Stephen Greenleaf

• Born: July 17, 1942
• Place of Birth: Washington, D.C.

TYPES OF PLOT: Hard-boiled; private investigator; courtroom drama

PRINCIPAL SERIES: John Marshall Tanner, 1979-

Contribution

The John Marshall Tanner novels by Stephen Greenleaf have been frequently recognized as extending the California hard-boiled private eye tradition established by , , and . Initially, the influence of Chandler and particularly Macdonald was unmistakable. Gradually, however, Greenleaf developed his own style, Tanner became his own man, and several of the novels succeeded in transcending genre conventions to engage important social concerns of the 1980s and 1990s.

Like Greenleaf, Tanner is a former attorney, and most of his cases involve legal as well as ethical issues. There is usually a prominent lawyer among the chief suspects in each criminal case Tanner investigates. Greenleaf’s two nonseries novels also directly involve courtroom dramas. The protagonist of The Ditto List (1985) is a male divorce lawyer who represents only women. Impact (1989) concerns a personal injury trial after an airplane crash.

Greenleaf’s plots are well-crafted, often involving multiple lines of action and different time frames as they delve into the colorfully messy lives of families across generational lines. He has even experimented with alternatives to murder as the moral and emotional catalyst for his mystery plots. In Toll Call (1987), for example, the narrative centers around sexual harassment involving Tanner’s secretary. When that situation is resolved, another dealing with kidnapping takes over as the focus of Tanner’s detection. As always, these crimes have their genesis in some past trauma, and as Greenleaf once told an interviewer, his principal concern is “less on who done it than on why it was done.” The result is remarkably deep characterization.

Biography

Stephen Howell Greenleaf was born on July 17, 1942, in Washington, D.C., the son of Robert Wendell, a lawyer and business executive, and Patricia Howell Greenleaf. Shortly thereafter, the family relocated to Centerville, Iowa. Greenleaf first became interested in detective novels in the fifth grade when he was sent home from school for sneaking a Perry Mason story into class. He received his bachelor’s degree in history from Carleton College in Minnesota in 1964 and his law degree from Boalt Hall of the University of California, Berkeley, in 1967. From 1967 to 1969, Greenleaf served in the United States Army, including a year in Vietnam. He married Ann Garrison, an author of children’s books, on July 20, 1968. The couple has a son, Aaron Howell.

Greenleaf was admitted to the bar of California in 1968 and served as a legal aid for Multnomah County in Portland, Oregon, from 1969 to 1970. The following year, he was an associate attorney at Thompson & Hubbard in Monterey, California. From 1972 to 1976, he was associate attorney at Sullivan, Jones & Archer in San Francisco, specializing in securities fraud, antitrust, and business litigation. He became dissatisfied with his career in law and cast about for a new challenge, deciding eventually, at the age of thirty-four, on writing. His years as a lawyer on the West Coast gave him a feel for the setting he would use as home base in the Tanner series.

Greenleaf moved back to Iowa toward the end of the decade and served as an adjunct professor of trial advocacy at the University of Iowa. He wrote his first Tanner novel, Grave Error (1979), while waiting to take the Iowa bar exam and was also a participant in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Lacking the benefit of an agent or any contact in publishing, Greenleaf saw his manuscript rejected by seven publishing houses before he managed to get the novel accepted by Dial Press. Over the next two decades, thirteen more novels in the Tanner series would appear, with middling sales despite mostly good reviews. Three of the final four volumes were nominated for major awards in the mystery field. The series concluded with Ellipsis (2000), by the end of which Tanner appears about to retire from his career as detective and to begin a new life with his wife-to-be, Assistant District Attorney Jill Coppelia.

Hoping to attract a larger readership, Greenleaf moved outside the mystery genre by writing two nonseries novels: The Ditto List and Impact, both of which involve courtroom dramas and were sold to Hollywood. After many years in Washington and Oregon, the Greenleafs settled in Northern California.

Analysis

Stephen Greenleaf did not begin his writing career until the age of thirty-four, after two years in the military and nearly six as a practicing lawyer. Therefore, he had a ready store of experience on which to draw as a writer. In particular, his career in law coupled with his family background—his father and both grandfathers had also been attorneys—created a strong awareness of the legal profession’s demands and shortcomings as well as its strategic place in American society. In one way or another, this awareness informs every book he has written.

The title character of the Tanner series was named after John Marshall, the longest-serving chief justice in the history of the Supreme Court. Before becoming a private investigator, Tanner was a practicing attorney for some five years, until his suspension for contempt of court. He spent six months in jail rather than apologize to the corrupt judge, an experience that sensitized him to another side of the legal system and to its victims.

