Five Decembers

Late November 1941: Joe McGrady is a Honolulu PD detective with a war record he does not discuss and a girl named Molly he means to marry, assigned to a double homicide of exceptional savagery, a young man and a Japanese woman butchered on farmland outside the city. The man turns out to be the nephew of Admiral Kimmel, commander of the Pacific Fleet, which buys the case resources, and the trail, worked through hotel registries and shipping manifests, points across the ocean: McGrady follows a suspect to Hong Kong, cabling home progress reports, planning to be back within weeks.

The date does the rest. Pearl Harbor is bombed while he is stranded in Hong Kong; Hong Kong falls around him days later, and McGrady, an American detective caught in a surrendering colony, disappears into the war, the novel executing the boldest structural move in recent crime fiction: the murder case freezes for years while its detective is imprisoned, transferred, and finally held in Tokyo under the private protection of a Japanese official with his own reasons and his own losses, in whose household McGrady spends the war years the title counts. What those chapters build, patiently, is the book's second heart, grief and adaptation rendered without genre hurry, so that when the war ends and McGrady, remade, returns to a transformed Honolulu to reopen a five year old double murder, the procedural's resumption carries the weight of everything between.

The solution honours both books the novel contains, the noir and the war elegy, and the last pages land the title's arithmetic.

Around four hundred and thirty pages.

Best for readers who want the hardboiled mystery expanded to a decade's scale, Chandler's instrument playing a war requiem.