Philip Marlowe and Jesus Christ on Cape Cod

EVEN JESUS CHRIST knows Atlanta has a professional basketball team.

THIS, MAYBE, is the latest incarnation of the American private i., aged past the primed '40s and sagging benignly into dotage, yielding his sleek hide and tough aspect to crowsfeet and innocence. Transplanted from the big bad city and the crass apparatus called technology, the shamus is hiding out in Cape Cod, cloaked as a gracefully-aging police chief who abhors modern development.

This, more likely, is the latest attempt at reincarnation of Jesus Christ. A man marked in youth by a ricocheting bullet that rendered him lame. Who is so naive, he confesses himself, that he doesn't even know Atlanta has a professional basketball team. Who as a boy of 29 faced the choice: will I be a Supreme Court Justice or will I be "guardian of Lymington" and chose to stay as the police chief of his home town. And ever since has shouldered the various petty sins of his constituency--their drunkeness, their rowdiness, their B&E's, their narrowness--without uttering so much as a complaint. Becoming slightly reflective and mellow now in his old age--due perhaps to the death of his wife (which he has accepted unquestioningly) but also no doubt to the daily administration, orally, of two jiggers of bourbon--he has become the kind narrator and apologist for the provincial orthodoxies of his community; like the stage manager from Our Town, he is the man who talks from beginning to end of The Guardian.

This, anyway, is Nye Richardson Gifford, 63, chief of the Lymington Police and a certain mixture of Philip Marlowe and Christ who has had to wait to shoulder his greatest human burden and solve his biggest crime until now, the beginning of this novel. Until a sunny August afternoon in 1972 and the discovery, on a back road in Lymington, of the body of a youngish woman, her identity blasted past police identification by four .38 caliber slugs to the face.

Despite the fact that the victim is legally disembowelled by a state pathologist, clinically sawed and sliced apart beneath fluorescent lights in the basement of a funeral home before his very eyes, Gifford is nonetheless slain by her. Perhaps moved by the false eyelashes and atrophied, prematurely menopausal, ovaries--indicative, for him, of the harshness of society--Gifford swears out some secret allegiance to this human victim. That even if he does not find her murderer, neither will he forget her betrayal, as he limps on toward his own death.

The less Christian aspect of John Hough Jr.'s novel is the unravelling of the mystery and the pursuit of the murderer, the account delivered unsentimentally by Gifford the old policeman, turned sleuth by only the second killing in his town in 40 years. Gifford joins in with state cop Tommy O'Rourke and traces the woman to her unhappy past in Boston and to the men to whom she was more devoted than they to her. The two cops' dogged pursuit--through what can only be termed a grim and desparate picture of urban civilization, and countless discotheques besides--nets them a grimy handful of none-too-virtuous witnesses who would just as well cast all blame on the suspect, Jimmy Johnson. A man who, it seems, has already been chewed off and spit out by this world, Johnson is ritually pronounced Guilty by his peers and shuffled off to life-long incarceration.

APPARENTLY, however, John Hough Jr. doesn't really want this to be a detective novel and subtly deemphasizes all aspects of the book that are such. The motive and method of the murder are quite ordinary, and, in spite of Gifford and O'Rourke's exertions, its solution is quite simple. The whodunit is so peripheral to the body of the novel, in fact, that the first real clues do not surface until three months after the killing and a sizeable lull in the narrative, and Gifford continues his account for a good 30 pages after the guilty verdict.

Hough apparently revels in Jesus Christ figures, and Gifford needs those 30 pages to accept the responsibility for the sins of some kids who cuss in front of their neighbors, a drunk who dies in a flophouse room, and Jimmy Johnson himself. The verdict is hardly definitive for Gifford, who anguishes, with the italicism that is appropriate to a Monday morning quarterback of the Crucifixion, "What if he's innocent?" Jimmy Johnson has become a Christ-figure too, and before Gifford can finish his narrative/life, he must accept the burden of fingered Jimmy, who, albeit begrudgingly, bore the sins of a half-dozen tainted witnesses off to prison.

CHRIST-MONGERING, however, is not really fair to Hough, whose book is more about a patient guardian than a martyr. Gifford's assumption of responsibility for Kimberly Ann Regan, the victim, seems all too Christian, but it makes sense for a man whose equanimity has depended, since a decision 34 years earlier to limit his scope to a Cape Cod town, on the preservation of a profound order within that community. Gifford's dedication to the community is so abiding that he feels called upon to write its history upon his retirement. The obliteration of Kimberly Ann Regan within his purview is too much for Gifford to be able to reconcile to his conception of Lymington and its order. He must find out why.

This book is about loss of innocence, then. Gifford's quest for the answer only convinces him of the fragility of the order he reveres; he sees that the lies of urban civilization will continue to make incursions into Lymington of a more destructive nature than the simple murder of Kimberly Ann Regan. Shopping malls, vinyl tombstones, and seaside development corporations are confounding the natural beauty of his town in more lasting ways than the incidental dumping of a bloody corpse on its sacred soil.

This loss of innocence, while moving, is not believable. Gifford is like a frail matchgirl amid the mean cusses who populate Kimberly Ann Regan's wretched past.

And Giff plods on, astonished by the crush of lives and goods that society has demonically blistered out of nature. Professional athletics, street crime, and violent sexism are worldly dimensions that Gifford has never had to contemplate from the blessed security of his provincial office. Hough's urban world is savage but somehow not believable. When the cops see a large black man bullying a white boy, O'Rourke hustles the outraged Gifford on. "Believe it or not," he explains, "they wouldn't want us to interfere. Not even the kid." Gifford responds to this fractured and isolationist image by blindly attempting to establish feeling contact with some of the warped souls he encounters in this "odyssey," as he calls it. It is not enough to see Kimberly Ann Regan's girl-friend cry and lament her own suffering over a pastromi sandwich during lunch-hour, then leave her for other witnesses. He must call her back, days later, past 3 a.m. in the morning, to find out how she's doing, and attempt stubbornly and hopefully to find a continuity in these fragments. Innocence of this scale is unimaginable; Gifford's just too much of a sap.

HOUGH's achievement is in narrating from an old man's perspective and expressing the weariness and grace of a responsible and lonely man crumbling unremorsefully into "decrepitude." Gifford's recognition of a new and foul society is stated not with the tragic alarm of the young man, say of Hough's age, but with humility and resignation, by a police chief who knows it is time to retire.

Hough writes honestly and seemingly effortlessly, with the kind of uncontrived prose that allows him to affect the old man's voice. Despite his apparent occupation with Christian figures, Hough is simple and unrhetorical in his description, inflicting no heavy judgements on the reader. Gifford's unease with civilization never, through Hough's style, becomes condemnation; it can at most be the natural sum of the man's observations. There is nothing intemperate about Hough's writing, and his metaphor is artless. A phrase like "fleecy globs" is used once to characterize autopsied brains, later morning smoke-clouds in Boston.

It's a mistake then, maybe, to violate Hough's softspoken-ness by attributing to him the perception of the detective-martyr, the guardian, as the Christian who reveals society. Maybe it is better to take Gifford on his own humble terms, as a gentle and kind man with an interesting story. But Hough has dropped too many hints here, or made too many mistakes, by endowing this man with such astounding parcels of innocence and responsibility, as to make such a conclusion inevitable.