Sun 18 Dec 2011
Reviewed by Allen J. Hubin: ROBERT RAY – Merry Christmas, Murdock.
Posted by Steve under Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Characters , Reviews[3] Comments
Allen J. Hubin
ROBERT J. RAY – Merry Christmas, Murdock. Delacorte, hardcover, 1989. Dell, paperback, 1990.
L.A. private eye Matt Murdock is back, celebrating a holiday in decidedly unfestive fashion in Merry Christmas, Murdock, by Robert Ray.
Here the past rises up before Murdock in two ways. Cindy Duke, a teen-ager who had maybe saved his life a couple of years earlier by driving him out of a burning canyon, asks him to find her father. He teaches in Wisconsin and came to L.A. in response to Cindy’s cry for help, raged at his ex-wife, battered her brother’s car with a baseball bat, ranged through a shopping mall in a failing search for Cindy, and disappeared.
Meanwhile, another teenager, Heather Blasingame, lies in a coma from a hit-and-run encounter with a vehicle at that same mall. She’s the daughter of Jane Blasingame, feisty Texas state senator, and the senator (though with considerable reluctance) hires Murdock to supplement what seems an inept police investigation.
These two cases are of course related, and powerful interests — not only Cindy’s grandfather Wheeler Duke and Duke Construction — are willing to go to about any lengths to keep Matt’s nose out of these matters.
Vivid, active tale.
Vol. 12, No. 4, Fall 1990.
The Matt Murdock series —
Bloody Murdock. St.Martin’s, 1986.
Murdock for Hire. St.Martin’s, 1987.
Dial “M†for Murdock. St.Martin’s, 1988.
Merry Christmas, Murdock. Delacorte, 1989.
Murdock Cracks Ice. Delacorte, 1992.
December 18th, 2011 at 5:48 pm
Here, as a bonus, is more about PI Matt Murdock. This was written by Kevin Burton Smith and taken from his ThrillingDetective website:
https://www.thrillingdetective.com/eyes/matt_murdock.html
“Matt was an army brat who grew up all over the States. Seems his father, AKA the “Top Kick” and the “Sergeant,” was a 30-year army man, and Matt grew up in Tennesse, Texas, Georgia and South Carolina. […] In an act of rebellion, Matt dropped out of high school and joined the army himself. He picked up some shrapnel in his right thigh in Vienam […] Returning Stateside, he did a hitch with the CIA in California, teaching English […] In the seventies, he joined the police force, where he ended up training other officers in SWAT tactics and small arms in Los Angeles and Orange County.
“And then he dropped out, went into construction […] When that business went belly up, he became a private eye, doing security consulting, bodyguard work and recovery of lost property and people. He works out of his office/apartment over a surf shop near the Newport Beach pier. Oh, and he allegedly does a bit of carpentry on the side.
“Somewhere along the way, Matt was briefly married, but now he seems content to do manly things, playing soldier, bedding various “ladies” and cleaning his guns.”
Of Murdock’s five book run, I remember reading one of them, and of that one, I remember only the ending. It had nothing to do with the story itself, only the situation, which at the time I thought unique in the annals of PI-dom.
WARNING: PLOT ALERT
One of the ladies he beds in the book finds herself pregnant.
December 18th, 2011 at 11:45 pm
I thought the later book in the series, MURDOCK CRACKS ICE, set partially in Seatle, lost much of the sparkle of the earlier ones set entirely in Orange County CA.
I very much enjoyed the earlier ones, Murdock was fine company with whom to spend a few hours…
December 19th, 2011 at 12:32 am
I suppose there’s always a limit as to how long a PI series can run before runs out of steam, which may be due to the author running out of tales to tell, or out of readers, which may or may not be the same thing.
Either way, it sounds as though five PI novels were all that Robert Ray had in him, and even a change of scenery didn’t help.