Word: giffords
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This, anyway, is Nye Richardson Gifford, 63, chief of the Lymington Police and a certain mixture of Philip Marlowe and Christ who has had to wait to shoulder his greatest human burden and solve his biggest crime until now, the beginning of this novel. Until a sunny August afternoon in 1972 and the discovery, on a back road in Lymington, of the body of a youngish woman, her identity blasted past police identification by four .38 caliber slugs to the face...
Despite the fact that the victim is legally disembowelled by a state pathologist, clinically sawed and sliced apart beneath fluorescent lights in the basement of a funeral home before his very eyes, Gifford is nonetheless slain by her. Perhaps moved by the false eyelashes and atrophied, prematurely menopausal, ovaries--indicative, for him, of the harshness of society--Gifford swears out some secret allegiance to this human victim. That even if he does not find her murderer, neither will he forget her betrayal, as he limps on toward his own death...
...less Christian aspect of John Hough Jr.'s novel is the unravelling of the mystery and the pursuit of the murderer, the account delivered unsentimentally by Gifford the old policeman, turned sleuth by only the second killing in his town in 40 years. Gifford joins in with state cop Tommy O'Rourke and traces the woman to her unhappy past in Boston and to the men to whom she was more devoted than they to her. The two cops' dogged pursuit--through what can only be termed a grim and desparate picture of urban civilization, and countless discotheques besides--nets...
APPARENTLY, however, John Hough Jr. doesn't really want this to be a detective novel and subtly deemphasizes all aspects of the book that are such. The motive and method of the murder are quite ordinary, and, in spite of Gifford and O'Rourke's exertions, its solution is quite simple. The whodunit is so peripheral to the body of the novel, in fact, that the first real clues do not surface until three months after the killing and a sizeable lull in the narrative, and Gifford continues his account for a good 30 pages after the guilty verdict...
Hough apparently revels in Jesus Christ figures, and Gifford needs those 30 pages to accept the responsibility for the sins of some kids who cuss in front of their neighbors, a drunk who dies in a flophouse room, and Jimmy Johnson himself. The verdict is hardly definitive for Gifford, who anguishes, with the italicism that is appropriate to a Monday morning quarterback of the Crucifixion, "What if he's innocent?" Jimmy Johnson has become a Christ-figure too, and before Gifford can finish his narrative/life, he must accept the burden of fingered Jimmy, who, albeit begrudgingly, bore the sins...