What Micky Spillane was to the tough-guy detective novel, Jon A. Jackson is to the sensitive tough-guy detective novel. That is, they write with gusto, macho, plenty of sex and blood, and, in Jackson's case, bathos. Whereas Spillane would have his hero boff the dame then have her die, in Jackson's world Detective Sergeant "Fang" Mulheisen not only never has sex with the bombshell he's known since high school (who dies nonetheless) but he lives with his mother (at least on weekends).
Jackson won accolades and awards for his novels Grootka, The Diehard, and The Blind Pig, which also featured his Detroit policeman. Hit on the House starts out with the first of a series of intra-mob murders that result in the entry onto the scene of--what I must admit is one of the more intriguing McGuffins I've run across in years of reading mysteries--one Joe Service, private investigator for the mobs.
The action in House moves along quickly and smoothly. Jackson assembles the disparate pieces much in the same manner you or I might assemble the parts of an automatic, creating something deadly out of otherwise useless metal.
One piece is his high-school friend Bonny Lande neé Wheeler. An outcast at school and later a pin-up, she and her geeky, foul-mouthed husband, Eugene, enter into Mulheisen's life shortly after he becomes involved in the first of the afore-mentioned murders.
Piece number two is the string of murders themselves, starting with that of Big Sid Sedlacek and his stooge on the street in front of Sid's house, where his vengeful, cop-punching daughter is visiting for Sunday dinner.
Other essential parts include Joe Service; Mulheisen's African-American partner and his wife; Mama Mulheisen, who's tapped into the environmental movement in order to protect her privacy; and a subplot from Love Story. Not to mention lessons in modern economics and computer science:
"...a lotta people think of money as,...well, dollars and coins,...but it ain't."
"Ah," said Mulheisen. He looked at Lande with interest. He would not have suspected the man of philosophy. "What is money, then?"
"It's just data," Lande said. "Information. When you work in computers, you purty soon find out that everything is data. You tell the computer something, the computer does what it's gotta do. You tell a computer this is fifty bucks, the computer says OK. ...who needs the actual bucks? All you gotta do is get the machine to tell another machine that it's got fifty bucks."
Bonny and Mulheisen looked at each other. She said, "But, Gene, honey, you have to have fifty dollars at some point, don't you?"
"Nanh. Oh, somewhere, sometime there's gotta be fifty bucks, but the machine don't care."
Indeed. Too bad those ATM-using mall shoppers in New England hadn't read this. The plot's not too complex, the dialogue's driven too much by dialect, there's gratuitous kinky sex, but Jackon's pulled off another one.
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