A Classic and Profoundly Moral Tale of Good Versus Evil

It’s not every day you find a crime novel that acknowledges its debt to legend, myth and motion pictures as proudly as Stephen Hunter’s “Pale Horse Coming” (Simon & Schuster, $25, 491 pages). Set in the early 1950s, it chronicles the adventures that befall the author’s redoubtable World War II hero, Earl Swagger, once he is exposed to the inhumane conditions at Thebes State Penal Farm for “violent blacks” in deepest, swampiest, most inaccessible Mississippi.

Swagger, as Hunter sees him, is the ultimate soldier who can’t help but seek out new battlefields. Having cleaned up a mob-infested town in Arkansas (last year’s “Hot Springs”), he almost eagerly enters the hell hole that is Thebes to rescue his friend and mentor Sam Vincent, a lawyer whose belief in justice has led to his imprisonment.

What he and Sam discover is an evil that goes beyond the sadistic and racist treatment of the convicts.

The last half of the novel finds Swagger assembling a team of six “specialists” to assist him in an attack on the penal farm. The result is an updated version of the battle in Aeschylus’ Greek tragedy “The Seven Against Thebes” by way of the western film “The Magnificent Seven.” (According to the author’s acknowledgements, Swagger’s magnificent six all have real-life antecedents. The only one I recognized was the scarcely disguised “most decorated soldier of the Second World War” turned movie star.)

Just about every excessively brutal work of fiction or film tries to excuse its ultra-violence with poetic phrasing or superficial morality. Hunter makes no excuses for the brutality he describes other than the fact that brutality exists. The power of his prose is its own poetry and rationale. He’s an uncommon storyteller, and “Pale Horse Coming” is a classic, profoundly moral tale of good versus evil--with maybe a little biblical eye-for-an-eye vengeance thrown in for good measure. It’s too bad Sam Peckinpah isn’t around to film it.

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Early on in Pete Hautman’s “Rag Man” (Simon & Schuster, $23, 254 pages), protagonist Mack MacWray asks his favorite bartender, “Do you think that if you were to do something that you would never do, that it would change who you are?” The bartender, the soul of diplomacy, refuses to be drawn into the discussion. Hautman doesn’t give the reader that option.

His novel hangs on our willingness to believe that MacWray, an unprepossessing clothing manufacturer whose partner has looted the firm, would, after refusing to rescue the embezzler from a fatal fall down a Mexican cliff side, pick up the departed partner’s sociopathic vibe. It’s a premise that’s a trifle hard to swallow, though Hautman’s darkly funny sensibility aids the digestion.

As MacWray returns to his old life, armed with a new immoral outlook, everything that was holding him back--the acts of venal and corrupt businessmen, in the main--seems to disappear. There’s an initial amusement in watching him out-peck the carrion who were hoping to feast on the remains of his company. But the author is too much of a moralist to let his now conscience-free antihero have things entirely his way.

He cleverly fits together plot elements for an ending in which justice is satisfyingly served. But this is a strangely straightforward morality tale. Its unique and quirky characters may behave in surprising ways, but their actions lead to consequences that are a bit too predictable, mainly because there’s little to distract us from their inevitability. “Rag Man” may be of average length, but it reads more like a novelette than a novel in full.

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If conditions on university campuses really are as bizarre and insidiously political as depicted in novelist-critic Lev Raphael’s new “Burning Down the House” (Walker, $24.95, 290 pages), higher education must be at an all-time low. As the author amusingly presents it, the faculty at State University of Michigan is an assortment of eccentric, conniving, self-promoting, not to mention homicidal, half-baked do-nothings.

Some of them are plumping for a white studies program that will call attention to the cultural contributions of such as Elvis Presley and Erskine Caldwell. Another, an ex-con, has just written a bestselling how-to entitled “Healing Your Inner Crook.” After a chapter or two, one may begin to suspect that Raphael is a social satirist posing as a mystery writer and that his novel is more a study of contemporary manners than a murder story. Both trade-offs are welcome when the material is as clever and sharp as it is here.

There’s a bit more to the book, however. Its title comes from a passage by Rebecca West in her “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia” comparing one’s desire for peace and happiness and a well-built house to darker desires that will “leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.”

Hero Nick Hoffman seems ready for a sea change that could result in a little house burning. His cynicism about academic life and the tribulations of tenure are dulling his love of teaching. His pacifism, undercut by his continuing bouts with the criminal element (the discussion of which is a nice example of contemporary mystery series deconstruction), has just about given way to gun envy. And the steadiness of his gay relationship of 15 years is being shaken by his sexual attraction to a flamboyant female professor whose life has been threatened by an unknown stalker.

A hero with a midlife crisis adds considerable substance to the book’s glib jibes and satiric set pieces. There’s a bit of a letdown at novel’s end, however. Though the stalker’s identity is uncovered, Hoffman’s personal problems are left to be continued. Cliffhangers are not my favorite endings, but I’m willing to concede that Nick has enough on his mind to require at least a two-book solution.

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Dick Lochte, the author of “Lucky Dog and Other Tales of Murder” (Five Star) and the prize-winning novel “Sleeping Dog” (Poisoned Pen Press), reviews mysteries every other week.