This city is large and diverse. There are pockets of grinding poverty, pockets of middle-class respectability, pockets of wealth. There is corruption beyond a normal person’s belief, and incredible selflessness and valor. Intrigue worthy of a spy novel, and innocence and wonder. Eight hundred thousand-plus people living out their stories.
And all too often, their stories merge with mine.
–City of Whispers (2011)
A classic hardboiled opening. It could have come from any of the guys – Hammett, Chandler, Ross Macdonald – but it didn’t. Its author was Marcia Muller, recently fired from her magazine job because she kept embellishing the quotes (“they were more interesting,” she said). A great fan of Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, and Lew Archer, Muller had became increasingly exasperated by the fact that there were no hardboiled American women equivalents. If she wanted to read one, she realized, she was going to have to create one herself. So she did.
Edwin of the Iron Shoes, featuring private detective Sharon McCone, was published in 1977. In 1982, Sue Grafton introduced Kinsey Millhone in A is for Alibi and Sara Paretsky did the same for V.I. Warshawski in Indemnity Only. But Marcia Muller was first – “the founding mother,” Grafton called her – and in 35 novels over 44 years, she proved that her p.i. could stand her ground with anybody.
McCone grew up a Navy brat in San Diego, her father a chief petty officer who was always gone, leaving her mother to cope with five unruly children. Her brothers were rowdy males, “ever on the brink of juvenile delinquency,” her sisters rebellious females “ever on the brink of teenage pregnancy” (A Wild and Lonely Place, 1995). Sharon was the good girl, but a loner, even in her own family. Her siblings all looked like the Scots-Irish they were; Sharon seemed to have inherited all the genes of her one-eighth Shoshone grandmother and looked nothing like them.
She was a cheerleader in high school, but as soon as she graduated, she forged her own path, becoming a department store security guard. However, “after a couple of years, I couldn’t see my life stomping through racks of dresses with a walkie-talkie in my purse” (Edwin of the Iron Shoes), so she went to Berkeley and studied sociology, financing herself with more security work at night, this time for a large agency that also tried her out on detective work. She liked it – but not the jobs she had to do, mostly involving wayward husbands and wives, and when she refused to do them anymore, she got fired and moved to San Francisco. There, she ran into a college friend named Hank Zahn, who hired her as the sole investigator for the poverty law firm he ran called the All Souls Cooperative, a place where most of the lawyers lived and worked together in a big old house.
And that’s where we first meet her: twenty-nine, and a bundle of contradictions. She’s idealistic but hard-headed, gregarious but wary of entanglements, a good shot but unhappy with guns, sensible but with a wild side: “I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with danger. I’d run from it, balanced on its thin edge, plunged in headlong” (A Wild and Lonely Place). She’s obsessed with research, but sometimes uses less analytical methods: When interviewing people, she tries to “tune out the words and listen to what’s hidden in the spaces between them. To the pauses, the hesitations” (Listen to the Silence, 2000). At crime scenes, no matter how old, she leaves herself open to the vibes: “Sometimes places can absorb the emotions surrounding events that have happened there” (Where Echoes Live, 1991).
She’s also passionate about justice, and the books are full of commentary and social issues: illegal immigration, gentrification, political corruption, gender inequality, racism, gun control, domestic violence, mental illness, human rights. That passion also leads her to make cases a little too personal sometimes, to care about them so much that she pushes too hard: “All too often when that happened, people around me got hurt” (Pennies on a Dead Woman’s Eyes, 1992).
In Burn Out (2008), she steps back, realizing that she has “to let go of the idea that I could right every wrong and instead settle for righting only a few.” But that’s easier said than done. Some cases just mean too much, and the older she gets, the more she finds justice and the law to be increasingly at odds. When a friend of her is killed in Both Ends of the Night (1997), she says to her companion, “I keep waiting for some sort of…settling, whatever. For some sense of wanting justice, not revenge.”
“Isn’t happening,” he says.
“No.”
And in The Shape of Dread (1989), she has at last run down a particularly cold-blooded killer and has her gun on him: “I could shoot him point-blank, I thought…should shoot him. No sense in letting this evil man live. No sense in going through the motions of arrest, trial, imprisonment, even execution, because it won’t make any difference….Give me a reason to pull this trigger.”
