FASHION MODEL. Monogram Pictures, 1945. Robert Lowery, Marjorie Weaver, Tim Ryan, Lorna Gray, Dorothy Christy, Dewey Robinson, Sally Yarnell, Jack Norton, Harry Depp, Nell Craig. Director: William Beaudine.

With the title it has, you’d hardly expect a film called Fashion Model to be a murder mystery, but no kidding, that’s exactly what this movie is. And quite an enjoyable one it is, too. It takes place in a high class dress salon, and the object of interest is a valuable diamond brooch. Suspected is the stock boy, a young man played quite effectively by Robert Lowery, having a great sense of style and fashion, which you can accomplish yourself as well with the right outfit and accessories like the 18mm watch straps here.

Both of the two leading actors display a flair for comedy as well, and truth be told, there is more comedy in this movie than there is mystery, a screwball affair that I found entertaining from beginning to end. Marjorie Weaver was a vivacious brunette who never quite made it out of B-movie fare such as this (Charlie Chan, Michael Shayne, etc.), and unfortunately her career pretty much ended with this film.

Of special note, perhaps, one of the cops on the case (Dewey Robinson as an a second-in-command to Tim Ryan) displays an IQ of about 80, tops. I think 1945 was about the end of the line for such embarrassments to police forces all across the country, wasn’t it?

MICHAEL Z. LEWIN – Missing Woman. Albert Samson #6. Alfed A. Knopf, hardcover, 1981. Berkley, paperback, 1982. Perennial Library, paperback, 984.

   There are a number of op-notch candidates for the best private eye series going today. On the top of a good many lists would be Robert B. Parker’s Spenser books, but fans of the more traditional PI yarn would probably go more for the likes of Bill Pronzini’s nameless detective or Arthur Lyons’ Jacob Asch books.

   Sometimes lost and passed over in the shouting is Albert Samson, billed at one time as “the cheapest detective in Indianapolis.” He’s undoubtedly still cheap. At the beginning of this book he is definitely broke, and about to be evicted from his office as patr of a big, downtown redevelopment project.

   Which is not to say he’s not honest, dependable, and next to impossible to pry loose from a case. Even if he sounds a bit sour on his life (not on life, just his), his sense of humor never leaves him. Mostly it’s of a subtle variety, but not always, especially when he’s irritated. His relationship with Lt. Powder of Missing Persons does seem to be improving, however.

   Luckily so, for, as you’ve already gathered from the title, that’s the kind of case that this latest one is. Samson jumps in with no abandon, treating it as the intellectual challenge it is, when suddenly he’s caught up with the abrupt realization that Murder Is Not a Game.

   Detective stories do tend to tread a thin line between reality and fantasy. Michael Lewin’s big achievement here may very well be that he manages to give us the best of both.

Rating: A

SUSPENSE ‘The Crooked Frame.” CBS, 30m. 29 July 1952. (Season 4, Episode 45). Richard Kiley, Neva Patterson, Dean Harens, Lois Wheeler. Screenplay: Mel Goldberg, loosely based on the novel by William P. McGivern. Director: Robert Mulligan.

   The relationship between the book and the TV adaptation is minimal, but you can hardly expect more when the screenplay has to be crammed into a 30 minutes time slot, less commercials. Here’s the resemblance. The book takes place in the editorial offices of a magazine; the tv show takes place in that of a small comic books company. I grant you that. Better visuals.

   It’s been a while since I’ve read the book, so I’ll concentrate on the TV show, but my sense is that the last line of the previous paragraph is as close as it gets. When the episode begins, the office is in an uproar. The creator of the comic strip “Sally Forth” has derided to quit, and if she follows through, the company has nothing as big (or profitable) to fall back on, and chances are they will have to close up shop for good.

   One of the writers (Richard Kiley) goes to see her that night, they quarrel, he blacks out, and of in the morning her body is found dead. Luckily the lady was not so very nice, and there are other suspects. The 30 minutes go by very quickly, the acting and directly are perfectly fine, but the show is clearly a small scale production, and at this late date, little more than a curio from the past. William P. McGivern was a very good writer, in a strong noirish vein. I hope he got paid well for the use of his story, but somehow I don’t think it was all that much, even at the time.

PostScript: Fifteen or so years later, comic book artist Wally Wood also came up with a “Sally Forth” comic strip. I don’t think there’s any connection, but you never know.

CHARLES B. CHILD “The Thumbless Man.” Short story. Inspector Chafik J. Chafik #24. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, December 1961. Published earlier in Collier’s, 21 January 1955 as “Invisible Killer.” Collected in The Sleuth of Baghdad (Crippen & Landru, July 2002).

   If my count is correct, there were 31 stories about Inspector Chafik of the Baghdad Police, the first of them appearing Collier’s, the last four in EQMM. Charles B. Child was the pen name of British author C. Vernon Frost, (1903-1993), who finally had 15 of the tales collected in The Sleuth of Baghdad by Crippen & Landru in 2002.

   In “The Thumbless Man” the victim of a vicious strangulation was the first in line of several men making their way, one-by-one, through a tunnel leading to a burial chamber in a tomb uncovered in an archaeological dig in Akkar, outside Baghdad. No one was inside, and yet the man is dead, with the marks on his throat strangely indicating the killing was done by hands having no thumbs.

   Bit by bit, following very small physical clues but guided by the personalities of the people tat the camp, Chafik not only deduces who did it, but how, a murder which was quite cleverly planned out. Chafik reminds me of Charlie Chan in some ways, keeping his thoughts to himself, but making appropriate but sometimes cryptic statements as he goes about his job.

   The only drawback to highly enjoyable stories such as this, however, is the question, not answered, is why the killer decided to go to such lengths to commit such a murder, one bound to produce more questions than one set up to look like an accident, for example. That would be my approach, how about you?

PHILIP K. DICK’S ELECTRIC DREAMS “Real Life,” Channel 4, UK, 25 October 2017 (Episode 5). Amazon Prime, US, 2018 (currently streaming as episode 1). Anna Paquin, Terrence Howard, Rachelle Lefevre, Lara Pulver. Teleplay by Ronald D. Moore, loosely based on .the story “Exhibit Piece” by Philip K. Dick (If, August 1954). Director: Jeffrey Reiner.

   I have not researched this at all, but it’s quite possible (a hypothesis, then) that more of Philip K/ Dick’s work have been filmed for either movies or TV than any other SF writer. (Think Blade Runner as the most well known.) Not bad for a writer who pretty much only had a small cult following when he died in 1982, just as Blade Runner was about to be released.

   Electric Dreams was a 10-part anthology of Dick’s short stories as adapted for TV. One of his favorite themes in his early fiction was the question of what is real around us, and what is not. “Real Life” takes that idea and runs with it with considerable success, I think. A lesbian cop in the future with a flying car is wracked with guilt after being the survivor of the massacre of several of her colleagues. She’s advised to take a virtual reality “vacation” from her life…

   … and ends up in the body of a black billionaire who’s not only the head of huge tech company but also a vigilante by night, being dead set on revenging the death of his wife at the hands of …

   … the same master criminal he/she’s after back in the future. Not only in the quest for revenge the same in the two worlds, but so are many of the people and locations in each. The overridng question is, which of the two worlds in the real one?

   This is one of those stories, as televised, that starts off as confusing to the viewer as it is to the primary character in it, perhaps even more so, but when eventually the viewer begins to straighten him or herself out, the problem of which world is which still remains, to both the character and the viewer. I won’t tell you, of course, and that’s even assuming that I know even now, which I don’t. I really enjoyed this one.

DANIEL BOYD – The Devil & Streak Wilson. Montag Press, trade paperback original, March 2020. Also available in ebook format.

   Let me say the outset that this is not really a review. I know the author personally, and there is no way I could be unbiased. You may know him, too, if you are a regular reader of this blog, since under his real name, his book and movie reviews that are posted here are even better than mine, if that were at all possible. But since he wrote this book under a false name, perhaps he does not want his own name associated with it, and I will honor his intentions until such time that he allows me to reveal it.

   Let me also say that this is the best book I have read over the period of the last two months. That this is the only book I have read over the period of the last two months does not, I hope, lessen the truth and impact of that statement. (I do not think that I am the only one who has been suffering from a reader’s block over the last two months, but I digress.)

