by Newell Dunlap
PETE HAMILL – Dirty Laundry. Bantam,paperback original, 1978.
It has taken free-lance reporter Sam Briscoe all of six years to get over (if not forget) Anne Fletcher. Then one snowy night in New York she telephones to say she is in trouble. Sam, against his better judgment, agrees to meet her. But, sure enough, she must have been in trouble, because she is killed before she can keep the appointment.
The story is a shadowy one, but as Briscoe pieces it together, it seems to go something like this: Anne Fletcher left a rich and powerful Mexican boy friend named Pepe. She moved from her apartment and got a job with a bank. Pepe found her and apparently bought the bank to re-establish contact with her. But Anne had incriminating papers she wanted to show Briscoe, papers alleging bank fraud. or Pepe fraud, or something of the sort. But, of course, Anne never reached Briscoe, nor did the papers. Even more puzzling is the fact that Pepe himself apparently was killed in a plane crash a few days earlier.
One thing is certain: The trail seems to lead to Mexico and to Pepe’s banking connections (and this is the basis for the title, as it is discovered that a Pepe-controlled bank launders money). So it is to Mexico that Briscoe travels, and it is in Mexico that the action reaches a fever pitch.
Briscoe is shot at several times, slugged, raped(!), and has a dead redhead dumped into his bathtub. Briscoe, in tum, shoots several people, slugs several more, and pursues $200 million and three culprits onto a stormy ocean.
Pete Hamill is, of course, the well-known New York newspaper columnist; he is also a talented and versatile writer, and it is a bit of a disappointment to see him employ the standard tough-guy, semi-smartass, semi-sentimental-slob narrative voice used in hundreds of such novels. Still, he does a good job of it and can certainly hold his own with anyone in the genre. Most readers of hard-boiled fiction will eagerly follow the action to an almost James Bond-like climax.
Sam Briscoe also appears in The Deadly Piece (1979),
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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.