An accidental detective finds his niche
The Churchgoer
Patrick Coleman Harper Perennial: 368 pp., $16.99
California is popularly regarded as the birthplace of noir fiction, so it’s no surprise that some of the genre’s most famous hard-boiled detectives have plied their trade in the Golden State. The private eyes who first entranced readers in the 20th century were unforgettable characters who for the most part had similar backgrounds: Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer was an ex-cop, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe honed his skills as a district attorney’s investigator and Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins was an Army veteran.
Mark Haines, the narrator of Patrick Coleman’s new novel, “The Churchgoer,” has a markedly different biography. The night watchman-turned-accidental detective started his career as a youth minister for an evangelical Christian church but fell hard from grace somewhere along the way. He’s not a typical noir protagonist, but “The Churchgoer” isn’t a typical noir novel — it’s a smart new twist on the genre.
“The Churchgoer” opens with Haines enjoying a breakfast burrito after indulging in his one and only hobby: surfing at North Jetty in Oceanside, the city he loves because of its assortment of hardluck characters. (“It wasn’t a place many people stayed if they could help it,” he observes. “I liked that about it.”) Haines is struck by a young woman begging for money on a street corner; he buys her lunch after she unsuccessfully attempts to cadge a free hamburger from the diner’s suspicious employee.
The woman, Cindy, manages to talk Haines into letting her crash at his house. Haines suspects he’s being played, but he doesn’t seem to mind: “Maybe I was bored. Obviously a little hard up. But she seemed like a girl who needed a hand, and deep in my brain some coming together of boredom and desire found a route into the memories of what it felt like to actually give one.”
It doesn’t take long for things to go south. When Haines is working his late-night shift at an industrial complex, he’s hit on the head while checking in on a fabrication shop. He regains consciousness hours later and learns that his friend and coworker has been shot and killed in the same shop. And after returning home, shocked and dazed, he discovers that Cindy has left without much of a trace.
Haines, disturbed by the timing of his friend’s killing and Cindy’s disappearance, makes it his mission to track down the young woman. In the process, some of his old wounds are reopened: Cindy, like Haines, is a former devout Christian who’s lost her religion, and Haines’ search for her leads him to the home of a true believer-turneddrug dealer and to a megachurch that reminds him of an Olive Garden (“When You’re Here, You’re Family.® Unlimited and unleavened breadsticks.”) While on the trail of Cindy, Haines finds himself forced to reckon with his own past — he left the ministry after his struggle with alcoholism and depression led to the breakdown of his family, and his estrangement from his grown daughter has fueled his considerable resentment of all things religious.
Noir isn’t the easiest genre to pull off; its tropes have been endlessly imitated and parodied. But “The Churchgoer” is both defiantly original and faithful to its literary predecessors — the novel’s pacing is perfect, and Coleman does an excellent job building suspense, particularly in one long, claustrophobic scene toward the end. Coleman uses red herrings and misdirection to keep the reader guessing, which isn’t an easy trick, but he executes it brilliantly.
Coleman also displays a masterful grasp of the language that’s become associated with noir fiction, while never descending into cliché — in one scene, Haines describes Cindy’s voice as being “as thin as spider’s silk and as sincere as a celebrity’s lavender marriage.” He leavens Haines’ narration with humor; after sweet-talking two young women at a church he visits, he reflects, “The two teenage girls ... smiled at me like I’d just told them about rescuing a onelegged puppy named Jackhammer.” Lines like this provide respites from the book’s dark subject matter and indicate that Coleman, far from taking himself too seriously, is having fun — and that fun is contagious.
His greatest accomplishment in “The Churchgoer,” though, is the character of Haines. The ad hoc detective is still haunted by the addictions he’s overcome: “It was as if the blackout years had divided me into two men, and one had died while the other — the weaker, smaller, cruder man — survived.” Troubled detectives are nothing new in noir fiction, of course, but the self-awareness Haines exhibits makes him fascinating; he freely admits that he’s become governed by resentment and rage. “I hoped for disaster in their lives,” he thinks, reflecting on the happy worshipers at a church he visits. “I wanted them to look more like me.”
Infusing every part of the novel is Southern California, a character in its own right — the setting, evoked beautifully by Coleman, brings to mind Robert Altman’s film adaptation of Chandler’s “The Long Goodbye.” Coleman’s book reads like a tribute to California noir, but there’s nothing well worn or derivative about it. “The Churchgoer” is a wonderful debut novel from a writer with more than a few tricks up his sleeve.