A work of genre fiction—a detective novel—The Lake Pirates (2020) offers a portrait of PEC just fictionalized enough. Many of the characters’ names are those of County families. But as players in a genre piece, they not nearly as local as they are universal: the flirtatious secretary, the retired police chief, the local bartender, the stoner water taxi operator. Joe Horn himself, a hard-drinking, dry-witted investigative newspaper reporter cut from the cloth of old movies, expresses a nostalgia for the days when journalism, with a secure platform and direct effects, commanded respect.

The Lake Pirates marks the return of Joe Horn, whose first appearance was in The County Murders (2016). Asked to house-sit for a wealthy friend on a private island just off the County’s coast, Joe imagines he might finally get that novel of his written — while his straight-speaking wife, Shelley, is skeptical of his capacity for self-discipline in such a setting. He is to guard the retreat from the threat of “lake pirates,” thieves who take advantage of owner-absences. Joe soon discovers that the remote cottage was the scene of an unsolved murder fifteen years before. His reporter instincts kick in, and he is soon on the beat, reopening the case, and putting himself in grave danger as the murderer starts reading his columns on the subject.

A study in genre, the plot could be from a Humphrey Bogart film, or, given the comic touch here, a Thin Man movie. The banter of husband and wife, the foolish mistakes, and, best of all, the classic round-up scene in which the investigator tells the criminal the story he has pieced together, all feature. Joe Horn’s voice is sometimes deliberately only half convincing, self-reflexively over the top in its tough-guy-alcoholic hard-boiled assertions: “she had on her Nana Mouskouri-ish librarian bifocals that make me crazy with desire.” At other times it is deliberately shallow, indicating Joe’s lack of self-awareness, blinded especially in his view of women. This is a man who lives in a world of lists, some of them written in a journal, others part of the first-person narrative of his existence, such as the songs he plays on the stereo.

Mr. Carpenter’s list poem about County shipwrecks in A Road Through the Corn crosses over with details of Joe Horn’s narrative in The Lake Pirates. Both the character and the poet examine the same map. This crossover suggests that something is lying under the surface of Joe Horn’s persona. When it comes time, the interior intensifies and reveals the grounding for all the ironic bravado.

The exaggerated mode of this film noir novel is willful where the poet is subtle, but it delivers a consistent approach to its subject, the person in the place.