Books in Brief: Backtrack

Backtrack, by Joseph Hansen (Foul Play/Countryman Press, 167 pp., $12.95). Joseph Hansen’s latest fictional effort lies well outside the canon of his popular Dave Brandstetter mystery series: it is a short, pithy Bildungsroman disguised as a suspense novel about a California teenager’s search for the killer of his father, a smalltime homosexual actor. An accomplished poet, Hansen commands a sharp-eyed prose style so vividly observed as to recall Evelyn Waugh’s admiring remark about P. G. Wodehouse—“One has to regard a man as a master who can produce on average three uniquely brilliant and entirely original similes to every page”—and Backtrack, like the Brandstetter novels, is enriched by the judicious artistic effects that Hansen obtains through the use of this striking style, reminiscent at times of the late Kenneth Fearing, another gifted poet-turned-mystery-writer. Equally effective is the author’s flawless ear for dialogue, here enhanced by his use of a first-person narrator. There is a touch of sentiment and a loss of tension in the denouement of Backtrack, and a novel that is paced like a mystery naturally arouses expectations of a tauter ending than this one. Still, it is good to see this imaginative writer able to do satisfying work without recourse to the road-tested pleasures provided by Dave Brandstetter and his colorful friends. Recommended. TERRY TEACHOUT