Hard-Boiled Hits The Hamptons
Chris Knopf’s detective carries on a tradition
by Richard Horwich
Hard-boiled doesn’t begin to describe two-fisted, vodka-swilling,
cynical Sam Acquillo, the amateur detective and antihero of Chris
Knopf¹s new novel, Two Time. Sam represents a present-day
sighting of the romantic-smartass hero first popularized by Dashiell
Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Think Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe,
and Rick in Casablanca, who like Knopf’s Sam has a dame
in his past that he can¹t get past, claims to stick his
neck out for nobody but ends up doing the right thing.
A bit later John D. Macdonald gave us Travis
McGee, who resembles Sam by living in a seaside resort town
full of juicy animus between the locals and the interlopers
(Fort Lauderdale in Travis’s
case, Southampton in Sam’s), is a better case-solver than
the cops, doesn¹t like being pushed around, and owns an
absurd car that he cherishes.
More recent and most notable is Robert B.
Parker’s Spenser,
to whom Sam owes quite a bit: the secretly elitist tastes that
underlie his proletarian sympathies (he drinks fresh-ground vanilla-flavored
coffee and exotic microbrews), his faithful dog, his penchant
for beating the crap out of guys who think they¹re tough,
and his troubled relationship with the cops. “The chief
frowns every time he sees me,” notes Sam, but his best
buddy is Sullivan, a detective on the Southampton force who comes
to Sam for help in solving the crime around which the story turns.
The chief later redeems himself in Sam¹s eyes by, of all
things, quoting verbatim the first two lines of Wordsworth¹s
Immortality ode; Sam, who himself makes in-jokes about J.D. Salinger
(“Seymour Glass . . . Hell of a carpenter”) and delivers
an unprovoked tirade against deconstruction, likes that sort
of showing off, and so, I guess, does his creator.
Sam is, like many of his literary forebears,
insufferably smug, which makes him hard to warm up to but oddly
fascinating for most of the book’s characters, and perhaps
for the reader as well.
The other characters span a considerable
social spectrum. Sam¹s
friends range from Hodge, the owner of what sounds like the worst
seafood restaurant on the East End, to Burton, a trust-fund baby
who belongs to what sounds a lot like the Meadow Club and lives
in a 24-room mansion but who, Sam proudly notes, “preferred
me to the empty-headed gentility that gathered on his lawn to
sip Campari and play one-upsmanship with each other.”
Part of what makes Two Time more interesting
and worthwhile than the typical summer potboiler is Sam¹s ferocious alienation,
a bilious secretion of contempt and rage that comes off him like
sour sweat. An ex-boxer, he sizes up every man he meets as a
potential opponent in the ring: a preppie sitting at a bar (or
as Sam calls him, a “fluff”) “was thick around
the middle, and his feet were badly pronated. Would go down in
half a second.”
It¹s not all talk, either; though Sam is 53, he takes on
a pair of hired goons and in seconds reduces them to cringing
whelps with blows to the head and kicks to the groin. And more
of that anger spills out in his ongoing critique of the Hamptons
social scene, its phonies and poseurs and pretenders—particularly
women.
At a table adjoining the fluff¹s is “a pair of hags
from up island—faces stretched into metallic masks, nails
hard as epoxy, and hair like lacquered teak.” A benefit
auction that Sam attends in the line of duty turns up “women
who wore the proud mark of cosmetic surgery . . . 60-year-old
women with faces tighter than a drum. Bony, undernourished things
with an air of profound disappointment.”
His real animus, though is reserved for those
who inhabit the hermetic world of art, theater, and contemporary
esthetic theory. The villain of the piece is a wealthy performance
artist who practices theatrical sleight-of-hand with other
people¹s
lives, and Sam never passes up an opportunity both to belittle
the jargon of the art world and at the same time to demonstrate
his mastery of it: “There was a strong organizing sense
underlying both the paintings that reminded me of Picasso. .
. . I wondered how many levels of articulated imagery could be
contained within a single work of art, like a fractal, revealing
themselves layer after layer as you dove into the painting.”
