In 1984, Richard Rosen won the Edgar Award for best first mystery novel, with
Strike Three, You're Dead. The Independent Mystery Booksellers
Association recently named it as one of the "100 Favorite Mysteries of the
Century." It's set right in Providence, and the protagonist, Harvey Blissberg,
is a centerfielder for the Providence Jewels, the newest American League
expansion team, which play their games on the sparkling new diamond at Rankle
Park, magically conjured up in India Point. When Blissberg's best friend on the
team is found dead in the team's whirlpool, Harvey becomes an ad hoc private
eye on the hunt for the guilty party.
In Strike Three, Rosen winds in bits and pieces of the unsanitized,
never-ready-for prime-time Providence as Blissberg pursues his roommate's
murderer: the pastel-colored houses along Hope Street in Fox Point; the
"redevelopment" on South Main Street; the large, bronze pineapple hanging from
the arch on Federal Hill; and the late, legendary Leo's bistro in the
then-unfashionable Jewelry District. The plot is as intriguing as the idea of
setting the story in Our Little Towne.
Rosen's next book, Fadeaway, takes Blissberg, now retired from
baseball, literally into the bowels of Providence, as he searches for clues to
the death of two NBA players in the East Side bus tunnel that runs below
College Hill from off of South Main to Thayer Street. Harvey has settled down
an hour north in Cambridge with his affaire de coeur, Mickey Slavin,
formerly "the best and most attractive television sportscaster in Providence,"
now moving up the network ladder as a sportscaster for Channel 7 in Boston. But
the novice private investigator is brought back to Providence, and his pursuit
of the murderer as familiar local sights and sounds stream by, part of Rosen's
nuanced depiction of Little Rhody's big city, is enough to keep the pages
turning.
Dead Ball (Walker & Company, 252 pages, $23.95), Rosen's latest
offering, delivers his usual blend of intrigue and provincial familiarity. It
was brought to my attention by the year-end review by Robert Lipsyte, the
excellent New York Times sportswriter, of the best sports-oriented books
of 2001. There's no better recommendation.
Readers familiar with Robert B. Parker's Spenser crime novels will recognize
the debt paid. But unlike Spenser's hard man lurking beneath the wag and
amateur gourmet chef, the equally glib and cynical Blissberg is feeling the
fading limelight of the majors and the slipping physical prowess of a former
pro ballplayer. In contrast to some authors' treatment of their noted sleuths,
Rosen has allowed Harvey and Mickey's relationship to age, however
ungracefully. Still ensconced in Cambridge, the ex-jock is fighting with the
vagaries of his creeping middle age and a new lifestyle of giving motivational
speeches to junior execs. Longtime co-habitant Mickey is now working for ESPN,
and her road trips are threatening to expand the distance between them in a
more than geographical sense. For many of you "pirates looking at 40," as Jimmy
Buffett would have it, it's a familiar scenario.
In Dead Ball, Blissberg is summoned from couch potato reveries by his
previous employers, the Jewels' owners, to put on his PI fedora and look into
threats being made against the Providence team's newest star, Maurice "Moss"
Cooley. Cooley is making a run at Joe DiMaggio's legendary 56-game hitting
streak, one of baseball's most sacred records, and it is "the biggest thing to
hit Providence since the Hurricane of '38." When Moss gets within a dozen games
of Joltin' Joe's mark, his success is greeted by a surprise present in the
clubhouse -- a headless black lawn jockey and a note telling him to cut the
heroics short or expect violent retribution.
The scenario is a replay of the hatred turned toward Hank Aaron as he
approached and eventually eclipsed Babe Ruth's career record of 714 home runs.
The amount of vicious hate mail received by Aaron showed how virulently bigoted
"fans" detested the idea of an African-American taking over the hero's mantle
from a white sports idol. Cooley is now in for the same experience.
This silent attack is enough to get the Jewels' management to hire the team's
former outfielder, with the window-dressing title of "motivational coach," so
he can cover Cooley's back. This includes looking into the threats, which
include more evocative calling cards left at the slugger's home in western
Cranston, a site drawn in enough detail by Rosen that you expect to encounter
former Governor Ed DiPrete washing his Winnebago in the driveway next door. The
ante is raised when Cooley's hitting streak ends, but the racist missives do
not. In a heartbeat, Blissberg has Cooley holed up in a safe house in Exeter,
and he serves as Moss's unwanted roomie, much to the dismay of Moss's
girlfriend, Cherry Ann, a Johnson & Wales culinary student who happens to
do a bit of exotic dancing on the side to pay the tuition. (Sound about
right?)
