Truth, in all the wrong places

Robert CRAIS has been a favorite author of mine since his 1987 debut novel, “The Monkey’s Raincoat,” introduced private eye Elvis Cole and his lethal and mysterious partner, Joe Pike.

Cole follows a long line of tough-guy detectives such as Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer who have made California their home. Where those pioneers of private-eye fiction are world-weary, Cole keeps an anti-establishment, ‘60s sense of humor. He can mix it up with the best of them (although usually with much more reluctance than Pike, a modern-day samurai), but there is still a lot of the Merry Prankster in his attitude toward life. How can you take seriously a man, no matter how tough, with a fondness for Mickey Mouse watches and Jiminy Cricket?

In “The Forgotten Man,” Crais adds depth to his hero’s personality by making him relive a painful childhood. The story opens with the Los Angeles police summoning Cole to a crime scene to view the body of a man eventually identified as George Reinnike. Cole cannot figure out why the police think he has any connection to the murdered stranger until he is told that just before he died, Reinnike claimed to be Cole’s father.

Cole, whose father disappeared before he was born, has been obsessed with discovering his identity since childhood. He spends the rest of the book trying to figure out who killed Reinnike and whether Reinnike really was his father.

What Cole doesn’t know is that Reinnike and his insane crime partner, Fredrick Conrad, have been involved in a series of brutal crimes, including several murders. The delusional Conrad wants to kill Cole because he’s convinced that Cole murdered Reinnike.

Cole narrates most of “The Forgotten Man,” so we get to share his thoughts and emotions, but Crais makes things more interesting by telling parts of the story from the viewpoints of Conrad and Carol Starkey, a former member of the bomb squad who is the heroine of Crais’ stand-alone novel, “Demolition Angel.”

Starkey is in love with Cole, but he doesn’t know it. You feel the pain that her secret longing for Cole causes this brave woman and you want to shake some sense into her so she will tell Cole how she feels.

Equally powerful are Cole’s flashbacks on his futile childhood searches for his father, wild goose chases spurred by his mentally ill mother’s lie that his father was a human cannonball in the circus. The young Cole believes her and runs away on several occasions to search for a man he never has any hope of finding.

Crais paints a vivid portrait of present-day Los Angeles and the small California towns that contrast sharply with the crime-ridden, traffic-choked metropolis where most of his novels are set. At one point, Cole is musing about the heavy “rain [that] had shriveled to a heavy mist....

“People who lived on the hillsides would soon emerge from their homes to inspect the slopes, searching for cracks and bulges. The world grew unstable when rain fell in Los Angeles. Soil held firm only moments before could flow without warning like lava, sweeping away cars and houses like toys. The earth lost its certainty, and anchors failed.”

As good as it is, “The Forgotten Man” has flaws. The maniacal Conrad is constantly going to the wrong places to kill Cole, just missing him. These hairbreadth escapes feel as contrived as the setups in the old movie serials. The final confrontation between Cole and Conrad has the feel of a scene thrown together to wrap up several plot threads.

But Crais keeps the suspense and the action boiling by leading the reader step by step toward the shocking solution to the two mysteries at the novel’s heart: the identity of Reinnike’s killer and the truth about Reinnike’s relationship to the private eye. Along the way, we learn a lot more about what drives Elvis Cole and the characters surrounding this complex man in what continues to be one of today’s best detective series. *