Jonathan Valin

• Born: November 23, 1948
• Place of Birth: Cincinnati, Ohio

TYPES OF PLOT: Hard-boiled; private investigator

PRINCIPAL SERIES: Harry Stoner, 1980-1995

Contribution

Like his predecessors Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Jonathan Valin has created a hard-living, wisecracking, but essentially admirable private investigator. Valin’s Harry Stoner solves mysteries that the police are unable or reluctant to handle, often because the wrongdoers—though not always wealthy or influential—have links to the rich and powerful. In the tradition of Hammett and Chandler, Valin writes in a straightforward, colloquial style. Like the earlier writers of the hard-boiled school, he is compassionate toward characters who occasionally rise to heights of courage and concern despite their human frailties. Valin differs from the earlier writers of this school in his greater emphasis on sexual perversion, drug addiction, and graphic, sadistic violence. Clearly, he sees these elements as characteristic of the decadent, corrupt American society of the 1980s and 1990s, in which Harry Stoner must wage his lonely wars. Popularly and critically acclaimed for his fiction—winning a Shamus Award for Extenuating Circumstances (1989), garnering a Shamus nomination for Second Chance (1991), and named top vote-getter in an informal 2006 Rap Sheet poll asking which series readers would most like to see continued—Jonathan Valin has since 1995 eschewed fiction for nonfiction. A contributing editor to The Absolute Sound, an audiophile periodical, Valin is considered an authority on contemporary upper-range stereo equipment and on classical musical recordings.

Biography

Jonathan Louis Valin was born on November 23, 1948, in Cincinnati, where he has spent most of his life. His parents were Sigmund Valin and Marcella Fink Valin. Valin married poet Katherine Brockhaus in 1971. He attended the University of Chicago and received a master's of arts in 1974. After two years as an English lecturer at the University of Cincinnati (1974-1976), he pursued doctoral studies and taught creative writing at Washington University in St. Louis (1976-1979).

After winning the 1978 Norma Lowry Memorial Fund Prize for his short story “Replay,” Valin became a full-time writer. He published his first two mystery novels—The Lime Pit and Final Notice—in 1980. Like all of Valin’s novels, both books concerned former police officer turned private detective Harry Stoner. Stoner is based in Cincinnati and modeled on hard-boiled private eyes such as Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, and Lew Archer. More than simply a wisecracking tough guy, Stoner is a sensitive, music-loving loner who typically takes on cases involving missing persons or suspicious deaths, often becoming entangled in middle-class family relationships that have fragmented.

Thanks to their action-packed, often violent plots, complex characters, and well-drawn settings in and around Cincinnati, the Stoner novels gained a loyal readership. Valin responded by adding to the series regularly, releasing Dead Letter (1981), Day of Wrath (1982), and Natural Causes (1983). After several years of hiatus, the author continued the series with Life’s Work (1986) and added five more entries, including the Shamus Award-winning Extenuating Circumstances, the Shamus-nominated Second Chance, and Missing (1995). During the same period, Valin also contributed “Malibu Tag Team” to the anthology Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe (1988) and “Loser Takes All” to The Armchair Detective (1991).

In the mid-1990s, Valin fully committed to his new fascination by cofounding a magazine devoted to music criticism and stereo equipment reviews, Fi (short for hi-fi). The magazine lasted four years, and then Valin became a senior writer and executive editor for The Absolute Sound, frequently contributing reviews of high-end audio equipment for that magazine and reviews of sophisticated video equipment for its companion publication, The Perfect Vision. He also occasionally writes for “Cincinnati CityBeat,” a column describing attractions in the Queen City, and wrote the foreword for Thomas R. Schiff’s Panoramic Cincinnati (1999), describing 360-degree photos of the city taken with a Hulcherama panoramic camera. Valin has stated that he does not plan to return to detective Harry Stoner, despite winning a Rap Sheet online poll as the mystery writer readers would most like to continue an established series.

