DIABLERIE
Walter Mosley
Bloomsbury USA
Fiction
ISBN: 9781596913974

The great mystery novelist Lawrence Block once told me that he could write a cookbook at that point in his career and it would be shelved with the mysteries in bookstores. Such is the peril of being stereotyped as an author.

Walter Mosley could have faced a similar fate. As the author of the bestselling Easy Rawlins series, he is a “name” mystery writer. But he has worked hard and prolifically over the years to branch out into other genres, such as literary novels, science fiction and nonfiction. Last year he wrote KILLING JOHNNY FRY, which was sexually frank or, in Mosley’s words, a “sexistential noir.”

Now Mosley has penned DIABLERIE, which echoes some of the themes of Johnny Fry to once again paint a devastating portrait of an ordinary man in extraordinary crisis. DIABLERIE cements Mosley’s reputation as one of our best writers of modern noir.

On the surface, Ben Dibbuk is an American success story. He is a 47-year-old computer troubleshooter for a huge New York City bank. Married for 23 years to an upwardly mobile wife, they raised a daughter now in college. And he created this comfortable life by overcoming his own personal demons. Once a blackout drinker and rambler in the years before his marriage, he has been clean and sober for over two decades.

But if there is one rule of noir, it is this: nothing is what it appears to be on the surface. Beneath the surface, Ben is emotionally dead. He describes his feelings when his daughter smiles at him: “While she beamed at me, the feeling that lurked in my shoulder blades took over. Not an emotion or something physical like pain or heat or cold, it was more akin to a void, a sensual numbness.”

Ben’s relationship with his wife, Mona, is in a freefall. He says, “We just wrangled, disputed over anything: Seela’s future, our sex routines, what life had or had not brought to either or us.” So Ben now pays the rent and bills of a much younger, Russian college “student” (perhaps mistress, perhaps hooker). Svetlana is on call 24/7 to have sex with Ben.

But even wild sex with a woman half his age doesn’t work for Ben anymore. “‘I don’t hate anybody.’ I said, thinking, nor do I love or fear or worry about anyone.” Ben’s entire existence is about keeping control. “The idea of me, Ben Dibbuk, losing control, even for a moment, was ridiculous.”

Then his life of quiet desperation is thrown into chaos when a lady apparently from his past walks up to him at a business dinner he is forced to attend by his wife, a magazine editor. The mystery woman seems to know him, but Ben has no recollection of her. What’s worse is when she appears again a few days later at his office, demanding to know why he wants to “hurt” her.

His drinking days are a “shadow,” which “contained a mountain.” Ben then finds that his wife not only has taken a lover, but is having him investigated by a detective. Why? What crime might he have committed with this mystery woman? Ben says, “I was beginning to feel fear…What was happening to me? Why was my past, a past that held nothing but a few drunken benders, coming back?”

Soon, cops from Colorado ask Ben to come in for questioning about a murder that happened 20 years before, of which he has no knowledge. Like the Edmond O’Brien character in the great film noir DOA, Ben has entered the perpetual noir night. He thinks, “Darkness was up ahead, I knew. Death and demolition were my destination, if not my destiny --- that is what I felt. But I didn’t care. The void in my shoulders protected me from the fear.” He won’t be going into work at the bank anytime soon. And he starts smoking again. For the first time, Ben is forced to face the truth, not only about his drinking days, but about his parents and his brother in prison, and the possibility of true love and redemption in life.

Mosley has once again written a great book that will keep you turning pages right until the end. Faulkner once said that “the problem with the past is that it is never past.” And that is certainly the theme here. But Mosley’s brilliance is that he writes about a world in which comfort and security is an illusion. Any day can bring a wrong turn on the road at the exact wrong moment, a voice from the buried past on the phone or the spot on the CAT scan that might throw us into the noir night.

Mosley writes, “Life for all Americans, whether they knew it or not, was like playing blackjack against the house --- sooner or later you were going to lose…The winners were my bosses’ bosses’ bosses. They lived in the Alps or Palm Springs or somewhere else where the earth is run from…Black people in prison, Iraqis blown up on job lines in Baghdad or Vietnamese peasants in their rice paddies becoming target practice for passing American helicopters --- we were all dealt a losing hand.”

And that is why DIABLERIE is even scarier than the mysteries for which Mosley is famous. Here, he has written a novel about real people with real weaknesses and vulnerabilities who miscalculate when everything is on the line. Ben Dibbuk could be any one of us on a really, really bad day.

    --- Reviewed by Tom Callahan

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