Albert Samson
8 total works
Meet Albert Samson - a detective in the tradition of Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade, Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe and Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer.
But Samson's no hard-boiled clone. For one thing, he doesn't even own a gun. For another, he works in Indianapolis, the apparently unglamorous Midwestern city where he grew up. But the city and its problems are not the stuff of stereotypes. And Samson uses his wits and his contacts to solve his clients' problems and make something of a living.
Here, in his first fictional outing - nominated for an Edgar - he has the most unusual client in his history, a sixteen-year-old school girl. She wants him to find out where her biological father is. At home with your biological mother? Samson suggests, unable to take the kid seriously. But the girl is certain. Her 'father' cannot be her father: she can prove it. And things soon get seriously complicated.
A dowdy woman hires private eye Albert Samson to locate her college chum. But is she missing or has she just run away from her husband?
A stop-start case takes Samson out of his Indianapolis comfort zone into Southern Indiana where he picks his way through intrigues, lies, and lures and where he tangles with a hostile police force. Everyone has something to hide.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if things did turn out to be as advertised, at least now and then. However here he scrapes the deceptions aside and works his way to the bottom of a tantalizing puzzle in a novel that was adapted for television in Japan.
Indianapolis private eye Albert Samson is hired to find out why a devoted sister is not being allowed to visit her brother in hospital. A salesman and researcher at a pharmaceutical laboratory, he's been in a coma and in intensive care for seven months after an accident at work. His sister's been told a visit would put him at risk. But how can that be?
Samson tries to find out, and he too gets stonewalled. But wouldn't his work be so much simpler if his clients actually told him the truth? Even so, the nest of intrigue expands to questions of murder, and even the FBI.
Can this go-for-it detective really be the Albert Samson we used to know? Advertising his wares on television? Having too many clients? If the workload is too intense, no problem: hire help for the less-pressing jobs.
In this novel, a 'Marlowe' winner in Germany, which cases have the strongest claim on Samson's attentions? Maybe it's the extraordinary fact that terrorism has come to Indianapolis. Yes, Indianapolis. A band of environmental extremists has hit the headlines by planting a bomb a week.
Not that Samson's been hired to find them - that's a job for the cops. But the city's panic has even affected Samson's normally level-headed police friend. For a moment - just a moment - the guy actually thinks Samson has something to do with the bomb-planters.
But that's ridiculous. Isn't it?
It wasn't bad enough that a ten-year-old kid had beaten him at basketball in the morning. Next Albert Samson was being badgered by a humourless prospective client. Was he, in fact, the cheapest private detective in Indianapolis? Did his daily rate include expenses or did he try to claim those on top?
Expenses were indeed extra, but Samson was still a bargain and he got the case. The client's son-in-law had been charged with murder. But she didn't want him exonerated - he had certainly pulled the trigger. What she wanted was evidence she could use to make her daughter see what a dead loss her Vietnam vet husband was. Sure, he'd been a hero over there, but this was Indianapolis, and real life, and now.
Real life is simple, right? Not this time, not when Samson discovers that his questions do not lead to satisfactory, or safe, answers.
An antiques dealer hires Albert Samson to prod a tardy producer about a play he's written. The producer has had it for weeks and now the playwright wants his script back. It's an unlikely project, but Samson hasn't got anything better to do on a snowy December night in Indianapolis.
But 'The Kokomo Case Case' turns out not to exist. Which is only the first in a long chain of ambiguous events. The series of half-truths and whole lies leads to the spectre of a murdered child.
Albert Samson, once described as the private eye combining 'the best moral qualities of the Continental Op and Lew Archer', feels life is looking good when he acquires two clients in an afternoon.
The first, an eccentric old man living in an expensive apartment and obsessed with his home computer, asks him to investigate a young man suspected of running with a wild crowd.
The second is a wealthy banker. His wife has discovered that her birth certificate is a fake which puts her whole history in doubt. Now she wonders if she has any identity at all.
Samson's investigations lead him, via dusty archives, a sentimental night club owner, the police and the press, to the 1930s and 40s and an old murder. It also leads him to suspect that a recent 'natural' death may be a cold-blooded killing.
Albert Samson is ecstatic when he finally gets his private investigator's license back. It's taken years and he's been through some very low times. But now the worst is over, at last.
And within days he has a couple of cases. Granted, one is a freebie, investigating vandalism at a neighbourhood church. But the other is the best-paying job he's ever had. He's working for lawyers defending a man accused of terrifying Indianapolis women for years. Well, everyone's entitled to a defence.
The only snag is that the arresting officer on the case was Samson's childhood friend, now a captain in the Indy police. Well, never mind. It was, after all, this 'friend' who cost Samson his license in the first place.
As Samson investigates both cases, he is led into territory far beyond what at first appears likely. And he involves some unlikely helpers, including his mother and his daughter - now all growed up and thinking about her own future. One possibility would be to join the detective agency, making it Samson & Daughter.