THE RED AND THE DEAD: CON LEHANE'S THE RED SCARE MURDERS

Con Lehane has always been a writer for the New York proletariat. His medium boiled mysteries featuting amatuer slueths bartender Brian McNulty or librarian Raymond Ambler give us a working class view of the city that often figures into the plot. He goes deeper into that viewpoint as he becomes more hard boiled and looks at a dark corner of our history in The Red Scare Murders.

Lehane's new protagonist is Mick Mulligan, a former Disney cartoonist who lost his job and family due to the blacklist. He takes up work as a private detective to scrounge a living. The head of a union hires him for a gig that puts him against the system that ruined him.

It's a hail mary job, trying to get Harold Williams, a black communist, off death row for killing Irwin Johnson, owner of the cab company he worked for. The police were tipped off by an anonymous call and the evidence is sketchy, but William's race and politics make it open and shut for the system. Mick soon learns that many wanted Johnson dead; his workers, his business partners, even his wife. More people want Mick to quit snooping around, including the N.Y.P.D., mob boss Big Al Lucania, and the FBI whose tactics are even more gangster than Al's. In fifties P.I. fashion Mike Mulligan will be beat up, betrayed, and shot at as he works to get answers.

Lehane proves he can portray his vision of New York in a historical setting as well as contemporary. He gets the details of the personalities of the time as well as their work. He paints a laboring class teetering on a few steps away from the middle class or sliding back down. This is what ends up making The Red Scare so scary. You can lose your livelihood as well as your life, making each subject and situation more dangerous.

As usual, Con Lehan gives us a wonderful human protagonist at the center. Mick, learning the gumshoe game on the job, is thrown in the deep end and flails at times. However his understanding of people and heart, though a little battered, makes him the man for the job. Even at his most cynical, he can't help but yearn for fairness and justice. When referring to the blacklist, screenwriter Dalton Trumbo said, "..it would do no good to look for heroes or villains...There were only victims."

Mick is a victim struggling to rise, at least for a moment, as a hero.

The Red Scare Murders reads like a book Con Lehane was born to write. It gives us a human and social look at McCarthyism from the workers viewpoint. Mick Mulligan doesn't go down just some mean streets, but journeys through a dark time.