Devlin Tracy is a claims investigator working for an insurance company. The VP gives him a case to investigate — a friend of the President of the company is in a sanatorium, one of the other patients changed their beneficiary on their insurance policy just before they died, and the doctor at the sanatorium got the winfall. The President is afraid that his friend will be pressured to do the same, and the President wants Trace to make sure there’s nothing weird going on.
What I Liked
Warren Murphy was the creator of several other series, and while some of those were kind of pulp-style, this one is a full “standard” detective novel. Wise-cracking, determined, but not always the fastest to figure things out. Trace works hard, keeps poking until something shakes loose, and then grabs on and won’t let go until whatever scheme falls apart. All the elements of the series are here — drinking like a fish, sleeping with suspects, wearing a little frog pin that records conversations, and a bit of a blundering style that worms his way into lots of situations. There are sub-stories with drugs and potential lawsuits, but mostly it is just about Trace shaking things up.
What I Didn’t Like
He has a girlfriend, of sorts, and her portrayal in this one is more annoying than usual for the series. Plus she comes in near the end as a super-detective to help solve the case, but Trace was doing fine on his own. She helps him out, as she often does, but she was mostly superfluous for this outing.
Set in the 1970s, a Russian poet has sought asylum in the U.S. Days before he qualifies for citizenship, he is kidnapped from Grand Central Station. Why was he taken? How can they help him? Where is he?
What I Liked
The story diverges on two tracks — a black-bag CIA operative comes in from the cold just enough to maintain full deniability while he looks for the missing poet. At the same time, an FBI manager keeps poking and prodding trying to find out why. Neither one knows the other exists, and the two stories remain fully compartmentalized.
What I Didn’t Like
The opening is extremely descriptive, almost one step removed from the action, and it takes a while until you fully engage in the two tracks.
Stephanie Plum has settled in to her job as a bounty hunter, and so picking up a missing NJ girl who failed to appear after stealing her boyfriend’s truck seems like a cakewalk. And there’s a bonus — the boyfriend is willing to give her money too to find her and get some supposed love letters back from her. Easy peasy. Except nothing is easy for Plum, ever. The missing girl wants to stay missing, and her mother and co-worker are helping. Even when somebody else is looking for the girl too, and willing to hurt people to get them to talk.
What I Liked
Plum has an extra helper in this case, a guy who’s good with codes and clues. A flamboyant cross-dresser, he livens up the scene. And the relationship with Moretti leaps forward with the two cohabitating for a while. I love the scenes where the women were talking about guns and what type of gun to carry, use, etc.
What I Didn’t Like
There are some baddies who are painfully obviously involved, which Plum misses for most of the book. And someone who is out to get her is obvious as well. Also painful to watch. Oh, and one of my favourite characters, Ranger, has nothing to do for the entire book. More like an afterthought to include him.
Way back in the dark ages of the late 1990s, I had an idea for a personal website. I had been sending out a personal newsletter full of humour and quotes, sometimes movie reviews, and I was also running a trivia game by email. It was just a small distribution group for the humour and stuff, larger for the trivia games, and I even got a few movie reviews posted on a local movie times site. I found that I really enjoyed it. But I wondered if I could move it from email to a website.
Over the years, I tried multiple layouts, formats, even types of back-end software to display it, but most of the core content elements remained the same. Somewhere in there I thought, “What if I posted book reviews too?” After all, I was reading a lot. But I tended to finish the book, throw it on a shelf, and move on. I wasn’t looking to become a reviewer for a newspaper, just some personal thoughts shared, well, somewhere other than a journal.
Last year, I finally said, “Okay, let’s figure this out right this time.” I figured out a layout, I figured out a workflow for myself, and I figured out where I wanted to post them. Plus, just for fun, I started updating my approach to book reviews (i.e. a personal “review” philosophy, if you will). Again, I don’t want to be a professional reviewer, but I also don’t want to be an online equivalent of grunting “Book good”.
I managed to figure all that out, but I didn’t get many posted with the full workflow. My goal for this year was to clear the initial backlog…thirty-six reviews that were written, posted somewhere originally, and relatively ready to go. Just not in the new format. I have been steadily munching away at them, a day here and a day there, a book review here and a book review there, and plowed through a whack of them today to finish it off.
I finally have all 36 up on the site, fully linked to the various review sites out there. I even have an index designed for all the book reviews, just need to populate these 36 in the list. It’s a bit tedious, but it was easier to wait until all 36 were done before trying to populate them all into the multiple indices.
I have a few more sitting in the wings, waiting to be finished, polished, or reorganized from notes into an actual review, but the bulk of the work? I’m calling it done like dinner. Woohoo me! 🙂
Warren Murphy is and will always be my favourite author.
