Austin Powers - The Texas Observer

Onto this stage step Mary Willis Walker and James Magnuson, Austin novelists alert to both the possibilities and dangers of life in the new city. Walker has now published four novels of

detection and suspense, set primarily in Austin; Magnuson, director of U.T.-Austin’s Michener Center for Writers, is returning to the novel after ten years of writing for television. In

their sprightly and inventive fictions, both authors have something to tell us about life on these increasingly meaner streets.

Walker’s Austin is home to Molly Cates, a magazine writer (“Lone Star Monthly”) who finds herself repeatedly at the center of spectacular and complicated crime stories. (Katherine Driscoll,

the Cates-like protagonist of Walker’s first novel, Zero at the Bone, had a less adventurous and less glamorous occupation: dog trainer.) Cates is a nineties heroine, a divorced woman in

early middle age with a nearly grown daughter. Not a detective herself, she has an ongoing affair with an Austin police lieutenant, who assists both heroine and her creator by providing

crucial information and passion at strategic intervals. And in the Ross McDonald tradition, Walker’s plots tend to be interwoven and reverberating – a story that seems to be about some

present crime inevitably echoes into the past, and gathers the detective (or in this case, the journalist) into its rhythms and history.

In All the Dead Lie Down, the present crime is potentially a garish one: a shadowy paramilitary group is plotting to detonate toxic gas into the Legislature, killing everyone present.

(Walker’s titles are from Emily Dickinson, who proves a surprisingly gothic thesaurus.) Cates hears of the plot one day from a drunken bag lady, but while she is skeptically pursuing that

story she finds it linked with her own past, and the mysterious death of her father when she was a teenager. Her search into apparently political criminality drifts inexorably into her

family history and out to West Texas, and then abruptly shifts back into the contemporary Austin scene.

The plotters are attempting to head off a pending gun control bill (upon reflection, perhaps the most unconvincing aspect of the story), but to Walker’s credit the novel’s topical politics

set a sharp backdrop without overwhelming her tale. Indeed, even the treatment of weaponry is ambivalent, for although Walker quotes approvingly another Molly (Ivins) on the folly of private

gun ownership, Molly Cates’ close work with a handgun proves indispensable in her own defense and in the unraveling of the plot. Equally important is the bag lady, Sarah Jane Hurley, who

appears first as a leering apparition of drunken dereliction, and then grows into a free-standing character with her own history and tale to tell. Indeed, Sarah Jane (a/k/a “Cow Lady”)

becomes almost literally a stand-in for the unknown Austin – largely invisible to the reporters, the authorities, and the traffic jams full of well-dressed people who matter.

I know that intersection, along Barton Springs Road; one of the important small pleasures of reading hometown novels is recognizing the landmarks. But another is discovering unfamiliar

places, unknown neighborhoods. Mary Willis Walker’s novels are adept at taking the mystery genre and investing it with lively new significance, and taking up Austin and finding a surprising

world where the familiar road ends.

Since we’re all lottery players these days, Magnuson’s grand joke is to turn what looks like a fairy tale into a thriller. He gives the luckless Lindberg what he thinks he most wants, and

then watches the unhappy results. English teacher salaries being what they are, and the true “owners” likely to be thieves at best, Lindberg can’t get rid of the money, and he can’t really

spend it. He’s afraid to tell anyone about it, even his wife, and other than small amounts for car repairs and athletic shoes, the money becomes as oppressive to him as Poe’s telltale heart.

Like a character in a mystery, he decides he needs to “launder” the money – only to realize he hasn’t got the slightest notion what that might mean. He confides in the sort of people who

might know, and soon they’re looking to launder him out of his fortune.

Like Walker, Magnuson follows his narrative into his protagonist’s interior, although he is less interested in catching the crooks than in capturing the slow breakdown of Lindberg’s spirit.

The professor is also a Thoreau scholar, perhaps on the verge of a crucial discovery about the notorious falling-out between Thoreau and Emerson. The shadow that fell over that historical

friendship becomes a premonition of the shadow that has fallen over Lindberg’s life. It’s a device that neatly links the inner and outer worlds of the novel, and it even provides the

occasion of the professor’s downfall: one of his part-time graduate students is also a small-time hustler, and the teacher foolishly turns to the student for advice about dealing with his

windfall.

In a dream Lindberg sees Thoreau, sounding the frozen Walden Pond. The water at first seems bottomless, but Thoreau brings up, out of the dreamer’s spirit, a nightmare of the first innocent

victim of the teacher’s avarice: an old woman slain by those searching for the stolen money.

As that passage suggests, Magnuson is after deeper fish than just Ben’s big score, and Windfall is less a novel about money than about the harsh light money shines on men’s hearts. It is

also about the new Austin – every roadway, office, and landscape is readily recognizable, and in speaking of the book the author is frank about his hometown target. “I feel that Austin in

the 1990s has become the emblem of something,” he told an interviewer, “the place where everyone wants to move, the All-American boom town, a city where you can protect the endangered

salamander and still make billions in high tech, a city that’s all sunshine and no shadow…. [But] I hope to create a portrait of contemporary Texas that is much more disturbing and

shadow-ridden than the pictures created by rah-rah publicists.”

It’s a pattern that’s as old as American literature, and indeed the country that spawned it. The newcomers arrive in an undiscovered paradise, only to find that it’s as fallen a world as the

one they left. How could it not be, when they brought their dark hearts along with them? The newest waves of Austin settlers are only beginning to imagine what these two novelists already

know.

You can chip in for as little as $3 a month.