OVER
THE EDGE is the third outing for Alex Delaware, the crime-solving
Los Angeles child psychologist of the very successful When The Bough
Breaks and Blood Test. This time the case begins with a maniacal middle-of-the-night
call from a young former patient, Jamey Cadmus.
Within hours the teen-ager has been arrested at the scene of the mutilation
murders of his mentor and lover, Dig Chancellor, and an anonymous
street hustler, and held as the serial killer the headline writers
have dubbed the Lavender Slasher The defendant is heir to a major
Southern California construction business fortune, a genius-IQ misfit
whose psychological deterioration has required his institutionalization.
Since Jamey was found with the murder weapon in his hands, his attorney
decides the job of the defense is simply to save him from the gas
chamber. Delaware is hired to establish Jamey's diminished mental
capacity.
Naturally, the case is not nearly as simple as it seems. There are
anomalies in Jamey's mental condition that throw into doubt his capacity
to commit the crime, let alone understand it. A friend of similarly
doubtful mental stability -- they were enrolled together at a UCLA
program for precocious children -- has absconded with evidence. Chancellor's
bad-seed-ex-cop bodyguard is bent on revenge. Jamey's family closet
has more skeletons than most families have shoes. Even his lawyer's
driver has a few screws loose. And there is the conspiracy to develop
environmentally contaminated land that motivates several of the principal
players. Murder, drugs, greed, various styles of illicit but not very
explicit sex -- the usual ingredients are here,
Kellerman self-consciously emulates Raymond Chandler in his use of
the landscape of the City of Angels, but his descriptions resemble
writing-class exercises more than the sweltering, rotten Southern
California dioramas Philip Marlowe inhabited. Bay City was a fully-imagined
region of hell, not a collection of entries from last week's "What's
Happening in Los Angeles" piece in the Sunday travel section.
Although Delaware drives a Seville, his depictions of freeways, deserts
and buildings evoke no image so strongly as that of Kellerman (in
a BMW, not a Cadillac) researching "interesting" venues.
In their Chinatown-style atmospherics and their evil-bloodline resolutions,
Kellerman's books resemble not Chandler's but those of another Southern
California crime writer, Ross Macdonald, whose Lew Archer stories
were similarly talky and broody. And so many pages are devoted to
learned discourse on the effects of mind-altering substances you think
more often of the pharmacological excursions of Andrew Weil than of
the adventures of the great L.A. detectives.
Kellerman's yuppified investigator is a mixed blessing for his creator.
Having been made a psychiatrist, Delaware must behave like one, which
is to say he does have a tendency to run on. Though he is sufficiently
alienated from his profession not to practice it full-time, Delaware
is not disaffected enough to be a rebel, to have original or iconoclastic
opinions that might make him a livelier character. In fact, happily
married, well off, secure professionally, he has no problems whatsoever.
The upwardly-mobile Boy Scout makes a nice change from the hairballs
featured in most crime novels. I suspect it is his very identity as
a DINK (double income, no kids) that makes him so attractive to so
many readers.
Kellerman is one of those genre writers who aspires to be taken seriously
as a stylist. His ambition is expressed in studiously grammatical
prose dressed with occasional metaphorical and adjectival flair. Whether
you like his writing or not will depend on your tolerance for such
concoctions as these: " -- Pseudosenility -- . That recalled
something -- the shadow of a memory -- but it darted through my mind
like a minnow and hid behind a rock." Or, "I stood up, pressed
my palms against the green
Kellerman enjoys a knack for creating complex plots and, with the
important exceptions of Delaware, his shadowy musical instrument-building
wife, and his best friend, an out-of-the-closet gay L.A.P.D. homicide
investigator, believable characters. Jamey, especially, is a triumph,
since truly mad characters are especially difficult to make sympathetic
and compelling, while the jelly-spined uncle and saccharine aunt who
are his guardians, the steely family attorney, their amoral retainers,
and a shadowy pair of murderous bikers are so vividly drawn Kellerman
approaches the boundary of the psychological horror story. (Book World,
The Washington Post; July 5, 1987)