In the mid-1990s, Valin fully committed to his new fascination by cofounding a magazine devoted to music criticism and stereo equipment reviews, Fi (short for hi-fi). The magazine lasted four years, and then Valin became a senior writer and executive editor for The Absolute Sound, frequently contributing reviews of high-end audio equipment for that magazine and reviews of sophisticated video equipment for its companion publication, The Perfect Vision, for over twenty-five years. He also occasionally writes for “Cincinnati CityBeat,” a column describing attractions in the Queen City, and wrote the foreword for Thomas R. Schiff’s Panoramic Cincinnati (1999), describing 360-degree photos of the city taken with a Hulcherama panoramic camera. Valin has stated that he does not plan to return to detective Harry Stoner, despite winning a Rap Sheet online poll as the mystery writer readers would most like to continue an established series.

Analysis

Unlike more leisurely traditional mysteries, Jonathan Valin’s hard-hitting mystery-adventure stories do not begin with exploring characters or creating an atmosphere. Instead, they immediately jump into action when private investigator Harry Stoner is hired for a specific task, usually finding a missing person or investigating a death.

Although Stoner accepts whatever case is offered, he is often suspicious of the person who hired him, and his suspicions often prove to be justified. In The Lime Pit, for example, Hugo Cratz telephones to ask Stoner to look for his little girl. Charitably, Stoner agrees, but instead of a child, the missing girl proves to be a prostitute with dangerous associates. In Final Notice, Dead Letter, Natural Causes, and Life’s Work, it is prosperous, respectable individuals who hire Stoner: a librarian, a scientist, a corporate representative, and a professional football executive. As Stoner soon discovers, however, none of these clients has told him the complete truth; one, the scientist in Dead Letter, is a Machiavellian villain who intends to use Stoner to cover up past misdeeds and to facilitate future murders.

Realizing that even his employers have not leveled with him, Stoner remains skeptical of everyone he interviews because he intends to deduce the truth and because his survival depends on it. If he trusts the wrong person, he may be led into a trap. In Fire Lake (1987), Stoner trusts and helps a former college roommate, Lonnie “Jack” Jackowski—now a psychologically unstable drug addict with criminal connections—and nearly loses his life.

In all of Valin’s mysteries, his detective’s relationship with a woman helps build and sustain suspense. By nature, Stoner is chivalrous. Sometimes, he is called a male chauvinist by liberated women such as young Kate Davis (Final Notice), who eventually must admit that she can use Stoner’s help and that her brown belt in karate may not be enough to protect her from a well-armed psychopathic killer. Stoner worries about her, and he worries even more because she is impulsive, inexperienced, and unlikely to spot a trap. In Dead Letter, much of the suspense involves Sarah Lovingwell, whose insistence that her scientist father is a murderer naturally arouses Stoner’s protective instincts. However, he cannot believe both Sarah’s story and the well-respected professor’s plausible account of Sarah’s emotional instability. To arrive at the truth, Stoner must suppress his own chivalric instincts. At the end of the book, although he has exposed the villainous professor, Stonger has lingering doubts about Sarah—he is certain she outsmarted him.

Valin’s readers and critics praise the realism of his settings. Although all of his novels are set partially or wholly in Cincinnati, in each, Valin creates a different environment, varying from the library setting of Final Notice and the football locker rooms and bars of Life’s Work to the sordid haunts of pimps, sex workers, and people with a substance use disorder in The Lime Pit (1980) and Fire Lake (1987).

When Valin takes his detective from the slums to the luxurious homes and offices of his employers and their friends, the description of the setting becomes ironic since some of the rich and powerful are deeply involved in criminal activities, often drug-related. The furniture may be different, but the corruption is the same. To discover the secret of that corruption and, with it, the secret of the murder, Stoner must resist the trappings of wealth, just as he must resist the blandishments of beautiful but evil women.

