H. PAUL JEFFERS – Murder on Mike. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1984. Hardcover reprint, Detective Book Club, 3-in-1 edition, no date. Ballantine, paperback, 1988.

   A brief note on the author at the end of the book tells us that in the real world H. Paul Jeffers was the head of the news department at WCBS in New York, which perhaps explains why his mystery writing career seems to have been awfully sporadic.

H. PAUL JEFFERS Murder on Mike

   It also says that he grew up listening to crime programs on the radio, which definitely explains where the idea for this particular case for private eye Harry MacNeil came from, and more on that in a minute.

   This is the middle of three cases that chronicle MacNeil’s adventures: The Rubout at the Onyx (Ticknor, 1981); Murder on Mike (St. Martin’s, 1984); and The Rag Doll Murder (Ballantine, paperback, 1987). It’s also the last of the three chronologically, as it takes place in 1939, while both of the other two are set in 1935. (Courtesy, as is often the case, to Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV.)

   MacNeil knows his way around Manhattan, and he’s known for also sitting in on late hour jazz sessions, but for hard-boiled fiction, you’d have to look elsewhere. When a good-looking girl asks him to look into the murder of radio’s most popular detective — well, the actor who played him, that is, and the creator of the Detective Fitzroy’s Casebook program — MacNeil is too soft-hearted to say that it’s an open-and-shut case, and that the lady’s boy friend, the show’s announcer, is sure to be convicted.

   He takes the case, he says, to be sure that Maggie Skeffington (Miss Molloy on the radio show) doesn’t waste her money with a more unscrupulous private detective.

   The accused, David Reed, already locked up and waiting trial, is the only person who could have done it and who does not have an alibi. By some fortuitous chance, the sound of a shot in the radio studio pinpoints the time of the murder exactly.

   Aha! You say, I’m one step ahead of you. That’s what I thought, too, and I’ll get back to that.

   Let me give you a feeling of Jeffers’ writing style, from pages 84-85 of the DBC edition. It’s a long quote, so jump in and out wherever you care to:

   As I crossed the street toward the plaza entrance of the RCA building, there was a crowd around the tree and and along the walls above the sunken ice rink where, even at that early hour, skaters were doing their stuff, every girl as pert and graceful as Sonja Henie and every boy as nimble as a Fred Astaire on skates.

   I paused a moment to watch as they performed and knew that in their minds they were stars, basking in the approval of the strangers surrounding the plaza. Whatever dreams of celebrity or affection or approval those skaters had in their heads were surely being fulfilled, if only for the brief moments they spent on the ice below Prometheus’ blank gaze.

   New York had always been a city for dreamers because it was a city that could make dreams come true. Which is why all those starry-eyed kids piled off trains at Grand Central or Penn Station or hopped off the buses at the Greyhound terminal on West Fifty-Third Steet and the All-American station just a short walk from the glittery promise of Times Square and Brodway, where dreams were a dime a dozen but where success was emblazoned in the lights of signs several stories high.

   There was the dream that David Reed had brought with him from Cleveland, the dream of being a star on a popular radio program that people listened to from coast to coast.

   Not a paragraph you’d find in the works of Hammett or Chandler, say. Maybe Woolrich, but as long as I’m making comparisons, the ending of this novel is pure Agatha Christie (see above) and very neatly done.

   And in closing, let me ask you this. Why in almost every retro-mystery like this, why is it that everyone who smokes, lights up a Lucky?

— August 2003


[UPDATE] 09-01-10.   This book was reviewed earlier on this blog by Bill Pronzini, in conjunction with an announcement of the author’s death in December 2009. There’s a complete crime fiction bibliography for him there also. It’s quite extensive, more than I realized when I wrote that first paragraph of my review above, once you add in the work he did under several pen names.