She doesn’t pull it – but the mental cost stays with her.
As do the many perils she faces throughout the course of her career. She is shot, stabbed, kidnapped, hunted, and put in a sinking boat to drown. Houses and buildings blow up or burn down around her. Planes she is piloting crash. Pitched battles rage.
The cases come from everywhere, often as assignments, just as often from friends, family, acquaintances. Vietnamese refugees hire her for protection. A daughter wants to find her mother, missing twenty-two years. A companion from physical therapy suddenly vanishes. Her Berkeley days come back to haunt her. A bomber targets diplomatic sites around the city. A country music singer receives threatening letters. A hostage negotiator goes off the radar in Mexico. A B&B owner suffers a string of inexplicable bad incidents. A woman impersonates her around the city, creating havoc.
Often the cases begin in one place, and as the investigation continues, veer off to some other place entirely. A supposed suicide turns into a story of murder, embezzlement, and sabotage. A shop owner’s death opens up a world of international art-smuggling. A woman’s disappearance embroils McCone in international war crimes. A search for stolen religious artifacts lands her, bound and drugged, in a paramilitary camp that is training for a coup.
No wonder McCone is exhausted.
Fortunately, she also has those friends, family, and colleagues to draw on for support…mostly. Her brother Joey is a screw-up. Her brother John is an ex-brawler who comes to her rescue more than once. Her sister Patsy is the B&B owner mentioned above. Her other sister, Charlene, is married to Ricky Savage, the country music singer similarly mentioned above, then divorces him, gets her PhD in finance, and marries an international financier. Their six kids, the “little Savages,” grow up in a variety of alarming ways, including Mick Savage, who ultimately becomes one of Sharon’s key investigators, though his mastery of computers and fondness for such books as Advanced Lock-Picking make his methods of acquiring information considerably dodgier than Sharon likes.
Her mother, meanwhile, announces in book twelve, Where Echoes Live, that “I have left your father,” causing considerable family drama, and warns Sharon that she is like her father: “There’s another side to you, something…wild that can’t be contained.” What she means is revealed to Sharon in Listen to the Silence, when her father dies, leaving instructions for Sharon to look in the garage, where she finds papers documenting that….she isn’t his child, or her mother’s.
She’s adopted, and that Shoshone blood is not one-eighth but one hundred percent, sending Sharon on an odyssey of self-discovery that leads to her true parents, and the devastating incidents that culminated in her becoming a McCone. Those parents, too, along with a newly-discovered half-sister and half-brother, will also become important characters in several of the books that follow, and the cases that fill them, including the murders of indigenous women in 2021’s Ice and Stone.
McCone’s colleagues, too, evolve as the books continue. Though Sharon will always stay close to Hank Zahn and others at the All Souls Cooperative, the place becomes too corporate for her, with new partners wanting to kick her upstairs to a desk job, so in book fifteen, Till the Butchers Cut Her Down (1994), she takes the leap to open her own firm, McCone Investigations, with offices on the San Francisco piers, bringing with her Mick Savage, investigators Rae Kelleher and Charlotte Keim, and office manager Ted Smalley. As McCone Investigations, too, grows over the years, these people are supplemented by others such as disaffected FBI agent Craig Morland, former SFPD detective Adah Joslyn, and a one-time prostitute named Julia Rafael, in whom Sharon sees something of herself and who turns out to be a top-notch detective.
Trust me when I say that many dramas ignite among all these many characters, infusing the series with a wealth of soap opera. Ultimately, McCone outgrows even McCone Investigations, and becomes a partner in McCone & Ripinsky International.
Ripinsky, you say? Who’s this? Only the most important character in the entire series, other than Sharon herself.
Sharon has had a few love interests in the books. The first was a homicide detective named Greg Marcus, who annoyed her at first meeting in Edwin of the Iron Shoes by calling her “papoose,” mocking her “woman’s intuition,” and asking “Do you really have an investigator’s license?” Grrr. It got better – a lot better – “but he still managed to piss me off on the average of once a week” (The Cheshire Cat’s Eye, 1983), and by the fourth book, it was over, though they stayed friendly through the years.
