Pumping New Life into Liffey

John Shannon is probably the most underrated and unjustly unread crime-fiction writer in California. I’ve talked about him before on this page, and have mentioned that his publisher, Pegasus Books, unceremoniously dumped him--even though his last novel for Pegasus, Palos Verdes Blue, was one of his best Jack Liffey outings.

Then earlier today, I received the following e-mail message from Shannon, which I’m delighted to reprint here:

Jack Liffey Migrates to a New Publisher!

Poor Jack, I wish he’d settle down. First he starts out at John Brown Books, then Berkley Prime Crime, then Carroll & Graf, then Pegasus--and now, the British/American publisher Severn House. With whom Jack now has a two-book deal.

There was a word for this in Malawi English when I taught in the Peace Corps. When someone was restless or changed domicile a lot, he was called “movious.” Poor movious Jack. So let’s all rush out and buy the next one--an independent mystery bookstore or Amazon may be your best bet--and maybe Jack will stay put for a while.

And just to ice the cake, the next novel, On the Nickel (Jack Liffey No. 12), actually deals with homelessness: At the outset, laid-off aerospace worker Jack Liffey finds himself temporarily mute and wheelchair-bound, and his 18-year-old daughter, Maeve, tries to cheer him up by taking the first steps of a new case for him, to find the missing son of his old friend, Mike Lewis.

Unintentionally, Maeve embroils her father in a simmering fight on L.A.’s Skid Row (known locally as The Nickel because Fifth Street bisects the area). The fight is between the homeless, who desperately cling to the only shelter they know, and developers trying to upgrade the single-room-occupancy hotels into pricey lofts for urban gentrifiers.

Bully-boys for the developers toss Jack and his wheelchair into the hellish night streets of the Nickel. Some of the night denizens steal what they can--his chair, his wallet and watch and shoes, while others end up helping him out.

Eventually a chance encounter with an old girlfriend from the first Jack Liffey novel--The Concrete River [1996]--helps restore his speech and legs. Jack can now repay those who helped him, and everyone is driven to an embattled flophouse: Jack, his current girlfriend, a Latina cop, Maeve, the missing boy and a small group of determined down-and-out Yiddish workers. The bully-boys’ scheme to frighten them away touches off a conflagration that drives them all up to the rooftop for a touch-and-go rescue, as flames eat up through the tarpaper.

Personally, I can’t wait to get my hands on On the Nickel. It is supposed to reach bookstores this coming summer. Severn has also signed up another great mystery writer, Gar Anthony Haywood (All the Lucky Ones Are Dead, Firecracker). Good on you, mates.