Lowe

Created by Ron Goulart
(1933–)

So when I first stumbled across this story in an old issue of Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, I’m thinking, “A-ha! Another southern California private eye from Ron Goulart!”

And it turns out the story, “Undertaker, Please Drive Slow,” is pretty damn excellent.

We don’t even know LOWE‘s first name. All we know is he smokes menthol cigarettes in an (unsuccessful) attempt to quit smoking, and he doesn’t like wasting his time on lost causes. And then I realized that Lowe might have been another test drive for Goulart’s John Easy, perhaps the ultimate seventies eye, whom he’d introduced in a short story in the same magazine the year before.

SHORT STORIES

• “Undertaker, Please Drive Slow” (October 1967, AHMM)