Books: Nightwork By Joseph Hansen (1984)

“Gifford Gardens has seen better days. As white families move away to the suburbs to flee the flooding and neglect, the city in turn cares less about fixing the problems. What was once a nice neighborhood has become a slum and a violent battleground for rival gangs. Paul and Angela Myers are among the white families that remained. With the economy in a downturn and wages frozen, Paul takes a job long-haul truck driving. The freight he moves around is strictly “no questions,” but Paul is an honest man and begins to wonder about what he has become a part of.  One night, Paul’s truck flies off a cliff and explodes in midair. Did he fall asleep at the wheel, or was he murdered? Paul’s life insurance company hires renowned private investigator Dave Brandstetter to look at inconsistencies with the accident. While digging into Paul’s past, Dave will uncover a haunting connection between Paul’s untimely death and the happier years in the declining neighborhood of Gifford Gardens.”

A bit darker, a bit more nihilist, Nightwork has Dave Brandstetter on a ruthless –though in the end, rather pointless- investigation into murder and mayhem on the outer edges of Los Angeles. Still, it’s fast-paced novel, and Hansen excels at creating memorable characters –even if they’re rather ugly and mean. But under Hansen’s deft hand, with his sparse prose that paints a picture both beautiful and gross, the series remains excellent.

The novel picks up a few months after the events of Gravedigger, where reporter –and Dave’s current boyfriend- Cecil Harris is still recovering from the injuries he received in the final pages of that book. Here is also where this book series really works, as Dave ponders if Cecil can fully recover from the psychological damage caused by the bullets. He wants to protect the young man, but is it possible when that young man wants to be involved with Dave’s sometime violent job?

Still, a lot people die here and a lot was left unsolved, and it also featured another abrupt ending, so by its final pages, I wondered what our dogmatic insurance investigator got out of all this. While it reflects the age it was written –the early 1980s, - it’s also prophetic in some respect –if only because nothing has changed in respect to gangs, street and gun violence.