Though Stoner is a large, imposing specimen, there is a David-and-Goliath element in all his adventures: He must always face superior forces—officials, police officers, businessmen, drug lords, and their minions. When such Goliaths arrange the elimination of the little people who get in their way, Stoner must avenge the victims. In The Lime Pit, it is a young girl casually killed in a sexual orgy; in Natural Causes, it is a Mexican mother and child tortured and knifed. Whenever someone defenseless suffers, Stoner becomes a killing machine.

Most of Valin’s characters, however, are ordinary people, neither all good nor all bad. Although Jackowski of Fire Lake is a junkie and a thief, even the wife who kicked him out knows that he is too gentle to have committed murder. In Life’s Work, a hostile, brutal football player becomes Stoner’s friend and dies in a heroic attempt to rescue a fellow player. Although one police officer in that novel is evil, the recurring character, Lieutenant Al Foster, is a decent man; George DeVrie of the district attorney’s office, though corrupt, is often helpful to Stoner.

Much as Stoner loathes the sadistic characters he encounters—whom he kills without compunction—he reserves hatred for the manipulators behind the sadists. When he confronts them, Stoner is capable of a merciless execution, as when he shoots Red Bannion and lets him burn in the dramatic finale of The Lime Pit.

The graphic descriptions of violence in Valin’s novels may prove too much for squeamish readers. Yet Valin has a sense of humor—in Life’s Work, he describes a preacher: “Like most evangelists, he looked as if he’d been dressed by his mother.” Because all the novels are written in first person, it is the sensitive, observant Stoner who comments on society, who notices, for example, that the relatively innocent drug-sharing friendships of the 1960s no longer exist. Drug lords of the 1980s have their addicts trained to kill on command, Stoner muses in Fire Lake. There are no friendships in the biggest business in the United States.

In the corrupt society of Valin’s novels, Stoner constantly tries to resist evil, both in his violent world and within himself. His code is simple: He will protect the weak; he will be true to friends, and he will seek the truth and conceal it only when telling it would harm the innocent. Although he has no objection to casual sex, he never treats partners with contempt, and it is clear that he continues to hope for a permanent relationship. Against the background of decadence, greed, and violence, Stoner carries Valin’s central theme: Even in modern society, good people can and must defy the evil that surrounds them.

Natural Causes

Natural Causes is Valin at his best. Like his other novels, it begins in Cincinnati when Jack Moon, a representative of a soap company that sponsors television shows, hires Stoner. In the initial scene, a major Valin theme is suggested. Although the soap company emphasizes the purity of its product and its image, its sponsored television show deals with alcoholics, drug addicts, and nymphomaniacs. Stoner is hired to look into the death of the chief writer of the popular serial Phoenix—a death that occurred, ironically, when the victim, Quentin Dover, was taking a shower.

As Stoner investigates, he finds things are not squeaky clean in the kingdom of soap. Dover’s wife is a brainless, promiscuous alcoholic who sold her self-respect for a luxurious lifestyle. A brilliant writer, Dover was addicted to alcohol and drugs, and there were rumors he had become incapable of writing and was facing termination. Dover’s business associates in Los Angeles, apparently concerned and compassionate, testify against one another in their greed and ruthless pursuit of power.

If illusion is the stuff of soap operas, lies are the tool of their makers, indeed, of everyone in Southern California, Valin suggests. Police officer Sy Goldblum is typical. He looks like a film star version of a police officer, but he is not who he seems to be. He started life as Seymour Wattle from Butte, Montana, and took a Jewish name, hoping it would help him in Los Angeles. Sy is helpful to Stoner, but only when the fee is set in advance; as Sy’s callous description of the dead body indicates, he has neither compassion nor interest in justice. His only motivation for finding the person responsible for Dover’s death is the money he can make by helping Stoner.

Another reflection of the theme of illusion and deception is the fact that Dover always lied about his past—he never told the same story twice. To the detective, trying to arrive at the truth, Dover’s habit of making his own history as fictional as the scripts he outlined makes the investigation difficult: Dover’s deliberate concealment of the activities of his final weekend only makes it harder for Stoner to solve the mystery of his death.

