Hit on the House by Jon A Jackson

And just like that, the great honor of being the inaugural post on The Books of One Stack goes to Hit on the House by Jon A. Jackson. I picked up this book at a book sale several years ago for no other reason than I liked the cover. It’s a little difficult to tell from the photo, but the cover is actually a bright tangerine color, so it definitely makes a statement. And I usually don’t go for murder mystery type books, but when I saw the cover, and the fact that it was $0.25, I figured I’d blast into a new genre with a bang…literally.

As with all the books I read, before I even cracked the spine, I did some research to see what I was getting myself into. Through this research I learned that this book is actually one in a series of novels by Jackson centered around the main character Detective Sergeant Mulheisen who I pictured throughout the novel to look like this:

Throughout the book, I imagined him as a moody detective from an old movie who mainly wore a trench coat with the collar turned up and always seemed to arrive in a cloud of smoke. And to be honest, that was kind of the mood I was hoping for with this novel – a tommy-gun riddled, gangster-driven novel about trying to solve a murder mystery before there were things like DNA analysis and other fancy modern inventions. And I think that was a little bit of what Jackson was going for, but instead of gangsters with guns and smoke filled alleyways and detectives with cigars (ok, there were a few of those), the tone of the novel is mainly set by Mulheisen’s own deteriorating mental state. For whatever reason throughout the entire novel, Mul always seems to be on the verge of a major depressive episode and his lethargy and general malaise set the tone for the rest of the novel which actually seems to work.

But let’s go back a little bit, to the beginning of the novel, like the very first chapter; here the author decided to do something I found to be pretty interesting. The novel is told in third person so as characters come and go we get to check out their world view a little bit. And at the beginning of the novel we start in the mind of Hal Good. He’s a hit man for the mob who’s been called to Detroit to “take care of” Big Sid Sedlacek. And in those first few pages, he goes over to Sid’s house and *bam* no more Sid. When I read this, my face was like, “Whaa? Not more than ten pages in, and we already know who the killer is? Can no one be trusted?!”

After that shock, the action moves back to Mul as he begins the task of unraveling the mystery of what happened to Big Sid while also dealing with a series of other seemingly mob related murders.

             Bonny Lande

     Gene Lande…or what I imagine him to look                         like…more or less…

As Mul is working on the Big Sid case, we are introduced to the other two main characters in the novel – Bonny and Eugene (Gene) Lande. Bonny was a failed love interest from Mul’s past and so she provides the bright, shining foil to Mul’s brooding sensibilities. While Gene, her husband, is at once the comic relief for the novel as well as a strange twist that I didn’t really see coming – he owns a computer company called Doc Byte. Right. So up until this is revealed I was guessing the setting was more or less the 20s, or some unnamed time reminiscent of that era, but then Gene shows up and adds computers to the mix – which Mulheisen is pretty adverse to – and suddenly we’re in the 90s?

This interesting, if sometimes seemingly forced, merging of the two worlds of noir detective novel and modern murder mystery, works for the most part, I think. I was also pretty pleasantly surprised to find that even though this novel was one in a series of novels about Detective Mulheisen, I was able to follow the story line without any prior knowledge of the characters. I was also grateful that the blood and gore that are often standard fare for murder mysteries (and which was advertised as a selling point on the front cover of the novel) was mostly absent except for a few passages that still tended to sweep past the gross stuff pretty succinctly.

Overall I greatly enjoyed reading this novel. Although quiet and brooding, I still wanted to get to know Mulheisen and would most definitely follow him on another adventure around Detroit or wherever he was apt to go. So out of a stack of five possible books, I give Hit on the House a stack of three books – one each for intrigue, excitement and mystery, but minus two for the strange integration of computers and several unnecessary, lengthy words that I had no choice but to look up (including some words I’m pretty sure Jackson just made up to make the mobsters look cool).