Sun 7 Nov 2010
Reviewed by Allen J. Hubin: STEPHEN PAUL COHEN – Island of Steel.
Posted by Steve under Authors , Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Reviews[5] Comments
Allen J. Hubin
STEPHEN PAUL COHEN – Island of Steel. Morrow, hardcover, 1988. Paperback reprint: Avon, 1989.
Stephen Paul Cohen, a real estate lawyer now living in Minneapolis, introduced Eddie Margolis in Heartless, not read by me. Eddie now returns in Island of Steel.
Here he’s working for the Charles Murphy Detective Agency, even though he has no experience in investigation and his boss is almost never around. To top this, he’s assigned to find a real estate lawyer who’s missing from the prestigious New York firm of Fenner, Covington & Pine.
Why would an upwardly mobile attorney go out for cough drops one afternoon and never return? Could it be fatal to find out?
Nicely peopled, nicely plotted, nicely tensioned, a pleasure to read.
Bibliographic Data: There were, as it happens, only the two adventures of Eddie Margolis. In terms of crime fiction, Cohen later co-authored a near-future thriller, Night Launch (Morrow, 1989), with then Senator Jake Garn, and on his own, a paperback novel entitled Jungle White, published only in Thailand.
Mike Grost has a short section on Cohen on his Classic Mystery and Detection website. He says in part, “Cohen has considerable poetic skills of description. Both novels seem to be epic poems, an Iliad and Odyssey set in modern New York City.”
November 7th, 2010 at 8:21 pm
Even though ISLAND OF STEEL was reprinted in paperback, both the book and the author are new to me.
With a favorable review from Al Hubin like this, and perhaps even more favorable comments by Mike Grost, both critics whose opinions I trust, it looks as though I missed the boat on this one when it came out.
November 8th, 2010 at 10:35 am
Steve,
I’d never heard of NIGHT LAUNCH or JUNGLE WHITE. Will try tracking these down. Thank you!
My review was written almost 20 years ago. Found these books in the public library, thought Cohen was going to have a big career.
Lots of “mid-list” writers found their markets vanish in the early 1990’s. It was bad, bad, bad for mystery fiction.
November 8th, 2010 at 2:27 pm
The market for all genre fiction is always in a state of flux and following the latest fad, witness all the Dan Brown clones and all of the urban fantasy/vampire/werewolf thrillers that have taken over the mystery and SF sections of your favorite local chain bookstore.
But you’re right about the early 90’s, Mike. Lots of PI series and their equivalent got choked off around then, about the time that various female-oriented “cozy” series started to take off. It sounds as though that’s what happened to Cohen.
November 9th, 2010 at 3:25 am
This is one I may have to look up considering who is doing the reccommending, but just for a second when I saw that mention of one book published only in Thailand, I started checking to see if I had slept through Christmas and New Years and April 1rst had slipped up on me.
I’d love to know how an American writer managed to have one of his books only published in Thailand.
March 26th, 2021 at 4:06 pm
[…] source of information is Allen J. Hubin’s review of Island of Steel on the Mystery File website. Comments suggest that publishers may have dropped hard-boiled fiction in the early 1990s, […]