Wed 1 Sep 2010
Archived Review: H. PAUL JEFFERS – Murder on Mike.
Posted by Steve under Old Time Radio , Reviews[7] Comments
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.
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:
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?
[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.
September 1st, 2010 at 8:44 pm
I read and enjoyed RUBOUT AT THE ONYX, and it certainly isn’t hard boiled, but it is structured like a lot of radio dramas of the classic era — more in line with RICHARD DIAMOND or YOURS TRULY JOHNNY DOLLAR than Hammett and Chandler.
In either case I enjoyed that one, and may well look up the others. Jeffers seemed to me more in line with Jonathan Latimer, Kurt Steel, Geoffrey Homes, Norbert Davis, or Robert Reeves than the tougher school of hard boiled writers, and much closer to the kind of thing done by radio and movie tecs of the era — which seems to have been his principle influence.
September 1st, 2010 at 9:47 pm
I wish I’d read more than this one, myself. I don’t remember much more about it than what I wrote in my review, which is the primary reason I started writing reviews, back in the late 1960s.
But I liked this one, obviously, and I don’t know why I haven’t read any of the others. I have most of them, so that’s not why!
September 1st, 2010 at 9:51 pm
PS. Jonathan Latimer, Kurt Steel, Geoffrey Homes, Norbert Davis, and Robert Reeves are pretty good company to be associated with. I like them all. Medium-boiled, perhaps, but their work is all very solid.
September 1st, 2010 at 10:13 pm
I guess it is because they aren’t imiatators of that classic Chandler voice or as
tough’ as Hammett, and maybe it is the humor, but I have a sneaking preference for Latimer, Davis, Reeves, Steel, Brett Halliday, and even Bellem and Adams as I grow older.
Bill Crane, Cellini Smith, Hank Heyer, Humphrey Campbell, Michael Shayne, Carstairs and Doan, even Rex (“what this country needs is an American Gestapo”)McBride* are all among my favorite sleuths of the period. Maybe it is as simple as the fact what they did hasn’t been beaten to death by a million cliches.
And too, they tend to do more actual detective work and straight forward sleuthing than the Chandler school of eye.
*In Adams defense re that Gestapo line, it is often quoted out of the context of McBride’s character. Rex was something of a lout, born on the wrong side of the tracks, and had a tendency to put his foot in his mouth.
Adams wasn’t trying to present a role model, but what he thought a ‘real’ Nick Charles might be like — unsophisticated, clever but not smart, tough, and with the rough opinions of a man of his time and class. McBride was a reaction to the supermen that Hammett and Chandler made out of Spade and Marlowe — a sort of warts and all version of the private eye.
September 1st, 2010 at 10:26 pm
I really liked the first two Kate Fallon books by Jeffers. These are mysteries set in a small town during World War II. The series kind of fell apart in the third and final book, though.
September 3rd, 2010 at 1:40 pm
Darn. My comment just… disappeared into thin air.
I read and enjoyed all three of these books, found the settings and characters to my liking and the crimes solvable and fun. Thanks or the review, I’d forgotten about these, but that’s the point of Forgotten Books reviews, isn’t it? I wonder if these are still around here somewhere…
September 17th, 2010 at 1:04 am
[…] No Evil) reviewed here not so long ago proves, and the one by H. Paul Jeffers (Murder on Mike) as well. That this one’s the lesser of the three does not mean it’s not worth reading. Far from […]