A Ponderous Murder Tale Nearly Kills the Suspense

The seven mysteries in Steven Saylor’s Roma Sub Rosa series (like the last entry, “Rubicon,” in which his sleuth, Gordianus the Finder, hunts for a murderer while Julius Caesar is making his march on the Eternal City) are proof of the author’s knack for mixing crime fiction with historical fact.

But what works in ancient Rome doesn’t always pay off in 19th century Texas. That’s the setting for “A Twist at the End” (Simon & Schuster, 462 pages, $25), a much-too-long new novel by Saylor in which the ever-popular master of the short story O. Henry (real name: William Sydney Porter) gets mixed up in a real-life serial murder case that took place in Austin in the mid-1880s.

Will Porter was a footloose young man-about-Austin in 1885 when the murderers he somewhat callously labeled “The Servant Girl Annihilators” brutalized and killed several young women. The killers started out with African American housekeepers, then expanded their homicidal horizons to the ladies of the house. Though the murders became the talk and the bane of the town, Porter had other things on his mind--like starting a career and wondering what to do about his infatuation with a local beauty who is married to the town drunk. But, as Saylor would have it, Porter’s life would be forever changed by the killings.

The book begins in New York City in 1906, when Porter’s pseudonym has become as famous as the Statue of Liberty. He’s having nightmares that take him back to his scuffling days in Texas and, in a bit of coincidence that he would have avoided in his own fiction, he is also being blackmailed because of something that happened way back when. No, it’s not his factual imprisonment for embezzlement (which prompted him to use the pen name); it’s part of the fictional plot conceived by Saylor.

Piling on even more coincidence, the author has an odd-looking stranger named Dr. Kringel arrive to make O. Henry an offer he can’t refuse. If Porter will return to Austin with him, Kringel will identify the person or persons responsible for the decades-old murder spree. All of this prompts a flashback that is the heart of the novel. But though it is presumably Porter’s flashback, Saylor frequently shifts the focus to others in his lengthy cast of characters.

The action hops from flamboyant young reporter Dave Shoemaker who’s covering the grim deaths to various African Americans who are eventually embroiled in the murders, to smarmy politicians, to an elegant madam who runs the finest house in Guy Town, to a pair of eccentric con men who are duping the social elite. In the course of all this, Porter often gets lost. It’s no way to treat a protagonist.

The Servant Girl Annihilators were never caught in real life, and Saylor doesn’t change that fact. But his research has provided a fairly definite identification of the guilty parties. Unfortunately, he makes his case so clearly that it robs the novel of a whodunit edge that may have justified its title. As it is, the twist at the end is that there is no twist. O. Henry would not have approved.

*

After working one’s way through the somewhat ponderous “Twist,” it’s a pleasure to hop aboard a thrill ride like Walter Wager’s “Tunnel” (Forge, 320 pages, $23.95). Since the ‘60s, Wager has been writing entertaining action thrillers under a variety of names.

His newest begins with an intricately plotted and exquisitely timed bank robbery and ends with the takeover of the third tube of the Lincoln Tunnel by terrorists. In between we meet a brusque but likable and certainly indefatigable NYPD captain named Jake Malloy, his significant other--Joanne Velez, a DEA agent--an assortment of tough, highly efficient sociopathic mercenaries who have set their tunnel-ransoming goal at $12 million and several members of Russia’s foreign intelligence who are perplexed by the news that Omar, a covert operation initiated by the KGB about which they know nothing, is moving ahead.

With steady hand, Wager manipulates the various threads of his tale to achieve maximum suspense. Employing a series of escalating mass murders in various New York boroughs, the brain behind the mercenary band saves his best work for last: The tunnel takeover is a suspense piece de resistance.

Malloy’s girlfriend, working undercover, is trapped in the tunnel with the vicious dealers who know she’s an agent. Another trapped woman is about to give birth. And, most perilous of all, to save them and the other commuters, Malloy, a former SEAL, has to go for a swim in the Hudson River. After that, how dangerous can the defusing of several tons of dynamite be?

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