GENE THOMPSON – Murder Mystery. Dade Cooley #1. Random House, hardcover, 1980. Ballantine, paperback, 1981.

   You have to agree – it’s a great title for a detective story. And for that it’s such an obvious one, would you believe that a quick check in Hubin’s Bibliography of Crime Fiction would show that it’s the first time it’s ever been used?

   That, plus the simple elegance of the cover – white on black with a small insert showing the front of a shiny Rolls Royce, splattered with blood – would suggest a reading treat of a highly elite nature about to unfold before us. The story. however, is a disappointment. It just doesn’t measure up to our expectations. (Well, it didn’t mine.)

   It tries. While obviously there are very few mean streets in Malibu, we are nearly persuaded that what lies behind the doors of some southern California mansions may be insidiously meaner. Doing the honors as the detective in the case is society lawyer Dade Cooley, who is persuaded by the daughter of a client that her mother’s fatal accident with her car was in truth no accident at all.

   Well, of course it wasn’t. And by actual count, at one point the list of possible suspects has reached at least twelve. This is a lot of people to keep close tabs on, and fear I lost track of some of them from time to time.

   The plot is complex, confusing, and slow-moving. It hinges at length on a bit of precarious time-tabling that does manage to get the murderer and the victim together at the same time, but that is all it does.

   As a detective, Cooley is literate and intelligent enough for the job, but he seems far too fond of himself and his wit for me to think of him as likable. Thompson may or may not be making him into a series character – this is apparently his first murder mystery – but if he is, I’m afraid he’s off to a toe-stubbing start.

Rating: C minus
   

POSTSCRIPT: There is something else that troubles me about this book, and maybe I should mention it. One of Thompson’s other characters, not Cooley, is said to have been a poet, and a few of his lines are quoted to prove it. I have no quarrel at all with that, of course, but at the end of the book Thompson reveals in a brief acknowledgment that the work in question actually came from the pen of real-life poet Gerard Hanley Hopkins. Even if it was reprinted with permission, I don’t know about you, but I’m inclined to think that if this is meant to be some sort of new literary technique, it’s one we can do without just as quickly.

The Dade Cooley series —

Murder Mystery. Random House 1980.
Nobody Cared for Kate. Random House 1983.
A Cup of Death. Random House 1988

UPDATE: I wasn’t able to do this then, long before Google was even conceived of, but this is now, and what I’ve been able to discover is that Gene Thompson was a fairly prolific writer for quite a number of television series. A few that you may have heard of are: Bob Newhart, Here’s Lucy, Harry O, Ellery Queen, Cannon, Quincy, and Columbo. (This list is far from complete.)