Murder Gras in the Big Sleazy

By Rob Latham

11/01/2005

Pronzini, Bill. Masques: A Novel of Terror. New York: Arbor House, 1981. 269 p.

Bill Pronzini is a prolific author of detective fiction who has earned a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private-Eye Writers of America, largely on the strength of his popular series featuring the San Francisco-based “Nameless Detective,” who has appeared in 31 novels to date. He has also authored a number of singletons ranging across several genres, from the Western to the political thriller. A few early titles—such as The Stalker (1971) and Snowbound (1974)—were gripping suspense stories centering on the exploits of criminal gangs, near-classics in the vein of Elmore Leonard and Richard Stark.

Among this diverse output, Masques stands out as a more intimate character study, with shadings of the supernatural. Set in New Orleans and the surrounding bayous, it follows a mentally disintegrating protagonist, Steve Giroux, into an underworld of voodoo ritualism and psycho-sexual madness. Unfortunately, despite some atmospheric descriptions of the city and a few genuinely harrowing sequences of flight and pursuit, the novel ultimately flounders in a welter of stereotypes and botched plotting.

Predictably enough, the novel begins during Mardi Gras week, and Giroux, a professional photographer from San Francisco, has come to New Orleans on vacation, trailing the tatters of a failed marriage and struggling painfully with alcoholism and depression. Desultorily watching the spectacle in the streets, he broods on this “place crumbling in on itself, slowly going to seed, and yet maintaining charm, dignity and a kind of ravaged beauty.” Trying desperately to enjoy himself, he takes up with two young women: a sexy amateur sorceress named Juleen, and Mona, a prim schoolteacher from the Midwest. Following a blackout drunk during which he thinks he may have murdered Juleen, he receives a series of baffling phone messages demanding he hand over a mysterious photograph; meanwhile, a man in a dragon mask begins tracking him through the streets, silently but obliquely menacing. 

This set-up sounds more suspenseful than it is, because most of the “action” consists of Giroux self-pityingly ruminating on his luckless fate. And his convenient hook-up with the virtuous Mona is clumsily handled and unconvincing. Readers also may find themselves trying to grasp why any woman, much less two, would bed down with this simpering twit. Pronzini doesn’t help matters by prefacing each section of the novel with an epigraph from Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death,” which promises more hallucinatory weirdness than he is capable of delivering. The voodoo-cult business is a concatenation of hoary clichés, and while a chase through a midnight graveyard provides some chills, the working out of the plot mostly involves Giroux making one stupid mistake after another (though the tale does end with a clever and unexpected little twist).

The depiction of New Orleans treads familiar ground: it is a space of hedonistic excess, “with undercurrents of violence and tragedy,” and it threatens to engulf the unwary soul in loveless dissipation. Reading the book post-Katrina, one cannot help but notice, with a stab of poignancy, Pronzini’s persistent use of metaphors that link the water-locked city with the beset self. For example, Giroux’s heavy drinking “was like shoring up a weakened levee with sandbags during a storm. Each time a crack appeared, you plugged it the best way you could. And hoped that it was strong enough to hold out.” Mona’s arrival in his life “was like a whole truckload of sandbags at his beleaguered emotional levee—shoring up his courage, adding her strength to what was left of his. He no longer had to face the storm alone.”

Unfortunately, as these quotes suggest, Pronzini’s metaphors tend towards a monolithic sameness, and his prose is generally flat throughout, despite occasional flourishes. But the main failing is the ham-fisted unraveling of the voodoo business, which turns out to have been little more than an elaborate practical joke. As Giroux observes mournfully near the end of the story, “When you looked at it all in perspective and hindsight, it had been a jumble of events that had no purpose, no logical pattern.”

Alas, this is so true of the reading experience itself—as well as of the novel’s plot line.