Sun 4 Apr 2021
JACK LYNCH – Bragg’s Hunch. Peter Bragg #1. Gold Medal, paperback original; 1st printing, 1982. Brash Books, trade paperback, 2014, as The Dead Never Forget. Reprinted in Bragg V1 by Brash Books, trade paperback, 2014. (This omnibus volume includes the first three Peter Bragg books.)
While other authors have recently been doing their best to stretch the boundaries of PI fiction, Jack Lynch’s Peter Bragg conforms almost exactly to the time-worn image everyone has of the tough independent California private eye. Women appeal to him, of course, but he doesn’t knock himself out chasing them. Even so (you guessed it), he still ends up with more of them on this case than he knows what to do with.
This is the first of a new series, based in San Francisco. Bragg is hired by a self-made businessman (which is a polite way of saying he has a piece of a good many sleaze-joints around the Bay area) who needs protection. The man is especially worried that whoever is making threats against him will start taking them out against his young teen-aged stepdaughter.
The trail leads Bragg out to one of those legendary western whore-towns that exist maybe only in fiction. Before he’s hardly had time to turn around, or so it seems, he’s managed to set the two major criminal elements in town off one against the other. A bloody gang war results, as fierce as anything seen since Prohibition – or the days of Dashiell Hammett!
All the right buttons are pressed. Somehow the right spark refuses to go off. Some well-drawn touches show some insight into character – some blatant, some subtle – but for the most part, well, let’s just say the action peaks too soon.
Rating: B minus.
UPDATE: There were in all eight recorded adventures of Peter Bragg. Reviewed earlier on this blog are #3,Pieces of Death, and #7, Seattle, here and here. The latter has a list of all eight.
April 5th, 2021 at 10:00 am
I remember reading the first couple books in the Bragg series and came away with the same reaction you did: derivate and uninspired. I didn’t continue with the series.
April 5th, 2021 at 12:19 pm
Please don’t hold me to it, but I think that Lynch was an author whose books got better as he went along. My review of #7 in the series was a lot more positive than either this one or #3. See the links above. When a writer is just starting out, sometimes he sticks a little too closely to the tried and true, not finding his own voice yet.
And even so, note that I gave this one a “B Minus,” even in spite of a review that doesn’t otherwise seem to warrant it. I have given up in trying to figure myself out.
April 5th, 2021 at 4:29 pm
The RED HARVEST plot was usually pretty reliable for even generic mystery fiction. Somehow I missed this series, but read other Lynch I liked.
April 5th, 2021 at 7:57 pm
Somebody should someday make a list of all the times the RED HARVEST plot has shown up in other books by other authors. As we’ve discussed before, the list would not be a short one.