Mr. Clarinet

When Max Mingus gets offered a multimillion-dollar bounty to find the missing five year-old-son of a powerful white Haitian family, he wants to stay no. Sure, he was the best in Miami once. But that was before he served time for killing a pair of junkie child murderers. Before he lost his PI license. Before his wife, Sandra, died. Now, he needs the money, and he knows Sandra would have wanted him to find the kid.


But Mingus doesn’t count on the depth of corruption, manipulation and greed Haiti breeds in its inhabitants, a murky evil worse then death that can easily swallow a man - especially a man like Mingus.


Mr. Clarinet has a lot of things going for it: atmosphere and setting are chief among them. When all is said and done it’s going to be from these twin well springs that the novel derives its power. Stone immerses us into a politically volatile country where heroes come from unlikely sources and the conventional infrastructure is non-existent.


Stone will fill us in with details and information about Haiti that is both intimate/personal and much broader in context. We will learn about the history and how thoroughly corrupt its leaders are and have been. We'll learn of its insignificant place on the stage of world politics and its subservient role as a pawn for the US Governments foreign policy. We'll learn of its cultural heritage and its hybrid religion, voudoun. We'll be introduced to its practitioners and its various uses both good and evil. We'll learn of the fundamental distrust and deeply bred hostility that the Haitians feel towards whites.


At one point we will ride shotgun with Mingus as he visits Cite Soleil, a city where the ground is made literally of shit.

That he goes there at all is a testament to his resolve to solve the case, that the place really exists, hammers a small part of the reality of the Haitian situation home.




We will also learn of a myth, a legend, a boogieman who is invoked whenever anything goes wrong especially when it comes to the disappearance of children. It’s this myth that lends its name to the title of the book, Ton Ton Clarinet. Though ostensibly about finding Charlie and those responsible for his kidnapping always lurking just below the surface, waiting to breach, are the origins of the Ton Ton Clarinet myth. Mingus is doled out information from multiple sources of sometimes-questionable credibility. But as he slowly pieces together the puzzle it will become clear that the origins of the myth are far more scary and insidious then the stories of him that haunt the lips of the Haitian poor. The final revelations of the book are shocking in their power and reach.

There are two scenes in Mr. Clarinet that rank among my favorites of the year so far and are worth a brief mention: The Interrogation scene and The Ritual scene. I'll take a closer look at the first scene in a moment but first I’ll give a taste of the second one.




In the Interrogation scene Bangladeshi peace keeping UN troops have gang raped a teenage girl. One of the main characters, a drug baron named Vincent Paul, is at this point responsible for meting out some form of justice because at this time in the countries history, 1997, Haiti has no constitution and by extension no laws. After an intense interrogation Paul decides that it’s fair to use the Bangladeshi law for punishing rapists as the basis for his decision. The result is a sustained intensity that draws its tension from the fact that there is no clear moral high ground in the situation as it’s presented. As you bear witness to this scene your residency in a civilized country weighs heavy on your mind. You know that this type of frontier justice isn’t right but when the full weight of all the details of the crime come out you can’t help but want to see them perish. It’s an interesting moral dynamic that is presented.




One observation that I'd like to share is that while I was reading Mr. Clarinet I was, in the first part of the book, anxious for the story proper to begin and I felt like Stone was trying too hard to introduce Mingus to me. My initial feeling was that some of his background information could have been either withheld or spread out over the course of the novel. I may have even mentally tossed around the word info-dump.


It’s a trade off getting so much information about the main character in the beginning. On one hand it can drag just a bit in places. But on the other hand it’s also immediately evident that the writing is top notch. So even though this was the first novel that I had read by Nick Stone I found myself trusting him. That trust ultimately paid off because in hindsight I see that he quickly and effectively created a three-dimensional character that he then sets loose in the story. Knowing the information about Mingus that we did make all of his future decisions and actions credible and flow along organically with the story. Max Mingus in the end becomes both a character that you know a lot about and someone that you want to know more about. I look forward to future books in the series.


--Brian Lindenmuth