In the latest installment of Chris Knopf’s tales of Sam Acquillo, his unwilling detective, Sam moves from the mean streets of Southampton to the even meaner streets of the Bronx. (“Back Lash,” The Permanent Press, 264 pp, $29)
Sam is not really a detective. He is more like a man to whom things happen. He has a stellar resumé: a graduate of M.I.T. and a CEO of a major engineering firm in charge of research and development. But his life took a turn for the worse. His wife left him, he lost his job, and he became estranged from his only daughter. He took up serious drinking.
Eventually, however, he pulled his life together and moved to the little cabin in North Sea that his father had left him. He got a job as a cabinet maker and found the love of his life, his neighbor Amanda. His favorite pastime is sitting with Amanda in his Adirondack chairs, tossing a tennis ball into the Little Peconic Bay for his dog, Eddie (Van Halen), to retrieve, and watching the sun go down while sipping Absolut.
But into this idyllic life comes a figure from the past: Sam’s father, André Acquillo. He was an explosive man, vicious to the point of sadism. He was a first-class automotive mechanic, but not a first-class human being. Sam hated him. He was murdered in a bar when Sam was young. It was doubtful that anyone mourned, Sam least of all.
The murder took place more than 40 years ago and was now a cold case, yet it was a mystery central to Sam’s life. Sam has received a message from a witness to the murder, the bartender, now living in a nursing home. It dredges up many unpleasant memories. The bartender, Marcelo “Bonnie” Bonaventure, has something to get off his chest. Bonnie was approached by a police captain—not a local one—and told not to look for the killers. André deserved what he got. Sam learns this after an interview with Bonnie.
Telling Sam Acquillo not to do something has the opposite effect. Sam looks for help from the Southampton Town Police chief, Ross Semple. Like many crime novel protagonists, Sam can crack as wise as Phillip Marlowe. But Sam’s distinction is that he can do it in Latin. A sample: Semple’s secretary quotes Semple when Sam asks to see him.
“He said something like ‘beneficial acceptance of liberty vendor,’” she told me, after ringing Ross on the internal phone line.
“‘Beneficium accipere est vendere,’ I said. ‘It means something like “only chumps ask for favors.”’
“‘How do you people know this crap?’
“‘They teach that crap in school. Somebody has to learn it.’”
Semple puts Sam in touch with an NYPD detective with whom he used to work, Madelyn Wollencraft, who specializes in cold cases.
Soon it becomes clear that there is someone who wants the case to stay cold and wants Sam to follow in his father’s footsteps. During his first night in the Bronx someone enters his hotel room, gun in hand. Sam, a light sleeper, becomes aware of the intruder and uses the only weapon at hand, a pillow, which he throws at the startled man. It is an uneven contest, gun vs. pillow, and Sam receives a slight flesh wound in the struggle. When hotel security appears, Sam’s assailant leaves through an open window.
All of this serves to increase Sam’s resolve. Says Sam, “I had to accept that my father and I did have something in common. The same people wanted us dead.”
Sam interrogates mobsters and reformed mobsters, a priest, a politician and a reporter—the latter three are related.
At one point he enlists the aid of his friend Jackie Kwaitkowski, an attorney who is very effective at eliciting information, either by displaying her long legs and short skirts or by brandishing the Glock in her handbag.
Sam is a persistent cuss, a trait that is probably genetic, but also learned as an engineer, a profession in which there is no tolerance for mystery. There is a reason for everything. It’s just a matter of time before we find what the reason is.
There are striking revelations in “Back Lash.” I leave it to the reader to find out what they are.
The great master of the hard-boiled detective mystery is Raymond Chandler, whose protagonist, Philip Marlowe, always sought the truth in ambiguous situations, armed with a ready wit, “neither tarnished nor afraid.” Chris Knopf is a child of Chandler, and Sam Acquillo could have stepped out of Chandler’s pages, the necessary changes having been made, or “mutatis mutandis,” as Sam might say.
Chris Knopf is a first-class crime novelist. This is his 13th book in 10 years. He is also a partner in an advertising firm and a co-publisher of the Permanent Press. An additional mystery might be, how does he do it all?
on Aug 22, 2016