Wed 14 May 2025
ARTHUR LYONS Hard Trade. PI Jacob Asch #5. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, hardcover, 1981. Henry Holt, paperback, 1983.
There must be more private eyes per capita in California than anywhere else in the world. Jacob Asch is another one. He’s been around for a while, but he’s never gotten himself so deeply caught up in the muck and mire or foul-smelling politics as he does in this one.
Throughout their long celebrated history, the majority of the work that private detectives do has been to deal with the likes of blackmailers, errant spouses and runaway daughters. Common everyday problems like that. People like Jacob Asch just don’t end up on the county payroll, working for the leading maverick on the L.A. Board of Supervisors or at least not ordinarily.
On the other hand, while private eyes are known for fighting the system, they’ve almost always been loners, at least in fiction, with hardly ever any kind of power or authority behind them. Nor do they usually end up uncovering a trail of corruption, tinged with illicit homosexual diversions, leading up anywhere nearly as high as this — clear to Sacramento and the governor’s mansion.
This is heady atmosphere, there’s no denying it, but what it does mean, as whenever a story takes this route, is that there’s a lot less action involved, and the paperwork outweighs the legwork by far. Have no fear, though — the ending is as authentically sour as anything you can find in the works of Chandler, say, and it does compensate a great deal for a slower-than-usual course of events from Mr. Lyons.
There is, by the way, one other note that is safe to add:
Here is a book that Jerry Brown will definitely not be pleased with.
Rating: B minus.
May 15th, 2025 at 6:15 am
Although often compared with chandler and Ross MacDonald, Lyons took his own path to become one of the best hardboiled writers of the 70s and 80s. Like many of his fans, I was sad to see that the last of the eleven Jacob Asch novels was published in 1994, when he was 48; he evidently then turned his attention to his great interest in old films — his choice, of course, but I have often wondered what other great Jacob Asch books could have been produced during his last fourteen years.
All of his novels are well worth reading.
May 15th, 2025 at 6:40 am
Lyons’ Jacob Asch books were sold in the mall at a Walden (spelling?) Books and were probably the first PI books that I had read, and started me reading and collecting from that point on.
The stories were all well told and Asch a sympathetic and realistic character, an old reporter that spent time in jail for not revealing his source if I remember correctly.
Lyons co-wrote a couple of books with the LA coroner after the Asch books then seemed to stop writing for a while, and ended up passing away pretty young.
May 15th, 2025 at 5:04 pm
While I don’t think the Asch books are in the top level of PI fiction (reserved, you know, for the likes of Hammett and Chandler) they’re at the top or middle of the next level down. If they came out in paperback, I bought them all.
What’s very strange, or at least it is to me, is that while I haven’t read one in over 30 years, last night I read the first chapter of DEAD RINGER, the book that came after this one, at the same time this old review popped up to be posted. Purely coincidentally.
I don’t remember the books to be hardboiled, though I could be wrong about that, only well-written with prose as smooth as silk. Or so that first chapter is.
— The Jacob Asch series:
1 The Dead are Discrete (1974)
2 All God’s Children (1975)
3 The Killing Floor (1976)
4 Castles Burning (1980)
5 Hard Trade (1981)
6 Dead Ringer (1977)
7 At the Hands of Another (1983)
8 Three With a Bullet (1985)
9 Fast Faded (1987)
10 Other People’s Money (1989)
11 False Pretenses (1994)
May 17th, 2025 at 1:12 am
During the flood of eyes in the seventies and eighties, a few had to go and I’m afraid Asch was one of the ones I jettisoned for this reason or that. The books were good, but mostly just not distinguished enough for me to hold onto.
The writing was smooth and assured, but they never felt special and during the glut there were others who better fit that niche for my tastes.
May 17th, 2025 at 11:46 am
I read about half of the Asch books and always meant to get back to the series and finish it, but you know how that goes. Lyons was a guest on a local call-in radio show one time, plugging his book about cults, and I thought about calling to let him know I liked his novels, but again, didn’t get it done.