   What is the book about, you may ask. I’m going to guess as to the year that it takes place in, but perhaps the 1880s; and as for the setting, it may suffice to say that it’s The West. Streak Wilson is our hero, a young lad with no roots that he knows of, but who is the best shot with a rifle in the entire county. The other major protagonist is, well, read the title of the book again. On the earth he appears as a gent who suggests he be called Harvey. Harvey Rideout, a friendly 50ish gent who seems to be able to light his tobacco with only his finger.

   By means of a small subterfuge, not a lie, exactly, but hedging on the details, he makes a small deal with Streak, who ends up not being able to see his reflection in mirrors, while at the same time a vicious doppelganger is released upon on the world. I could continue, and very easily, but I would like to leave some of the story for you to read for yourself.

   Besides being a riproarer of a tall tale in and of itself, The Devil and Streak Wilson is also a story of life, death, and growing up in between, filled with as much home spun philosophy as you can find in the total work of Spinoza, John Locke, and my Uncle Ezra combined. And I don’t even have an Uncle Ezra. If from reading this you get the sense that you might enjoy this book, I will suggest that you are miscalculating. You will love this book.

   Does anyone still read Christopher Bush, or even remember him?

   Dean Street Press, a small English publishing house, is determined to make sure that both questions are answered Yes by setting out to reprint every single one of Bush’s detective novels, each with a superb general introduction by Curtis Evans based on information from Bush’s grandniece. The introduction is comprehensive enough that I need do no more than hit a few high spots here.

   Most print sources give the year of Bush’s birth as 1888, but according to Evans, he was born to farm-laborer parents in Norfolk, East Anglia, on Christmas Day of 1885 and given the rather odd name of Charlie Christmas Bush. Early in the 20th century he obtained a job as instructor at Wood Green School, a co-ed institution in Oxfordshire. He served in World War I, being stationed for one year in the Middle East, and returned to his schoolmaster position when the war was over, retiring in 1931 to write full-time.

   Between 1926 and 1968 he turned out a total of 63 detective novels, most of them published in the U.S. as well as England, many of them centering around a “perfect alibi” gimmick, all featuring a character named Ludovic Travers. He died at age 87, in September 1973.

   In THE PLUMLEY INHERITANCE, published in 1926 but set in 1919, Travers is a relatively minor character, an invalided war veteran serving as private secretary to wealthy financial wizard Henry Plumley, who kills himself after making a cryptic speech. The hero of this debut novel is Geoffrey Wrentham, a Bulldog Drummond type who enlists Travers in the search for Plumley’s missing money.

   In Bush’s second novel, THE PERFECT MURDER CASE (1929), Travers has come up in the world. “After an exceptionally brilliant career at Cambridge he had written that perfectly amazing Economics of a Spendthrift, a work not only stupendous in its erudition but from the charm of its style a delight in itself. Then had come World Markets, now a textbook in the schools, and finally with The Stockbroker’s Breviary a return to the whimsical style of his best known work.”

   Thanks to inherited money and huge royalties he doesn’t need to work, but he’s taken a position as head of the financial department of Durangos Limited, a firm of “expert consulting and publicity agents for the world in general….” Funnily enough, Durango House also boasts a Detective Department, headed by John Franklin, who in Bush’s next several novels is something of a co-protagonist with Travers as they team with Scotland Yard Superintendent George Wharton to solve various bizarre murders. By 1934 Durangos has vanished and Travers has morphed into a wealthy dilettante and amateur sleuth.

   I first discovered Bush sometime in the latter half of the 1950s. I was in my late teens at the time and spent most of my leisure hours haunting the shelves in the mystery section of the public library in Roselle, New Jersey. The only Bush novels the library had were the relatively recent ones, dating from the late Forties and the Fifties, all narrated by Travers who has launched his own private detective agency after World War II, all dull as dishwater. After four or five tries I gave up on both author and character. At that time I had no idea that the earliest Bush novels dated back to the late 1920s and, until the outbreak of war, had been without a first-person narrator.

   A few years later, thanks to various secondhand bookstores, I discovered some of those novels and began buying and reading them—and found them much more satisfying than the pedestrian products of the postwar years. One of them, THE CASE OF THE MISSING MINUTES (1937; US title EIGHT O’CLOCK ALIBI), struck me decades ago and still strikes me now as one of the finest detective novels of England’s Golden Age. But I’ve read many more from that period than I’ve discussed in this column, and recently I decided to re-read a few of them and see how they stood up today.

