REVIEWED BY MIKE NEVINS:

   

RICHARD S. PRATHER – The Amber Effect.  Shell Scott #40. Tor, hardcover, 1986; paperback, 1987.

   The ingredients of today’s private eye fiction are brooding and corruption, mangled relationships and a soiled world. But there was a time when, if you picked up a PI book by one particular writer you’d be grabbed by plot situations wild and woolly as a bighorn ram, by characters straight off the nut tree — including a bevy of nubile bubbleheads sans clothes or sexual inhibitions –and by narrative and dialogue eccentric enough to pop the eyeballs.

   For this particular writer the private eye novel wasn’t a Film Noir in prose, it was a hoot, no more believable or substantial than a comic book but outrageously, bawdily funny while it lasted. His name was Richard S. Prather and his principal character was Shell Scott, a big ex-Marine PI with the white hair cut Camp Lejuene style and the angular eyebrows and the Cad convertible and the tropical fish.

   Scott was the first major private eye whose adventures were published as paperback originals, and roughly 40,000,000 copies of those escapades were sold between his debut in 1950 and the mid-1970s. Then, for reasons too complicated to go into here, Prather shut down his word factory. The good news is that production has started up again — this time in hardcover — and that none of his inspired looniness has been lost.

   Prather plots defy summary. Suffice it to say that The Amber Effect kicks off with Scott finding the doorway of his L.A. apartment graced by an undraped lovely who is both the winner of the Miss Naked California contest and the target of a gaggle of hit men, including a human clam, an ex-Rams linebacker, and a half-senile gun-for-hire known in the trade as One Shot.

   In time Scott finds the connection between the lady and a weirdo scientist who, before he was murdered, invented something potentially worth billions. All trails lead to a pair of unforgettable wacked-out action scenes where. without a gun and assisted only by several three-dimensional holograms of himself, Scott takes on the entire cast of bad guys.

   The Amber Effect isn’t way out there in the stratosphere with alternative classics like Prather’s 1964 The Trojan Hearse, but — insane story-line, juvenile double entendres, Fifties mammary fixations, and all — -it’s a tour de farce of the sort no one in the world but this particular writer could have turned out, and it’s wonderful to have him back at work.

— Reprinted from The MYSTERY FANcier, November/December 1986.