Mourners, A Nameless Detective Novel by Bill Pronzini

Brace yourselves, Bill Pronzini fans…Mourners is another big turning point in the life of The Nameless Detective.

I’ve heard criticisms about The Nameless Detective novels. Some have argued that Pronzini spends too much time on Nameless’s personal life, making the series into kind of a quasi-soap opera. I always felt that the time that the novels spend on Nameless’s life is one of the main things that make the series so special. I love the mysteries that come from the cases that Nameless gets himself into, but my favorite parts of the stories are often the ones that deal with his life and loves.

Mourners is the 30th Nameless Detective novel and the central theme of the book is indeed, mourning. The entire novel is melancholic and each character in it is going through varying degrees of agonizing grief. Nameless and his wife Kerry’s relationship seem to be slipping away, due in part to the emotional results of a ghastly revelation from the last novel, Nightcrawlers. Kerry herself is undergoing a personal hell of both personal and physical reasons. Jake, the newest member of Nameless’s team, is still in acute grief due to the death of his wife. Tamara’s long distance relationship with her boyfriend is worsening.

Then there is the case that the team is working on. Nameless has never liked domestic problems, but a long-owed favor obligates him to accept an odd one. A woman is worried about her husband, who is keeping odd hours and is disappearing on regular instances. She is insistent that he is not having an affair, but she is worried about his declining mental state. Upon investigation, the subject has been showing up at funerals. Funerals for individuals that he has no relation to. Examinations of his habits link him to a brutal rape/murder from the recent past. Did the man commit the atrocity? Or did he witness it and do nothing?

There are certain milestones in the series that stand out in my mind as the most intensely personal of the bunch. Mourners is one of them. Others I’d list are Blowback, Shackles and Scattershot. Mourners is a dark, brooding story that reflects the sadness of those going through desperate loss.

I really like the way the new characters are shaping up in this latest episode. Tamara, who appeared to be a one-dimensional stereotype, has completely fleshed out into a complex and likable individual. Jake gets more of the legwork action all the time and rightly so, as he is much younger than Nameless. We glimpse a bit more into his tortured psyche in Mourners, yet through his black depression, a ray of hope comes through.

I’ve always loved series fiction, ever since I was a child. Favorites of mine were Doc Savage, Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes. As an adult, I cherish characters from series’ of books like Lansdale’s Hap and Leonard and F. Paul Wilson’s Repairman Jack. However, my very favorite is Bill Pronzini’s The Nameless Detective. I was lucky enough to stumble onto Nameless at a very early time in the career of Bill Pronzini and I’ve read each and every one in nearly the order in which they were published. I always look forward to a new Nameless, but due to the events of Mourners, I anticipate the next one more than I ever have before.

Suffice to say that this latest episode in the complicated life of The Nameless Detective is one of the best in the series.

The only thing is, Forge needs to lose that ridiculous fingerprint with ears that is on the cover and every first chapter page of the books!