Murder and War: James Kestrel’s Five Decembers

When Joe McGrady pulls the case, it is not without strings. A Mexican groundskeeper has come to his boss terrified of a corpse found in the equipment shed where he sleeps, and the boss is a prominent man. Joe’s Captain, Beamer has several beefs with the detective: Joe hasn’t worked a homicide case on his own, and there’s some unprofessional rivalry/jealousy at play, and he is not a local boy. Still, Beamer hands the case over with some provisions:

“You’re either from here, or you’re not,” Beamer said. “And you’re not. You ever walked a dog?”

“Yes, sir.”

“If it doesn’t know the length of its lead, it’s liable to get hurt,” Beamer said. He held his hands about six inches apart. “Yours is like this. Run ahead, I’ll yank you back so hard your neck snaps.”

Five Decembers, 14

When he gets to the scene, he finds the shack is actually a slaughterhouse. The body has been beaten black and blue and then treated like cattle. The male cadaver is not alone, however. There’s another tucked away under some blankets, a Japanese woman in a similar horrible state, who will not be revealed until a man arrives to clean up the mess with a can of gas. There’s a gunfight, and what should have been an open and shut case lingers because Joe cannot escape the hunch that this was more than a one man operation. That gut response gains wings when the male vic is identified as having powerful relatives who want to find the perpetrator. The trail will be a bloody one, leading away from Hawaii to Wake Island, where a similar crime has occurred, and on to Hong Kong. Joe leaves his girl Molly behind, what life he has, and expects to be back soon enough. Unfortunately, world events conspire against him.

This is the tail end of November 1941. In less than a month, the United States will be plunged into a two-front war. Joe’s life will go topsy turvy, swirling around the toilet bowl but never quite flushing down completely, as history takes hold of him and provides a four year tour of both Hell and Heaven. He will be taken prisoner, he will see a release from the tortures found as a Japanese prisoner of war, he will discover heartbreak and horror and rebirth …

James Kestrel’s novel Five Decembers starts out small in scale and scope, a detective on the trail of a killer, but it bursts out of these boundaries into an epic tale of historical suspense, romance, and mystery. Kestrel is a nom de plume for an author that’s easy to identify—one need only google one of the glowing recommendations from famous authors for the “author’s previous work” mentioned on the back cover copy to find out who it is. Be that as it may, the book is a triumph on several levels, a layered text written with subtlety and style, hardboiled without resorting to cliches, and so damned rich in both character and incident. This is the kind of book that launched crime writer James Ellroy into the stratosphere, and with luck it will do the same for Kestrel.

I mention that other author for some specific reasons. Five Decembers echoes some of Ellroy’s best books, both in terms of structure and theme, yet it does away with that author’s swagger as well as the clipped style that has come to dominate Ellroy’s books following his initial LA Quartet. The opening to Five Decembers is not dissimilar to Ellroy’s The Big Nowhere, which finds a desk sergeant with little detective experience catching a brutal murder call due to short handedness in December (as opposed to the shorthandedness just before Thanksgiving, which nets Joe the case in Five Decembers), which soon expands into a historical crime epic. Of course, Ellroy’s book is set amidst the McCarthy issues of the ’50s instead of WWII; he would not tackle that particular time period until the much more recent entries, Perfidia and This Storm. There’s even an adversary with the last name Smith in both authors’ works. Some of this might be intentional tipping of the hat, and much of it might be coincidental. For all their similarities, Five Decembers is not The Big Nowhere recast in Hawaii and the Pacific Rim. Instead, Kestrel’s book feels like one well informed by crime fiction’s past. And it’s hard as hell to write in this particular field while also escaping the shadow of the self-proclaimed demon dog of crime fiction …

That said, there is an exquisite beauty to the prose and a wide range of locations and characters. This is fiction unafraid to cross boundaries, a literary suspense yarn that finds a character encountering several forms of crisis, losing more than he gains. Kestrel well knows how to write.

Whether he’s offering us glimpses into a rather brutal crime scene, an impromptu backyard party between four tipsy grad school roommates, a trip across the Pacific, first impressions of Hong Kong, a jail cell, or the lovely Japanese home that will serve as an unofficial prison for four years, Kestrel knows the salient details. He writes lucid prose that locks us into a moment or gallivants across decades with equal ease. He gives us a warts and all approach to his protagonist, a man who is devoted to his profession and yet who is more than just another police detective. His feelings, his thoughts, his doubts, and his drives are all right there for us to consider, to piece through, to rub together. The internal stew of what makes Joe tick is there, and it is the same stuff that makes us human. He’s not a hero, he’s a person with strengths and weaknesses. He’s a force, and he’s thrown about like a ragdoll by forces greater than him. He is a viewpoint into a period of history that gets a lot of press, yet he offers us glimpses of things we might never get to see.

The novel is a third person narrative, which spans the years 1941 through 1945. It is divided into three sections, which are generally contained to period of those year. The first kicks off in November and ends on a day that lives in infamy, December 7, 1941. Kestrel does not go for the expected, however, and hit that infamous day where we might expect; instead, he puts our protagonist in Hong Kong as that day arrives and gives him a mystery to pursue until the Japanese are simultaneously assaulting several locations in section two. That second section then tackles the rest of that month and on into January. The final section, which composes about half the book focuses mostly upon the November to December period of 1945, with quite a bit of interstitial material in its opening. Here, we see Joe hiding from the Imperialist Japanese forces in the home of a high ranking politician, Takahashi Kansei and his daughter Sachi.

It is this final section that does some of the most interesting work, employing both character and plot driven elements to deliver a meaty, layered work. It’s powerful stuff, beautifully written, and when I reached the conclusion, I was nearly in tears. This is not a book that ends when the mystery is solved and the case is closed, it’s a book that continues for a goodly time, only reaching its ending when the characters fully realize what they’ve lost and do their damnedest to recover what they can, to find meaning in meaninglessness.

I am hard pressed to find a weakness with the book. There are no glaring flaws, no terrible choices. Sure, I might wish the author would spend a little more time in the intervening years. There’s a bit of a time jump between the second and third parts of the book. Of course, expanding it through these regions would be something James Clavell would do, and it could bog down an otherwise sleek and well-paced story. No author I’ve ever met has ever groaned when he’s told a reader would like to live in the world of their book just a little longer, see the minutiae, share more time with the characters. It’s a badge of pride, really. Here, James Kestrel has delivered a convincing look at the past, mean in places, beautiful in others, gentle and cruel in equal measure. I look forward to revisiting the book, but I’m also sad that I cannot marvel at the treasures it offers for the first time.

Five Decembers is a beautifully written book, a hardboiled detective story, a tale of the people who often get overshadowed during wartime, and a look at the world that was. It’s a moving work, powerful in all the right ways and just about impossible to put down. It’s the kind of book that deserves to be shoved into the hands of friends, the kind of book worth talking about and considering. It ranks among the finest novels Hard Case Crime has yet published, and it’s a book I hope gets plenty of appreciation for the subtle power of its prose as well as its rich characters and twisty plot.

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Five Decembers is available in eBook and hardcover editions from the fine folks at Hard Cas Crime.

Next week, we shift gears to look at the first novel from Shamus Award winning author Gar Anthony Haywood, Fear of the Dark. That book is available in an eBook edition. All the physical copies seem to be out of print, alas.

WORKS CITED

Kestrel, James. Five Decembers. Hard Case Crime: 2021.

“Murder and War: James Kestrel’s Five Decembers” is copyright © 2021 by Daniel R. Robichaud. Quotes and cover image taken from the Hard Case Crime hardcover edition.

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