The second love interest was a DJ named Don who was a tad clingy and wanted a family and…he didn’t last too long. The third was an eminent psychiatrist, for whom Sharon fell hard, and he for her, but he was married to a mentally ill woman, and in all conscience he didn’t think he could leave her: “He was an honorable man…but sometimes on cold, lonely nights, I cursed him for that honor” (The Shape of Dread).
Then, in book twelve, Where Echoes Live, Sharon chases an environmental case up into the high desert of northeastern California, and meets a tall, lanky, widowed environmentalist and fellow pilot named Hy (Heino) Ripinsky, and she’s a goner, despite plenty of warning signs, like that large gap of unaccounted-for years in the 1970s when he might have been with the CIA…or something. “Underneath that laid-back exterior, he’s still dangerous,” a friend warns her. “A genuine crazy man who’ll go against anybody in any way.”
He’s got his own reservations about Sharon – “You are the same goddamned stubborn, annoying kind of person as my late wife, and one man doesn’t deserve this kind of grief twice” – but he’s kind of a goner himself.
And then he disappears.
Sharon’s search leads her to a high-powered outfit called RKI – Renshaw and Kessell International – whose founders have similarly dark gaps in their pasts and now provide hostage recovery and counterterrorism services for corporations. They’re high-tech, unscrupulous, and Ripinsky does occasional work for them in exchange for autonomy on his own projects in the human rights area. That last part is nice, Sharon thinks, but, boy, are these guys shady.
She doesn’t know the half of it. Renshaw and Kessell did unspeakable things in Southeast Asia in the 70s, and the things Hy saw and did there gave him “nightmares, tightly boxed demons, enough regrets to last ten lifetimes” (A Wild and Lonely Place). It takes Sharon several books to learn the complete truth about him, and to understand him and forgive him, and by that time, she’s done a little work for RKI herself. When that past comes thundering back to wreak its vengeance on both Renshaw and Kessell, it’s Sharon and Hy who pull the pieces of RKI back together.
And the pieces of themselves, too. No secrets now. No conditions. An unbreakable bond the commitment-wary McCone never thought possible.
“McCone,” he said through our linked headsets/ “I can’t think of a better place to do this than a mile high in our airplane….For about what seems like the hundredth time: will you marry me?…”
The word was out of my mouth before I had time to argue with myself. “Yes.” (The Dangerous Hour, 2004)
McCone has finally learned: “Hardboiled” doesn’t have to mean “lone wolf.”.
Nor an end to the danger that keeps her balanced on the thin edge: A bullet knocks her to the dirt in the next book.
***
Marcia Muller came to an interest in violence and crime naturally. In her first two decades, “my orthodontist shot and killed his wife and child; a friend’s mother was fatally stabbed by her husband; a plane carrying another friend’s father was blown up by a bomb; my next door neighbor in my college dormitory killed herself.”
Yikes.
Born in 1944, Muller says she wanted to be a writer from the time she could first read and write. “My father was a great storyteller. Every evening he would tell me a story when I went to bed. He’d make up fantastic stuff. He would act out different roles.”
It isn’t surprising, then, that she’d written her first novel by the age of twelve, a tale about her cocker spaniel, complete with badly drawn illustrations. “It did have mystery elements,” she said. “I guess I knew where I was going.”
Her college instructors did not, however. At the University of Michigan, her creative writing instructor told her she would never be a writer, “because you have nothing to say.” Opting for journalism instead, she earned a master’s, landed a job at Sunset magazine, and…”I was a terrible journalist. Whenever I interviewed somebody boring, I’d fictionalize the situation, put words in the person’s mouth.”
And so ended that career. By the end of the 1960s, however, somewhat at sea as to what to do with herself, she discovered hardboiled crime fiction. It immediately resonated with her, but she became frustrated that women were constantly only the sideshow: dolls, vamps, victims.
Maybe she did have something to say after all.
“Sharon McCone was conceived in 1971, when an insistent and annoying woman’s voice in my head began demanding I pay attention to her. But as insistent as she sounded, at first she gave me few clues as to her identity. In fact, she seemed more intent upon impressing upon me who and what she was not” (McCone and Friends, 2000).
