In The Looney Bin
by Debby Montague
Weirs Times Book Reviewer
The Red Horse, A Billy Boyle World War II Mystery
by James R. Benn, Soho Crime, September 2020
“We sat together as the light faded, daylight mingling with dusk, until the night sky drove the day to ground under the distant horizon. We talked of many things. Small things, important things.”
The Red Horse finds Captain Billy Boyle at St. Albans Convalescent Hospital, formerly the St. Albans Pauper Lunatic Asylum, recovering from a recent mission in newly liberated Paris. Billy is exhausted physically and emotionally after his short time in Paris where he overdid the methamphetamines trying to keep up, where he saw his beloved, Diana Seaton, taken prisoner by the Gestapo, and where his best friend and partner, Kaz – Lieutenant Piotr Augustus Kazimierz – suffered a heart attack and is now at St. Albans with Billy.
At St. Albans Billy gets the rest cure, which is good for his physical and perceptual well-being, but even after forty hours of sleep emotionally things are not much better. Billy gets the news from Big Mike, Sergeant Miecznikowski, another of his partners in war-time crime solving, that Kaz’s sister, Angelika, and Diana are being held at Ravensbruck concentration camp. Kaz is facing a life as an invalid and subsequent dismissal from the armed services which would greatly restrict his ability to search for Angelika. Before Billy can help Kaz get well and stay in the loop or figure out how to get Diana and Angelika out of the concentration camp he has a murder or two to solve. Solving murders, as Billy has learned over the past couple of years, is particularly challenging in wartime and when a murder occurs at a looney bin, even a former looney bin, there are bound to be snafus.
The Red Horse, James R. Benn’s fifteenth Billy Boyle World War II Mystery, is marvelous in every way – the plot, the characters, the style. Indeed, after enjoying and reviewing every one of Benn’s Billy Boyle novels I am hard pressed to come up with new and different adjectives to describe his books because I used up superlatives long ago.
As usual Benn’s writing is first-rate. In The Red Horse the sentences at the beginning are short, staccato echoing Billy’s disjointed thoughts, his shaky hold of reality. Then the sentences lengthen, evolve with Billy’s recovery as he muses about the crime at hand, Kaz, Diana, Angelika. It is gratifying to read a book so artfully crafted. No need for repetition or florid language in Benn’s novels. The language is precise, yet descriptive. Benn can capture a scene or a person in a sentence: “Holland wore his silence like a curse.”
Two gems found in all of Benn’s Billy Boyle novels are great historical characters worked into the story and less familiar facets of World War II. Agatha Christie is a help to Billy in The Rest Is Silence (2014) and in The Devouring (2017), Moe Berg, former Red Sox catcher and coach, assists Billy and Kaz on a case. In The Red Horse you have the pleasure of meeting Dr. Dwight Harken, a surgeon who advanced new techniques in heart surgery, and Leo Marks, genius cryptographer, who worked for the Special Operations Executive.
The Red Horse is also a story about a great friendship. There have been many great friendships and partnerships in mysteries – Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, Hercule Poirot and Arthur Hastings. Billy and Kaz’s fellowship is every bit as great as the fictional friendships and partnerships that preceded theirs. Benn is expert at drawing his characters, keeping them vibrant, moving, and maturing. Fourteen books ago, in 1942, Billy was barely in his twenties, a brash kid, not wanting, exactly, to avoid serving his country, but hoping to serve from a desk in Washington. Instead he is in England serving the war effort by chasing spies and solving murders. Two years later Billy has survived war in Africa and Italy, gone undercover in Ireland and the Vatican, done a short stint in the Pacific theater, and in the liberation of Paris. The scenery changes but not Billy’s care and love for his friend Kaz, nor Kaz’s love for Billy. They have saved each other’s life, comforted each other’s sorrow, bucked each up. In The Red Horse their friendship is threatened by physical risk and emotional peril. Billy needs to hold it together to help Kaz stay in the action so that he can search for Angelika. Kaz wants to support Billy and his shaky recovery so that he can rescue Diana. Billy and Kaz, friends whose destinies, as Benn describes it, are “as intermingled as the air we breathed.”
This fifteenth Billy Boyle was so good I wanted to slow down as I got toward the end. I wanted to savor the language and the story. But I was worried about the outcome for Billy and Kaz, so I rushed on to the end. I will tell you this: a few days in a looney bin with Billy as your guide can work wonders for your spirit in this crazy Covid world we live in. Find out for yourself. Read The Red Horse and cherish your friendships.
