Tue 22 Jun 2021
An Archived PI Mystery Review: MICHAEL CORMANY – Lost Daughter.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[3] Comments
LOST DAUGHTER – Michael Cormany. Dan Kruger #1. Lyle Stuart, hardcover, 1988. Leisure 3063; paperback, April 1991.
I’m not completely convinced this is a step forward for the world of Pl fiction, but here it is. PI Dan Kruger is hired to find a man’s daughter, but the case becomes far more than that. Rather. than try to summarize the plot myself, maybe I’m better off simply quoting from p.150:
This is the story, as it turns out, of an all-American family gone to hell in the 80s. It’s paced like Paul Cain (author of Fast One) on speed, and it’s plotted like Hammett on cocaine. It’s not quite as good as either one, but unless you can’t stand repulsive dope-smoking, Valium-addicted, booze-ridden PI’s such as former cop, ex-rock musician Dan Kruger, this will do quite nicely as an up-to-date substitute. It all depends on your level of tolerance. (Picture Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe in 1973, then add 15 more years of revisionist literary history.)
I’m not old enough to know, but to the general public, is it possible that Sam Spade was as great an anti- hero in his day? Like Spade, Kruger has at least one redeeming feature in his favor. Once hired, he refuses to be bought off, frightened off, or even fired, from what he’s been employed to do. He sticks to the case like a bulldog who can’t let go, and that, if nothing else, is precisely in the solid PI tradition.
The Dan Kruger series —
Lost Daughter. Stuart 1988
Red Winter. Stuart 1989
Rich or Dead. Birch Lane 1990
Polaroid Man. Birch Lane 1991
Skin Deep Is Fatal. Birch Lane 1992
June 22nd, 2021 at 9:12 pm
I read at least one of these, not sure which. Not bad, but not so good I followed up.
I suspect Spade in the books was an Anti Hero before the term was ever spawned. Certainly there is little to actually admire, and a good case can be made Hammett was commenting less than favorably on his former profession in FALCON and in THE THIN MAN.
The Flitcraft story suggests to me Spade is a tragic figure in Hammett’s eyes, a good detective and a failed human being. It’s Huston and Bogart who made him into a romantic hero.
June 22nd, 2021 at 9:14 pm
My thoughts then, when I wrote this review, and still very much so now.
June 22nd, 2021 at 9:22 pm
Steve,
Re Spade as anti hero, I have always thought Hammett was being subtle and ended up too subtle for most of his readers, editors, and publisher (not the first time, his joke about “gunsel” and “shamus” wasn’t supposed to end up in the vernacular either). They saw Spade as a brilliant detective and I think Hammett meant for us to see him as a miserable human being and a good detective, something Hammett would have seen as thoroughly compatible with his life experience.
Modern audiences are so tied up in the Huston/Bogart version I’m not sure they see just how flawed a human being the character in the book is. “The stuff that dreams are made of …” is much more romantic than the sour note both FALCON and THIN MAN books end on.