I was looking for one of his books in e-form today, and just reading through the description of a book I hadn’t seen before, I came across a small phrase that struck me cold — “Warren Murphy passed away in September 2015”. I missed the news entirely. Heck, I heard from him on FB sometime early last year I think, certainly less than a year before his death.
That makes it almost sound like I knew him. I didn’t. I just knew his books.
The first ones I read were the Destroyer novels. My father used to read The Executioner series, Mack Bolans, etc., Nick Carter. So I read them too. And in some pile of similar books at a used store, I came across a pulp-style novel about a killer named Remo. An expert in the art of assassination, courtesy of the House of Sinanju, the basis for all martial arts. It was a glorious premise — the cop who gets framed for a murder, goes to death row, dies (almost), and is resurrected and trained by a small organization that only reports to the President in an oblique way, designed to take on the forces that would destroy the country and who operate outside the law so far that the law has no chance of stopping them. The most lethal of all lethal weapons who could terminate with extreme prejudice.
But the pulp format belied something deeper — the books were fun. The banter back and forth between the student Remo and the trainer Chiun was rapid, insulting, brutal — and hilarious. I loved it.
Murphy wrote them with Richard Ben Sapir and I started collecting books by both of them, including the Destroyer series. Eventually, I found one of Murphy’s Trace novels. It was like striking gold. To be honest, I didn’t find Trace first. I found Digger. If that sounds confusing, it should…they are two series by Warren Murphy with different publishers. Both contain:
a lush of an investigator who wears a wire for all his important conversations;
insurance investigations for a big company that keeps him employed because one of the senior people likes him for a favour he did him once;
an Asian girlfriend who frequently shows up at the end of the novels, listens to the tapes and identifies an important clue to help solve the crime; and,
an ex-wife and two children that he doesn’t remember the name of and so calls them by generic nicknames.
Digger is Trace; Trace is Digger. But apparently there were issues with the first publisher (for Digger), and Murphy wanted to go higher end with the novels while the publisher was going pulpy. Murphy took the books elsewhere, they were more full novel length, and Trace was born. I still have the email from him where he explained some of the details (I posted about it on a list, said I’d love to find out the real story some day, another person on the list knew him and forwarded it to him, and he responded directly to me). Getting an email in my inbox from WARREN FRICKING MURPHY was like winning the lottery. I responded, and I totally acted like a fanboy. Never heard back again. I’m sure I went in the “loo-loo” pile.
But I was seriously hooked. I read Destroyer books even after Sapir died and Murphy wasn’t writing them anymore. I read all the Trace books. I hunted down Razoni and Jackson and the Digger novels. I read his King Arthur books, and Grandmaster (swords and modern mysteries!). I found out that he had written others under a pseudonym — Dev Stryker — with his then-wife Molly Cochrane, and gobbled those up too. Hard to find, and he wasn’t blazing the ebook road, so paper was the way to go (some hard to find ones I got through inter-library loans). But every once in awhile, I’d go searching and find a new one by him. Like gold, every time.
I even remember going to see the movie Lethal Weapon 2, and loving the banter, etc. For no real reason in particular, I stayed behind so I could read the credits. I partially wanted to see who the writer was to see if there were any books out there — and there it was. Warren Murphy’s name. Of course. No wonder I loved the writing. It was him.
I didn’t know for a long time that he wasn’t a secret. That he had two Edgars and two Shamus awards. That he’d been a president of MWA. That he was a screenwriter with multiple hits to his credit. That he was actually quite famous.
He was just the writer of the most fun books I had ever read. It was Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mysteries for grown ups, and without the noir or the cozy or the modern forensics focus. Sure, I moved on. I read about V.I. Warshawski. I met Stephanie Plum. I devoured Kinsey Milhone. I fell in love with Susan the guidance counsellor that Spenser loved, and that Hawk seemed to have a warm place in his heart for too. The gumshoes, the sleuths, the professional detectives.
And it is what made me want to be a writer. For the first time, I saw a genre that I loved. Not kids mysteries, not series like Rick Brant or Tom Swift. Not sci-fi. True mysteries. Series that built a genre. Not an Agatha Christie-like sleuth, not a Sherlock Holmes. A plodder. Who got the right answer by hook or by crook, and by plain straight stick-to-it-iveness. My writing may never see the light of publication but if it ever does, if I ever get to introduce my protagonist, you can damn well bet that the dedication will be to Warren Murphy.
My library took a hit today. Five months after his death at age 81, but still a hit. I’ll miss his stories…
