Open Shadow

by Charles Walker

The job was supposed to be easy and even easier money. Dorothy Voss, the fetching and mysterious wife of a pharmaceutical magnate, hires Levon Apfelwein to discover why Daniel, her petulant and secretive son, has been disappearing into the night several times a week. Levon, a jaded private investigator, knows full well fast cash always comes with a catch, but he could use the payday. What starts as a routine gig quickly devolves into a sordid mixture of blackmail, lust, betrayal, heartbreak, and, of course, murder.

As the soup thickens and the bodies start piling up, Levon finds himself under fire, knee-deep in redheads, and stumbling onto a blackmail scheme entwined with familial duplicity and the narcotics trade. Complicating matters, he falls for two beautiful women. One is a mysterious glamor puss with movie star looks who frequents blind tigers and hot-sheet hotels for kicks, and the other is a feisty, voluptuous archivist with a taste for bad boys and the danger they attract. The women, each different in every conceivable way and with their own set of secrets, play the femme to the other’s fatale as they vie for Levon’s affection.

Levon races through the amphetamine-fueled, alcohol-soaked days and nights trying to unearth the mystery driving Daniel’s nocturnal activities and the shocking truth they hold. There’s no internet or smart phones, and computers are the size of a Macy’s showroom. All Levon has at his disposal are his wits, a Colt .45, and a burning drive to uncover the truth, no matter the cost to him or those around him. As the swirling and tumbling pieces of the puzzle gradually coalesce around a singular, cruel conclusion, Levon is left with one question. Is he uncovering the truth, or is he merely a pawn in a much larger game?

Set in the Golden Age of Los Angeles, Open Shadow unfolds in the dark and jazzy era of smoke-filled saloons, hard numbers, fast women, predawn drinking, and red-eye breakfasts. Grifters, pimps, pushers, suckers, gamblers, and hard-luck oddballs litter the landscape, each looking for an angle and chasing the fast nickel. Corner girls prowl the streets and ply their trade in gloomy, two-bits-a-drink underground gin mills catering to esoteric kinks. In a world where men are more apt to wear a sidearm than a wristwatch and ladies expect a twenty for a trip to the powder room, everyone is on the chisel and life, though not necessarily cheap, certainly goes on sale a lot.

Open Shadow introduces the latest member into the pantheon of literary sleuths tirelessly pounding the pavement and chasing down criminality while trying to stay clean in the process. Levon Apfelwein is a hard-drinking and harder-hearted private detective with an elastic moral code who wants to do the right thing but not always for the right reasons.
Charles Walker’s debut novel is a simmering page-turner with a brooding, cinematic feel that’s part detective story, part romance, but hard-bitten fiction at its black core. Whether a fan of wingtips-scuffing-on-wet-pavement noir masters like Chandler, Hammett, and Spillane or contemporary favorites Michael Connelly, Harlan Coben, and Dennis Lahane, Open Shadow is an ideal read for the crime fiction enthusiast.

362 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 8, 2022

Reviews

[Shannon McKinney · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book came with a bit of a learning curve for me, but it was worth it. It reads like a mixture of an old-timey mobster movie and something Rod Serling should be narrating. If you’re not well-versed in 1950s colloquialisms (a bird is a woman, a heater is a gun, so on and so forth) and accustomed to the heavy use of colorful analogies, this is a bit like reading a 200-level book in a language for which you’ve only taken the 100-level courses: you recognize the words, but have to pause and study the context to really understand what’s happening.

However, once I got the hang of the language, I found that the plot really thickened about 100 pages in, and from there I was hooked. I was surprised and impressed by the character development in the protagonist, and the way the details are woven together and selectively and gradually revealed is really clever. I went from not really liking Lee at the beginning to really and truly rooting for him by the end. I anxiously await the next Levon Apfelwein novel (and hope it arrives before I forget all my mid-20th century slang!)

[Greg Carmichael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Charles Walker's writing is the scenic route. There would have been far more efficient ways to execute Open Shadow's plot and deliver the reader to their destination; it is a vehicle to showcase Walker's distinctive voice and the talented writing that supports it. Like any good hard-boiled detective novel, Open Shadow has generous amounts of shifts and surprises, sex and romance, drugs and booze, and betrayal in service of power and money, but that isn't the point. It’s Walker’s prose that draws our attention. Walker shows expertise not only in the milieu of 1950s L.A., but of humanity at scale through his protagonist, Levon Apfelwein. Astute and clever like any good detective, Apfelwein is also worldly yet world-weary, tough yet vulnerable, and wise though doesn't always act on that wisdom. Open Shadow's world feels real, yet its account likely wouldn't have been told in its time. You'll have to read it to know what I mean. You could also wait for a well-deserved screen adaptation, but as always, it won't be as good as the novel, which I highly recommend.

[Richard Rove · Rating 4 out of 5]

Decent job...nice references to the LA in the 50'.