Disposable Lit Reviews

Avon Books, 1981
26 pp.
ISBN 0-380-78329-0
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One can easily say that the hardboiled detective novel is old and tired. It’s not often that that’s a compliment.

In this case, actually, it’s not the conventions of the genre that are old and tired; it’s the detective himself. Retired private eye Jake Spanner was in his prime somewhere around WW2, but by now (i.e., 1981), he’s a seventy-something layabout who’s become all of those things he dislikes about old people.

But retirement never goes smoothly for old PI’s, and Jake’s parkbench reverie is interrupted one day by Sal Piccolo, an LA gangster whom Jake sent to the big house for thirty years (himself also almost an octogenarian). Sal’s not here for his pound of flesh, though; Sal’s grandson has been kidnapped for ransom, and Jake’s the only one Sal can turn to to make sure that he gets his grandson back.

What should have been an easy (though expensive) ransom drop goes sour; Jake gets clocked over the head, and by the time he comes to, the money’s been lifted by a third party Sal doesn’t know. Now Jake has to try to find the stolen money in time to save the kid by using the only resource left to him: Old people.

Nicely, Morse manages to make a “back for one last case” story not feel like a cliche. Jake’s a tough old coot, softened only by his awareness of mistakes in his life that have left him in old age with no family, no equity, and nothing but memories. His own annoying mortality is full in his face before he even starts the case, which is one of the reasons that he embarks’. on an escapade that’s sure to crunch some brittle bones. He’s got a bad habit of rewriting his epitaph constantly: “J. Spanner: Run over by the wheel of fortune.” “J. Spanner: Salivated himself to the point that he dried up and blew away.” “J. Spanner: Crushed beneath an overdeveloped sense of responsibility.” He avoids being a “grumpy old men” style parody, and comes across as believedly aged yet believably capable. (All right, the scene in which he makes it with a pretty young woman at least forty years his junior — daughter of a call girl he used to know — is a little unbelievable, and more than a little icky.)

Of course, capable as he is, he’s still in over his head. By the midway point of the book he’s recovered the money and returned it to Sal — and when the gangster Jake knocked over comes back for him, the bombshell drops: The money was never Sal’s. And Sal’s long dead.

A book like this has the greatest justification for containing throwback echoes to the hardboiled private-eye tales of decades ago, and makes the conceit work. It’s a book that needs to be around a little while longer, even if by now Jake wouldn’t be.

(Interesting though irrelevant side note: Morse is also the author of Video Trash & Treasures: A Field Guide to the Video Unknown, similarly and lamentably out of print.)

Nathan Shumate