BRAD SOLOMON – The Open Shadow. Summit Books, hardcover, 1978. Avon, paperback, 1980.

BRAD SOLOMON

   The private eye team of Thieringer and McGuane is as quietly competent as they come, most of the time. The only difference is that while Thieringer’s name is Fritz, McGuane’s is Maggie. They’re also both as tough as they come, so how’s anyone going to convince her that detective work is no job for a lady, if no one has by now?

   Besides having to convince a reluctant client to hire them to protect himself from a kid with threats and a gun, Thieringer finds himself nursing along a youthful new assistant who may or may not work out. It’s a rough business.

   As a specimen of the hard-boiled school, this is closer to Hammett than Chandler, the added plus being some refreshing humor that stays just this side of parody. Promising.

— Reprinted from The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 3, No. 6, Nov/Dec 1979 (very slightly revised). This review also appeared earlier in the Hartford Courant.


Bibliographic Comments:   In spite of the promise I saw in the Thieringer and McGuane team-up, there never was a followup case for the PI twosome. Brad Solomon, in fact, wrote only three detective or crime fiction novels in the late 1970s, then seemingly disappeared from our field for good. From the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

SOLOMON, (Neal) BRAD(ley).

    The Gone Man (n.) Random 1977.

BRAD SOLOMON

    The Open Shadow (n.) Summit 1978.
    Jake & Katie (n.) Dial 1979.

BRAD SOLOMON

   The hero of record in The Gone Man was Charlie Quinlan, an actor who turns to PI work to make a living. Bill Crider reviewed the book here on his blog, where there’s also a link to Ed Gorman’s blog, where Dick Lochte posted a list of his “Top 20 PI Novels,” which includes The Open Shadow. The company’s not bad there, either, what with Chandler, Hammett, Macdonald, Parker, Ellin and Estleman among the competition.

   Bill also reviewed Shadow on his blog. Look for it here.

   As for Jake & Katie, I don’t believe it did very well. There are only 10 copies offered for sale on ABE, for example, compared to 80 of The Gone Man and 60 of The Open Shadow. It’s described as a novel on the cover, but one seller calls it a “Hollywood mystery.” Yet another goes into considerable detail:

    “Jake isn’t making it in Tinseltown. He meets Katie in a bar, and his life changes dramatically. Katie is young, beautiful, charismatic. when she moves in with Jake, she takes possession of his life . transforms it, getting him the roles he’s been looking for. Jake begins to feel that he’d be nothing without Katie, and it terrifies him. Soon he realizes that he really knows very little about the woman he’s living with. Why does she have such extreme mood swings? Why does she tell conflicting stories about her past? What does she want from him and how far is she prepared to go to get it?”

   There is the briefest amount of biographical data on Brad Solomon in Contemporary Authors, and nothing to suggest why these three books were all there were.