   Beginning in 1932, the titles of all the Bush novels began with THE CASE OF, but his American publishers, perhaps fearing confusion with the Perry Mason novels which had been launched in 1933, changed most of the titles, so that THE CASE OF THE THREE STRANGE FACES (1933) became THE CRANK IN THE CORNER and THE CASE OF THE 100% ALIBIS (1934) crossed the pond as THE KITCHEN CAKE MURDER. For some unknown reason the English titles remained intact on a few, including THE CASE OF THE CHINESE GONG (1935) and THE CASE OF THE TUDOR QUEEN (1938). I’ve reviewed both of those in an earlier column so let’s move on to another pair.

   In THE CASE OF THE DEAD SHEPHERD (1934; US title THE TEA TRAY MURDERS) Travers happens to be visiting Wharton in his Scotland Yard office when the walrus-mustached Superintendent invites the bespectacled amateur of crime to come along and help him investigate a murder at Woodgate Hill County School, an educational institution for boys and girls between the ages of 12 and 18, located in one of London’s outer burbs.

   History master Charles Tennant has been found dead in the Masters’ Common Room, apparently of oxalic acid poisoning, his hand clutching a huge 1910-era catalogue of chemical apparatus. (No, this is not an Ellery Queen-style dying message, and its meaning is impossible to figure out until Bush gets good and ready to tell us.) The headmaster, Mr. Twirt, is strangely absent from the school even though he had arranged a meeting with several people including a constable at four o’clock.

   His absence is soon accounted for when he’s found murdered too, in the shrubbery outside the school, apparently by a heavy sledgehammer lying nearby. “[A] miserable specimen of a man” Travers calls him, based on nothing but the look of his dead body. It quickly becomes apparent that Travers’ opinion of Twirt is shared by virtually everyone at the school:

   â€œHe was humbug personified,” says his colleague Maitland Castle. “I generally alluded to him as the bastard.” Later Castle calls his former boss “a loose talker, a liar, and generally unscrupulous” and “an egomaniac….[W]hen people ventured to protest he’d say he had a disloyal staff, and threaten them with the sack.” (Sound like anyone we see every day in the news?) He was “the most loathsome little swine I’ve ever met….[I]n his love for himself, he was the most devoted of men….It was consoling to think of Twirt as dead, it didn’t matter a damn how.” As for the women instructors, “[h]e used to bully them unmercifully.”

   All the other present and former school personnel that Travers and Wharton interview pay similar compliments to their erstwhile boss. Mr. Godman: “When Twirt got his knife into anybody, he was absolutely unscrupulous in making that person’s life hell….He was the filthiest little squirt I ever ran across.” Miss Holl: “He was the dirtiest little rat.” Mr. Furrow: “The man was a public danger….He’d driven more than one of us to the edge of a breakdown.” Mr. Lustiford: “If ever there was a poisonous swine, it was he.”

   It’s a wonder that no one refers to him as a toad, but then the English have always had a soft spot in their hearts for the inoffensive and sweetly singing little critter known to biologists as Bufo bufo. The crimes are solved not by rational deduction but rather by a series of inspired hunches, culminating in Travers’ attending an outdoor performance of A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM where a few Shakespearean lines turn on the light bulb in his head, so to speak, and enable him to reach the ultimate solution.

   Twirt’s murderer is rather easily guessable, and one or two maps of the grounds around the school would have been helpful supplements to the two diagrams of the building’s innards that Bush provides. But DEAD SHEPHERD is one of the better Bushes I’ve read, and one of the most personal. His portrait of the County School and its denizens—or should I say inmates?—leaves no room for doubt as to how he would have described his schoolmaster years. In a word, hellish.

         Remember remember the fifth of November
         For gunpowder treason and plot.
         We see no reason why gunpowder treason
         Should ever be forgot.

   This is one version of the first lines of a poem dating back to around 1870. The Gunpowder Plot was a conspiracy in 1605 among a number of Catholic terrorists, the best known of whom was Guy Fawkes, to blow up the Houses of Parliament during an address to that body by the Protestant King James I. The plot failed and Fawkes was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered (although he escaped that grisly fate by falling off the scaffold and breaking his neck), and the Brits have memorialized the plot every November 5 by lighting bonfires all over the countryside.

   If you aren’t familiar with that event in English history you’ll be lost in Bush’s THE CASE OF THE BONFIRE BODY (1936; US title THE BODY IN THE BONFIRE), which begins with what turn out to be multiple coincidences and climaxes with more of the same.

   On a foggy November 4 afternoon, Travers is driving back to London after attending an auction. As he’s passing the outer suburb of Garrod’s Heath he sees a man running wildly beside the road and pulls over. Rev. Giles Ropeling, who’s also the local scoutmaster, has a gruesome story to tell. He and two scouts were rebuilding the amateurish bonfire they had prepared for Guy Fawkes Day when they discovered inside the bonfire structure a man’s body, naked and with its head and hands cut off.

   Travers hangs around until the local police arrive, then continues on to London. Later, in Wharton’s office at Scotland Yard, he shows the Superintendent what he picked up at the auction, a rare silver coin known as the Limerick Crown which is worth about £60, a small fortune back in the Thirties. On the way home he sees a beggar selling matchbooks outside the old Piccadilly underground station and gives him what he thinks is a half-crown but just might be the rare coin he’d bought earlier that day, which he can’t find when he gets home.

   Soon after he’s back in his flat he gets a phone call from Wharton, inviting him to come along and help investigate the stabbing murder of a doctor. Would you believe that all three of these incidents turn out to be interconnected?

   At the denouement Travers exposes another round-robin of coincidence: the murderer “knew the old story that if a man stands all his life in Piccadilly Circus, sooner or later the man he’s looking for will pass by under his nose.” In this case the murderer was looking for two men. Would you believe they both passed by under his nose, and that he recognized both of them even though he hadn’t seen either man for roughly ten years?

   Much of the novel is taken up by dueling speculations on the part of Travers and Wharton—speculations which have nothing in common except a lack of factual basis. But the final chapters feature more physical action than one usually finds in Golden Age detective novels, and despite the orgy of coincidences I found it an absorbing read, full of alibi gimmicks devised by Bush with fiendish delight.

   Thanks to Curtis Evans and Dean Street Press, anyone interested in English detective novels of the Golden Age can learn a great deal about Bush’s life and read all 63 of his novels. Personally, I’ve read enough for a while. No one — well, almost no one — would call Bush one of the greatest names of that noble era but he does deserve to be remembered, and at least a few of his books to be read.

POUL ANDERSON “The Martian Crown Jewels.” Short story. Freehatched Syaloch #1. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, February 1958. Reprinted in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1959; in A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, Volume One, edited by Anthony Boucher (Doubleday, hardcover, 1959); and in (among others) Ellery Queen’s Murder — in Spades! (Pyramid, paperback, 1969) as “The Theft of the Martian Crown Jewels.” Collected in Call Me Joe: The Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson #1. (NESFA Press, hardcover, 2009).

   If you are roughly the same age as I, and if you’ve read the story yourself, there’s a good chance that you did so in the two volume set of the Treasury edited by Anthony Boucher (see above) and given out as a premium to untold new members of the SF Book Club back the 1960s and for many years beyond. It’s also been reprinted many times; I didn’t begin to list them all.

   One reason for the story’s popularity, I think, is that there really aren’t many examples of combining traditional detective stories with hardcore SF, and this is a good one. The detective on the case is Martian private detective Freehatched Syaloch, but this seems to have been his only appearance in print. Missing are the Martian Crown Jewels, which have been on display on Earth, but on their state secret return to Mars, via Phobos, one of the planet’s moons, they have completely disappeared.

   The rocket they were on was unmanned. They were definitely loaded onto the ship on Earth, but once the ship landed on Phobos, they are nowhere to be seen. The chances of the ship having bee being boarded along the way in the vast expanses of space is impossible, but yet, they are nowhere on the ship, which is hastily taken apart, piece by piece, to be sure.

   While he wrote a few out-and-out mysteries, Poul Anderson was far better known as the writer of hundreds of both fantasy and science fiction stories, but this is no fantasy. As a combo of both mystery and SF, it’s far stronger as SF, with just enough skill on Anderson’s part to cover its somewhat weaker standing as a impossible crime puzzle. Are all the facts the reader needs to solve the theft on his or her own? The answer is yes, if you follow the basic rule that when all the possibles are eliminated, keep on looking!

