Sat 6 Apr 2019
ROBERT CAMPBELL – Red Cent. Jake Hatch #2. Pocket paperback original; 1st printing, January 1989.
Robert Campbell, in this second mystery solved by railroad detective Jake Hatch, has a nice effortless talking-to-the reader style of writing, but in terms of what he has to say, what can you say about a story in which the first chapter is the most interesting?
A man is killed in a railroad car nu a gang of drunken Indians riding in pickups along the tracks, and Jake thinks there is more than misadventure involved. There is: Indian agencies, lawyers and mistresses, squabbles over jurisdiction, changes of venue, and so on.
In Red Cent Campbell begins with a decent premise, and while he seems to have a solution in mind, he really doesn’t have a very solid idea of how to write up the detective part of the mystery and make it interesting, Hatch is beginning to have women trouble in this second book — all of the lonely windows he’s been seeing are starting to talk of marriage, and probably high time too — and you know you’ve got a less than stimulating detective story on your hands when matters like this are more gripping than the mystery.
I think I’ll talk about the cover, too, while I’m at it. Iy’s strikingly done, too, with a view of the victim slumped in his seat with a bullet in his temple. But besides having the color of his shirt wrong, in the book the man’s head was blown pretty nearly clear away. Blood all over. His widow has to identify him from his hands. They didn’t show this on the cover.
Bibliographic Note: The one earlier book in the series was Plugged Nickel (Pocket, 1988). Red Cent was Jake Hatch’s final appearance.
April 6th, 2019 at 6:14 pm
I liked Campbell a bit more than this, but in all fairness he didn’t always seem as interested in plot as character.
April 6th, 2019 at 8:09 pm
I liked the idea of a railroad detective at the time and I still do, but either sales weren’t good or Campbell quit the series on his own. Either way, there were only the two of them.
His other series did better, 14 Jimmy Flannery books, and 4 Whistler books.
I reviewed one of the Flaanery books here: https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=55432
And Barry Gardner covered a Whistler book here: https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=53555
April 6th, 2019 at 8:01 pm
Red Cent — a great title.
April 6th, 2019 at 8:04 pm
The books were going in the wrong order, from a Nickel to a Cent, but another good title, or so I’ve always thought, would have been THIN DIME.
April 7th, 2019 at 7:59 am
I read a few of the Flannery books but not these.
April 8th, 2019 at 10:56 am
About The Author:
If you’re watching a late movie, and the screenplay is credited to R. Wright Campbell – this is him.
When he got into book-writing, he went back to his birth name.
Also, Robert Wright Campbell’s brother is the actor William Campbell (the Trekkies in the crowd will remember him as “The Squire Of Gothos”).
Just so you know …
April 8th, 2019 at 11:31 am
Right you are, Mike. Besides his movie credits, he also wrote a few horror novels as by R. Wright Campbell. Not my cup of tea, so I’ve never tried one.