first set
as soon As the police had released the office, transported Phelan, the yellow caution tape in the trash and instructed to abrade a cleaning company in order to remove a steam radiator, the blood from the wooden floor and the stain.
The book
Delpha Wade’s back. Three years ago, we learned the young woman in the novel “A Job for Delpha” know. Also in the sequel which is now published under the title “Family Business” in English, she tries still to get a foot in the “normal” life. The 32-Year-old has only been recently, after 14 years in prison, paroled – she had killed the man who had raped her. “She was now in freedom, even if she had to call again and again in memory.”
When private detective Tom Phelan in the Texas town of Beaumont Delpha got a Job as a Secretary. The name was then still so: We are in the year 1973, in Washington, the hearings on the Watergate scandal, President Nixon to run but is still in office. However, Delpha Wade for Phelan quickly not only the office workers. That the like a few years older, a woman, is only incidentally a topic. Above all, they not only guards the phone and fetch coffee, but works actively and imaginatively with the investigation. And she is the main character of the novel.
An old man asked the detective Agency to seek his brother, who is supposed to have under an unknown name settled in the area. Through Research in archives – we are still far from the digital time – find out Delpha, that the Principal used a false name. What a game the man is playing? Why is hiding his brother? “Don’t count on it, that one is Good and the other Evil,” warns Phelan Delpha. “Here’s to family disputes.”
Lisa Sandlin told hard, but also with a dry sense of Humor. The novel stands in the Tradition of the classic “hardboiled” private detective novel as we know it since the classics of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. This long-time popular variety of crime literature has come in the last few years, something out of fashion, but Lisa Sandlin shows convincingly that it still works today perfectly.
at Least if you provide such an interesting protagonist as Delpha to. One that is curious about the life that has been missing to a large extent. And to want to continue to develop, “on an objective, the other perhaps meant nothing, but a self”. She still has a long way to go. “I don’t trust anybody,” she says once, to Phelan, to take care of, sometimes almost touching them, “take it for me, not bad.”
scoring
author
Lisa Sandlin, born in 1951 in Beaumont, Texas, lived first in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where they grosszog a son. After that, she taught for many years in the Writer’s Workshop of the University of Nebraska in Omaha, and creative Writing. Since the 1990s she has published several volumes of short stories. The short story “Phelan’s First Case” was awarded with several prizes, and in 2013 in the prestigious anthology, “USA Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series” included.
her first novel, “The Do-Right” (English: “A Job for Delpha”, 2017), which appeared, in 2015, took the characters from this Story. The novel was prices with two major American Crime, the Hammett Prize, and Shamus Award. The successor novel “The Bird Boys” is now published in German (“Family Business”), was nominated for the prestigious Edgar Allan Poe Award and was on the list of the ten best crime novels of the year 2019, the critic Marilyn Stasio in the New York Times. Lisa Sandlin lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Lisa Sandlin: “Family Business” (Original: “The Bird Boys”, Cinco Puntos Press, El Paso, 2019). From the English by Andrea Stumpf. Suhrkamp, Berlin 2020. 357 p., about 15 Fr.
All of the other meetings you will find in the Collection “crime of the week”.
Created: 04.03.2020, 14:57 PM
