Twilight at Mac's Place

The televised Congressional hearing into the Iran-Contra scandal was a spectacle of legerdemain by master politicians. You couldn’t turn the volume up high enough to hear any truth. More than once, while reading Twilight at Mac’s Place, I pictured Thomas sitting in front of his TV, watching the testimony of Oliver North with a gigantic smile on his face.

From this background of secrecy and misdirection, Thomas asks, in Twilight at Mac’s Place, a million-dollar what-if. What if one of these covert players had written a book about it? To what lengths would his bosses go to make sure it never saw the light of day? That is the seed. What better soil for Ross Thomas to grow one of his brilliant hybrids of thriller, murder mystery, and political amorality tale?

It’s easy to lose yourself in trying to identify the specific agencies, bureaus, committees, news organizations, and scoundrels that populate this novel. But it’s even easier—and much more fun—to revel in Thomas’s dead-on characters and the wily dialogue upon which these characters are built. As with any good novelist, Thomas never falls for personification. Nobody stands for anything. That would be too simple. Each character is a bundle of enigmas, and we don’t learn which is the alpha-enigma until the end. Even their names are delicious: Tinker Burns and Isabelle Gelinet and Gilbert Undean and Michael Padillo and Hamilton Keyes and Cyril McCorkle and Detective- Sergeant Darius Pouncy. (McCorkle and Padillo appeared in Thomas’s first novel, The Cold War Swap, in 1966.)

Thomas was a terrific storyteller and a skilled wordsmith. His language pops with the unexpected and is a joy to read. An example:

[He] had a tree-trunk neck [and] one of those reflexive all-purpose smiles that show too much gum and are used to express pleasure, rage, pain, hope, fear, mirth, approval and sometimes nothing at all.

Tinker Burns had seen such smiles in the Legion and knew that they often belonged to nut cases. He remembered two particular Legionnaires, both borderline sociopaths, who had died two days apart in terrible agony, each of them gut-shot, their all-purpose smiles firmly in place.

Beyond the dizzying spiral of story, the rich characters, and the cocked and loaded language there isn’t much to say except thank you to St. Martin’s Press for reissuing Ross Thomas.

I think the years have been kind to Twilight at Mac’s Place. Thomas would live to write only two more novels. He died in 1995. Nice to know that such entertaining and topical writing can stand on its own two feet and get around so nimbly after fourteen years. Fourteen more and fourteen more? Sure.

Enjoy.

Chapter 1

Shortly after the death of the failed Quaker, Steadfast Haynes, the Central Intelligence Agency received a telephoned blackmail threat that was so carefully veiled and politely murmured it could have been misinterpreted as the work of some harmless crank.

But it wasn’t misinterpreted. And it was solely because of this vague threat to reveal what Haynes had really done while serving as an occasional agency hire in Africa, the Middle East, Central America and Southeast Asia that the Department of Defense, after much grumbling, gave in to CIA pressure and ordered the Army to bury him at Arlington National Cemetery with standard military honors.

Steadfast Haynes was fifty-seven when he died at 11:32 P.M. on January 19, the night before the inauguration of the nation’s forty-first President. He died in bed on the fourth floor of the Hay-Adams Hotel in a $185-a-night room that commanded a fine view of the White House. He died quietly, even discreetly, much as he had lived, and the thirty-three-year-old woman who lay next to him when he died was a former Agence France-Presse correspondent and old friend who knew just whom to call and what to do.

Her first call was to Paris and lasted a little more than four minutes. Her second call was to the front desk to notify the hotel that Haynes was dead. Her third call was to the robbery and homicide division of the Los Angeles Police Department.

After this third call was finally transferred to Sergeant Virgil Stroud, she identified herself and, speaking in tones both formal and slightly accented, asked for Detective Granville Haynes in order to inform him of his father’s death.

“That’s not bad,” Sergeant Stroud said.

“Sorry?”

“I mean we had one guy call yesterday, maybe the day before, that had to talk to Granny because he was Granny’s identical twin and dying of leukemia and needed a bone marrow transplant.”

After a moment of hesitation, she said, “There is no twin brother.”

“Yeah. I know. But you’d be surprised what people will say to get to him.” This time it was Sergeant Stroud who hesitated. “Or maybe you wouldn’t. Be surprised.”

“Something’s happened to him—is that it?”

“That’s it all right. He won the lottery three weeks ago and quit us the next day.”

“I still need his home telephone number.”

Sergeant Stroud used a chuckle to say good-bye and end the call.

When the Los Angeles Police Department was robbed by fortune of Granville Haynes’s services, it was also robbed of its only homicide detective with a master’s degree in Old French from the University of Virginia, where he had written his thesis on the three major humanistic aspects of Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel.