WARREN MURPHY “Another Day, Another Dollar.” First published in Murder on the Run: Stories from the Adams Round Table (Berkeley, hardcover, February 1998). Reprinted in The Shamus Winners: America’s Best Private Eye Stories, Volume II: 1992-2009, edited by Robert J. Randisi (Perfect Crime Books, 2010).

   To start with, if the guys who run the Private Eye Writers of America want to call this a PI story, I’m not going to argue with them. It’s close enough, even though the leading protagonist is a middle-aged black woman who works on the line in an automobile factory. I don’t think anyone who works there knows why she stepped down from the secretarial pool there to work down there, but the reason is an easy one.

   She needed the money. Money she used to raise her nephew. Money to make him the man he is. Or was. He and his wife have been found murdered. Strangled. What she does not understand is why there is no mention of their young daughter. The police do not even seem to know of her existence. And it is the life of the youngster who is the focus of her own life from that point on.

   She takes a leave of absence from her job, and does what a PI would do, once hired. Find the girl. Which of course she does. With a vengeance. I wondered in the beginning how Mr. Murphy, best known as being the co-anther of the tough guy The Destroyer series, could get away with writing about the adventures of a middle-aged black lady. But that he does. Whether it’s a PI story or not, it’s one worth reading. No doubt about it.