To Bring My Shadow

Other than Wade Miller’s Max Thursday novels, published from 1947 to 1951, there have been surprisingly few crime novels set in one of America’s largest cities, a Navy town, and a border town. Perhaps that’s because all the crime stories have been blown by the Santa Ana’s to the giant megalopolis to the north. That’s all about to change. In ” To Bring My Shadow,” Phillips brings us a giant helping of bleak San Diego noir.

It’s a buddy detective novel with two homicide detectives, Frank Pinson and his partner Slade Ryerson. Pinson feels like a dead Man walking ever since his wife took a swan dive off the Coronado Bridge. He’s wandering the streets after his shift ends, chasing down ghosts on empty streets and in empty bottles. Ryerson is the younger of the duo, a suave ladies man: “Slade pretended—though he didn’t admit it—that he was a movie star cop. You know the type: Dude wore a black leather jacket, faded at the elbows. Had himself a nice set of expensive shades, a spare pistol—one of those .25s the movie star girls carry in their purses—tucked slim and sweet in an ankle holster.”

The novel rumbles and shakes with deadpan gallows humor about what these detectives see at night, but there are hints that they’ve become so jaded that it’s all they are really comfortable with. We are told: “It’s funny what death can do to somebody. It doesn’t matter what side you’re on—you could be a cop or a crook, but death will sink her teeth into you like a ragged mutt on a Tijuana street.” Especially in the beginning, we get all kinds of great phrases from this novel, offering us a glimpse of the darkness Pinson, the lead character, feels.

The Case they catch here is a corpse in a barrel on a nearly deserted beach with his hands and his junk missing. The Cartels don’t usually act this way north of the border, but The whole thing is mixed up with Santa Muerte symbols and secrets that need to be unraveled.