What she was not was an existential loner, a tough guy, an alcoholic, a hardbitten cynic. McCone would be emotional, caring, surrounded by friends, family, and co-workers. She would be independent, powerful, surrounded by people, and at “a place she could go for poker games and all-night talking sessions.” She would evolve – her character would change and grow, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, “as close to a real person as possible. Like real people, she would age…experience joy and sorrow, love and hatred – in short, the full range of human emotions. Each of her cases would constitute one more major event in an ongoing biography” (“Partners in Crime,” The Writer, May 1997).
It took a while to find someone who wanted to publish that biography, however – three manuscripts and five years of rejection. “It was a rocky start, and many times along the way, I was tempted to give up.” Finally, with Edwin of the Iron Shoes, she found an editor who liked it, at the David McKay Company, sold it directly to him, and sat back in 1977 to enjoy her new career.
Which promptly collapsed. That editor left McKay, and nobody else there was interested in publishing her – in fact, McKay stopped publishing fiction altogether. It took another four years before Muller could find another home:
“Four years later, the world of publishing had caught up and they were recognizing that, yes, there were female private eyes, there were female cops. The whole woman’s movement had affected what we were doing. So when I went to New York, I finally met an editor [Thomas Dunne at St. Martin’s] who immediately bought Ask the Cards a Question. It was the same publishing house where another editor had previously rejected it, proving the rule that it only takes one person to really respond to your work and get you into print.”
Paretsky’s Indemnity Only, Grafton’s A is for Alibi, and Muller’s second book, Ask the Cards a Question, were all published within three months of each other in 1982. None of the authors ever looked back.
In the meantime, Muller had met fellow crime writer Bill Pronzini, author most notably of the “Nameless Detective” series; they married in 1992, and remain married to this day, often collaborating with each other on novels, anthologies, and the reference book 1001 Midnights: The Aficionado’s Guide to Mystery and Detective Fiction (1986).
She is the winner of the MWA’s Grand Master Award (as is Pronzini), the Private Eye Writers of America Lifetime Achievement Award (Pronzini, too, again), and the Romantic Times Lifetime Achievement in Suspense Award (sorry, Bill). She has been a finalist for pretty much every American crime novel award that exists, including the Anthony, Shamus, Edgar, Barry, and Macavity; and won the Anthony for Wolf in the Shadows (see Essentials below) and The McCone Files, and the Shamus for Locked In (ditto).
Muller has also learned to fly a plane, just like McCone and Ripinsky.
And if you visit her, you just might catch a glimpse of her longtime hobby: making fully electrified, remarkably detailed miniature houses representing places where her characters have lived, including the All Souls Cooperative:
“My hobby feeds my work. Helps me visualize certain settings. I’m down to doing some boxes now – no space for any more big ones. And repairs – the rooms and houses are always needing them, just like real houses. Sharon is not always with me, but she’s never far away.”
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The Essential Muller
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With any prolific author, readers are likely to have particular favorites which may not be the same as anyone else’s. Your list is likely to be just as good as mine – but here are the ones I recommend.
Edwin of the Iron Shoes (1977)
I stood next to the car, waiting for the number ninety-three trolley to pass, its antennae zinging along the overhead cable. The lighted windows of the trolley were empty except for the driver and a lone passenger. It was two-thirty in the morning….
I’d been jerked from my sleep about forty-five minutes earlier by the insistent ring of the telephone and my employer’s voice saying, “Sharon, get yourself up and meet me over at Salem Street. Joan Albritton’s shop….”
“Don’t tell me someone’s set another fire over there?”
“Worse. A lot worse. This time it’s murder.”
So begins the first Sharon McCone novel – you should always start at the beginning. An antique store owner is dead, stabbed with a bone-handled dagger from one of her own display cases, and as Sharon is about to find out, there are several suspects: a former lover, a socialite business tycoon, a group of high-powered real estate speculators. Each of them has a reason for shutting the victim down permanently; none of them has the scruples to keep from doing it.
There is only one witness, and he can’t speak: Edwin, a mannequin of a little boy, his feet fitted with a pair of ornate iron shoes. He stands, staring at an oil painting on the wall. But if you know how to ask, he will speak volumes.
A perfect introduction to a ground-breaking series.
Wolf in the Shadows (1993)
Beware of the wolf in the shadows. He is watchful and patient, and when he catches you, he will eat you – skin and bones and heart.
