of familiar landscapes and artifacts. So the world his hero had to deal with was a world of fandom, nostalgia and pulp seriousness. (I don’t mean pulp seriousness like Race Williams being seriously irritated at the very presence of a butler in front of him, I mean the seriousness about pulp collectors and fans and dealers.) This was a world Dick knew, so Dick could spend the whole book explaining to his hero facts and anecdotes that Dick already found of interest.
And which would improve the hero.
Now, that’s pretty clever. The Comic Book Killer becomes a full-length recruiting pitch for Dick’s own personal interests. Hobart Lindsey is a dull person, more dead than alive, who comes to radiant life when exposed to things that interest Dick Lupoff. He’s humanized, sensitized, and made more attractive to women. Step right up!
However, since Dick is also warmhearted, intelligent and a fine writer, in addition to the fiendish cleverness we’ve just winkled out. The Comic Book Killer is more than a recruiting poster, more than an animated essay about the world of collecting. The story is beautifully tricky and complex and satisfying, the characters are believable and interact wonderfully, and the coming to sensitive life of the hero is gently and sympathetically done.
So can he do it again?
Of course not. As I say, I have no idea whether or not Dick had it in mind to do a Hobart Lindsey series when he began, but he had to know that the most central element in the first book was unrepeatable. Unless he gave Hobart—Bart, I feel I can call him—a lobotomy between books, there was no way he could have the same hero wake up from his dull half-dead state and discover the beauties of the world around him more than once. Bart may have further adventures—I hope he does—but they will be happening to a very different character from the one who began the first book.
Quite sensibly, what Dick did instead was shift his attention to the other significant element of the first book, the characteristics of the collector. The 1928 Duesenberg whose theft initiates this new story is no longer an actual automobile—even though it’s driven more than once in the course of the story—but is a memento, a relic of another time. Its purpose is not transportation but remembrance.
Nostalgia, remembrance, a movement into other times; that was the source of the cohesion of the first book, and it has become the subject of the second. From the introduction of a colorized Casablanca on page one, The Classic Car Killer is an extended contemplation of the question of our proper relationship with memory.
And, although the novel is light and at times refreshingly funny, it is also true that any extended consideration of time must be tinged with sadness, a sadness Dick doesn’t deny, and which is at its most poignant in the person of Bart’s mother, who moves through time willy-nilly, unlike the others who choose to replace the present with some other era in which they believe they can feel more at home.
Because of print, and film, and tape, we can live at least part of our lives in other eras. More than anyone in any preceding century, we can move at will across time, and all time becomes now. “Is that a rerun?” somebody asks, peering at the TV screen, and finally the question doesn’t matter. Nothing, or very little, disappears. If the currently popular is not popular with you, yesterday’s big hits are still on tap. If you find this moment in history uncomfortable, a poor fit, try another.
It is this phenomenon, the way our culture has made temporal nomads of us all, that Dick Lupoff taps into with Hobart Lindsey. In the first Bart story, the theme was sounded, a clarion call that woke the hero from his non-existence and introduced him to the world of shifting time. Now, with earned assurance, Bart begins to get a handle on what this means, that the solution to a mystery can exist in another time entirely (not like Ross Macdonald’s Archer novels, which weren’t about time at all, really, but about the concept of family), that events echo through time, and that he can be the master, time the servant.
So he’s done it. Dick Lupoff made the slight shift necessary to turn a novel into a novel with a sequel, and he brought it off. Good. Now I’m ready for the series.
CHAPTER ONE
Somebody had gone to a lot of trouble to colorize Casablanca. It takes a lot of work, a lot of computer time, and a lot of money to turn an old black-and-white movie into a full-scale modern production with blue skies, red wine, skin-colored skin, and blood-colored blood.
But Mother insisted on watching it with the TV controls set to turn everything back into shades of gray.
Hobart Lindsey sighed as the ancient airliner lumbered into the North African night. He couldn’t see much of the plane, but it was probably a DC-3. They don’t build airliners the way they used to, Lindsey thought. The jetliners that all the airlines used nowadays were generic. No personalities like they had in the old days. Worse even than modern cars.
The screen faded to the familiar Warner Brothers end-logo as Rick Blaine and Louis Renault walked arm-in-arm into the fog while Victor Laszlo and his wife, Ilsa Lund, escaped the Javert-like pursuit of Major Heinrich Strasser. Bogart and Rains, Henreid and Bergman and Conrad Veidt. They didn’t make actors like they used to, either.
Lindsey had sat through the picture twenty times. Or was it fifty? He recognized the greatness of the film, but it was Mother who insisted on watching it every time they showed it on cable, and if it didn’t turn up for a few weeks she would make him rent it on tape for her. He almost enjoyed the trips to Vid/Vid/Vid to look over the latest releases and the classics section.
The telephone’s intrusive burbling brought Hobart Lindsey back into the present. He left Mother sitting on the dark blue sofa. Let her stay in the past, he thought. She was happier there than in the present, better able to handle her widowhood. She wandered in time. Most often she thought that Dwight Eisenhower was just starting his presidency and Josef Stalin was menacing the Free World and that her husband—Hobart’s father—was alive and was serving on the destroyer Lewiston off the coast of North Korea and was going to come back to her someday. Hobart moved past the table still littered with the empty containers that had held their Saturday dinner of egg rolls and chow mein and shrimp in lobster sauce and moved to answer the call.
The voice that came over the telephone line was unpleasantly familiar. “Lindsey, I’m glad you’re home. You’d better hustle down to Oakland and handle this. Now!”
Lindsey moaned inwardly. There was no mistaking the voice and manner of Harden at Regional. Lindsey had spoken with him often enough, but always from the office. And he’d even met him a couple of times. But Harden’s phoning Lindsey at home was unprecedented. And on Saturday night, just when he was starting to feel happy and relaxed, halfway through a pleasant weekend!
“What happened in Oakland, Mr. Harden?”
“You’d know if you put in a few more hours, Lindsey. What time is it out there in fruits-and-nuts land?”
Lindsey looked at his Seiko. He’d moved up from a Timex, and every time he checked his watch he experienced a mixed rush of pride and guilt. Pride in the gleaming timepiece, and guilt for adding needlessly to the balance of payments deficit.
“It’s ten minutes before twelve.”
“Yes. I don’t suppose you’ve checked the incoming claims tape lately, have you?’
“I check it every morning, Mr. Harden. Ms. Wilbur or I take every call that comes in during business hours, personally.”
“You understand the International Surety KlameNet Program, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir.” Lindsey had been briefed when the KlameNet