Greenleaf’s knowledge of the law gives a particular edge to his engagement with social issues. Reviewers have often noted the remarkable acuity with which his novels have examined such themes as radical politics, the legal insanity defense, corporate chicanery, libel in works of fiction, surrogate motherhood, racism, the AIDS epidemic, repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse, police brutality and corruption, and the plight of illegal immigrant farmworkers. In Greenleaf’s hands these issues invariably raise complex legal and ethical questions that are credibly made to serve as the impetus for plot developments by providing a variety of suspects, victims, alibis, hidden identities, and the rest of the apparatus needed for Tanner’s investigations to progress. At the same time, by giving the issues concrete human embodiment, his novels elicit compassion and understanding in a way that mere ratiocination or polemic could not.

As is often the case with hard-boiled noir fiction, the setting in the Tanner novels is important. Most are set in San Francisco and its environs, making available the full range of material and tonal assets needed in a private eye series: extremes of privilege and deprivation, racial and cultural diversity and antagonism, cunning as well as brutal criminal activity, and a general atmosphere evocative of modern alienation and angst. The proximity of the swells of Nob Hill to the hells of the Tenderloin section and of nearby exotic locales like Monterey and Berkeley are reminders that the American dream remains elusive even in a place where its rewards are gaudily on display.

Tanner narrates the novels in the first person, and his voice, though not flashy, is a clear and effective instrument for interpreting his world. Well-read and conversant with jazz, modern art, and professional sports, he is observant and attentive, especially to pretension and material excess, frequently the targets of his irony, and to suffering and deprivation, which elicit his empathy.

Grave Error

Greenleaf admitted that when he began the series, he had hoped to “write about the Bay Area in the way Ross Macdonald wrote about Southern California.” This is especially evident in his first novel, Grave Error, in which crimes committed in the past provide a hidden link to present crimes and the effect of earlier traumas on later generations of a dysfunctional family becomes the motivational key to the case. What begins as a relatively simple investigation into what is possibly blackmail becomes a tangled web of theft, racism, incest, and multiple murders—with Tanner ultimately discovering the connections between all the strands, yet withholding crucial information that would bring needless pain to a member of the primary family involved. Like Macdonald’s Lew Archer, Tanner acts in accordance with a tacit code of honor. This case offers the first of a series of tests of that code, tests that challenge the meaning of honor and compel constant redefinition, if not subversion, of the code.

In one of his many suggestive asides, Tanner notes that the private eye’s job is “short on glamour and long on moral ambiguity.” For him, the ambiguity is often a product of conflict between the observer’s preferred professional stance of detachment and objectivity, and the humane desire to become involved and to help those in need. It is a conflict that Tanner never quite resolves to his satisfaction but one whose complexities make for illuminating, if sometimes troubling, insights.

Fatal Obsession

The fifth Tanner novel, Fatal Obsession (1983), is a departure in that it takes place not in San Francisco but in Chaldea, a small town in western Iowa, where Tanner was born and raised. There is more exposition about his early life than in any other novel in the series. Tanner, an all-state football star in high school, has three siblings, two of whom still reside in Chaldea. Their parents were killed in an auto accident when Tanner was just ten. The disposition of the family’s farmland provides the occasion for the siblings’ reunion, a situation that allows Greenleaf to explore the range of difficulties faced by small farmers.

The apparent suicide of Tanner’s nephew, a tormented Vietnam veteran, becomes the focus of Tanner’s investigation, during which he uncovers local manifestations of national problems such as the illicit drug trade, environmental plunder, investment scams, and the dissolution of the family, and becomes involved with the small town’s struggle for economic survival.

Tanner solves the puzzle of his nephew’s death only to feel disappointment in his own life, which had once seemed so full of promise. He reflects at the end:

I thought that my return to Chaldea might reveal something that would explain or even excuse some of the things I was and unfortunately was not. But it hadn’t done anything of the kind, of course. It had just reminded me that those days were worse than I remembered, not better, and that the search for excuses is endless and therefore worthless.

Like other titles in the series, including Book Case (1991), Past Tense (1997), and Strawberry Sunday (1999), Fatal Obsession is enjoyable as a novel, beyond its interest as a mystery.

