A poet laureate of Alaska, John Straley is also a criminal defence investigator and a crime novelist. With Big Breath In, he leaves behind the quirky residents of Alaska and takes us south, past British Columbia, to Washington. It’s in Seattle that we meet Delphine, a cancer patient nearing the end of her life. However, she has plenty of kick left in her, and this novel is unlike any of the other geriatric crime solver books so popular at the moment.
Delphine is staying in a downtown apartment so that she can be close to the hospital for her chemo. It’s an unruly area of the city and one day she sees a young man hit a woman, cutting her head open. Delphine intervenes and helps the woman get to hospital for treatment. Leigh has a year-old baby called Blue, but her relationship to Tyler, the man who hit her, is unclear. Partner? Pimp? Dealer? All of the above?
It won’t be safe for Leigh and Blue to go back with Tyler, so Delphine shelters them in her apartment for the night – she’s especially worried about the baby. Plus, an old colleague of her deceased investigator husband John has been in touch, asking if she’ll help him with a case locating a missing child. It’s wild coincidence, but Tyler is actually in the baby business – arranging white babies for wealthy couples all over the state. So, Delphine tries to find out more and indeed she discovers more women with babies who are in danger, and being controlled by Tyler.
It’s a crazy set-up, which grows stranger still. Delphine is modelled on Straley’s real life wife, Jan, a whale biologist. So, in between events like the street assault or her apartment being ransacked for drugs, Delphine ruminates on what she’s learned about sperm whales – big-brained mammals, as she sees them – throughout her career. Passages of several pages at a time discuss how they find food, evade danger and care for their young, creating loose parallels with some of the characters in the story who are themselves fighting for survival.
Others in Delphine’s apartment block are patients at the cancer ward too, and when her friend Robert dies, he leaves her his Roadster. Emaciated from her chemo, she can barely start it, but the motorcycle gives her the chance to continue her surveillance of Tyler, Leigh and Blue, and the situation escalates when the baby trafficker sets up a major deal with a Neo-Nazi motorcycle gang on the high plateau, a desert in Eastern Washington. As unlikely as it seems, it’s time for a road trip and Delphine heads off in that direction, along with Robert’s wife, Jenny, their three sons and a dog called Booster.
Already, people she’s met in Seattle have been murdered and the peril Delphine now faces is extreme. She doesn’t care for herself – she’s dying – but you have to worry for her anyway. And the reason for this is that two or three small babies are Tyler’s bargaining chips with 88s – the Aryan gang. If Delphine is killed, what happens to the kids? At least she has allies in Jenny, as well as a lesbian motorcycle gang that operates in the area. Law enforcement are a vague presence at best and not to be relied upon in this very bleak view of America.
Like John Straley’s other crime novels, Big Breath In is unpredictable, unlikely, unusual and highly philosophical. It’s a very personal book, with plenty of Delphine’s past intersecting with the author’s own life and that of his wife, who today has Parkinson’s. Delphine, with her beyond-all-odds determination, is a magnetic character and her struggle takes on saintly proportions, keeping the pages turning. Eventually, she’s on her own against the worst sorts of people around, single-minded and unstoppable. Or is she? Take a big breath in and enjoy the ride.
Cold Storage, Alaska, is a great starting place with John Straley.
Soho Crime
Print/Kindle
£12.72
CFL Rating: 4 Stars
