Harrigan's File

Harrigan's File is one of the August Derleth Judge Peck mysteries set in the long Sac Prairie Saga, the fictional Wisconsin small-town setting Derleth was documenting in dozens of novels and story collections in parallel with his Lovecraft Mythos work. The case opens with a body in a hotel room and unspools into the kind of slow regional investigation that is the form's usual register.

Derleth's strength in Harrigan's File is the Wisconsin texture. The small-town politics, the German and Polish immigrant family histories, the river-town geography, are rendered with the kind of insider attention that comes from a career-long commitment to the same setting. Fans of Wallace Stegner's western regional fiction or Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio will recognize the careful regional-American literary tradition.

The mystery is competent rather than ingenious. The texture is the actual pleasure.

Three stars. Recommended to readers who care about regional American literature and to crime readers interested in the actual peak of mid-century Midwestern fiction. The Harrigan's File August Derleth novel works as an entry point to the long Sac Prairie Saga.