Harvey Blissberg Mysteries

[keeping with the baseball theme] While Providence may not have had a major league team since 1884, in R.D. Rosen's world, Providence is a major league team, home to the Providence Jewels, along with an architectural treasure of a ball park located somewhere around India Point park.

Rosen has written a series of mysteries featuring Harvey Blissberg, a former Providence Jewel player turned detective turned motivational speaker. Blissberg is a great detective character- by turns blustery, unsure of himself, and self-effacing. He's a very likable character, flaws and all. And of course, seeing places like Wayland Square, Haven Brothers, and the Industrial National Bank Building is very interesting for the Rhode Island savvy among us.

Rosen's geography is a little off (in the book I read, he has 95 and 195 confused at points-- 195 passes over Richmond Street, not 95!) but that's a tiny niggle. He gets lots of geographical things right too!

Here's a little excerpt about Haven Brothers: [from Dead Ball, beginning of Chapter 5]

Every afternoon at four, for as long as most people in Providence can remember, a lunch
wagon hitched to a truck cab has pulled into a couple of parking spaces on Fulton Street
next to the Second Empire-style City Hall and remained there until dawn. Set on an angle
atop the wagon, a small neon sign blinks "HAVEN BROS. DINER." The diner is like some
alien aluminum creature from another world, a fossil of the 1940's that seems to have
crawled out of urban America's unconscious, a film noir artifact spliced nightly into the city's
present. Throughout the night, in the shadow of the floodlit old Industrial National Bank Building
on Kennedy Plaza, a trickle of the city's powerful and powerless, Ivy League-educated and
semiliterate, sleepless and snack-deprived, climb the portable steps of the diner for a bowl of
red beans or a steamed hot dog.

The books are great fun if you like mysteries. The plots move along relatively quickly, and reading about Providence and the mythical Providence Jewels makes you wish we did have a ball club (forget about the headaches of traffic, parking, and corruption for a minute.) Read the books, you'll be glad you did!

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