Being a Fed, it seems appropriate to close "Ladies' Week"
with a note on another Fed, former National Park Service Law
Enforcement Ranger Nevada Barr, whose series character, Anna
Pigeon, is a National Park Service Law Enforcement
Ranger.
NPS L/E Rangers perform local type police duties in National
Parks that are rural, as well as quite a few that are in
urban areas. (In three urban areas, Washington, DC, New York
City, and San Francisco [NOT
"Frisco"]), police duties on National Parks are largely
performed by the US Park Police. Don't ask me why the NPS
maintains two different police agencies to perform
essentially the same tasks. I've worked for the G off and on
since 1994 and I still can't figure them out.
Anyway, Nevada Barr has, for several years been writing a
damned fine series of novels about roving park copper Pigeon.
Interestingly, given the discussion of whether or not police
procedurals shoul be included in the hard-boiled canon, the
first Pigeon novel, TRACK OF THE CAT, won an "Agatha" as one
of the best "cozy" mystery novels of the year. I don't think
it counts as a cozy in any way. The crimes can be pretty
vicious in a Pigeon novel, and Anna is too tough-talking, and
hard-drinking (she's got a bit of a drinking problem in fact;
shades of Blcok!) to qualify. She does tend to plot
along
"classic-puzzle-whodunit" lines, but so did Brett Halliday,
and, for that matter, Dashiell Hammett.
Unusually for a procedural series written by a cop, the
Pigeon books show a definite left-ish sort of slant. But
then, Ms. Barr apparently considered herself less of a cop
then a ranger whose particular specialty happened to be law
enforcement, an attitude her character seems to
replicate.
Ms. Barr is, quite simply, one hell of a writer, and while I
wouldn't say a word against her style, chracterization,
dialog, or plotting, I'd have to say her greatest strength is
sense of place. She makes readers feel as though they are in
the parks she writes about, much as Tony Hillerman makes the
Navajo Reservation so vividly real in his Reservation Police
series.
My favorite book in the Pigeon series, so far, is BLIND
DESCENT, set in the Carlsbad Caverns, which features the most
suspenseful best cave sequences since Injun Joe chased Tom
Sawyer and Becky Thatcher with murder in his eye.
Next week: The Big Apple.
JIM DOHERTY
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