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Ace Carpenter

kevinburtonsmith

Created by Hamilton T. Caine
Pseudonym of Stephen Smoke
(1949–)

“Her spirits, as well as her tits and ass, were beginning to sag more than a little.”
— Caine tries to do Chandler in Hollywood Heroes.

ACE CARPENTER is a Southern California P. I. created by Hamilton T. Caine (actually Stephen Smoke, founder and editor of Mystery Magazine). In fact, Smoke worked out the character in a handful of short stories in that magazine, before making the jump to novels.

Ace’s debut, 1981’s Carpenter, Detective, was a finalist for the Best Paperback Original Shamus, and there was a solid sequel, Hollywood Heroes, that popped up five years later.

As I recall, I enjoyed the books, partcularly the first one. I thought they were pretty good solid P.I. fare, full of Chandleresque patter, and they certainly deserved far better than Living to Die, a criminally inept 1991 B-flick starring (and directed by) Wings Hauser.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Not that Living to Die apparently slowed down author Hamilton T. Caine (an obvious pseudonym of Stephen Smoke, which also sounds like a pseudonym). He’s become something of a Shamus Game renaissance man, with his fingers in an awful lot of pies. He’s a musician and songwriter, author of over thirty books, including the New Agey, hard-boiled P.I. series featuring Nick Sands, and a filmmaker/multi-media artist. Besides founding the short-lived Mystery Magazine, he published one of the first online mystery magazines, Hamilton Caine’s Mystery Digest, on CompuServe way back in 1984.

NOVELS

SHORT STORIES

FILM

FURTHER INVESTIGATION

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.

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