Review: The Novel, The Esmerelda Goodbye…

Theme. You remember that concept, don’t you? From back in high school? Perhaps you recall the titles that accompanied it, like The Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, Romeo and Juliet, or, gasp! Hamlet? Theme was the thing your English Teachers tried to hammer into your brain while you were too busy trying to figure out the goddamned plot. Your Social Studies Teachers wouldn’t go near it, not with all the names, dates, and events you had to memorize to pass that class. 

But theme is a thing. And it could very well be a good thing, especially in the right hands. And it is crafted, developed, and executed expertly in the novel, The Esmerelda Goodbye, by Corey Lynn Fayman. 

Firstly, a theme is a message, a message that the author, musician, sculptor, etc., tries to impart through their piece of art. Songs, short stories, paintings–if elements within them have something in common, five will get you ten that it’s a theme that’s trying to emerge. They’re evident in the sentences, chords, and brush strokes of each artifact.

And in TEG? The theme is that corruption is inescapable. No one is safe from it, the innocent are damned by it, veterans are hardened by it. Nobody escapes its sinister clutches, its far-reaching effects, its labyrinthine web. Nobody. 

The tale is set in 1955 in La Jolla, in the suburbs of San Diego, California. A pageant of historical figures parades throughout the novel, including Desi and Lucy Arnaz, Zsa Zsa Gabor, J. Edgar Hoover, Meyer Lansky, and especially Raymond Chandler, who acts as a mentor for the green protagonist. Said hero, Jake Stirling, a rookie policeman who usually patrols during the graveyard shift, embodies the symbol of innocence in this dark noir tale. A symbol that is oh-so-ripe for corrupting. As mentioned before, even he cannot escape corruption, despite his valiant efforts. 

What first seem like isolated occurrences in Officer Stirling's life gradually develop into crucial components of a complicated mystery, linking a theft to a string of apparently unrelated murders. His childhood friend, Todd DuBarry, is somehow involved in all of this, stays out of sight for most of the novel, and becomes a target of the law enforcement higher-ups before he too becomes a victim. 

It’s a setup that’s quite promising. Young Jake Stirling, eager and idealistic rookie policeman, loyal son and older brother, in love and soon engaged to be married, befriends and falls under the wing of Raymond Chandler, one of the greatest crime novelists of our time. Chandler, a crusty old curmudgeon at this point, warms up to the young officer and imparts warnings about rampant corruption, especially predicting that a “man who tells tales” is the worst offender of the bunch and should be avoided at all costs. 

And it’s Jake’s boss, said “man who tells tales,” Police Captain Wade Lennox, who emerges as the tarnished symbol of the corruption that public officials can embody. He’s always the first to arrive at crime scenes that Jake initially calls in, as if he is clairvoyant. He secretly assigns the overarching case to Jake, pressuring him not to tell anyone else at the department about it. The fact that Captain Lennox is the one who shoots Jake in the back, leaving him paralyzed, underscores this theme of corruption and its inescapability completely. That point in the novel still gives me chills.  

Needless to say, I highly recommend this book. It’s not often that a genre novel can express theme in such a masterful manner as in The Esmerelda Goodbye.