JACK EARLY – A Creative Kind of Killer. Fortune Fanelli #1. Franklin Watts, hardcover, 1984. Carroll & Graf, paperback, 1995, as by Sandra Scoppettone (the author’s real name).

   Fortune Fanelli, the first-person narrator of A Creative Kind of Killer, is a former cop who inherited money, made a lucky investment, and left the force. He’s now a private investigator, but not exactly the usual kind. He’s a single parent, trying to bring up his two teenage children and work on murder cases at the same time.

   His ex-wife, a soap-opera producer, has no real interest in raising children, so Fortune gets the job. He lives in New York’s SoHo district, and the first murder in the book takes place right in his neighborhood. The killer is “creative,” posing the corpse in the window of a boutique so artfully that Fanelli himself admits he must have passed the body six limes without noticing it.

   His investigation of the case leads him both into the arty crowd and into the more sordid world of runaways and kiddy porn.

   A Creative Kind of Killer is a promising debut. Fanelli is an interesting character, and his relationship with his children makes for a different kind of subplot. The love interest is provided by a young woman who is a dead ringer for Meryl Streep; and Father Paul, the handsome local priest. is a strong character.

   Early is particularly good in his descriptions of SoHo, and Fanelli’s feelings about the changes in his old neighborhood are an effective commentary on one man’s desire to remain involved in his community. The mystery is a good one, too, and the resolution satisfactory. It seems likely that Fanelli will appear in other cases in the near future.

   Early’s second novel, Razzamatazz (1985), is a straight thriller sans Fanelli, however.

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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
   

[UPDATE]: In spite of Bill’s suggestion that it might happen, a second recorded case for Fortune Fanelli never occurred.
   

[ADDED NOTE]: This is the first of four reviews that went missing during the loss of service undergone by this blog over this past weekend. Unfortunately all of the comments for it have permanently disappeared.