New Twist for a Master Storyteller

In some 40 novels, such as “Citizen Tom Paine” and “Freedom Road,” Howard Fast wrote of history’s titanic struggles, always from the point of view of the underdog. Because of his communist leanings, he had to squat for decades in the literary equivalent of a foxhole. Now, still around, still writing, Fast has produced a gentle afterthought of a book: a murder mystery that’s also the story of love between a 78-year-old man and a woman three decades younger.

Love is the last thing Ike Goldman, a widower and a professor emeritus of contract law, expects to find when, driving back from a faculty gathering to his New York apartment, he spots a woman about to jump off the George Washington Bridge. He stops and talks her back from the edge.

Ike is not a particularly religious man, but he is haunted by the Talmudic injunction that he who saves a life becomes responsible for it. He takes the woman, Liz Hopper, home, nurses her and listens to her story.

She is the ex-wife of Sedge Hopper, an Olympic-athlete-turned-Wall-Street-shark, a blond beast like Tom Buchanan in “The Great Gatsby.” A devout Catholic, she endured his verbal and physical battering until, enraged that she couldn’t conceive a child, he got the marriage annulled.

From the opening chapter of “Redemption”--a nice touch, that Fast begins it like an ordinary police procedural, so that our sympathies are with the detectives--we know that six weeks after Ike and Liz meet, Sedge Hopper will be found dead in his Manhattan office, shot in the head. The murder weapon, a .22-caliber pistol, will rest atop a note scrawled in lipstick. The inference: A woman did it.

Meanwhile, Liz, who has never known anyone as kind as Ike, blossoms under his care. The rescue mission turns into friendship and then into love, despite Ike’s misgivings that there’s no fool like an old fool (ridicule of the type goes back at least to Chaucer) and that he, in particular, is too old for an attractive, newly vital woman in her 40s. They get engaged.

Then the detectives arrive and arrest Liz for Sedge’s murder. She had ample motive, they point out. Plus, her lipstick matches the brand on the killer’s note. The gun is registered to Ike Goldman, who kept it in a drawer and hadn’t looked at it in years. Elated over the engagement, she went out for a walk the night of the murder, so that even Ike, who believes firmly in her goodness and innocence, is left with a nagging doubt.

Most of the second half of the novel is courtroom drama. Sarah Morton, a former student of Ike’s, takes leave from her job as a public defender to represent Liz. The prosecution’s case is pushed by an ambitious assistant D.A. Ike is rocked by waves of hope and fear: Is his faith in the woman he loves misplaced?

Fast has always been a rousing storyteller, and not all of his skills have deserted him. But some have. His political novels had a romantic sweep (it’s no wonder Hollywood filmed his version of “Spartacus” rather than Arthur Koestler’s) and, above all, a physicality to them; he made us feel acutely what it was like to sweat under wool uniforms and a Brown Bess musket (“April Morning”) or in 120-degree heat in African quarries where slaves toiled for the Romans.

This quality is missing here, when it would have made Ike’s late romance both more precarious and more poignant. We have only to think of what Saul Bellow could have done with it, given his ability to describe the aches and crotchets of older people, the influence of bodily limitations on character. Psychologically, too, Fast is easy on Ike. In this kind of story, at least once his doubts should expand into full-blown despair, but they don’t.

The interplay among the minor characters is deftly handled, and the courtroom scenes are competent, but the progress of the defense’s case is a little too smooth, say, for John Grisham fans, accustomed to more twists and reversals of fortune. And how Ike’s gun happened to be the murder weapon turns out to depend on a howling coincidence that no real mystery writer would tolerate.