EDITH PIÑERO GREEN – Rotten Apples. Dearborn V. Pinch #1. E. P. Dutton, hardcover, 1977.  Berkley, paperback, 1982.

   Dearborn V. Pinch is described by one of Ms. Green’s publishers as “the world’s oldest and cleverest detective.” At well over seventy, the former at least may be true.

   Pinch, a charming and enterprising old gentleman who still has a sharp eye for the ladies, receives a visit from old flame Antoinette Ormach, who reveals her long-standing membership in the Rotten Apple Corps. This group of eleven, founded in the Thirties, had one characteristic in common: All had committed some sort of minor crime — from poisoning a rival’s dog on the eve of a dog show to plagiarizing a poem that later won a national award. Now the remaining members of the group have begun to die in suspicious circumstances, and Antoinette is afraid she may be next.

   Dearborn has been known lo help out friends with delicate problems they do not wish to take to the police, and Antoinette asks him to look into the matter. Dearborn declines, but when Antoinette is murdered, he undertakes an investigation out of a sense of obligation. As Dearborn probes into the lives of the Rotten Apples, he becomes convinced that one of the group wishes to see the others dead — a true rotten apple; and as he crisscrosses New York City in search of that person, he encounters more peril than any septuagenarian is entitled to.

   Dearborn is an endearing character and, with the exception of L.A. Morse’s “Old Dick,” the horniest old man in mystery fiction. This entertaining elderly sleuth (who combines the best of the little-old-lady detectives with quirks of his own) reappears in Sneaks (1979) and Perfect Fools (1982).

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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.