Peter Temple's An Iron Rose: Best second crime novel ever?

An Iron Rose is sometimes lush and sometimes elliptical, the latter not just because some of its characters speak laconically, but because the novel's viewpoint is so thoroughly that of its main character.

What does this mean? It means the story feels much more real than most. Protagonist Mac Farraday is also the first-person narrator, and no one person knows everything. Farraday misses parts of the story, and he makes wrong guesses, and the truth hits him hard when he learns it, just as it will likely hit the reader.

Farraday is a convincing blacksmith here, just as Temple's other protagonists have been convincing cabinetmakers and horse players; no crime writer writes about work better than Temple does, especially skilled manual work.

Gorgeous deadpan wit and memorable observations abound:

• "After supper, Lew and I played Scrabble. He was good with small words, quick to see possibilities."

• "`Leon's a charming person,' she said. `His problem is chronic envy. Non-specific envy. His greatest fear is that he's missing something ...'"

• "Alex looked around at the pub: yellow smoke-stained walls, plastic furniture, scratched and cigarette-burnt formica-topped bar, three customers who looked like stroke victims."

Temple also reveals details of Farraday's back story gradually, which enhances the book's realism. A reader may feel not just that he or she knows the character, but has come to know him the way one comes to know a person in real life.

***

An Iron Rose, which appeared in 1998, is Temple's second novel, following Bad Debts and preceding such award-winners as The Broken Shore and Truth. It's easily as good as those books and must be one of the best second novels in all of crime fiction. What other good second novels can you think of?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010