Tue 14 Apr 2020
An Archived PI Mystery Review: WILLIAM KAYE – Wrong Target.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[4] Comments
WILLIAM KAYE – Wrong Target. Chickie French #1. Leisure, paperback original, 1981.
You might call this a private eye procedural. Not in the Joe Gores/DKA Agency sense, though, for I get the distinct impression that the closest William Kaye ever came to real life investigator was about the same as you or I. In print, that is. From reading about them.
But in deciding to write about the adventures of a PI named Chickie French, Kaye probably made the right choice, since, if anything, he is even less apt at describing how real-life police operate.
For example, after French’s sister, the wife of mayoral candidate, Whit Davidson, is shot and killed at a political rally (note the title) , French comes in late and still manages to get in his share of interrogating the witnesses. And when he’s done, he and Davidson simply drive away. Methinks the cops clamp down harder than that, even in small towns.
Returning, though, to my original thoughts, French does do a neat job of shuffling several cases around at the same time – some of which are completely followed through upon, some not; some are connected, some are not – and he still manages to solve his sister’s murder.
Although I am still wondering about his secretary’s strange behavior in Chapter Four – it is never referred to again – there are some very good moments in this book, many of them occurring when French is feeling nostalgic and retrospective.
Unfortunately, there is not much of a mystery that’s involved. Apparently Mr. Kaye has no sense of misdirection at all.
So, to sum things up, the book is terribly uneven, and yes, even amateurish in style and technique. Nonetheless, the moments that are very good suggest that as a writer Kaye does show some promise. (On the other hand, whoever it was wrote the copy for the back cover is simply and utterly incompetent. There are no other words for it.)
Rating: C minus.
UPDATE; This is the only entry for William Kaye in Hubin, and thus also making this Chickie French’s only recorded case.
April 14th, 2020 at 10:33 pm
The adversarial relationship between police and private investigators depends a great deal on the type of investigator and the type of case. Police can be a great deal more cooperative and pleasant when private investigators present them with evidence, cooperate, and stay within the law.
When I was with Pinkertons I was loaned out to the Dallas Prosecutor a few times and once to the Texas Rangers, but that was a major agency that frequently cooperated with local and Federal agencies, and not some small operation.
Much of it depends on the private detectives reputation, how strictly they follow protocols, and the local prosecutors and police officials. For instance local police and prosecutors often followed our recommendations about witnesses who had cooperated with us as did parole boards, and since they still got credit for arrests and prosecutions they were quite happy for us to present them with a fait accompli. It isn’t like we left a trail of corpses like Mike Hammer.
I only ever worked on one murder case, for the victims family, and local police didn’t much want us there, but that Pinkerton badge was more than they wanted to deal with so they didn’t get too nasty, and even then the sheriff’s office and State Police were happy to cooperate, just the local police chief was unhappy.
April 14th, 2020 at 10:56 pm
That’s more than I thought I knew about police-PI cooperation. Thanks! I don’t remember how much of his applies to the book I reviewed, though, other than what I what I said in the review. It struck me as off, obviously, but perhaps wrongfully so.
April 15th, 2020 at 9:40 pm
P.I. novels either tend to have the best friend cop caught between his superiors and his friend (Tony Rome, Rockford, Mike Hammer) or the adversary cop (CITY OF ANGELS), and neither is quite accurate. In real life private investigators seldom nose in on ongoing police cases, and since police usually get the benefit of anything the private investigation uncovers they usually don’t much mind. It differs a bit in high profile cases where a P.I. is working for a defense lawyer, but there he is covered by the attorney’s rights to see evidence he needs and talk to possible witnesses. In any case it would be unusual for the same P.I. and policeman to meet on many investigations in a bigger city.
This sounds like it is based on watching movies, television, and reading books, but not the right ones.
In the THIN MAN Nick Charles gets along well with Guild, but in the MALTESE FALCON Spade is more adversarial because Spade and Archer obviously have a history of playing fast and loose with the law as Spade does for much of FALCON. Marlowe is about halfway, his smart mouth does get him in trouble, but he usually stays just on the friendly side of the police and his pal Nulty, and he isn’t as loose with how he treats the law even though he lets a murderer go at the end of THE BIG SLEEP.
Considering the number of bodies Pat Chambers is remarkably tolerant of Mike Hammer. Bill Crane is from an earlier era in Latimer’s books but it isn’t a bad picture of the relationship between Agencies and police with the exaggeration of fiction. Michael Shayne is in both camps to some extent (good and bad cop), but not all that unrealistic in the Halliday ones, he plays pretty fast and loose with the law too. Most of the eyes in the Hammett tradition tend to skid on thin ice with the police because of Spade.
Lam and Cool fall in the Spade and Archer category in that Lam’s mouth and his and Bertha’s scheming make the police relationship rockier than most, in the Perry Mason tradition they will do anything to protect a client.
There isn’t much in the way of realistic private eye fiction. Bits in Hammett, some of Joe Gores work, and Stanley Ellin’s THE EIGHTH CIRCLE and STAR LIGHT STAR BRIGHT come to mind.
For a genre that prides itself on realism much of it is kabuki drama, not much more realistic than the Golden Age amateur save in who dies and how. Philip Marlowe solving a murder isn’t much more believable than Lord Peter truth be told, and frankly most investigations are full of dull detail, endless interviews and research, and ambiguous results that wouldn’t make for much of a novel and an investigator for an agency may only be one small cog in an investigation.
April 15th, 2020 at 10:06 pm
Thanks, David. I enjoyed reading that. You’re quite right. The byplay between a PI and the police, whether friendly or not (or sometimes both) is always a major part of the enjoyment of reading a PI story.
Reading the first sentence of my review now, it was my impression that Kaye was trying to do a book in the realistic Joe Gores mode, and for whatever reason, it did not seem to me that he managed to do it. Based on the situation he and his client were in, I thought the police gave him, apparently the one man working for a one-man agency, too much leeway in asking questions and driving away with his client when more realistically she’d be asked to come down to the station house for more questioning. I didn’t think that he had that much clout.
Or that’s what I’m thinking I was thinking at the time.