Book #228 of 2018:
The Man Who Killed His Brother by Stephen R. Donaldson (The Man Who #1)
Author Stephen R. Donaldson is best known for his fantasy sagas like The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, but his character work and intense internal struggles resonate more than the epic quests and magical worldbuilding, and that’s what shines in his The Man Who detective novels. Originally a trilogy that Donaldson wrote under a pseudonym in the 1980s, the series was later reissued with the author’s real name attached to accompany the publication of the fourth (and so far, final) book in 2001.
This first story is probably the weakest of the lot, but it still has distinctive flourishes that raise it above the genre standard. The language is deliciously hardboiled, and although the setting lacks any giants or wizards, it’s painted as such a torturous purgatory for the titular detective that I hesitate to call it entirely earthbound. I’ve read plenty of other stories about alcoholics, but no series has ever made addiction seem as starkly horrifying as it does here. The narrator’s dependence on alcohol colors every corner of his investigations, with drinking presented as this awful, ugly thing that Axbrewder is nevertheless compelled to do. I’m honestly half-convinced that reading this series in high school may have been the catalyst that sparked my own lifelong decision not to drink.
It’s not a perfect book. Donaldson is still clearly figuring out the rules of detective fiction at this stage in his career, and careful readers will likely run a few steps ahead of Axbrewder and his partner in unraveling the case. There’s a lot of oblique subtext that would have been stronger if spelled out explicitly, especially concerning the backstory in the title of the time the private investigator fired at a suspect while drunk and gunned down his brother by mistake. It’s clear that even on the wagon the protagonist no longer believes in the possibility of his own redemption, but Donaldson focuses narrowly on that effect at the expense of really exploring its root cause.
There’s also a somewhat strained racial dynamic between what the text calls Anglos and Chicanos in the fictional southwestern city of Puerta del Sol. Axbrewder is the rare member of the former group who doesn’t discriminate against the latter, but the minority characters do come across as just a little more stereotypical and mysticized than their white counterparts. I remember this being less of an issue in the sequels, so perhaps it’s yet another mark of a talented but clumsy early writer. Luckily, there’s still a lot to recommend this first volume, and the books only get better from here.
[Content warning for child prostitution and rape, off-screen but regularly discussed throughout.]
★★★☆☆
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