Book Case

In what may be Greenleaf’s finest novel, Book Case, Tanner is hired by a publisher friend to find the author of an anonymously submitted manuscript of a novel called Homage to Hammurabi. This novel appears to be a potential blockbuster, dealing with a sex scandal at an exclusive private school. The more he looks into the case, the more Tanner becomes convinced that the supposedly fictional plot is based on fact and that the scandal, involving sexual abuse of a female student by a male teacher who subsequently lost his job and was sent to prison, had actually occurred at an elite preparatory school in a posh San Francisco suburb. Tanner believes the fired teacher may be the author of the manuscript, and he uncovers evidence that the charge was fraudulent and the prison sentence therefore a cruel miscarriage of justice.

As the former teacher, recently released from prison, has become a homeless vagrant, Tanner’s search for him necessarily entails a descent into the seamiest part of San Francisco, known as the Tenderloin. This search contrasts sharply with scenes in the suburban enclave where the school is located. Tanner’s investigation ultimately discloses fundamental connections between these seemingly opposed worlds, in both of which greed, fear, addiction, and despair drive people to criminal behavior.

The convoluted story of both Book Case and Homage to Hammurabi, as one character observes, is “straight out of Kafka—nothing is as it seems; no one is unsullied; guilt and innocence are indeterminable.” Tanner responds that it sounds more like something Ross Macdonald would write.

The complex plots, witty dialogue, convincingly drawn characters, and richly textured prose style have made the Tanner series one of the most distinguished in the genre and have helped elevate its literary stature. This estimate is supported by the predominantly enthusiastic reviews Greenleaf has received from the beginning, though his modest sales may offer a clue as to why he has stated that he will add no further volumes to Tanner’s saga.

Principal Series Characters:

• John Marshall “Marsh” Tanner is a San Francisco-based private eye in his late forties. Formerly a defense attorney, Tanner was suspended because he publicly defied a corrupt judge. However, he retains his law license so that he can invoke attorney-client privilege and withhold sensitive information from the police. Although he is sometimes roughed up, Tanner is not particularly adept with his fists or with firearms. Rather, he is intelligent, perseverant, and adept at role-playing. His sympathies are always with the underdog, and he recoils from the rich, the powerful, and the self-important. He is also a depressive, an insomniac, a technophobe, and something of a loner. His private vices include scotch and sandwich cookies, and he enjoys jazz, modern art, and modern literature.
• Charley Sleet, a detective lieutenant in the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD), is Tanner’s best friend. A large man with a tough demeanor, Sleet shares Tanner’s sympathies for the underdog and regularly (though without fanfare) donates time and fortune to help the homeless, drug addicts, prostitutes, and others marginalized by society. Tanner has unofficially assisted Sleet on some police cases, and Sleet, in turn, makes available to Tanner confidential police information that helps investigations.
• Ruthie Spring is a profane Texas cowgirl, former nurse, and widow of Tanner’s mentor Harry Spring. After Harry’s death in the initial novel of the series, Ruthie becomes a private investigator and often assists her good friend Tanner on his more logistically challenging cases.
• Peggy Nettleton is Tanner’s loyal and resourceful secretary. As the series progresses, she becomes a more prominent figure, one of Tanner’s most trusted confidantes. After both mistake their trust and friendship for sexual passion, in Toll Call (1987), Peggy quits her job and moves away from the Bay Area. Thereafter, she makes only one more appearance in the series as Tanner’s client in a case that takes him to Seattle.

Bibliography

Bedell, Jeanne F. “Interdependent Mazes: The Detective Novels of Stephen Greenleaf.” Clues: A Journal of Detection 10, no. 1 (Spring/Summer, 1989): 51-62.

Greenleaf, Stephen, and Kevin Burton. “John Marshall Tanner – The Thrilling Detective Web Site.” Thrilling Detective, 11 Nov. 2019, thrillingdetective.com/2019/11/11/john-marshall-tanner/. Accessed 22 July 2024.

Greenleaf, Stephen. “Detective Novel Writing: The Hows and the Whys.” The Writer 106, no. 12 (December, 1993): 11-14.

Greenleaf, Stephen. Interview by Thomas Chastain. The Armchair Detective 15, no. 4 (1982): 346-349.

Greenleaf, Stephen. “The John Marshall Tanner Novels.” Mystery Readers International 11, no. 2 (Summer, 1995): 28-29.

Lynskey, Ed. “Stephen Greenleaf: Creator of California’s Next Great Private Eye.” 2005. http://www .mysteryfile.com.

Murphy, Stephen M. “Stephen Greenleaf.” Their Word Is Law: Bestselling Lawyer-Novelists Talk About Their Craft, edited by Stephen M. Murphy. New York: Berkeley Books, 2002.