Nostalgia that’s swashbuckling

Bloodlines

An Irene Kelly Novel

Jan Burke

Simon & Schuster: 468 pp., $25

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Jan BURKE’S ambitious new Irene Kelly mystery spans more than 60 years of Southern California history, but it focuses on one night in 1958 when reporter Jack Corrigan awakens after a savage beating to see -- or to think he sees -- a car being buried in a field. That same night, four members of a wealthy family vanish at sea, their infant heir is kidnapped and the baby’s nursemaid is slain. Then two men suspected of beating Corrigan are murdered. Despite the best efforts of the police and of Corrigan’s journalistic protege, Conn O’Connor, the crimes defy solution.

In 1978, Burke’s spunky, quick-thinking heroine, Kelly, is a cub reporter at the Las Piernas News-Express, mentored by O’Connor. She is covering the groundbreaking for a suburban shopping center when workers dig up a car with human remains and diamonds in the trunk. Another flurry of investigation follows and secondary bad guys are jailed. But the deeper truth drifts away. It seems that the fictional city of Las Piernas, which resembles Long Beach, will remain in the grip of a criminal mastermind so obsessed with revenge that he may have targeted O’Connor as long ago as 1936, when the 8-year-old paperboy alerted Corrigan to an instance of jury tampering.

In 2000, O’Connor is dead -- killed off by unrelated villains in Burke’s first novel of the Kelly series, “Goodnight, Irene.” It falls to Kelly, now a veteran newshound, her homicide detective husband, Frank Harrigan, and two green reporters to exhume the 1958 mystery once again when DNA tests promise to establish a man as the missing heir as violence returns to Las Piernas.

Plot is nearly everything in popular fiction, as Burke demonstrates here. The prose in “Bloodlines” is routine, the exposition time-consuming, the dialogue often stagy. The characters come more from Central Casting than from real life (though the good guys, especially, tend to grow on us, with their hot tempers, warm hearts and Irish wit). The historical background is thin, if interesting -- immigrants laboring in the oil fields of Signal Hill, rich people digging tunnels from their bluff-top mansions to the beach where bootleggers’ boats put in, the vogue of the Beats, housing tracts gobbling farmland, the sad decline of our second-tier newspapers.

If Burke tends to romanticize the swashbuckling old days of Southland journalism, she’s accurate about the forces that have impinged on it over the last half-century -- the rise of TV news, the demise of afternoon papers, the shrinking of staffs, the dumbing-down of coverage, the shortening of stories into factoids, the replacement of the noisy old newsroom, full of drunks and practical jokers, by a hushed and timid environment that is PC in both the technological and the ideological senses.

But the plot is a humdinger. Burke has crafted it marvelously. It has almost everything in it -- mistaken identities, a hidden pregnancy, a reformed prostitute, war profiteering, office politics, dynastic ambition, wife abuse, a serial killer and his copycat, romance true and spurious, the lifelong grief of the victims’ families. Everything connects, and when the tumblers finally fall and the rusty lock on the truth springs open, we feel an old-fashioned pleasure.

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Michael Harris is a regular contributor to Book Review.