Boxcar Travels Take Mysterious Turns

If Jack Kerouac, J.D. Salinger and Dashiell Hammett had gotten together in a clean, well-lighted room to concoct a crime novel, the result might have been something like Joe Gores’ remarkable new mystery, “Cases” (Mysterious Press, $23, 354 pages).

Gores has been at the storytelling game for a long time, most often with tales about Daniel Kearny Associates, a detective agency in San Francisco, culled from his own experiences as a private investigator.

Every so often, he deals a surprising wild card, such as “Hammett,” a 1973 novel that used facts from the seminal author’s life in a breathless hard-boiled ‘30s caper that Hammett might have written.

“Cases” is an even more audacious work that borrows bits and pieces from Gores’ autobiography. Set in the summer of 1953, the novel follows the adventures of Pierce “Dunc” Duncan, a bright but still-green college grad who hits the road “bumming around on boxcars” to see what America has to offer a would-be writer.

Almost immediately, a vagrancy arrest introduces him to the brutality of a Georgia chain gang. This is followed by a variety of misadventures that nibble away at his naivete--a bar fight in Mexico, the befriending of a boxer in Las Vegas that results in multiple murder, his discovery, in Southern California, of both true love and a scam involving a religious cult and illegal immigrants. These are the warm-ups to Dunc’s final adventure--as a novice private detective in a crime-filled, bebop San Francisco, working under the tutelage of a fascinating reprobate named Edward “Drinker” Cope.

It’s here that Gores displays his yarn-spinning genius by gathering many of the seemingly unconnected tendrils of Dunc’s travels into a dark pattern of conspiracy.

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In “Angels Flight” (Little, Brown, $25, 393 pages), Michael Connelly has cleverly crafted the latest chapter in the life of hapless LAPD Detective Harry Bosch from an assortment of the decade’s hottest true-crime stories, including the Rodney King and Haitian immigrant Abner Louima beatings, the O.J. Simpson trial and the killing of Jon-Benet Ramsey.

The novel begins with the fatal shooting of Howard Elias, an African American defense attorney who has forged his reputation by putting members of the Police Department on trial. Half the cops in town are suspects. Bosch follows the clues to the most incendiary case on Elias’ docket: the defense of a black client about to stand trial for killing the young white daughter of a prominent local businessman.

The defendant has not only claimed his innocence, he also apparently was brutalized by officers while in prison. As the city readies for riot, Bosch battles departmental politics and prejudice on both sides of the color line in his search for truth.

Connelly’s complex, battered but unbowed protagonist continues to fascinate. As do the author’s descriptions of the way things work (or, more to the point, don’t work) in our city’s Police Department. That, combined with a full-blown riot finale, make for a notable addition to this phenomenally popular series.

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The protagonist of Barbara Seranella’s “No Offense Intended” (HarperCollins, $24, 266 pages) is an ex-con trying to go straight with a 9-to-5 job as a service station grease monkey. In the heyday of film noir, the role probably would have been played by John Garfield or James Cagney. In this fast-paced neo-noir thriller, Seranella more than makes the point that anything an antihero could do, an antiheroine can do better.

Miranda “Munch” Mancini, still feeling the aftermath of her last body-and-soul-shattering ordeal in “No Human Involved,” is trying her best to stay away from booze, drugs and bad companions.

But a former lover’s murder and the subsequent kidnapping of his baby daughter drag her back to old friends and old temptations, with homicidal bikers, a parole officer from hell, an amoral, ambitious FBI agent and a shrewd but humane cop all on her case. Seranella’s prose is lean and mean, but this doesn’t mean she skimps on characterization.

The Times reviews mysteries every other week. Next week: Rochelle O’ Gorman on audio books.