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BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY RICHARD A. LUPOFF
The Adventures of Professor Thintwhistle & His Incredible Aether Flyer (with Steve Stiles)
Killer’s Dozen: Thirteen Mystery Tales
Lisa Kane: A Novel of Werewolves
Sacred Locomotive Flies
Sword of the Demon
THE LINDSEY & PLUM DETECTIVE SERIES
1. The Comic Book Killer
2. The Classic Car Killer
3. The Bessie Blue Killer
4. The Sepia Siren Killer
5. The Cover Girl Killer
6. The Silver Chariot Killer
7. The Radio Red Killer
8. The Emerald Cat Killer
9. One Murder at a Time: The Casebook of Lindsey & Plum
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 1994, 2012 by Richard A. Lupoff
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
DEDICATION
For my Brother with Love
INTRODUCTION
by Jane Langton
A suspense novelist sometimes carves out a special niche, a personal space, by sticking to one subject or setting.
Tony Hillerman writes about crimes on Indian reservations in New Mexico, Emma Lathen about shady manipulations on Wall Street, Jonathan Gash about hanky-panky among dealers in antiques.
Richard Lupoff’s bailiwick is all his own, the world of the nostalgic collector. His protagonist, Hobart Lindsey, works for International Surety, an insurance company that must shell out when the valuable collectibles it insures are stolen—rare comic books or classic cars or antique airplanes. Lindsey does his best to save the company enormous sums by tracking down the lost articles himself. Along the way, the reader is treated to fascinating lore about Batman and the Human Torch in The Comic Book Killer, a parade of glamorous automobiles in The Classic Car Killer and a succession of Zeros, Focke-Wulfs and B-17 bombers in The Bessie Blue Killer. Of fabulous value and heavily insured, the comic books and the magnificent cars and the heroic war planes vanish or are threatened, and International Surety sends Lindsey on the road to find out what happened. Like any ordinary hard-boiled private investigator, he must work his way past many a dangerous obstacle before tracking down the clever deceiver at last.
Along the way, bobbing up in Lindsey’s mind during his pursuit of lost valuables, are remembered fragments of the pop culture of the thirties, forties, fifties and sixties. Walking into villainous bar or sleazy hotel, he is reminded of old films with Victor Mature and Jane Russell, or Jack Webb in “Dragnet,” or the music of Miles Davis, or the jingle of Gary Cooper’s spurs as he saunters into the Last Chance Saloon.
There was a TV set above the bar. It looked like something out of the Lyndon Johnson era. It was silent and dark. Maybe they’d left it up as a memorial to the Great Society.
Swift images like these enliven the action, evoking layer upon layer of time. The sense of a superimposed present and past is not easily come by in a thriller. Most of the characters in a mystery novel inhabit a flickering now. Lupoff’s have histories that sometimes coincide with our own. We too remember Billie Holiday. The intersection of the reading self with the invented one brings the fictional person sharply alive.
Another specialty of Lupoff’s, part of the niche he inhabits, is the setting, his home territory, the California cities of Berkeley and Oakland. Hobart Lindsey moves in a landscape that rises vividly around us as we follow him—the sun falls behind the East Bay hills, fifty thousand people roar in the Oakland Coliseum, the morning fog descends on Berkeley, kids mill around on a dangerous street in downtown Richmond, a gray cat strolls down a gangplank to a wooden pier on the Oakland Estuary.
He drove to Oakland…and found the Embarcadero. Roberts’ address was in a block of modernistic condos opposite a railroad track and an industrial slum. But the condos themselves looked expensive, and with the estuary on the other side, it seemed a safe bet that the occupants wiped the sight of the factories and warehouses from their minds when they got home at night.
This is more than pleasant description, it’s social commentary, evoking a complex image in depth, reminiscent of the way Raymond Chandler writes about Los Angeles.
The landscape isn’t merely a background against which events happen. Rather it has an organic relation to the story, which grows out of it like a strangling vine wrapping around the legs of Hobart Lindsey and Morton Kleiner and Aurora Delano and Desmond Richelieu and Lieutenant High.
Something else that sets Richard Lupoff’s stories apart is his profound interest in the color of his characters’ skins, his close examination of a multiracial metropolis. It’s not simply his white protagonist’s love for Marvia Plum, an attractive and brilliant black woman. It’s his keen depiction of the interaction of black and white at every level.
A poignant example is the moment when Lindsey introduces Marvia to his mother on the last page of The Comic Book Killer. Throughout the story as it unfolds we have become familiar with Mother, lost in a dream world of the 1950s, completely out of touch with the present. Through her son’s concern and sympathy we too are committed to her welfare. It is all the more shocking when she greets Marvia as if she were the new cleaning woman:
“You must be the new girl,” she said. “1 try to keep up with the house but it’s such a problem with a little one underfoot and my husband away at war. It’s hard to get a good colored girl to clean up. I hope you’ll work out better than the last one we had.”
It hurts. There’s a real pang. And pangs are few in detective fiction, in spite of the proliferation of murders as we flip the pages.
Lost collectibles, nostalgia, Berkeley and Oakland, race relations—these are all part of Lupoff’s special niche. But the principal occupant is Hobart Lindsey himself, a man of stature. As a character, he is both real and good, no mean trick. Lindsey moves through Lupoff’s chapters cautiously, making his way thoughtfully from point to point, carrying no gun:
“Well, what about your pistol permit?”
“Don’t have a permit. Don’t have a pistol. Don’t know how to use one. Don’t want to learn.”
“That’s the trouble with you minimalists. Nothing we can threaten to take away from you. How are we supposed to keep you in line?”
Unarmed, his courage is the greater, if more wary. Inevitably, he is attacked. Violence swirls around him, and he goes down. When he gets up, he doesn’t reach for the gin and leap into his car. He has a terrible headache. But his limited strength is balanced by intelligence and a politely ironic view of the world. His likableness grows on us, turning into admiration. Lindsey, we discover with gratitude, is a man of compassion. For instance, after learning that a child
