequent poisoned divorce from his
social-climbing,
materialistic wife who turned their daughter against him.
When the book opens, Sam is living in a built-by-hand
cottage “at
the tip of Oak Point on Little Peconic Bay in the Town of
Southampton,” on
9/10ths of an acre his father bought in the mid `40s for
$560. He drives a `67 Pontiac Grand Prix and is mercilessly
direct in
his assessment of people and things, especially Summer People,
with their “encroachment of Post-Modernism and German
cars, seeping out of the estate district and spreading out
like the brown
tide across the neighborhood.” Sam knows that the area
in which he lives “is a little like a guy in a cheap
suit accidentally invited to a gallery opening,” but
he grew up here, with a “persistent breeze that could
suddenly snap into hysteria and the smell of rotting sea
life at low tide.” The style
proves the writer in Chris Knopf—the shrewd analogy
to art, the absolute rightness of the verb “snap” and
the rhythmic flow of the last two phrases. Later on in the
book, Sam is ruminating
on his ex-firm’s counsel whom he liked, a guy with
a sense of humor, “which meant he had a little perspective
and imagination.” As
much could be said, if not more, for Sam and the author who
created him.
Knopf, whose credits include writing award-winning
copy for a major ad agency, cabinet making, house design,
and playing
bass
has fashioned
in The Last Refuge a taut tale that features The East End
as much as various characters, mostly locals. These include
hot-stuff
dipsy
Sag Harbor lawyer Jackie Swaitkowski, with her mini skirts
and marijuana, and a pathological kid who instinctively hates
and
brawls but winds up impressed by Sam: “You’re
some kind of strange f-----.” “Glad you noticed,” Sam
shoots back, “It usually takes people longer to figure
that out.” Knopf
knows his way around dark Bonacker bars but also the world
of Wall Street movers and shakers whom he deflates in fine
gnomic style “Big
corporations are like gas giants—huge swirling balls
of toxic, overheated gas held together by gravity, and controlled
by a form
of planetary tectonics that forces the entire mass into endless
cycles of expansion and collapse. The energy unleashed throws
off institutional debris that recombines as tiny sub-spheres
of frantic
activity. They drift free for a while before getting snagged
by the gravitational field and sucked back into the body
of the organization.
But along the way there was always the danger that one of
them would call you on the phone.”
Despite his intention
to avoid people and “deadly threats,
like human kindness and affection,” Sam Acquillo Gets
Involved. A foul smell one night leads him to check on his
elderly, cantankerous
neighbor, whom he finds dead in her bathtub. That’s
OK for the police at first, but Sam knows the old broad took
only showers.
A murder mystery should be plot-lite in review, but entertaining
and suspenseful as it is, The Last Refuge is not distinguished
by its narrative so much as by excellent dialogue and evocative
setting— not to overlook the clever use of vodka as
a leit motif. The booze figures as such a constant companion
that you
might well want to settle in with your own—but hold
the tonic, the book supplies plenty of its own.
