Sun 28 Oct 2018
RON ELY – East Beach. Jake Sands #2. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1995. Worldwide, paperback, 1997.
This is the same Ron Ely who played Tarzan. I haven’t read the first in the series, Night Shadows, but I read at least one review panning it. You never know, though.
Jake Sands has just about healed from the physical and emotional injuries sustained in the last book, though he still grieves for the wife and family lost earlier still. He has no desire to get back into his old dangerous line of “work,” but fate is against him.
He meets a beautiful young waitress while watching a beach volleyball game, and she promises to call him that night. She doesn’t, but he doesn’t think much about it — he really didn’t expect her to. A few days later he learns she was beaten and killed that night. Reluctantly he finds himself drawn deeper into finding out what happened to her, and more people die.
I thought this was surprisingly good. It’s a standard loner-with-tragic-past-avenging wrongs type of book, but it’s well done and I liked the character. Ely has a good feel for Santa Barbara (he lives there) and the Southern California beach life.
He tells his story first=person, and paces it well. There’s the usual problem of the police being ignored, but hell, Travis McGee did that, too. It comes with this kind of territory. This makes no pretensions to being anything other than an action/crime story, but if you like those I think you’ll like this.
Bibliographic Update: There were only the two books in the Jake Sands series.
October 28th, 2018 at 7:17 pm
I was pleasantly surprised by his first book, but missed this one. Much better than I expected in a minor JDM McGee vein.
October 28th, 2018 at 7:58 pm
I passed on both of them when they first came out, wondering how good could a mystery written by an actor be? From what Barry said and what you now tell me, I may have been wrong about that, and it certainly wasn’t very fair to Mr Ely.
And by the way, all indications are that Mr Ely wrote both himself.
October 28th, 2018 at 10:46 pm
You should never assume that an actor can’t write although a number of the books signed by actors were ghosted.
October 28th, 2018 at 10:57 pm
Quite right, Randy, which is why I made the confession I did, and added that last line to my comment #2. All indications are that Ron Ely wrote both of the two Jake Sands novels, and I may have been wrong to have so summarily dismissed them when they first came out.
October 29th, 2018 at 12:16 pm
I liked them both quite a bit, and reviewed them both in the APA. They’re still on the shelf, so perhaps time for a re-read.
October 29th, 2018 at 7:01 pm
Quite a few good writers among actors including Errol Flynn, Sterling Hayden, Dirk Bogarde, David Niven, Laurence Payne (who ironically played Sexton Blake on television), and others, though some of those ghosted books like those by Gypsy Rose Lee and George Sanders were pretty good.