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Once upon a crime, most of the classic private eyes were pretty much quirk-free.
Oh, Marlowe played chess alone, Spade slept with his partner’s wife and Hammer called his death-spitting roscoe Betsy or something.
But that was pretty much it.
But retired private dick FRANK RAVEN more than makes up for it in his one appearance to date, the deliberately offbeat The Nutting Girl (2017).
Besides a past that includes stints as a monk (blind) and a drunk (also blind), he currently runs a creaky old movie theater in sleepy Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, dances and sings with a local troupe of Morris Dancers, records bird calls on his phone and runs a small movie studio. He’s also something of an armchair philosopher, and perhaps a little too fond of dropping quotes from classic literature and sixties rock’n’roll into whatever conversation he’s having. But—retired or not—he’s still a whiz at finding people.
Which comes in handy when a young Spielberg-like director, Nick Mooney, comes to town to make a film and urges Frank to track down his wild-child star, twenty-one-year-old Juliana Velvet Norcross aka “VelCro”), a young woman who’s not quite the vapid bimbo everybody assumes she is. Unfortunately, bimbo or not, she’s swept away on the very first day of shooting. By a flood, of all things, when the local Deerfield River overflows its banks.
Did she drown? Did she fall? Did she jump? Was she pushed? The trail meanders this way and that, with plenty of philosophical pit stops along the way, with the meditative gumshoe eventually following the bread crumbs all the way to New Orleans and back.
STRAIGHT FROM THE AUTHOR’S MOUTH
- “… what In was trying to do was to write a PI novel with all the familiar tropes but still make it read fresh.”
— Fred DeVecca
