The Black Marble

It's harder to do a book review of a book that you read almost 30 years ago. The Black Marble by Joseph Wambaugh was written in 1978. I probably read it within 5 years after it was written, I don't remember. I probably reread it 2 or 3 times.

It's a story about fate. The main character, Homicide Detective Sgt. Valnikov had recently lost his detective partner who had died. He was quickly drinking himself to death. He was assigned a new partner, Sgt. Natalie Zimmerman, who thinks he is going nuts. He's of Russian descent and so he drinks vodka. His new partner keeps coming this close to turning him in, but something always intervenes. Natalie gets him really drunk one night to pump him for information. She only finds that he enjoys Russian classical music and has a poetic streak. You can see her heart softening to the guy.

The story revolves around a dog groomer named Philo Skinner. This guy is down on luck, owes a lot of money to the mob for bad gambling debts. In order to get money to pay back his debt, he kidnaps a prizewinning purebred dog to ransom him back to the rich owner. The dog's owner, Madeline Whitfield, is actually not rich, she is practically broke, but maintaining a facade and holding out, waiting until she loses it all. She loves the dog like it is her child, but she is very unstable because she drinks excessively. Detective Valnikov finds a case he can really get into in this dog kidnapping, and even begins to sober up. In the course of helping her, they end up having sex, even though they are both over the hill lushes.

The icon of the Black Marble is from a saying, "Why do I always get the black marble?" That means why am I always getting the bad choices, why do I have such bad luck? The story is a black comedy. None of the characters is noble, perfect, or even completely respectable. The funny things that happen are usually painful or tragic to the people that experience them. Somehow, rather than becoming distressed and dragged down by the characters' pathetic lives, you find sympathy and humor for them.

Valnikov's problem ends up being that he has been slowly losing it over seeing too much death. Most cases he studies are actually suicides. His old partner seemed to be following a similar path before Valnikov. He was slowly getting more and more depressed by what he saw, people doing themselves in. He became an expert at recognizing it and eventually committed suicide himself. Many of Valnikov's random memories thoughtout the book are a series of flashbacks of the horrific ways that people did themselves in.

In the end, he solves the crime, saves the dog, saves his own life, and gets the girl. Strangely, the happy ending is not what you remember most about this story over the years, only the struggle to persevere when life hands you the Black Marble.