Bill Pronzini's Blue Lonesome

reviewed Harry Shannon

Picture a somewhat shy CPA who is pushing forty. He generally eats the same meal every night at the same San Francisco coffee shop, the ironically named Harmony Café. His name is Jim Messenger, and he exists in quiet desperation, listening to classic jazz and making up stories about other people’s lives.

He calls her Ms. Lonesome.

She is not pretty in the traditional sense; a bit too thin for his taste, with ash-blonde hair left slightly unkempt and skin clearly weathered by a previous life outdoors and under a much harsher sun. Messenger doesn’t quite know why he is so fascinated by her—perhaps she is just a convenient diversion, a distraction from his own melancholy isolation in an indifferent, seaside city. He becomes obsessed by Ms. Lonesome. He even surprises himself by following her home one night, feeling vaguely guilty, just to see how and where she lives. At her apartment house, he learns her name is Janet Mitchell.

Days turn into weeks and months. Along the way, Messenger tries to approach her once, and is instantly, and not surprisingly, rebuffed. She does not want company. And then one night her chair is empty—again the next night, and the next. Messenger becomes concerned enough to go to her apartment, where he pretends to be a friend and is told that Ms. Lonesome cut her wrists in the bath tub and died.

That is where another man’s obsession might end, but for Messenger (and the story) this is just the beginning.

"Blue Lonesome" is my favorite Pronzini book (although I like damned near every one I have read, "Step to the Graveyard Easy," for example, or "Shackled," or that powerful novel "A Wasteland of Strangers"). Maybe that is because Messenger follows the dead woman’s trail to the tiny town of Beulah, Nevada. I know those towns like the back of my hand, and have set much of my fiction in similar places. Or perhaps it is the finely stitched western characters, who are really enough to be my Nevada relatives and friends from thirty to forty years ago. Hell, I also understand and relate to Jim Messenger, a man who has refused the call to adventure so many times he doubts his own capacity for courage.

No, it’s more than that. It’s the depth of experience the author brings to the tale. This is a professional at the peak of his powers, so most of all it is the writing; the pure, lean, wickedly accurate creation of moody, small town desert atmosphere. As Messenger interacts with the haunted denizens of Historic Beulah, and the plot unfolds, the moodiness is palpable and hangs over the tale like a thick, dark blanket of fog—or maybe a timeless jazz solo by someone like Mingus, where nothing is what it seems.

You see, it seems poor Janet’s real name was Anna Roebuck, and she was accused, although not convicted, of murdering both her husband and their little girl.

"Blue Lonesome" is such a damned fine book. Oh, it isn’t the plot itself, which is certainly serviceable and a quality piece of mystery fiction, because the small town with a lot of secrets is not an unusual storyline. No, it is that eerie atmosphere that does the trick. The comparison I feel most comfortable with is saying that Bill Pronzini’s "Blue Lonesome" is something like Horton Foote’s magnificent "Tender Mercies," in that it creates a timelessly moving, western-influenced achingly human tale—and does so as much by what it does not say as what it does.

If you’ve never read this one, do yourself a favor and track down a copy. You’ll thank me.

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Copyright © 2004 Harry Shannon

Read an extract from Harry Shannon's Memorial Day