Plum Perfect

When I was 18 my heart was broken for the first time, by a boy so wonderful that even my mother loved him. Only one thing stopped me crying and blotted out the pain and the thought of Him – reading easy crime novels. I read every single available Maigret. Although it was the early Sixties, a Maigret was my only drug. The effect didn’t last long, but I could barely live without the next one.

Things have calmed down now, but the state of the world is still pretty dreadful. Now when I need a short break from my general mood of fear and dread, I turn to the crime novels of Janet Evanovich. Much better than Maigret, because not only are they peppered with psychopaths, murderers, slime-balls and ‘homicidal mutilators’, but they’re also a laugh, and loveliest of all, the heroine is a woman – Stephanie Plum. One can tire of brilliant but surly and tormented male detectives, often sharp-suited and cynical, with a history of hopeless relationships with women. True, Stephanie is divorced and is ‘down on her luck’, but she doesn’t trudge about looking mysterious. She remains upbeat, dresses rather sassily, and bravely takes on a terrifying job – Bond Enforcement Agent, in her rather odious cousin Vincent Plum’s bail bond company. It’s all terrifically American. I’ve never heard of Bond Enforcement Agents (a.k.a. bounty hunters) over here. It sounds a bit Wild West, though more urban. Stephanie lives in Trenton, New Jersey, often staking out Stark Street, scary centre of criminal activity. At the Stark Street gym, boxer Benito Ramirez, murderous rapist and ‘hulking mountain of muscle’, works out. This is a frightfully dangerous job for a girl. But Stephanie is not an ordinary girl. I feel a bond with her because her Grandma Mazur, aged 72, is outrageously forceful and robust (just as mine was), and her mother is desperate to feed her and find her a boyfriend (just as mine was), and is forever tempting her home with scrumptious dinners, because she felt (as my mother did) that her daughter was incapable of cooking and feeding herself properly. And she is right. Stephanie, when alone, eats rubbish: peanut butter crackers, popcorn, doughnuts, frosted flakes and, in times of particular hardship, her hamster Rex’s nuggets. This is a family of strong women, with a father who sensibly keeps his mouth shut, just occasionally muttering ‘Christ’ or ‘Jesus’ in the background (just as mine did), and Stephanie’s relationships with men are pretty hopeless (just as mine were). There is one man around – Jo Morelli, a cop – with whom she has a rather odd relationship, somewhere between love, lust and hate. His Levis are a fabulous fit, but the jury is still out on whether he is, or is not, a truly decent cove. Morelli has ‘fast hands, clever fingers . . . and a tongue like a lizard’, but those are far from his only attributes – or faults – call them what you like. Stephanie and Morelli have a history. When she was 6 and he was 8, he lured her into his father’s garage to play choochoo trains. Ten years later he seduced her at her workplace, the Tasty Pastry bakery, ‘four minutes after closing, on the floor . . . behind the case filled with chocolate éclairs’. And three years later Stephanie ran him over, deliberately, and broke his leg. I always like a woman who has spirit. As detectives go, Stephanie Plum’s investigative methods are refreshing. In this area of Trenton, known as the ‘burg’, everyone knows everyone else’s business. Well, the women do. To extract information about a criminal’s whereabouts from his girlfriend, Stephanie cleverly tells the girlfriend about his other woman. For less specific information, she just asks her mother, ‘Anything going through the gossip mill?’ It is the women who really know what is going on. ‘Bars, funeral homes, bakeries and beauty parlours form the hub of the wheel that spins the burg,’ writes Evanovich, and only the women are in that hub. Grandma Mazur is perfectly situated, nosing about at funeral parlours. She rather fancies the job of bond enforcement agent herself, and quickly gets the hang of it. In the first of the Stephanie Plum books, One for the Money (1994), she shows an interest; in the second, Two for the Dough (1996), she is soon ‘grilling’ people, being attacked with an ice pick, and apprehending a criminal at gun point in the funeral parlour. Which just goes to show that not only can women catch dangerous crooks, women of any age can do so. The female approach to extracting information also comes naturally to Grandma Mazur. She picks up vital information at the ‘beauty parlour’ about fugitive Kenny, who asked his friend Billy to lend him some money but failed to collect it. Billy told his wife, his wife told his mother, his mother, Norma, who was getting her hair dyed while Grandma Mazur was having hers set, told Grandma Mazur, who told Stephanie. No man has this type of skill. Grandma’s work at the funeral parlour is even more impressive. There one can, with any luck, learn things about the cause of death:

Grandma Mazur reads the obituary columns like they’re part of the paper’s entertainment section. Other communities have country clubs and fraternal orders. The burg has funeral parlours. If people stopped dying the social life of the burg would come to a grinding halt.

Grandma adores funerals and, at the ‘viewings’, blessed with the lack of inhibition that comes with old age, she dares go where no one else will. She will lift the lid off a sealed coffin and question sobbing mourners. In fact almost all of Evanovich’s women are pretty fabulous – robust, colourful, positive, eccentric, irrepressible and collectively good – but the men are, with the exception of three, a fairly repulsive lot and generally very bad. Vinnie Plum is ‘5ft 7in without his lifts and [has] the slim, boneless body of a ferret’; Eugene, a Failure to Appear (FTA), is ‘all nose and chin and squinty red eyes and 100-proof breath’; Kenny Mancuso, sociopath and murderer, tries to kill darling Grandma Mazur and also ‘burns women with cigarettes’. Who cares if this is sexist? I don’t. It is heaven to see women bursting with character, regardless of looks, and men taking the back seat for once, especially in crime fiction. This is a cunning little series of books. The plots are fast and gripping, and in each book the characters develop. By the end of the first one I was already very fond of all of them and needed to know how they were getting on. Grandma Mazur isn’t the only one progressing and acquiring new skills. Stephanie is turning from bumbling amateur to professional, with all the right gear and a much better car, and Lula, the prostitute working on Stark Street and almost beaten to death in the first book by the crazed and brutal Ramirez, has turned her life around in the second, become the filing clerk at Vinnie’s agency (‘she was born to file’) and sometime assistant to Stephanie. By the third book you could almost say they were partners. Lula is on the front line. ‘I’m gonna get right on this. I’m gonna detect the shit out of this case.’ She also has her own underworld grapevine – another source of invaluable gossip. All this may seem rather lightweight, but behind the laughs is a glimpse of a very nasty world indeed, where women are battered, raped and murdered, drugs and arms dealers abound, and Trenton, once busy with industry and commerce, has:

dwindled . . . to its present day status of being just one more big pothole in the state highway system . . . The ghetto had crept in around the train station, making it virtually impossible to get to the station without passing through streets of small, yardless, depressed row houses filled with chronically depressed people. During summer months the neighbourhoods were steeped in sweat and open aggression. When the temperature dropped the tone turned bleak, and animosity sat behind insulating walls.

Evanovich’s books have been called comedy thrillers. That sounds like an oxymoron, but with this series it certainly is not. Life is horribly grim and dangerous and, without a laugh, our heroine and her assistants would never survive. Of the three good men, two are policemen and the other a bond enforcement agent. And they always win in the end, because they have to.

Trenton cops wore more hats than I could name. They were arbitrators, social workers, peace-keepers, baby-sitters and law enforcers. The job was boring, terrifying, disgusting, exhausting and often made no sense at all. The pay was abysmal, the hours were inhuman, the department budget was a joke, the uniforms were short in the crotch. And year after year, the Trenton cops held the city together.

I like a bit of meaningful social comment and realism in a thriller. It makes me feel a little less guilty about having a gripping but easy read. And it gives me hope – that good can sometimes triumph, even in the real world. And when the hope fades, then there’s always another Stephanie Plum book.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 25 © Michele Hanson 2010