In this novel, Valin again dramatizes his belief that cold-blooded, prosperous leaders of society are willing to victimize the poor and unknown. Dover became involved in large-scale drug operations because he had gone dry as a writer and preferred to risk the lives of unimportant people than reduce his own standard of living. He was willing to join the drug trade to get a manuscript he could pretend to have written. As a result of his actions, one Hispanic family is murdered, and a ranch foreman faces imprisonment. At the end of the novel, the evil deeds of the wealthy hypocrites are exposed, with Stoner acting as the instrument of justice; as in other Valin novels, they have been killed, committed suicide, or face prison terms.

Nevertheless, there is only an approximation of justice. Too many innocent people, such as Maria Sanchez and her child, have died along the way, and too many individuals who are basically decent, such as the ranch foreman and Jack Moon, are punished out of proportion for their offenses.

Finally, even Stoner himself must live with guilt, for in Natural Causes, many of the deaths that occur are a direct result of his investigations. In an imperfect world, Valin believes, the burden of evil falls on the innocent and the helpless, the well-meaning and the bumbling, and the evildoers themselves. Burdened with guilt, Stoner can only reiterate his belief that hidden evil breeds more evil than exposed evil and that he is the agent of truth, no matter the risk, the loneliness, and the grimness of his later recollections. Valin has constructed works with a tragic dimension within the conventions of the hard-boiled private investigator novel.

Missing

In Missing, Valin returns to familiar themes: a missing person with a past and secrets that must be uncovered to reveal the truth. In this case, it is Mason Greenleaf who has disappeared, and his lover, Cindy Dorn, hires the detective to find him. Greenleaf is a well-respected teacher who happens to be bisexual, and his history is tainted by a disputed soliciting charge and littered with gay former partners. When Greenleaf turns up dead in a sleazy hotel several days later, an apparent suicide, Stoner embarks on an investigation that leads him into the twilight world of closeted homosexuals, corrupt, homophobic police officers, and the plague of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). In the course of his work, Stoner bonds with Cindy, and though the results of the case are ultimately inconclusive, the detective finds redemption for his own past misdeeds—and possibly love—in the arms of a good woman.

Principal Series Character:

• Harry Stoner, a private investigator, is a Vietnam War veteran and a lifelong resident of Cincinnati, where he was, for a time, attached to the office of the district attorney. At the beginning of the series, he is thirty-seven years old and single. While he is often annoyed by the smugness of what he calls the Cincinnati Puritans, he admits that he is a moralist, so angered by the drug-ridden, brutal society of the 1980s that he often runs deadly risks to protect its victims.

Bibliography

Callendar, Newgate. “Crime.” Review of Dead Letter, by Jonathan Valin. The New York Times Book Review, Jan. 17, 1982, p. 29.

Callendar, Newgate. “Crime.” Review of Natural Causes, by Jonathan Valin. The New York Times Book Review, 4 Sept. 1983, p. 20.

DeAndrea, William L. Encyclopedia Mysteriosa: A Comprehensive Guide to the Art of Detection in Print, Film, Radio, and Television. New York: Prentice Hall, 1994.

"Jonathan Valin." Good Reads, www.goodreads.com/author/show/97168.Jonathan‗Valin. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Moore, Lewis D. Cracking the Hard-boiled Detective: A Critical History from the 1920s to the Present. McFarland, 2006.

Pronzini, Bill, and Marcia Muller, eds. 1001 Midnights: The Aficionado’s Guide to Mystery and Detective Fiction. New York: Arbor House, 1986.

Publishers Weekly. Review of Missing, by Jonathan Valin. 241, no. 49 (Dec. 1994): 69.

Valin, Jonathan. "The 2023 AXPONA Show: Jonathan Valin on Speakers $30k and Up." The Absolute Sound, 20 Apr. 2023, www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/the-2023-axpona-show-jonathan-valin-on-speakers-30k-and-up. Accessed 20 July 2024.