Book Review

By Derryll White

Kaminsky, Stuart M. (2001).  The Last Dark Place.

Sometimes one has to read the old guys to put everything in perspective. Stuart Kaminsky came up the hard way after the Second World War, working whatever jobs he could find and writing, always writing.  He always had a good number of brown envelopes in the mail to prospective publishers.

By the time he wrote ‘The Last Dark Place’ he had four strong series in print and over 60 books published.  He knew a thing or two about writing.

Kaminsky is adept at sub-plots. There is always the heartbeat of Abe Lieberman, aging Jewish Chicago detective, pursuing the main evil transgressors. But there is also the ‘Blue Glee Club’, the Twin Dragons Chinese gang, and the police officer crazed with vengeance for a raped wife. Meanwhile Abe Lieberman keeps up his pursuit of a crime boss while worrying about his grandson’s upcoming bar mitzva.

The author reaches widely with his pen – into racism, gender issues, religion, history and family.  Kaminsky makes it all small, manageable, understandable. Abe Lieberman is just a man doing what he can, getting through life like any of us.

Stuart Kaminsky is faithful in wrapping up all the sub-plots with inventive care, and in keeping Abe Lieberman very real. To some degree ‘The Last Dark Place’ is a meditation on family and community, and well worth a reader’s time.

*******

Excerpts from the novel:

A BAD MAN – Mr. Woo cultivated a mystique drawn from Old World myths and American-breed images.  He often wore silk Chinese robes when he held an audience.  He burned incense, an odor that irritated hm, when he wanted to impress a visitor or enemy.  He had begun as a thief in Shanghai sixty years ago and bribed, stole, and murdered his was to respectability.  He had come to America and learned that playing to a stereotype had advantages in dealing both with white Americans and with Chinese.  Gradually, very gradually over the course of decades, Mr. Woo had grown accustomed to and comfortable with the persona he had created.  He had become what at first he only pretended to be.  He was well aware of this and accepted it with no discomfort.

SIMPLE THINGS – “You’re back,” she said with relief.

“Lieberman has returned,” he said.  “Not in triumph, but in the recurrent failure which is the lot of most men’s lives.”

“And women’s, too,” she said.  “You hungry?”

HISTORY – No one said what it was or where it had come from.  No one had to.  Mr. Woo knew that it was Mesopotamian and had been stolen during the war in Iraq from a museum in Baghdad.  Its value was in its age and history and not in beauty.  To possess it was to have in one’s power a relic that proved human history was vulnerable to the furtive fingers of a thief.  To possess it was to say that one had it in his power to preserve or erase a small piece of the past.

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.

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