Outside the Madero diaries, there is only one moment in "The Savage Detectives" that documents a prolonged surge of passion.
These men and their newspapers will go far beyond the outer limits of fair commen to destroy my leadership, to strangle in the cradle the surge of passion and political engagement that brought it about, and which offers such hope for the future.
A WILD SURGE OF GUILTY PASSION, by Ron Hansen (Scribner, $25).
One of the best things about "A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion" is its liberation from noir clichés; another is its seamless execution.
But he has made it the basis for "A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion," a novel that separates the mawkish tabloid murder case from its later, tougher incarnations.
In using the crime as the basis of his new novel, "A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion," Ron Hansen joins a distinguished group of writers for whom it has served as an imaginative platform: Sophie Treadwell, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler and William Styron.
The title "A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion" comes from an editorial in The New York Daily Mirror written by Cornelius Vanderbilt III, and it too is powerfully evocative of the overstatement that this murder case provoked.
In her New York Times review of this collection, Anne O'Neill-Barna wrote about how hard it could be to tell Irish writers apart: "The intoxicating mention of Dublin street names … or of country counties and towns with their surges of inhibition and passion … could have been the possession of any of the New Yorker Irish writers".
Guitar distortion and surges of ominous psychedelic organ chords loomed suddenly in "Gun," about a crime of passion, and her voice took on an accusatory rasp in "Heard It All Before," about infidelity and its aftermath.
But the problem with a full-blown surge of new love and new hope is that eventually, like passion, it starts to fade.
