Masking for Trouble

Richard Cobson never really intends to become a bank robber. He’s just an ordinary man living in an ordinary town called Riverton sometime in the 1950s who decides, on a whim, to lift a couple of dollars from the petty cash at the Eddy & Dowd Safe Deposit Company, where he works. He waits to see what will happen, and when he realizes that “nobody gave a damn,” it’s not relief he feels but “the stirrings of excitement.” He heads down to a diner and orders himself a steak. A few weeks later, he does it again. An idea starts to form in his mind, “one that he couldn’t shake, one that would crush the world as he knew it into dust.”

The story Kevin Jagernauth, a seasoned literary and film critic, tells in The Longest Death follows the classic tropes of mid-twentieth-century crime fiction and is narrated in a kind of hand‑me-down noirish argot. In the first few chapters, we are introduced to Frank Todd, a former “flatfoot with a badge” who is now a “private...