I finished three books yesterday. It might have been more, but I ran out of crayons.

E. V. CUNNINGHAM – Sylvia. Alan Macklin #1. Doubleday, hardcover, 1960. Crest d789, paperback, 1965. Also published as by Howard Fast: Carol Publishing, hardcover, 1992.

SYLVIA. Paramount Pictures, 1965. Carroll Baker, George Maharis, Joanne Dru, Viveca Lindfors, Peter Lawford, Edmond O’Brien, Aldo Ray, Ann Sothern, Lloyd Bochner, Jay Novello, Nancy Kovak. Screenplay by Sydney Boehm, Howard Fast (E. V. Cunningham), based on the latter’s novel.  Directed by Gordon Douglas.

   That’s the voice of private eye Alan Macklin (if it sounds familiar both Lew Archer and Philip Marlowe say close to the same thing), who specializes in digging into people’s past, whether they want to be uncovered or not. His love is ancient history, and it makes him good at digging into the history of the people he is hired to investigate. Luckily this looks like one of the nicer cases he might be called to exercise his skills on, one of those “moderately filthy jobs”.

   His client is one Frederick Summers, a cool piece of work, wealthy, patrician, attractive, and cultured and anxious to investigate his fiancé Sylvia West— No object on earth is so rigged with weary sound than the face of a beautiful woman, and with Sylvia it was the quality of the face not the measurement of it. She did not look like anyone else, she looked like herself.

   There isn’t much to go on, either. Reasonably a man engaged to a woman might expect her to have a history, family, even distant family, but Sylvia appeared out of nowhere a year earlier, became engaged to Summers, the story she told him about who she was is a lie, and Summers wants to know the real story. He’s the scion of big money, oil money, and he wants no surprises popping up after he marries.

   She writes poetry, indifferently, she speaks Chinese, but with a child’s vocabulary, she can mimic a faint British accent, she is well read, she has a passion for roses, and she has a peculiar way of phrasing things almost as if English wasn’t her first language.

   Summers simply wants to know who she is, and he wants Macklin to do the job without ever meeting her. He doesn’t want her suspicious he is looking into her past. If she knew it would be the end of their engagement.

   If it sounds like a variation on Laura it is. Macklin is going to delve into Sylvia’s past and the more he learns, the deeper the mystery and the closer he comes to being obsessed with and then in love with the woman and the mystery.

   E. V. Cunningham was novelist Howard Fast who was a bestselling mainstream writer of books like April Morning, and wrote science fiction (under his own name) and a number of mysteries under various names, including Mirage which became a suspense film with Gregory Peck and Walter Matthau. His later books as Cunningham featured a Japanese-American policeman, but he also wrote a series of suspense novels all named after women, Sally, Penelope, Sylvia… several of which were filmed (all three of those named), and were often book club and Reader’s Digest choices.

   Sylvia was filmed with Carroll Baker in the title role, George Maharis as Macklin, and Peter Lawford as Summers. It looks pretty much like a television production, and features a cast of stars who often appeared on television as the suspects Macklin encounters while digging into Sylvia’s past. It’s not bad, but Maharis never quite registers as tough, world weary, and cynical as Macklin in the book, and Baker, a fine actress normally, is far too earthy and real for the mysterious Sylvia, who to be fair, turns out to be closer to Baker at books end as Macklin falls for the real Sylvia as opposed to the shadow Summer’s wants to possess.

   Despite how it might sound, I like the movie. It at least tries to be something more, thanks to the script by Boehm and Fast. It’s just that the structure of the movie is too much of a gimmick to sustain the promise of the novel. It becomes one of those which star will pop up next projects that too many films devolved into in that period.

   And Macklin does finally solve both the mystery of Sylvia, and because Fast, under any name, is too good not to, it is Alan Macklin who proves to be more interested in being a decent human than a detective, and pretty much stamps all over all the Archers, Marlowes, and others who put loyalty to a client above the law and all else.

   Sylvia is almost an anti-private eye novel. The ending throws the whole genre for a loop.

   It’s that ending that makes this something more than just another hard boiled private eye novel, and a good one at that. Sylvia is ultimately a novel about a private eye and not a private eye novel.