PARNELL HALL – Blackmail. Stanley Hastings #9. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 19994; paperback reprint, March 1995.

   There are now twenty books in Parnell Hall’s series of crime novels featuring New York City private eye Stanley Hastings, the most recent being A Fool for a Client, published just last year. I keep telling myself I ought to read more of them, since I enjoyed this one very much, but so far, by a very rough count, I’m only up to three or four

   Hastings may have changed jobs over the years, but in Blackmail at least he’s still doing accident injury reports for a high-powered liability lawyer, not the most glamorous job in the world, but it does pay the bills. And once in a while he finds a real-to-life client waiting for him in his office.

   What’s more, she both beautiful and blonde. Not surprisingly, given the title of the book, she’s being blackmailed and she wants Hastings to act as the intermediary between the blackmailer and herself. The reason Hastings hesitates is she is unwilling to give him any more information than that. Since he can use the money. five hundred dollars worth, he takes the job.

   And finds himself up to his neck in first, smutty photos (no surprise there) and then secondly, two cases of murder — both the blackmailee then the blackmailer. Hastings, having no particular friends on the police force, could find himself the number one suspect if (1) he had a motive, and (2) there were any evidence against him, besides being the first on the scene in both deaths.

   The case is complicated, enough so that Hastings is forced to let his wife Alice do some of the detecting along with him. Hall’s witty style goes a long way in negating the fact that the most obvious connection between the two victims is quietly ignored, giving any would-be armchair detective reader at home plenty of opportunity to solve the case before Hastings does.

   Quite enjoyable, as I say, with one tiny caveat. If this were a movie, it would be rated R for a sprinkling of four-letter words throughout. Since this otherwise is not a hard-boiled PI yarn, far from it, I found this clashing with the overall ambience and mood. Not in a major way, but just off-putting enough to bring it up, that’s all.