The Man from Primrose Lane

The Man from Primrose Lane
by David Renner
Published in 2012
Published by Sarah Crichton Books

The Man from Primrose Lane, an eccentric mitten-wearing man who lived a solitary existence in suburban Ohio, has been murdered! Not only was his death bloody (I'm talking fingers-in-a-blender bloody) and the list of suspects nonexistent, but investigation shows his identity was faked. No one knows who he really was. The years pass and the case grows cold.

Eventually journalist David Neff is persuaded to begin his own investigation. Neff has grown rich and famous from the success of his true-crime book The Serial Killer's Protege, which led to the institutionalization of one of Ohio's most notorious murderers. But he and his young son have lived a life of seclusion since the mysterious death of his wife. Researching the case of the Man from Primrose Lane promises to bring David out of his shell. Incidentally, David's wife died in a suicidal car crash the same day the Man from Primrose Lane was murdered, but any rational person would agree that there couldn't possibly be any connection between the two deaths. Right?

David Neff is clearly based, at least in part, on James Renner himself. Renner is an Ohio-based crime journalist who once published a book called The Serial Killer's Apprentice, though this was a compilation of Renner's previously published stories and not as explosively original as Neff's similarly-titled book. This strikes me as an in-joke rather than a case of Mary Sue.

Renner's real-life experiences help build the apparent verisimilitude of the novel's version of Ohio.  For roughly the first third of the novel, the story appears to stay within the boundaries of the crime fiction genre, despite the accumulating bits and pieces of oddness that promise that something very, very strange is going on.

And then things get explicitly science-fictional, and I almost feel bad for any SF-hating reader who was duped into reading the book by the fact it does not go out of its way to advertise its sciencefictionality.

I say, bring it on. I love banging genres together. I love the sound it makes. And don't worry, hardcore science fiction fans: Renner knows what he's doing when he plays with the tropes. I won't say too much about what's really going on, but I will say that Renner thought through the implications of how this universe works as well as any established SF author, and as far as I can tell the narrative never contradicts its own internal logic.

For all that's good about the novel, I do have to agree with Kirkus Reviews that it's slightly discomfiting that (a) a certain Cindy, who is the only female character who doesn't need to be saved by a big, strong David Neff, is 'made to look like an incompetent, vindictive bitch', and (b) said Cindy appears to be remarkably superfluous to the story, considering the amount of time spent on her. (Not that this is in any way provable, but I got the feeling that she was a real person, or composite of real people, that the author knew and disliked.) Point (a) above is surely unintentional and could have been avoided by fleshing her out more; fix that and point (b) probably would have gone unnoticed.

That aside, this novel does a tremendous job meshing the genres together. Whether you are likely to enjoy this depends on the degree to which you like the two constituent genres (bear in mind the writing style is primarily that of hardboiled crime fiction) and the degree to which you enjoy dumping them both in a bowl and mixing them together.