Another unexpected commentary on the art
scene is Hodge, who may seem like a broken-down nobody but
who has his own unique take on things: “ ‘I used to play cards with an artist
over in the Springs,’ he said. “They called him a
genius, though to me he wasn¹t much more than a nasty drunk.
. . . Finally managed to wrap his car around a tree’.”
This, I guess, is the Emperor¹s New Clothes theory of artistic
appreciation that enables, at least in Sam¹s view, ordinary
guys like Hodge to see through phonies like Jackson Pollock and
other darlings of cultists and fashionistas. So Sam and his buds
get to have it both ways. Sam is a walking contradiction—a
populist, a man’s man, an Existentialist brooder, accepted
by baymen and billionaires, able to move comfortably, if disdainfully,
across the glossy surface of Southampton society, offending headwaiters
and socialites whenever the opportunity arises.
One area in which Sam not only feels but
really is superior—and
Mr. Knopf puts it to excellent use as the novel unfolds—is
his background as an engineer. When he isn¹t chasing crooks
and denying his feelings, Sam now works as a freelance cabinetmaker,
and much of the novel is an extended description of his building
an addition onto the bayfront shack he calls home, a project
which (along with Absolut, Camels, and coffee by the gallon)
provides him with an alternative to thinking about the dark secrets
of his past, which slowly unfold as the plot meanders along.
Carpentry at first seems quite a comedown
for the former “head
of R & D at one of the big hydrocarbon conglomerates,” a
career that ended when he punched someone higher on the food
chain, was left by his wife, and began his social and financial
descent.
But all his specialized knowledge comes in
handy when Sam undertakes to find out who blew up a car and
several bystanders at a dockside restaurant at which he was
drinking. The blast kills its target, a young financier named
Jonathan Eldridge, together with several passers-by; it also
wounds Sam¹s dinner companion Jackie,
which gets Sam really hot under the collar, particularly when
Detective Sullivan is subsequently stabbed by hired muscle who
mistake him for Sam.
So Sam attacks the problem like the M.I.T.
grad he is. No longer are his energies wasted by obsessing
over construction details (“The top angle on the first rafter seemed right, but there
was something wrong with the bird’s mouth notch where it
joined the plate.”). Sam tells us that he “always
knew my edge as an engineer was a taste for chaos, for the unruly
aspects of problem solving, a prejudice for intuition over methodology.”
Hunches rather than number crunches are how Sam gets the angles
right, both in carpentry and in crime-solving, and when he begins
to harness his knowledge and methodology in the service of something
more worthwhile than do-it-yourself projects, a path opens for
him to rejoin the land of the living.
Engineering and math in this novel are an
abstract, solitary world; intuition is what leads this troubled,
lonely, and not very likable man back to the messy pleasures
of living among people and feeling things again. An able assist
is provided by Amanda, an ex-girlfriend who broke Sam¹s
heart but who has now bought the house next door, and who soon
becomes his bedfellow and assistant detective.
The plot acquires new complications with
almost every turn of the page (a distinctive feature of this
genre; I defy anyone to produce a coherent summary of The Big
Sleep). But here, the story is subsidiary; Mr. Knopf¹s real interest is in how
Sam engineers his own rehabilitation, and crime solving is just
the matrix in which that project is set. Occasionally, some of
the characters, even Sam, seem too much like an accretion of
made-up details that don¹t always fit together; at one point
Sam says he has no use for baseball, but shortly afterward he
and Burton are planning a trip to the Bronx to see how the Yankees’ new
trades are working out. By and large, though, Mr. Knopf, who
also seems to prefer intuition to calculation, gets his characters
almost plumb and fairly true.
Not an easy task, since, as the title hints,
both events and personalities have an odd tendency to replicate
themselves—the
book is full of odd mirrors, doppelgangers, aliases, and evil
twins, and what goes around in Two Time invariably comes around.
I won¹t give away any of the secrets of the denouement,
not because they’re stunningly unpredictable but because
getting there is most of the fun. And despite, or because of,
Sam¹s know-it-all manner and compulsion to pronounce judgments
on everything and everybody, it is fun. Two Time is more than
a lively summer read; it¹s an odd and original take on a
prickly but compelling stock character of 20th-century American
detective fiction.
