California Girl by T. Jefferson Parker Published by William Morrow 370 pages, 2004 
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The Fabulous Becker Boys Reviewed by Kevin Burton Smith
T. Jefferson Parker's California Girl is that most wonderful of rarities -- a crime thriller whose story justifies every single one of its pages. Anyone who's followed my musings on crime fiction over the years is well aware that I'm no fan of those big bloated slabs of hollow storytelling publishers are always trying to fob off on us, as though readers crave quantity more than quality. What, after all, is so thrilling about a 200-page story saddled with an extra 200 or 300 pages of literary fat? Who really needs all those extraneous side plots, parallel plots and back stories, or that brain-numbing overwriting? California Girl, though, is a glorious exception. Parker's always had the literary chops, but this tale of brothers trying to come to terms with the events of the late 1960s in Orange County, and the gruesome murder of their poor, doomed childhood acquaintance, Jannelle Vonn (the "California Girl" of the title), is something else again. It's a bold, ambitious, richly detailed yarn that casts a searing, unblinking spotlight into the dark corners of a turbulent era, and for once, readers are getting their money's worth. Forget pointless pages -- there's barely a wasted word here. Over the last two decades, the Edgar Award-winning Parker has carved a niche for himself as the go-to guy when it comes to big, noir-tinged books of crime and violence that belie their sun-drenched Southern California settings, and which often use the trappings of police procedurals and police officer protagonists to make their point. In 11 previous, acclaimed novels, ranging from his 1985 powerhouse debut, Laguna Heat, right up to last year's awesome Cold Pursuit, a regret-tinged fever dream of murder and family secrets, Parker has shown amazing versatility, constantly challenging both himself and his readers. It's strange, then, that California Girl seems at first glance to be just a retread of Cold Pursuit, another story of a police detective whose troubled family history is dragged kicking and screaming back into the light when he's assigned to investigate a local murder. Fortunately, it only takes a few pages to dispel that disappointment and to realize that Parker is after much bigger game this time around. Whereas Pursuit's San Diego homicide cop, Tom McMichael, was a seasoned detective, and his investigation into the bludgeoning death of a local fishing captain and politico took place in contemporary times, and played itself out mostly in a matter of weeks, the action in California Girl ranges over half a century, from 1954 to "Here and Now," as the opening preface and concluding section of this book, narrated by aging police officer Nick Becker, are titled. In fact, the three-page preface, which finds Becker taking a nostalgic drive through the past that still haunts him, on his way to meet with his journalist brother, Andy (still "tough as boiled owl"), is an amazing bit of writing, subtly evocative, and offering a fast glimpse of the emotional richness to come. As he passes by where the SunBlesst orange-packing plant once stood in the small, Orange County town of Tustin -- and where the mutilated corpse of Janelle Vonn was discovered in October 1968 -- Nick muses on his history, back when "I was young. When I thought that what happened there shouldn't ever happen anywhere. When I thought it was up to me to put things right." It's a strong opening, as well as a fair introduction to a tale that is all about the past -- its power to haunt and twist the present. And the ruefully admitted confession that, once upon a time, Nick thought he could put things right (and the unspoken suggestion that he no longer believes that) speaks directly to the theme of lost innocence that permeates this novel. This is a sad, bittersweet sort of nostalgia, perfectly rendered by Parker's deft prose. But it's nothing compared to the narrative bombshell that Andy drops on Nick as they sit down to eat: "Listen to me, Nick. Everything we thought about Janelle Vonn was wrong." Then, before the reader can even get his or her head around this notion -- or ask, "Who the hell is Janelle Vonn?" -- we're transported back to a soft June evening in 1954, a time when, as the unnamed narrator notes with almost a sense of awe, there were still orange trees in Orange County. The four teenage Becker brothers -- David, Nick and Clay, accompanied by the "baby," 12-year-old Andy -- are heading to the SunBlesst packinghouse, to take part in a rumble with the notorious Vonn brothers, local high-school badasses, over a baseball cap. Stupid, maybe, but not exactly life or death. Except this episode is a grim foreshadowing of things that will become matters of life and death, of all that will happen over the next 50 years -- a tiny pebble tossed into the puddle of time that will continue to reverberate through the decades and tear through peoples' lives like a tidal wave. It is in the aftermath of that scuffle, when his vision is still blurred as a result of a cowardly blow by one of the Vonn boys (wielding a tree limb), that Nick first spots the girl whose life, and death, will ultimately have such an impact on the Becker brothers' lives: She had a faded blue dress and a red ribbon in her hair and a pair of scuffed brown cowboy boots. An orange in each hand ... Looked about five. But Janelle isn't out of sight for long. She soon reappears, in sections of this book dated 1960, 1963 and, in particular, 1968 -- that last being the largest chunk of California Girl, by far, in which rookie detective Nick is charged with investigating her grisly death. During the process of his investigation, and through the unfolding of the Becker brothers' lives, we bear witness to a world in constant flux, reported in loving detail that takes the time to note both the cost of LPs ($2.99!) and the hopes and fears of the era (The Commies! The hippies! The pigs!), encompassing both the buttoned-down world of the Beckers' straight-laced conservative parents and the wide-open counter-cultural swirl of free locedurals that stand in tribute to the works of Tony Hillerman -- who made Southwestern American backcountry mysteries chic -- but are also distinctive enough to expand that subgenre. Twenty years ago, when U.S. regional crime fiction was in its infancy, critics wondered whether books set outside of New York or Los Angeles could compete. Certainly Emerson and Jance have proved that they can. | July 27, 1998
Seattle resident J. Kingston Pierce is the crime fiction editor of January. |
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