There’s a crisis brewing at the All Souls Cooperative, but McCone has no time for that now. Her new lover, Hy Ripinsky, has vanished, and the only one who seems to know why is his boss Gage Renshaw, who thinks Ripinsky has double-crossed him during a hostage negotiation: “When I find him, I intend to kill him.”
McCone has no choice but to fly to Mexico herself in an attempt to pick up his trail. Druglords, bandits, and murderers are all around her, the most dangerous man she has ever met pursuing her. With Wolf in the Shadows, the series takes a dramatic leap from crime fiction to international thriller, and McCone herself finds a depth and determination that she never knew existed.
“Not since Nero Wolfe dropped five pounds has there been a more thrilling transformation,” said the Washington Post, and the Baltimore Sun stated: “This may be Muller’s breakthrough book – the one that pushes her into the household icon realm.”
You don’t want to miss it.
Listen to the Silence (2000)
Now I know that “always” is a lie.
Now I know that in the end, death is the only certainty.
Running home after her father’s fatal heart attack, Sharon gets the shock of her life going through a box labeled Legal Papers: A petition for adoption for four-day-old BABY GIRL SMITH, to be known as SHARON ELIZABETH MCCONE.
Everything she though she had ever known about her past is a lie.
Embarking on a search for her identity, she winds up at Montana’s Flathead Reservation, where more lies and evasion await her, secrets piled upon secrets, but also a family she never knew existed – and a desperate killer intent on silencing her for good.
Sometimes the skeletons is one’s closet aren’t metaphorical – they’re all too real.
A powerhouse story of discovery and obsession, with surprises up to the very last pages.
Locked In (2009) and Coming Back (2010)
A fantastic double-header, two books that work as one.
A dark figure appeared only a few feet away and then barreled into me, knocked me against the wall. My head bounced off the sheetrock hard enough to blur my vision. In the next second I reeled backward through the door, spun around, and was down on my knees on the hard iron catwalk. As I tried to scramble away, push up and regain my footing, one of my groping hands brushed over some kind of metal –
Sudden flash, loud pop.
Rush of pain.
Oh my God, I’ve been shot –
Nothing.
One late foggy night in July, Sharon surprises an intruder in her office, and is shot in the head. When she awakens, she’s in a hospital bed, a fragmented bullet near her brain stem. She can’t move, she can’t speak. Her mind is working, but no one knows it. She has locked-in syndrome, and no way to tell anyone she’s still in there. “Patients typically die within months,” a doctor tells Hy, “although some live for a few years.”
But Sharon is having none of it. She blinks twice at Hy: No. “Are you here with me?” One blink: Yes.
In the weeks that follow, all her colleagues work extra hard on their cases: that of a man knifed and disfigured, of a couple whose son has disappeared, of an identity theft expert whose own identity has been stolen, of a prostitute whose slasher death nobody seems to care about, of a burgeoning corruption scandal at City Hall. We see her people crisscrossing the city, digging for clues – and visiting Sharon at her bedside, pouring their day out for her, her attentiveness sometimes prodding them in directions they hadn’t thought of.
It’s crisp and compelling, and a marvelous portrait of a group of dedicated professionals working toward a common goal, made all the more urgent by the medical setbacks that strike with no warning.
Coming Back opens months later. Sharon is home, but relearning to walk, to speak, to show that she can still lead. “There are times I just…stall,” she tells Hy. “I lose myself in memories of all that lost time. People around here are starting to think I’m losing it.”
She’s not wrong. “Sometimes she’s not as quick as she used to be. And she forgets details,” notes one of her detectives, wondering if there’s something easier she can be given, to another’s furious retort, “You act as if she’s some…cripple we keep on staff because she needs a job.”
She begins to wonder if all of them are right – and then a fellow patient at her rehab center stops showing up, and when Sharon goes to her house to check on her, she finds a woman claiming to be her niece, and then, seventy-two hours later, the house is cleaned out and empty. Energized, Sharon pursues the case, landing in the middle of a story of international intrigue, rogue government agents, and covert assassination that is breathtaking to the end.
Read ‘em both. You’ll be glad you did.
