The Orange Curtain

Jack Liffey #4

by John Shannon

If you've not met Jack Liffey -- and every mystery lover should -- here's your chance. This taut new novel featuring author John Shannon's "brave and decent" hero also offers you the perfect opportunity to get hooked on this much-admired mystery series. Liffey's turf is the sprawling, deceptively open cityscape of greater Los Angeles with its forgotten suburbs, its volatile communities, its dangerous neighborhoods. To the anguished despair of parents and protectors, it's a city that holds lots of dark, secreted places for sons and daughters to hide. Or be hidden. Jack Liffey may have lost his job in the aerospace industry but he has found his calling -- tracking down lost children. His case in The Orange Curtain takes him deep into the Los Angeles Vietnamese community, where a beautiful young woman, Phuong -- her name means Phoenix -- has disappeared. The exotic realities and complex alliances of Little Saigon are not all that Liffey has to contend with, however. Beyond its boundaries there's a sad young man named Billy. Billy likes to watch people, and he has a relationship with his mother as strange as any in Hitchcock.

Genres: Mystery

240 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

John Shannon is a contemporary American author, lately of detective fiction. He began his career with four well-reviewed novels in the 1970s and 1980s, then in 1996 launched the Jack Liffey mystery series. He cites as his literary influences Raymond Chandler, Graham Greene, Robert Stone and Jim Harrison.

Reviews

[Lukasz Pruski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Average ratings of John Shannon's Jack Liffey series are rather low and no wonder - these are not your typical mystery novels. Usually, readers of mysteries go for the plot and rate books by intricacy, twistedness, speed, and unpredictability of the stories. Mr. Shannon. instead, is a sort of a modern Ross Macdonald who puts socio-economic, historical, and cultural observations in the forefront while the plot meanders in between. In addition, Mr. Shannon's novels are rich in literary and philosophical references, some of which are interesting and insightful, whereas others are pretentious and stilted.

"The Orange Curtain" contains, for instance, the discussions of: philosophy of Hegel, linguistic consequences of a brain tumor, and numerous quotes on toadstones, such as "These convex osseous Tubercles are of the same kind with our English Bufonites or Toadstones - Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (1696)". I suspect Mr. Shannon is just having fun at the expense of the reader, but who knows, maybe there is some depth to it?

The plot of "Orange Curtain" takes place in the Vietnamese communities of Orange County. Mr. Liffey is hired to find a young Vietnamese woman who disappeared. Looking for Minh Phuong, he drives on the streets that I know quite well, for instance, Beach Boulevard. He eats lomo saltado in a Peruvian restaurant, which I frequently do as well. This may have caused my positive bias toward the novel.

There is a corporate undercurrent that is based on a struggle between various businesses and people over a new airport construction. The cultural and economic differences between Orange County (aka "Orange Curtain") and L.A. County are well rendered. As usual, there is Mr. Shannon's signature scene of something weird going on in the L.A. metropolis - this time Jack Liffey watches people throwing their possessions into a burning bungalow, presumably their own bungalow.

The thread of relationship between Mr. Liffey and his teenage daughter Maeve is very well drawn. Tien Joubert, a powerful yet vulnerable Vietnamese businesswoman is portrayed vividly and with quite some psychological depth.

A few pages of the novel left me totally speechless: Jack Liffey meets the actual Philip Marlowe, who is in his nineties but still lucid. The conversation between them is totally extraneous to the novel, but I suppose it was again great fun for Mr. Shannon to write. The fast-action ending is quite ridiculous, but the very last sentence of the novel is a gem.

Four stars.

[Terry Tschann Skelton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first book I've read by John Shannon. It's more realistic than a lot of mystery series that I've read. And besides, Jack Liffey, isn't meant to be an actual detective. I thought it was very well written . . . by an author who knows the community and its history: Orange County isn't just Newport and Laguna, ya know.

[Darcy Stewart · Rating 1 out of 5]

I didn't really like this book very much. The book is original, but it so boring. I couldn't get that into it. By the end of the book I decided I didn't like the main character. The book tends to lack a lot of plot. It's pretty just him interviewing people about a missing vietnamese girl. The book wasn't very realistic. In fact I found the writing to be terrible. The author doesn't use good word choice. It doesn't sound right.The book is way too simple. Not a whole lot going on.

[Jessica · Rating 2 out of 5]

A bit too esoteric for my tastes for a hard-bitten detective novel. Lots of crap about a toadstone which was just dumb, but since one of the main characters was crazy, that makes sense. It was fine - I will read others by this author.

[Matt Mahoney · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little slow at first; very disjointed. I got into it at the end but not one of my favorites.