Sheriff Joe Bain is the protagonist of a short series, prematurely abandoned, of crime-investigation mysteries by the American author Jack Vance, better known for his science fiction novels. The series as published comprises The Fox Valley Murders (1966) and The Pleasant Grove Murders (1967). An unfinished third novel exists. The milieu for the books is San Rodrigo County, a fictitious precinct in rural California, the state Vance lived in for most of his life.
Contents
Style and characters
Though the murder mystery in each novel is plotted with Vance’s customary ingenuity, the real pleasure in these books is the spare, unembellished style (compared to the Baroque prose of his SF fantasies, Vance’s earth-bound thrillers cultivate a deadpan narrative idiom), the light touch of Vance's habitually pervasive irony, the minute and affectionate observation of rural and small-town California, and the interaction of a rich gallery of characters. The central character is the policeman Joe Bain, who must run for sheriff to succeed his corrupt and lackadaisical boss, Sheriff "Cooch" Cuchinello throughout The Fox River Murders and keep an eye toward his reelection in the subsequent novel(s). Bain's wife ran off shortly after the birth of their daughter Miranda, who's in high school at the time of these novels, and who he's raised with the help of his mother Miriam. Typically for a Vance protagonist he is good at his job, sparing of speech, generally amiable and not very impressible. He's a graduate of the Chapman Institute of Criminology in North Hollywood and often puts what he learned there to good use. He is surrounded by characters more flamboyant, ambitious, egotistical and (in their own estimation) much cleverer than he. Though the narrative approach is generally ‘realistic’, lacking the fantastic invention of Vance’s SF, he occasionally teases the boundaries of the ‘detective novel’ genre, as with the character of Luna with whom Bain has a mild flirtation in The Pleasant Grove Murders: a New Age real estate agent who claims to be really a visitor from the planet Arthemisia, with which she communicates by means of a number of bowls of water filled to various levels.
San Rodrigo County
As in many Vance novels, the milieu virtually has character status. He has said that San Rodrigo county is a blend of elements of several actual Californian counties, and there are general resemblances to the San Joaquin Valley region in which Vance spent most of his childhood. Moreover the county is given cartographical reality by several maps which appear in the books, from a general view of San Rodrigo County within its borders to street-plans of some of its townships. The chief of these include San Rodrigo, Pleasant Grove, Aurora and Marblestone; the high ground is generally on the west of the county; the principal waterway is Genesee Creek, which debouches into Genesee Slough in the north-east quarter. Roads leave the county boundaries in the direction of real places -- Monterey, Carmel, Salinas, San José -- and we are informed that from the western border it is only 13 miles to the Pacific Ocean. All of this circumstantial evidence places Joe Bain’s precinct rather precisely on the western edge of the central San Joaquin Valley.
The Third Novel
Vance seems to have planned an extended series of Joe Bain novels, and was fairly well advanced on a third one before he decided to pack it in. Photocopies of a typescript draft of The Genesee Slough Murders have circulated among collectors over the years. The draft is evidence of Vance's working practices. The entire story, including the solution of the crime, is extant in outline, and some early chapters are fairly fully drafted, though obviously lacking a final polish. A version of the draft was published in The Work of Jack Vance. An Annotated Bibliography & Guide by Jerry Hewett and Daryl F. Mallett, edited by Boden Clarke (San Bernardino, California, 1994).