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Book Bonus
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Interspersed with the McCones are four other series by Muller. The first two, featuring museum curator Elena Oliverez (1983-1986) and art security expert Joanna Stark (1986-1989) are three books each and “were largely written out of financial necessity, because publishers were not paying that much for mystery novels at the time. It was not really enough to live on, but since I had few other recognizable skills, I needed to do more than one book a year to survive.
“The Stark series was intended to only last the three books, with the personal story wrapped up in the last one. With the Oliverez books, I really burned out on the character. She was very young, and I couldn’t find anything more to say about her.”
That latter series, however, did include a collaboration with Bill Pronzini, who in 1985 had created a nineteenth-century mystery featuring Secret Service agent John Quincannon and Pinkerton operative Sabina Carpenter. In 1986, he and Muller wrote Beyond the Grave, which had Quincannon partially solve a case in 1895 and Elena Oliverez complete it in 1986. Says Muller, “Although another Elena was under contract, I simply couldn’t come up with anything that could top or even equal Beyond the Grave, and I eventually persuaded the publisher to release me from the obligation.”
Decades later, however, Muller and Pronzini were fooling around with some short stories featuring Quincannon and Carpenter, he writing the male character and she the female, and enjoyed it so much that they wrote five books about them from 2013 to 2017. They’re charming and well worth your while if you like historicals.
Also in the mix are three books set in the fictional Soledad County on the California coast four hours north of San Francisco. Published from 2001 to 2005, they’re dark and brooding, and came about when Muller’s car broke down on the coastal highway one day, in a place where cell phones didn’t work. A few days later, she was talking to her editor “and I had a persistent vision of this woman standing beside the car at the side of the road. The book proceeded from there.”
Muller has written a couple of other novels with Pronzini, as well, including a book that united McCone with Pronzini’s “Nameless Detective,” called Double (1998), and together they’ve produce a slew of anthologies, plus the reference book mentioned earlier. Muller’s short stories have also been gathered in such collections as Deceptions (1991), The McCone Files (1995), McCone and Friends (2000), and Somewhere in the City (2007). That last one also includes some Western stories by Muller, as do the collections Time of the Wolves (2003) and Crucifixion River (2007).
“I really enjoy writing the Western stories,” she’s said. “I am fascinated by history and I love researching the historical aspects.” How good are they? One of the Crucifixion River stories, “Time of the Wolves,” actually won a Spur Award nomination from the Western Writers of America!
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Movie/TV Bonus
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The McCone series has been optioned at least twice by film companies, but, as is the case with so many film/TV options, they never reached the script stage. However, if you can, track down a 1991 made-for-TV movie called Into the Badlands. It consisted of three different stories about a bounty hunter, played by Bruce Dern, searching the West for a wanted outlaw. One of those stories was adapted from “Time of the Wolves,” the Spur Award nominee mentioned just above. Others in the movie include Mariel Hemingway, Helen Hunt, and Dylan McDermott – and it even got an Emmy nomination.
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Meta Bonus
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Greg Marcus: “What is it with you private operatives? You all sound like you’ve read too many paperback detective novels.”
McCone: “Well, of course.”
“Really? You read stuff like that?”
“When I was at Berkeley, I worked nights as a security guard to make my tuition. When you sit hour after hour, watching over an empty building that no one in his right mind would want to break into, you’ll read anything.”
He shook his head in disbelief.
(The Cheshire Cat’s Eye)
Don was reading a novel by Ross Macdonald, whose work I enjoyed even more than Hammett’s.
“I got you hooked, didn’t I?” Mysteries were practically all I read these days.
“It surprises me that a private eye would want to read about fictional ones,” Don said. “I mean, don’t mystery novels seem pretty unrealistic to you?”
“That’s what I like about them. They’re so much more interesting than my life. When you spend a lot of your time interviewing witnesses and filing documents at City Hall, you appreciate a little excitement on paper.”
(Leave a Message for Willie, 1984)
Jane Stein was a pleasant surprise. With the typical snobbery of northern Californians for Tinseltown, I’d been anticipating someone flashy, a trifle tacky, perhaps loud.
“It’s a pleasure to meet a real private investigator, rather than those cinematic horrors we’re always creating down south,” she said.
“I’m glad you feel the way I do. I can’t watch those shows or films. I like mystery novels, but the way we’ve been portrayed on the screen….”
(The Shape of Dread, 1989)
–Featured image, author photo by Tom Graves
