A political storm

Detective fiction, with all its befuddlements and frustrations and intimations of mortality, may well be the genre of middle age. And middle-class, Midwest Minnesota, where winter is the defining season, making the others that much sweeter, could be the geographic equivalent. Combine the two, and you have "The Man in the Blizzard," Bart Schneider's latest novel, with all the wistfulness and dark reckonings of aging wrapped in a mystery playing out amid the politics of the coming Republican convention.

Oh, it is a dastardly business, all these right-wingers swamping the Twin Cities, that last bastion of liberalism. Or so it seems in the world projected by Schneider's private eye protagonist, Augie Boyer, an unregenerate old lefty with a radical singing star daughter, a not-quite-ex anger-management-expert wife, a low testosterone level, an outsize marijuana habit and a taste for poetry acquired from his buddy, Detective Bobby Sabbatini of the St. Paul Police Department. Yes, a sad sack, with attitude and a certain charm.

And, as in detective stories from "The Maltese Falcon" to "Chinatown," an alluring, untrustworthy blonde walks into the private eye's office and ensnares him in a story far more complicated than it seems.

The Twin Cities are already churning on the eve of the convention. An army of antiabortion nuts (and in Augie's world, they're all nuts) is descending for a rally featuring, umm, induced births in a tent city on the Capitol grounds (they're reclaiming "Labor Day").

The dimpled governor (whom Schneider wryly names "Holsom") is using the opportunity to promote his place on the ticket as vice-presidential candidate. Augie's daughter, the infamous Minnesota Rose, is coming in for the counter-rally. And in walks this bodacious blonde, a violinist, with suspicions of her husband's nefarious activities.

How all of these elements come together, along with a perfidious Nazi legacy, incest ("Chinatown" again!), sexual perversity, violin lore, gun culture, political advocacy, recent music history, vicarious romances, and a course in poetry appreciation (at one point Sabbatini, the poetry aficionado, tells a character he thinks it's time to commit Pound's "Cantos" to memory), is Schneider's story and, to some extent, Schneider's problem, but one he handles with aplomb.

Along the way, he offers an intimate tour of Minnesota culture: architecture, history and people, from Bob Dylan to Jesse Ventura to Garrison Keillor. The Democratic boosterism is somewhat excessive (the right-to-life Republican villain is a child-abusing Nazi and just about everything else a prototypical villain might be), and the characters' speechifying can be tedious, but let's just attribute these defects to a flawed narrator/protagonist and enjoy the novel's numerous delights, not least among them an introduction to some of the most wonderful poetry of our time:

The Man in the Blizzard

by Thomas McGrath

Even his tracks are gone!

And, of course, his shadow . . .

But he keeps walking around,

Searching

Certain that someone

(Himself perhaps)

Was here before --

Or will be.

Ellen Akins is the author of "Home Movie," "Home Town Brew," and other novels. She lives in Cornucopia, Wis.