Arrow-right Camera
The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

‘The Forgotten Man’ a complex murder mystery

Frank Wilson The Philadelphia Inquirer

Robert Crais’ seventh Elvis Cole novel opens on a horrendous crime scene: Cops arrive at a house where a mother, father and son have been bludgeoned to death.

That’s bad enough. Worse is the little girl they find in a bedroom with her back to the wall, holding a soiled pillowcase to her nose as she sucks on her index finger.

One of the cops, Frank Padilla, “would always remember that – she sucked the index finger, not her thumb. She stared straight ahead, her mouth working as she sucked. Dried blood crusted her feet. She could not have been more than four years old.”

What this has to do with the murder Cole hears about over the phone at 3:58 a.m. more than 30 years later is what “The Forgotten Man” is about.

The call Cole gets is from a Detective Kelly Diaz, who’s found some old guy shot in an alley in L.A. Seems the last thing the guy said to her was that he was looking for his son – Elvis Cole.

Cole had spent a good part of his childhood running away from home to look for his old man: “When my mother was twenty-two years old she disappeared for three weeks. She disappeared often, walking away without telling anyone where she was going, but always came back, and that time she came back pregnant with me. My mother never described my father in any meaningful way, and may not have known his name.”

He can see that the guy in the alley – covered with self-administered tattoos of a bizarrely religious nature – doesn’t bear any resemblance to himself: “The dead man had a head like a praying mantis and I had a head like a rutabaga. I didn’t look anything like him. Nothing like him. Nothing.” And yet, he’s got to be sure.

Connecting the murder of the family and the murder of the man in the alley is a veritable cat’s cradle of plotlines, including some tangled romantic threads. Cole is pining away for his ex-girlfriend, whose son he had rescued from kidnappers but who “concluded that life with yours truly was not worth the risk.” At the same time, his police buddy Carol Starkey is pining away for Cole, who never seems to notice.

Further complexity comes from the way Crais tells the story, alternating between Cole’s first-person narrative and a third-person account of the comings and goings of a creepy character who calls himself Frederick Conrad. (His real identity is part of the mystery.)

Crais writes a spare prose that modulates smoothly into something bordering on the poetic. There’s the light rain that “shriveled to a heavy mist,” the woman who emerged from her trailer “like a brown recluse spider springing a trap,” the bike messengers who “whipped between cars like tweaked-out hummingbirds.”

When Cole arrives at the alley to view the body of the guy he is told claimed to be his father, “I cocked my head to see him as if we were looking at each other. His eyes were open and would remain that way until a mortician closed them. They were brown, like mine, but dulled by the loss of their tears. That’s the first thing you learn when you work with the dead: We’re gone when we no longer cry.”

Then there’s this, when Starkey and Cole meet in a deli to compare notes: “She slid out of the booth, but I didn’t get up. Starkey bent to kiss my cheek. When she turned to kiss me, her hair fell forward. I had never seen Starkey from that angle. She was pretty.”

That mix of observational sharpness and emotional obtuseness pretty much defines the heartbreakingly hardboiled world Elvis Cole inhabits.