RICHARD BLAINE – The Silver Setup. Pageant Books, paperback original; 1st printing, August 1988.

   The Silver Setup is first of two recorded adventures of hardboiled L. A. PI Mike Garrett, the second being The Tainted Jade (1989). Both were published by Pageant Books, a firm whose two-year existence coincided exactly with that of Garrett, 1988-89. These two years also span the career of the pseudonymous Richard Blaine, at least under that name.

   The year is 1948. One briefly wonders why the LA background for Garrett is so greatly emphasized. This first case finds him working in a small industrial town somewhere outside Philadelphia, and the second book reportedly finds him in Texas. But it doesn’t matter too much. His tough guy veneer and constant wise guy repartee is the same everywhere. It’s only that they seem to rub the cops in Lancaster the wrong way more than usual when the bodies start to mount up.

   He’s hired this time around to find a missing husband, the wife being an old friend of a pal back in LA. It’s an easy case. He finds the man dead in a motel of ill repute within a day of looking, laid out dead on a bed with a gun in his hand.

   Suicide? Garrett doesn’t think so, and of course complications quickly arise. Tough cops and tougher hoodlums run the town, and Garrett runs afoul of both, and his body soon shows it.

   Blaine is channeling Chandler in his storytelling, no doubt about it. Some sample lines: “She sat there now squeezing a small shiny black clutch purse in her lap, squeezing it the way you go after the last bit of toothpaste in an old, wrinkled tube.” (p.77)

   And from p.127:

    My next stop was the liquor store for some more Old Kentucky. The same old man looked at me kind of funny, “Where you putting it?” he asked. “Gasoline rationing is over.”

    “I’ve got a sick friend,” I told him.

    “You must not want him to get better,” he said.

   I didn’t say anything.

   The solution is more complicated than it needs to be, but along the way there are quite a few twists in the tale, some of them obvious, a couple of them doozies. What this is is a throwback to the days when hardboiled private eye tales were expected to be fair play detective novels too. This one obliges on that account as well, in spades.