Freak – Michael
Collins
The title warns us that this mystery from the early 1980s will be
in the Elmore Leonard/Loren Estleman mode of hard-boiled PI fiction. That is,
besides the loner PI hero and the lying client and razor-sharp dialogue, featured
are ultra-violence committed by disturbed perps and world-weary cynicism.
Though about 40 years have passed since those palmy Magnum PI / Miami Vice
days, the skepticism and disdain about the ways of our scheming world still
feel familiarr. Plus, the stark violence still impresses us delicate reader-introverts
powerfully. The night I finished this mystery, I had an intense dream that did
not relax my nerves.
Out of my head and into the book, however.
One-armed PI Dan Fortune in New York City is hired by Ian Campbell, owner of a successful software company, to find his son, who has taken a powder. The 26-year-old Alan, who worked for the company, inveigled a large sum of cash from his father and sold a house that pop had given to him as a wedding present. Shortly before, the son had married party-girl Helen Kay, 18 years old and, as the Sir Paul song goes, hell on wheels.
One-armed PI Dan Fortune in New York City is hired by Ian Campbell, owner of a successful software company, to find his son, who has taken a powder. The 26-year-old Alan, who worked for the company, inveigled a large sum of cash from his father and sold a house that pop had given to him as a wedding present. Shortly before, the son had married party-girl Helen Kay, 18 years old and, as the Sir Paul song goes, hell on wheels.
Fortune begins to investigate. He picks up their track and
soon finds two people he wants to question murdered. In the second case
Fortune is even in the same motel room as the bloody deed is committed, but is
beaten by the perpetrator and locked in a bathroom. This scene is pretty scary.
Always loyal to worthless clients, however, Fortune continues the
search. He finds a friend of Helen Kay who willingly informs him of the
happy couple's whereabouts and he locates them. Alan and Helen Kay pretend
to have broken out of a boring life in suburban New Jersey. Then they trick
Fortune and escape, confirming to the detective that those little rascals have somehow
not told him the whole truth. Before he can face his client again, however,
four criminals confront Fortune
As for the idea behind the "freak" of the title, it
seems clear as soon as the head crook, Jasper “J.J.” Murdoch, enters the
scene. J.J. is a toddler time bomb. His actions can never be predicted
which makes him creepy, dangerous and familiar in that it’s a stock
character:
completely crazy with a brain clogged with half-understood reading,
half-digested knowledge, emotions stirred only by rousing music by Mahler,
Sibelius, and Vaughn Williams.
Anyway, the crooks tell Fortune that they have kidnapped Alan and
Helen Kay and will release them for a ransom of a quarter-mill. The chase takes
the cast to a canyon outside of Flagstaff, Arizona, where a showdown occurs in
the Wild West-era brothel, the only preserved location in a ghost town. Collins
comes up with a grisly post-modern surprise that explains J.J.’s
psychopathology.
Worth-reading, for fans of the bleeding-edge hard-boiled noir of
the 1980s and retro stuff like pay phones and tape decks. Dennis Lynds (1924 -
2005) wrote about 20 Fortune novels from 1968 to 1995. The first Fortune novel Act
of Fear won a 1968 Edgar Award for best first
novel.
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