From the archive...
A JADE IN ARIES (1970) by Tucker Coe
Reviewed by Barry Ergang
When I was twelve years old I read my
first Perry Mason mystery, The Case of the Vagabond Virgin, and I
was hooked. I read a dozen more, one right after another, until I was
over-saturated with Erle Stanley Gardner’s style and approach in this
particular series. (He had a multitude of series, and his style varied
accordingly, as I learned over time.) Many years went by before I picked up
another Mason novel. As a result of that experience, I generally made it a
point to avoid consecutive readings of works by a given author, lest I burn out
on him or her. There were probably a few exceptions, but I never binged on
anyone else to the extent I did with Gardner.
I mention this because I read the book
under consideration here, which was written by Donald E. Westlake under his
Tucker Coe pen name, immediately after finishing Drowned Hopes. The books
are radically different in style and approach—A Jade in Aries is
not remotely comical, whereas Drowned Hopes emphatically
is—and each is, in turn, very different from the novels he wrote under his
Richard Stark pen name.
A Jade in Aries is the fourth in a five-book
series narrated by former NYPD detective Mitchell Tobin, a man disgraced and
punishing himself for it by literally and figuratively both digging a hole to
retreat into and walling himself off from society as much as possible. He does
not have a private detective’s license, but has occasionally undertaken
investigations to supplement the money his wife Kate earns from a part-time
job.
This story begins when Tobin is
approached on Wednesday, January 7th, by a young gay man, Ronald
Cornell, owner of a men’s boutique. He insists that his partner—personal and
professional—Jamie Dearborn, was murdered, and that the police detective, Aldo
Manzoni, won’t do anything about it, having written it off as what he calls a
case of the “Changeable Sailor.” Disbelieving this, certain that Jamie’s killer
is someone he and others in his circle know, Cornell is determined to identify
him. He is seriously into astrology, and only needs Tobin’s help to find out
the exact dates and times of birth of the six men he’s narrowed his list of
suspects to. Tobin calls an old cop friend in Missing Persons, tells him what
he needs, and then tells Cornell to call the friend directly the following
Monday.
Over breakfast Tuesday morning, Kate
Tobin reads a newspaper story she shares with her husband, he having told her
about his meeting with Cornell. The story says Cornell is in the hospital after
an attempted suicide. Based on the alleged method and what he observed about
Cornell, Mitch Tobin refutes the story, sure that Cornell was assaulted, but
refuses to get involved. When Kate subsequently—trying to wear down his
resistance—tells her husband that she visited Cornell in the hospital, that he
has made an extremely generous offer in exchange for Mitch’s help—and they can
certainly use the money—that the bigoted, homophobic Detective Manzoni insists
Cornell is emotionally unbalanced and should be institutionalized, Tobin caves
in and undertakes the investigation. The result is an absorbing
character-driven story as Tobin deals with a variety of personalities,
including the oppositional Manzoni, from the Cornell/Dearborn social circle to
solve Cornell’s assault and two murders.
Homophobes are unlikely to read A
Jade in Aries. More enlightened readers will probably have to make, as I
did, reactive adjustments concerning the context of the time in which it was
written, specifically with regard to language and attitude. I was 23 when it
was published and don’t recall gay being a synonym for homosexual back
then. Thus, homosexual is the term used throughout, unless
someone disparagingly says queer or faggot, as
some characters do. One who uses faggot a couple of times is
Tobin himself, which I found somewhat disconcerting since he’s sympathetic to
Cornell’s plight, and treats those in Cornell’s coterie the same way he’d treat
heterosexuals: with respect or contempt based on how they comported themselves
and responded to him.
In Chapter Eight, looking at his
fifteen-year-old son, Tobin briefly wonders whether the boy might become
homosexual, as if it were a matter of choice or upbringing: “I don’t know if I
can be proved right or wrong, but I hold to the belief that homosexuality
almost always shows a failure of some kind on the part of the parents. The
failure of the father to be a man, or of the mother to be a woman, or of both
to give their child security and love. Whatever the particular style of the
failure, I think it almost always lies in the parents when the son emerges to
adulthood as a homosexual.”
Reading that, I couldn’t help but
wonder if it was strictly Tobin the fictional character speaking, or if it was
Westlake the author using Tobin as a conduit for his own beliefs. If the
latter, I wonder if Westlake’s attitude changed during the decades prior to his
death as more became known about human sexuality.
I found A Jade in Aries engrossing,
compelling, and hard to put down, even though I wouldn’t necessarily call it a
“great” mystery novel, and can recommend it to those who don’t object to a
major aspect of its subject matter.
Amazon Associate Purchase Link: https://amzn.to/4hHWruV
Barry Ergang ©2015, 2025
Derringer Award-winner Barry Ergang’s written work has appeared in numerous publications, print and electronic. Some of it is available at Amazon and at Smashwords. His website is http://www.writetrack.yolasite.com/ and he can be reached there for your editorial needs.
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