I sensed, rather than saw, Holmes cast a glance in my direction. With precise movements, betraying, I suspected, a certain relish for the task, Mycroft relocked the dispatch box, snapping its clasp with finality, and set it aside, retaining hold of the envelope.
--Nicholas Meyer, The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols (Minotaur Books, 2019)
Reacher slammed into him with a twist and a dip of the shoulder and the guy flailed through the air like a crash test dummy and landed in a long sliding tangle of limbs, half on the sidewalk, half in the gutter. He came to rest and lay still.
--Lee Child, Blue Moon (Delacorte Press 2019)
Ballard saw it before she felt it. In the woman's hand was an open folding knife with a blade curved like a horn. All matte black except for the edge of a blade that had been sharpened to a shine. The woman brought it up and into Ballard's left armpit and then put her other arm around her neck in a V hold. She was now behind Ballard and using her as a shield. Ballard saw Bosch holding his weapon, looking for a clean shot that wasn't there.
--Michael Connolly, The Night Fire (Little, Brown and Company, 2019)
The slushy mess had settled into sullen rain. My head was a balloon. Scotch comes by sea; the cradling influence gentles it down. On the other hand, I wasn't aging as well as the bottled in bond. I guided the Cutlass into a lot next to a chain steakhouse, where I sponged up the poisons with a medium-rare-sirloin, baked potato, and a demijohn of caffeine.
--Loren D. Estleman, When Old Midnight Comes Along (Tom Doherty Associates, 2019)
These four books represent genre writers at the peak of their careers. This is Nicholas Meyer's fourth book about Sherlock Holmes (he has also directed a number of films --including the excellent Time After Time in 1979-- and written others). Blue Moon is the twenty-fourth book in Lee Child's series about drifter and vigilante Jack Reacher; The Night Fire is Michael Connolly's twenty-second book about Harry Bosch and his official and unofficial partners in the L.A. police department, and When Old Midnight Comes is Estleman's twenty-eighth novel about private eye Amos Walker.
Although none of these writers are at the level of John D. MacDonald, Ross MacDonald or Raymond Chandler, they come fairly close. I like the Estleman and the Meyer because they are written in the first person, allowing us only to see what private detective Amos Walker and Dr.Watson see, and I like that the Estleman is very detailed about his novel's specific location, Detroit, as is Connelly's use of Los Angeles and its police department. In Meyer's book Holmes and Watson travel to Russia at the behest of Holmes's government-employee brother, Mycroft, and Holmes even has a mild flirtation (and perhaps more, out of sight of Watson) with their translator Anna Walling, as they successfully prove that 'The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion' is a forgery, though they fail at keeping it from being disseminated, as it still is in anti-Semitic circles today.
Lee Child's Blue Moon is the only of the four books to not specify its location (it is a city controlled by gangs, one Albanian and one Ukrainian) and is not written in the first person. It is considerably influenced by Dashiell Hammet's Red Harvest (1929), as well as the movies Yojimbo (directed by Akira Kurosawa in 1951) and A Fistful of Dollars (Sergio Leone, 1964), as drifter Jack Reacher helps someone who is about to be robbed on a bus, rescues him from loan sharks, and then manipulates the two gangs in town into destroying each other. Reacher even comes close to falling in love, before he decides against "the long, slow fizzle" and decides to move on.
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