Sun 6 Jul 2014
Reviewed by Allen J. Hubin: ARTHUR LYONS – Other People’s Money.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[2] Comments
Allen J. Hubin
ARTHUR LYONS – Other People’s Money. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1989; paperback, 1990.
The tenth case for private eye Jacob Asch is Other People’s Money, by Arthur Lyons. Mr. Saffarian asks Jacob to keep an eye on his daughter, who decamped from Istanbul with a furnace worker and lives with him in LA. Asch hires a team and they begin surveillance, reporting a few contacts to Saffarian, who then abruptly pulls Asch off the job.
End of story, it might seem, except one of Jacob’s team disappears. Now on his own, Asch works his way into a scheme involving smuggled antiquities, an avaricious collector and museum director, and death, the latter in goodly quantities.
Crisp narrative, wily plotting.
Vol. 11, No. 3, Summer 1989.
Note: Ray O’Leary reviewed this same title earlier on this blog some two and a half years ago. Look for it here. There were 11 Jacob Asch novels in all. A complete bibliography for Arthur Lyons was posted on this blog at the time of his death in 2008. Follow the link.
July 7th, 2014 at 3:44 pm
This was right after I had culled Asch, Benny Cooperman, and Harry Stoner with a few others from my reading list since I was drowning in private eyes at the time. Frankly, even good writers like Lyons were starting to blur into one continual private eye novel to the point I felt compelled to cut drastically and only stay with the more unusual, offbeat, or more ambitiously written of the lot.
I’ve heard quite a few people say something similar of the era. It was literally too much of a good thing, and too many competent to very good writers in the field. The writers I stuck with were Pronzini, Greenleaf, Healy, Crumley, Hansen, Grafton, Crais, and Paretsky along with a handful of others.
July 7th, 2014 at 4:23 pm
You sum things up very well for me very also, David. Maybe we just didn’t know how good a thing we had when we had it. On the other hand, I’d still have to place the Jacob Asch books as being in the second rank of PI’s of all time. Good but not great, as the old saying goes. If there were time, I’d love to go back and sample some of these authors again, the ones no longer active, but alas there isn’t.