Robert Skinner's Skin Deep, Blood Red

reviewed Tony Griff

At night on a street in New Orleans, a Packard parks, two blasts roar, a drunk reels and recognizes his killer in the flare of a lit match before sighing and dying.

Could be the introduction of any number of noir-ish novels. But Skin Deep, Blood Red by Robert Skinner is anything but ordinary.

Wesley Farrell, debonair, sleek and handsome is both respectable and violent. As ready to kill as to fire up a Camel. Shark nosed and yellow Borsolino-ed Captain Moroni and Inspector Francis X. F. Casey both know Farrell as a local businessman on the shady side who had reason to pick off Chance Tartaglia, but so did two hundred others. Farrell had once thrown the bagman down a flight of stairs when offered protection but Tartaglia was "too crooked for me to like and not dangerous enough to bother me." Anyway, Farrell was with one of his girls all that night and the brass shell the detectives found by the curb was from a .455 Wembley navy automatic that suggested the hitter was from out of town. Big, blonde, blunt Griffin O'Meara darkens the quarter and picks up drinking money armed robbing groceries and gas stations. He bloody well listens to the instructions of dapper, bodyguarded Emile Ganns. Ganns has oily fingers in all the political crawdad pies and gathers damaging information on whoever attempts to cross him.

Farrell could hardly care less. He is in the business of "minding my own business," and business is bon temps. With his Cafe Tristesse, other niteclubs, brothels, gambling parlors and backalley crap games, Farrell's got a good thing going. Plus, Savannah—big, brown sugar—is crazy for him. The dead policeman's mourning daughter, Sandra, gets interested in the mysterious man with the pale, gray eyes.

But a distant Tante shames him into a favor. And Ganns wants him to find the killer. If not for ten thousand dollars, then for not revealing the secret that Ganns has uncovered. Farrell becomes enveloped in a roux of accomplices, enemies, family and breed.

Robert Skinner has created a character seldom included in noir fiction - a pale gold, razor toting, niteclub owning, mean and angry sporting man who has passed for white down south, prospering in a shadowy world between races. Creole, mulatto,quadroon, octoroon—exotic blends of race at a time in Louisiana when even one-sixteenth Negro blood would make Farrell black, change his world and threaten all he had. Wesley Farrell could be Ezekial Rawlins' grandaddy. Self aware and experienced, he is not ashamed of who he is, but is clever enough to know how to get by, and tough and cunning enough to survive in the corrupt, brutal city that care forgot.

Skinner paints a precise picture of pre-war New Orleans, uptown and downriver, detailing the era with Dime Detective novels by Frederick Nebel, Mills Brothers' tunes and suits of gray shantung. There are plenty of characters to twist the turns. Blood spills, sheets are rustled, calvados is measured, diamonds are stashed. The story has a sassafrass flavor with a few surprises mixed in. Skin Deep, Blood Red is a fast moving, intricate, historical mystery from a different perspective.

Skinner has written several Wesley Farrell novels, including Cat-Eyed Trouble, Daddy's Gone A 'Hunting and Blood To Drink. He has also co-authored Chester Himes: An Annotated Primary and Secondary Bibliography with Michel Fabre and Lester Sullivan.

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Copyright © 2004 Tony Griff

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TONY GRIFF was born in Perth Amboy, New Jersey and raised in Chicago. He spent several years on the road, coast to coast, on stage crews for rock + roll bands. He continues to get out of town as often as possible.
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