Yesterday I read another Noir, without intending to, and I loved it.  I am definitely developing a taste for non-gruesome Noir.  I should have gotten a clue from the title, Dead Horse, but when I delved in and read the three obituaries that begin the novel, I was enlightened.  Walter Satterthwait takes a real incident from the 1930s, the death by suicide of the beautiful and glamorous Emily Davies Vanderbilt Thayer Whitfield, and weaves a story of love, lust, and betrayal around her marriage to Raoul Whitfield, the famous pulp writer of the time (and creator of The Black Mask), and their friendship with wheeler/dealer/man manipulator Murray Carleton.

The dogged hero of the book, widowed Sheriff Delgado, is nicknamed Inspector Javert by Whitfield when he refuses to accept the ruling of death by suicide.  Over  a period of ten years he pursues the truth, only extracting the details from the death bed of a witness. Or perpetrator? I won’t give the ending away but it wasn’t the ending that stirred, anyway.  It was the atmosphere Satterthwait creates.  He creates the opulence of Paris in the thirties, its beauty (seen from the birds eye view of a borrowed plane) and its decadence, seen from the inside of a bordello turned opium den.  It is the decision taken in that bordello, one that excludes Carleton from what he wants, that sets the course of snaking evil that will destroy the happy, golden couple once they settle down in New Mexico.

Satterthwait again creates atmosphere in New Mexico, both its beauty (“huge pine trees swept down a step incline, down along ridges and knolls and rambling valleys.  At the bottom the trees disappeared and the landscape opened up, spreading out in an enormous fan of yellow and red to the hazy blue mountains at the horizon” ) and its danger (“The old Dodge passed between the gate posts and beneath the bleached white skull bolted to the crossbeam overhead…the shadows of the pinon and juniper trees lay long and black across the road.”).

In New Mexico, Whitfield finds freedom in his wife’s money and adoration, but when he falls prey to her jealousy, the devil finds a way into their marriage. The apple is offered, the bite is taken, and paradise is taken away, bit by bit, with darkness descending and no way out.  Dead horse, dead dreams.