Tue 12 Jan 2016
Archived Review: CHARLES ALVERSON – Not Sleeping, Just Dead.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[4] Comments
CHARLES ALVERSON – Not Sleeping, Just Dead. Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, hardcover, 1977. Playboy Press, paperback, 1980.
Joe Goodey is a private eye. Being a cynic comes with the job, but along with a sour view of the`world and a nasty way of saying his mind comes an unquenchable sense of justice that not even the soul-scouring impact of group therapy can touch.
What he’s hired to do, and what he does, is to learn who caused the death of wealthy man’s granddaughter at a Big Sur drug rehabilitation commune. He also finds once again the success does not always bring satisfaction, much less gratitude.
While there are some novelistic weaknesses in his approach, Goodey’s last statement on the matter is an impassioned defense of the moral point of view that explains society’s continued need for incorruptible investigators who are unafraid of the truth and willing to point fingers of guilt where they should. It’s not been done better since the days of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and praise greater than that cannot be given.
[UPDATE] 01-12-16. I’ve not read either this, or Alverson’s Goodey’s Last Stand (1975), the first entry in an all-too-short two book PI series, in nearly 40 years. I liked both very much at the time, but I wonder how they would stand up today. I also have no idea why there were only the two books. Based on my opinion back then, there should have been more.
January 13th, 2016 at 3:16 pm
I wasn’t quite as impressed, but the series had potential.
One comment here, despite his speech about being a detective and his ultimate actions I think the reading that Spade is incorruptible is based on Bogie’s reading in the third film version and not Hammett. Ricardo Cortez reads virtually the same speech and you wonder how much more money would have influenced the character in the first version.
I’ve always held that while Hammett wrote Spade as the man most private detectives wanted to be he wasn’t suggesting they wanted to be incorruptible only that they wanted to be smarter than anyone else, able to turn on dime in any tricky situation, and true to their profession if no one and nothing else.
I’ve always held that at least in FALCON, if not the short stories, Hammett intends Spade as a critique of the private eye as much as a model for them. Anytime someone casually compares Chandler’s knight errant and Hammett’s Spade on moral grounds they are thinking of Bogart’s Spade and not Hammett’s.
January 13th, 2016 at 8:50 pm
To amuse myself, I’ve gone looking for other reviews of this book. Here’s what Kirkus had to say, in part:
“Frisco gumshoe Joe Goodey made an ingratiating debut in Goodey’s Last Stand (1975), and he now returns with his smart (but not smart-alecky) narrating voice intact; at his best, he’s a latter-day Archie Goodwin, wise-cracking with an emphasis on the wise. Too bad, then, that he’s stuck in a freeze-dried plot.”
You make some good points about Hammett and Chandler, David, and Spade in the book vs Spade in the movie. Back when I wrote this review, I doubt that I was able to make any kind of statement along these lines.
And I wish I could something say something about which of the above comes closest to Alverson’s book, but it’s been too long. I can’t. I don’t remember anything about it, other than the words that my younger self had to say about it.
Alverson has his own page on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Alverson
and he’s had quite a life, but there’s nothing there that suggests why there were only the two books in the Joe Goodey series.
At this point, with only the one comment left by anyone reading this review, and that by you, David, I’d have to say that Alverson is a forgotten writer.
January 13th, 2016 at 10:05 pm
I probably read both of these titles in the early to mid 80’s when I started reading and collecting PI books, but they didn’t do as much for me as the Lyons, Healy, Greenleaf, Estleman and Pronzini books did.
He also did a book called Fighting Back (Bobbs-Merrill 1973) which I have listed as a PI novel.
January 13th, 2016 at 11:09 pm
David P
There was a lot of competition in the realm of PI fiction back then. Some survived, Estleman and Pronzini, the two most obvious ones. Both are still writing today. Others didn’t, and for whatever reason, Alverson was one of them.
Also. I knew about Alverson’s book FIGHTING BACK, and in fact Hubin lists it in his CRIME FICTION IV. I had no idea that it’s a PI novel. I’ll have to look into that. Thanks!