Review: ENTERTAINING  TRADITIONAL P.I. MYSTERY
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 05 10, 2012
We have here a contemporary version of the old fashioned Richard Diamond or Sam Spade detective stories. Oh, there is a borrowed change, a politically correct one, and a generational anti-hero one, but none of these go to the essentially framework, format, established by writers of the twenties through the fifties. The changes? well the borrowed one is obviously taken from a fine contemporary writer who passed on recently, Kaminsky, whose hero has an older brother, a police officer of rank, who is constantly induced into a boiling state by his actions and his mouth, leading, often,to the hero being smitten mightily by said brother. The politically correct alteration is to change the older sibling to a sister, and reduce the hitting to verbal abuse. The Baby Boom alteration (though borrowed from a Post WW 1 attitude) has him being a PI without a gun, who has little physical skill in hand to hand combat. I should add, that unlike most traditional "private eyes", he is married with children. While there are Nick and Nora (in the films) and Mr. and Mrs. North (in a long series of books as well as radio and television series), it is Nick who is the private eye and he does successfully exclude his wife from any but a bystander role, and, in the North books, it is their friend Captain Weigand, upon whom the couple rely for formal detecting.These comments are not intended to be critical. I enjoyed the book and think readers attuned to the not too heroic private eye will also do so. The book is well written, has not too many nor too serious plot illogicalities, and arrives at its denouement with no more than a couple of 'coincidence' which somewhat strain ones credulity.