“Misfit Blues,” a novel by Michael G. West, paperback, 178 pages, from Sepiessa Press, Vineyard Haven. $12.95. Available at select Island retailers including Bunch of Grapes and Edgartown Books, and online at Amazon.com.
Blues musicians favor an anthem that holds, “If you ain’t had trouble, you can’t sing the blues.”
Tommy Shakespear, the waggish gumshoe protagonist in Michael West’s Island-based detective series, has all the trouble he wants in his latest adventure, set on Martha’s Vineyard circa 1989.
The Shakespear series includes a standing cast of well-defined characters, including the J.F.K.-assassination-obsessed backgammon wizard Creech, a ganja-obsessed fellow, and the Red Sox-obsessed Boston attorney Hank Greenberg — Tommy’s sometimes employer.
Tommy’s persona is an eclectic blend of street, old money and academe. Possessor of a not-quite-large-enough trust fund, Tommy is a 20something Island odd-job guy from Boston, a former Golden Gloves boxer and a dropout from the Amos Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.
He’s also a sucker for long-shot romances. In this one, he falls for Elaine, who spends her weekdays with Tommy and her weekends with her millionaire fund-manager fiancé.
Tommy stands to collect a $5 million trust-fund bonus at age 30, provided he doesn’t drink or do drugs, as his grandfather’s trust dictates. He is sometimes on shaky ground with drinking and marijuana, and on even shakier ground on the third requirement: He has to live until his 30th birthday to collect.
This condition is not a slam dunk in “Misfit Blues.” It turns out Mr. Greenberg has hired Tommy to find a witness to a murder, Shari Nemchek, for which Mr. Greenberg’s client, Zymanski, is charged, but which he did not commit. Shari was on the scene when it happened, took a flyer to escape the murderers, and ended up, you guessed it, hiding out on the Island with her sister.
Now Zymanski, Shari’s erstwhile boyfriend, is not a boy scout. He’s a local hothead who went to confront bookie Willie Hicks about his relationship with Shari, maybe administer a beating while he was at it, when two leg breakers for Arnie Bres, a feared Boston slumlord and connected scumbag, showed up and tuned them both up, landing Hicks in the ER with a fractured skull.
Zymanski was unconscious when the cops arrived, so he got the charges and Greenberg got the problem. He needs Shari. She doesn’t want to be found, and definitely doesn’t want to testify. Fortunately Mr. West has set the scene in midsummer, largely in Vineyard Haven and Oak Bluffs, when you’d be hard-pressed to pick out Dumbo the Elephant on Circuit Avenue.
Tommy finds Shari and Bres’s thugs, who are also in search of her, on the Island. Bres’s legmen are former cops gone bad. They do the legwork, and are tracking Shari and Tommy down. Our hero is faced with the problem we’ve all encountered: how to get unwanted guests off the Island.
He figures it out with the help of a woman’s wig and a hitchhiker. But it’s a temporary fix, and the bad boys are back, forcing Tommy to step on their toes (literally) at the Tisbury Inn (now the Mansion House) in Vineyard Haven.
The action goes to warp speed from this point, when Tommy must evade an Eastern European professional assassin, who strews the Island with strangled corpses, while protecting Shari.
While it is our policy not to reveal plot endings, we can safely say that Tommy will be back. Creech, unfortunately, will not. The police found him in Tommy’s storage locker with a noose around his neck, along with a large bag of pot. Oops.
Mr. West has a fertile imagination, and there are subplots and definitely a couple of twists you won’t see coming. Mr. West has been busy over the past few years, publishing four mystery novels, including the initial Tommy Shakespear opus.
The Shakespear works are my personal favorites, because the principal characters are always engaging. Tommy is a broader character than your average hard-boiled private eye. He is flawed, not always one step ahead of the bad guys, and his romantic inclinations sometimes threaten to take his eye off the ball, so to speak.
The Tommy Shakespear character and Mr. West seem to have comfortably figured each other out, and the character works in a variety of settings, on- and off-Island.
Come to think of it, the cadre of Island mystery writers is growing. With Phil Craig, Cynthia Riggs, the Rev. Judith Campbell, and Mr. West, there are probably enough cadavers to fill the freight boat.