Title: Drop Dead Cadillac
Subtitle: A Marlowe Black Mystery
Author: Gabriel F. W. Koch
ISBN: 978-1977280701
Publisher: Outskirts Press
Pages: 302
Genre: Fiction / Crime / Detective
Reviewer: Jake Bishop
Hollywood Book Reviews
For those among you who wander around book shops looking for yellowed and dogeared copies of a still readable James M. Cain or Jim Thompson, you’ll be glad to know that not every vestige of hardboiled crime writing has gone with the proverbial wind. Drop Dead Cadillac is one contemporary writer’s homage to the Fedoras and wide lapels of guys often referred to as a gumshoe, shamus, or private dick. The author of this tale wants to make sure that devotees of detective fiction won’t miss his respect for the noir spinners who have come before him. So, he surrounds his hero with a name from Raymond Chandler, a gal Friday from Dashiell Hammett, and an attitude via Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer.
The setting is 1950s New York. The ex-cop turned Private Detective is Marlowe Black. He’s an ex-serviceman thankful to have survived World War II, still trying to come to grips with the murder of his unborn child’s mother, and doing all he can to tamp down his personal demons with tough talk, occasional sex, and enough violence (rather than music) to soothe his savage breast. None of which he finds easy.
This particular tale begins with a rape and murder that results in not just one victim, but two. It’s not gratuitously graphic but neither is it for the faint of heart. And it sets the stage for a series of events that lead to additional calamities, frequent moments of mayhem, botched attempts at murder, and killings both successful and deserved.
Marlowe Black enters the fray when a noted novelist beckons the P. I. to his rambling seaside abode. There, the sleuth is intrigued by the scribe he finds with an engaging wit and a room chocked full of typewriters. Not to mention the Cadillac that he finds with its trunk filled with numerous hungry crabs and two seriously dead naked bodies. Thus begins a plot filled with crime families in conflict, police playing catch up, and Black battling to right wrongs from the past as well as the present.
The author does a good job of keeping the pace swift, the action slam-bang, and the dialogue stylistically snarky. As when he has his hero complain, “I was beginning to like him less than when I did not like him before.” Attention to period detail is woven nicely into place, products, and personalities. New York boroughs are given just enough descriptions to etch them visibly on the page. The smell of restaurants and diners waft from the lines. Characters’ behavior and emotions feel credible both when expected and unpredictable. As in life, morality often tangles with passions, and one can never be sure which will win.
If one is looking for good, old-fashioned, hardboiled crime and punishment, one will find a trunk load of it between the pages of Drop Dead Cadillac.