Bridge at the Beach (Clyde Smith 4), by Garrick Jones

[Ulysses]

Bridge at the Beach (Clyde Smith mysteries, 4)
By Garrick Jones
Five stars
Published by the author, 2024
Page count: 440

It seems likely that I may never visit Australia in person. Thus I am particularly thankful to have Garrick Jones’s books, which offer some insight into the life (over more than a century) in that country. Of course, I doubt this is his intention in writing these books, but he’s one of those authors for whom place is all-important, and thus Sydney comes to life for the reader—at whichever time he has placed his narrative and his characters.

Bridge at the Beach is set in 1957, and the charmingly misleading title is the trigger for a murder-mystery of byzantine complexity—and a mystery that dredges up Clyde Smith’s own past again and again. That is one of the charms of this series: Clyde is not some detached “noir” detective, observing cynically from the sidelines. Sydney is Clyde’s life, and the dizzying array of characters that populate these mysteries are also, frequently, part of Clyde’s life. Friendship, kinship, acquaintanceship—all the variations on human connection are woven into this story. It is exhausting at times, but also enriching and endearing.

Clyde Smith (and his partner, Harry Jones) are particularly fine-tuned characters, being, by my calculations, about the age of my parents. As gay men in an era when that term didn’t yet exist, Clyde and Harry are both fully plausible and breath-takingly fortunate. The 1950s were nowhere on earth friendly to men who loved other men. Yet, somehow, Clyde and Harry are remarkably undamaged and unhampered by the proscriptions and prejudices of their world. It might be their war experience that has made them confident and sure of themselves despite being out of step with the “morals” of their time. Jones imbues all of his characters with psychological believability and truth, each reflecting their individual situation and self-awareness. He gives Clyde the gift of empathy, drawn from his own experiences. Through Clyde’s eyes we see the range of emotional damage done to men like him in his generation, and through Clyde’s eyes the reader comes to understand how it all fits together within the framework of the plot’s action.

I love Clyde and Harry—but they are not simply sweet fantasies. They are men who could have existed, but who were virtually never allowed to appear in literature of the 1940s and 50s. Jones has created a possible reality, and it fills his books with a comforting senses of “this might have really happened.”

I can’t possibly describe the mystery itself—four older people found dead in what appears to be the middle of a bridge game near one of Sydney’s beaches. Right from the start, it’s weird, and it only gets weirder as Clyde—helping his friends on the police force—digs into the backstory, which happens to involve people he knew growing up in Sydney. You have to really pay attention to all the moving parts, but in the end you get surprised (as does Clyde) anyway.

All around are reminders of the earlier books in the series, but also reminders of why Clyde and Harry are so mentally sound and so strong as a couple in a world where their relationship is illegal. Harry’s mother, Mary, works with “her boys” in managing a charity for poor rural families. Mary represents the kind of woman who really existed, and who made a vast difference in her son’s life (and hence in Clyde’s). She is also a reminder that Harry and Clyde are from different classes, even though Clyde himself is dapper and posh enough to belong to an elegant men’s club. Clyde’s evolution into a man in full is one of the underlying miracles that makes these books both believable and romantic. His skills as a detective are less impressive than his mental wholeness (in spite of his own doubts and anxieties). He is a quiet hero.

There’s no reason in the world these books can’t keep going from here. Seems like there’s enough crime in Sydney to keep Clyde and his readers on their toes. I do hope so.