Rosen lays on more local color as the plot continues to twist and turn. As
Harvey and Mickey's relationship becomes more precarious, they discuss their
down-spiraling emotions at that well-known home of amateur psychiatry, the
steps of Providence City Hall, late at night, enjoying the finest cuisine Haven
Brothers can offer. They avoid the really difficult subjects by discussing
their surroundings.
" `Haven Brothers is about the only thing that hasn't changed in this town,'
she said when he sat down next to her. `The city's got sushi bars now and
parking lots where it costs five dollars for the first half-hour. They took the
Providence River and turned it into a canal with gondolas and started calling
the town Renaissance City. They've got hit TV shows that take place here.
They've got bars with secondhand sofas in them, for chrissakes, just like
Manhattan.' "
Once Cooley is on the road with the team, Blissberg takes off as well. It
turns out that his Southern-born slugger's advocacy for a civil rights
organization may be the cause of the ongoing threats, and Harvey finds himself
in Georgia looking for trouble and soon finding it. Blissberg quickly picks up
the race thread and deftly runs with it, tracking answers down dirt roads and
the dirtier history of lynching that features too prominently in the region's
past.
In the end Harvey, Moss, and Cherry Ann find themselves descending from all
angles on an apartment in Wayland Square, along routes that careen from Chicago
to Providence. The trio finds itself behind in the bottom of the ninth, but
true to America's pastime, they're given their last cuts.
R.D. Rosen can weave as good a mystery as any of the top writers of the genre.
Dead Ball, like other offerings from the Blissberg repertoire of
pitches, is socially complex, emotionally compelling, and spot-on when it comes
to realistic sports action and dialogue. You sprint through it, stopping only
to take in the local scenery and, in response to the trivia questions that the
characters toss at each other along the way, to reach back into the closet of
useless information in your brain.
That the book includes glimpses of Providence in all of its contradictory
glory is the extra juice on the spitball, making the tale bend and break in
wonderful, unpredictable ways. Dead Ball is a live one.
Celebrated city
An all-star first basemen while attending high school outside of Chicago, R.D.
Rosen's playing career ended after his freshman year at Brown University. He
transferred to Harvard, where he won the American Academy of Poets Prize in
1971. He later worked as a writer and editor at the Boston Phoenix,
invented the word "psychobabble," and wrote the book of the same name that
explored the way in which psychotherapy has contorted the American language.
Rosen became an Emmy-winning writer and commentator at Boston's PBS radio
station, WGBH, before moving to New York City, where he continues to reside.
After working as a writer for Saturday Night Live and a producer for CBS
News, he's currently engaged in a number of projects. Dead Ball is the
fifth in the Harvey Blissberg series of mysteries.
Q: Let's start with the obvious question: Why Providence?
A: Landscapes are an important part of the process for me, and you have
to kind of create a landscape in your head. Providence was a place I had lived
for only one year, and I had mythologized it because my brother went to Brown,
and I visited him when I was 15 years old. It was already occupying some corner
of my brain. I grew up in the Midwest, so it was fascinating as one of the
original colonies, and it had that downtrodden New England look to it. When I
finally got to Brown, I was fascinated by its size and its combination of
beauty and homeliness.
I grew up in a big city, and the idea of a small size city was enchanting to
me -- I thought cities just came in the jumbo size. The year I spent at Brown
refined that landscape. I'm a very visual person, and I think Providence is
gorgeous in a gritty, urban way. I always loved the Industrial National Bank
Building, and the landscape in those days was dominated by it. It kind of just
got in my bloodstream. In fact, I probably would not have ended up setting the
books in Providence had I stayed at Brown, because then the city would have
become very real to me. It would have been integrated into my life.
