Coronet Books
5 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.
Indianapolis police veteran, Lt. Leroy Powder, works nights. Every night. It suits him, not least because it keeps him away from the department's higher-ranks - the ones who are less concerned about doing things right than about advancing their careers. Powder's not popular with those types because he likes things to be done right. He's even ready to show other officers how to become better cops. Not that they always appreciate it. Powder's not a popular guy, but so what? Doing right by the citizens of Indy is what matters.
It's one more average night in Indianapolis. Burglaries, assaults, a missing girl. And then someone reports a body, a man murdered with a distinctive MO. But why don't the daytime cops in Homicide work the case right? Well, they can't complain if Powder helps out on his own time, can they? And what's a private eye named Samson got to do with it all?
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.