Ellen Meister, The Rooftop Party

Amateur sleuth Dana Barry is back in Ellen Meister’s The Rooftop Party, applying her photographic memory and surprising detective chops to another mysterious killing. The catch being that, this time, she’s not sure the murderer isn’t herself.

There can be a strangeness to the role of serial good guys in crime fiction, arguably the genre in which recurring characters most commonly appear. I’ve thought a lot about this of late, as I’ve chipped my way through an omnibus edition of G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories (see note). Father Brown is now and again summoned by police to crime scenes by dint of his well-known sleuthing skills. As frequently, though, he manages to be on the scene as a as a matter of simple happenstance. One feels blessed in this case that life does not mimic art. In decades upon this earth, the closest I’ve come to an actual murder is to have worked with the wife of a guy whose brother killed a hitchhiker. If real murders were as common as one might infer from the Father Brown stories (or those featuring plenty of other amateur detectives), we’d live our days knee-deep in the corpses of the unjustly killed. Indeed, we’d be damn lucky to reach advanced age ourselves.

But such unreality serves a literary end. To engage such tales, a reader must bow to their improbable premise. And in so bowing, the reader cedes control. I’m to be taken on a ride, one acknowledges, and I grant the writer permission — simply by agreeing to read the first word of the first page — to commandeer the wheel.

And so it is with Manhattan’s Shopping Channel — Dana’s employer and seemingly a dangerous place to be. In The Rooftop Party, The Shopping Channel finds itself under pressure from the internet and its plethora of opportunities for effortless online shopping. To right this possibly sinking ship, the Board has brought in a new CEO — the outwardly pious, habitual sexual harasser Ivan Dennison — from the electronics industry. Dennison intends to reorient the company from fashion sales to electronics, and everyone at headquarters understands that layoffs are on the way. When Dennison takes an involuntary (and unobserved) dive from the rooftop at the Channel’s yearly Christmas party, the question is motive — was the new boss murdered on account of his sexual predations or for reasons economic?

Dana’s problem is this — she knows Dennison aggressively hit on her, yet she has no idea what she did about it. He’d slipped, you see, a dose of Rohypnol (the date-rape drug) into her martini and the time of his killing is a blur. Learning what she’d done in that moment — did she push him? did she not? — is key to her relationship with hunky cop boyfriend, Ari Marks, and perhaps to the survival of The Shopping Channel, itself.

Meister’s amusing gallery of characters — Dana’s tone-deaf father and shopaholic sister; Meghan, her best friend/manager; Lorenzo, Shopping Channel sound guy and Dana’s once lover; Sherri, her congenitally sour boss; Ari, the police detective with male-model looks — are back with all the rest. Southern belle, Ashlee, Dana’s new assistant, is a particularly droll addition.

Meister’s prose is streamlined and transparent, reflecting that high level of craft that eschews calling attention to itself in favor of serving its tale. And at moments, reading The Rooftop Party, I would find myself grinning with the sheer, headlong fun of it. Dana’s phenomenal memory and eye for detail seem less central to The Rooftop Party’ than they were to Love Sold Separately, this novel’s predecessor (see my review of September 14, 2020 on pauleberly.com), and I might observe that this latest murder’s solution flirts with being exogenous to its book’s broader plot. The Rooftop Party is, however, a stay-up-all-night-worthy addition to the Dana Barry saga, and I can only hope Meister won’t make us wait overlong for her next installment.

Do read The Rooftop Party! Pre-order online (bookshop.org), and do it now before you forget. (The internet — it’s quite effortless!) Or — better — order it at your local bookstore. The world is soon to reopen — let’s get out and engage our booksellers in the flesh.

Note: Beloved by such pillars of crime fiction as Julian Symons and P.D. James (Symons would have it that Chesterton’s shorts are rich to the point that one should sample only a few at a time, while James would aver that their sheer deliciousness should prompt one to read with gluttonous abandon), Chesterton’s tales are nonetheless marred by their racism, antisemitism, and Catholic triumphalism. I am not one who’d argue that historical authors should be deleted from the canon for their failure to conform to modern understandings of sexuality, religious tolerance, or race. And I am not suggesting that readers ought to avoid Chesterton for his failures in this regard, disagreeable as they might be. Rather, I suggest that Chesterton ought to be shunned for simple lack of literary merit. I’ve now read nearly all of his Father Brown corpus and I can report that barely a tale stands out to the point that I much remember it. If you want a Father Brown fix, watch the BBC series with its mostly defanged and ecumenical cleric. Skip the actual stories — I’ve read them so that you don’t need to.