As it was, I transferred colleges, and Providence remained in my dream life as
this sort of film noir city. Ten years later, when I sat down to write a
mystery novel, Providence came up as the very first and obvious choice to set
the book. It was an imaginary landscape that I could actually visit in the real
world to do research. For Dead Ball, I drove down to Providence with a
friend who is an actual private eye [to do backgrounding and scout locations].
My love affair with Providence is very peculiar. I think it's an amazing blend
of stuff. It's so concentrated, everything is so close to each other. You can
walk from Federal Hill to College Hill in 20 minutes. I don't think there's a
city that serves my purposes so well as Providence.
Q: You were surprised, given their highlighting of the city, that
the Blissberg mysteries haven't gotten much publicity in the Rhode Island
media, despite great reviews elsewhere. Especially since people here fall all
over themselves when anyone pays Providence a compliment.
A: I don't know how I escaped. It's some sort of a mystery to me. John
Grisham I'm not, so you kind of have to go out of your way a bit to know about
the books. I don't know of any other series that is set to this extent in
Providence, and I don't know why I've been overlooked in that regard. In every
book there's a real valentine to Providence. As an author you don't know why
things happen, but despite the fact the books are set in Providence, there are
very few people in Providence who are aware of them.
Q: Do you think that using sports as your arena, so to speak, loses
the non-sports inclined readers, or somehow trivializes your books to
readers?
A: I feel that, I can't deny it. I chose to write about a thing I know
about -- which is baseball and sports in general. Books, and mystery books, are
bought largely by women, and I think it's something of a handicap in the
marketplace to set these in the world of sports.
The tragedy of it, quote unquote, is that some of my favorite compliments come
from women who have read it, who have said to me, "I don't care about baseball,
but I loved your book." But even there, it's as though they liked it despite
the baseball. In fact, the first and third books are set in baseball and the
others aren't. It just happens to be what this guy Harvey Blissberg does.
Q: Being aware that you already know about the game of baseball, do
you still get close to the game, into clubhouses and onto the field, to get the
feel for the modern game of professional baseball?
A: Oh, absolutely. Over the years I've done it from time to time. I've
never been a real sportswriter, so I don't do it on a regular basis. But I got
to know Ben Mondor [owner of the Pawtucket Red Sox] 15 years ago while working
in public television, and I got to do a piece on him after he took over the
PawSox. When I started to research Dead Ball I gave him a call, and he
invited me down, and I spent some time just in the locker room taking notes,
and in his owner's box talking to him and [Mike] Tamburro, the general manager
[now president].
I really used Mondor and his operation a lot, not as a model, but as a source
of information about how baseball had changed. Then, of course, I have to rely
on my own experience as a baseball player for the inner sense of the game.
That's what I'm trying to capture. I'm not a baseball geek. I'm not the
greatest baseball fan in the world anymore.
When people ask me if I'm a fan, I like to say, "No, not really. I played the
game, I don't have to be a fan." The game kind of exists for me as an inner
state.
Q: If you had a chance to tell Providence Mayor Buddy Cianci what
you think about the city, what would you say, as you've observed it over
time?
A: I would say to the mayor, "I don't know to what extent this can all
be attributed to you and your administration, but Providence over the years has
become a true gem of a city." I was really moved by the WaterFire
performance I saw -- it was the most fantastic piece of public art.
Of course, the physical changes, from my point of view, are all for the good.
There doesn't seem that any of the historical splendor of the city has been
compromised. There are historic landmarks, almost the whole downtown. It's a
lovely city. The changes have been very discreet ones, and the city is more
beautiful than ever. I think if I was starting out to write mysteries and
wanted to set them in an old New England mill town that was slightly crumbling,
I couldn't use Providence anymore. Because there truly has been a Renaissance.
Also, I love Cianci's attitude and the city's attitude toward young artists,
giving them a break. The idea of the city being a patron of the arts is
fantastic. Haven't tasted the marinara sauce, though, so I can't pass judgment
on that.
My whole life, I've been a connoisseur of different shades of urban squalor
and urban romanticism. The way Providence looks at night, and Haven Brothers,
the fact that this thing is rolled into the picture every night and then
disappears, is something out of a 1940s movie, a combination of Fritz Lang and
Edward Hopper. I prefer to think Providence exists on a different plane.
-- C.Y.
Issue Date: March 1 - 7, 2002
