Thrilling chemistry

Crime pays for readers as a new mystery novel uses chemistry to help its protagonists find stolen jewels

It may not do much for its overall image, but it was very nice to see chemistry used so significantly in the new crime thriller novel Blood's a Rover.

Published in September by Alfred A. Knopf, the novel is the latest crime epic from author James Ellroy, also the creator of the bestselling L.A. Confidential.

Blood's a Rover is a massive and complicated tale set in the late-1960s and early-1970s involving crooked cops, somewhat honest thieves and all the strange and passionate people who surround them (with cameos by Howard Hughes, J. Egdar Hoover and Richard Nixon, to name but a few), with a truckload of stolen emeralds spurring them all on. It's an often lurid and sordid tale, sparing no punches, but absolutely a page-turner, one of those books that make you stay up very late.

Readers of ICIS Chemical Business may find great enjoyment in how empirical chemical knowledge winds up in play: One of the main characters, Wayne, is a chemistry whiz, and when he's not cooking narcotics for his organized crime buddies, he's trying all sorts of formula to decipher heavily redacted government documents - I warned you it was a complicated book.

Later, one of Wayne's accomplices/sidekicks/rivals, Crutch, hits the Bunsen burners, trying to finish Wayne's work.

What's fabulous about Wayne and Crutch's scenes in their respective home labs is that they aren't throwaways, like you might see on a TV cop show, where some sexy technician hits a few buttons, a pop song starts on the soundtrack and a montage begins, reducing a complicated technical process to the equivalent of a brainless music video.

Ellroy, on the other hand, puts the reader into the heads of the characters as they are trying out solution after solution, trying A, then B, then C, and so on.

We sample their frustration and confusion at experiments that should work but don't, and their joy when finally the scientific method helps crack the code. We read their internal voices turning over their methodologies, materials and supplies. When Crutch is flummoxed at one point, he hits the library to scope out the chemistry section. Now when was the last time a crime novel did that?

Blood's a Rover is an often a nasty and mean-spirited book, certainly not for the squeamish, but if you're looking for a book where chemists take on the mob, the police, revolutionaries and voodoo practitioners- I warned you it was complicated! - then this is it.