Thu 16 Aug 2018
Mystery Review: HAROLD ADAMS – The Man Who Met the Train.
Posted by Steve under Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Characters , Reviews[6] Comments
HAROLD ADAMS – The Man Who Met the Train. Carl Wilcox #7. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1988; paperback, May 1989.
Although in the past Carl Wilcox has been on both sides of the law, at the beginning of The Man Who Met the Train he is a itinerant sign painter, working his way around 1930s Depression-era South Dakota, making ends meet when and how circumstances allow. When he comes across a one-car auto accident in which three are dead, one is seriously injured and a small four-year-old girl is pulled to safety unscratched, circumstances allow him to put on his favorite guise, that of private detective.
Working for both the local judge and then the town banker (but not at the same time), Wilcox finds himself more and more the center of both the town’s curiosity and hostility, and as he does so, incidentally solves the murder of the young girl’s father, a genius with numbers who could not hold his liquor and who was assumed to have had a fatal accident or committed suicide (perhaps) by walking in front of an ongoing train not long before.
Although he had his own distinctive style, Adams wrote as closely in the mode of Dashiell Hammett as any author I can think of. His stories are as definitely hardboiled as they come, but they come fully equipped with an underlying sensibility that shows how deeply he understood people too. And it’s not the plot that’s the key in this one. It’s the people in it that makes this story sing.
The Carl Wilcox series —
1. Murder (1981)
2. Paint the Town Red (1982)
3. The Missing Moon (1983)
4. The Naked Liar (1985)
5. The Fourth Widow (1986)
6. The Barbed Wire Noose (1987)
7. The Man Who Met the Train (1988)
8. The Man Who Missed the Party (1989)
9. The Man Who Was Taller Than God (1992)
10. A Perfectly Proper Murder (1993)
11. A Way with Widows (1994)
12. The Ditched Blonde (1995)
13. Hatchet Job (1996)
14. The Ice Pick Artist (1997)
15. No Badge, No Gun (1998)
16. Lead, So I Can Follow (1999)
August 16th, 2018 at 8:37 pm
Few modern writers captured the feel of the Depression era as well as Adams, at times almost too well since Wilcox adventures weren’t to be read very closely to each other without lighter fare between, but it is an undersung and underpraised series by a writer with a distinctive voice and style.
August 16th, 2018 at 8:43 pm
I remember reading the first three as soon as they came out. All three may have been paperback originals, but I could easily be mistaken about that.
In any case, it took another two years before the fourth came out, and while I kept buying them, I stopped reading them, until this one happened into my hands.
This was a big mistake on my part.
August 17th, 2018 at 6:31 am
I keep meaning to go back to him too. It’s been a long time since I read the first one.
August 17th, 2018 at 9:31 am
His first three were pbo’s and then he shifted into hardcover. His characters, time and setting were captured perfectly I thought.
I had heard that he eventually had serious writer’s block and had to stop writing.
Was just going through some old files the other day and thinking I need to go back and reread this series.
August 17th, 2018 at 11:18 am
Wow, I don’t know how I missed this author. I have no memory of him or these books, yet this was a time I was buying and reading a lot of mystery fiction.
August 17th, 2018 at 4:08 pm
I don’t know your tastes all that well, Rick, but I have a hunch you’d like this series.