Created by John Dunlap
“Someday I’m going to loosen those binds on her hands and show the establishment that (Lady) Justice is really a mean bitch waiting for the chance to get those scales (of justice) back in her hands where they belong and to have her revenge on all those who have usurped her power for too long.”
Private eye JACK SULLIVAN was a detective once upon a time, for the Gateway City cops, but was forced to resign because, according to him, he couldn’t be “bought, bribed, or bent.”
So now he scratches out a living as a hard-boiled private eye, sporting “a battered trench coat, his trusted .357 Magnum, and eyes that have seen too much.”
So, at first glance, there’s nothing here that’s breaking any new ground. Not that that’s necessarily a dealbreaker, but Jack’s pretty much your standard issue dick — cynical, divorced a few times, with a faithful office manager (“And what a body!”) and a handy office bottle (Scotch, if you’re keeping track). He speaks lovingly of his gun, and he lives alone.
A bland title, a painfully generic cover and the setting of it all in an obligingly corrupt fictional city designed to fit the author’s vision probably doesn’t help. And naturally it’s all narrated in first person by Jack in toughguyspeak. Unfortunately he doesn’t seem to have much of a distinctive voice; he’s more Mike Hammer (night is when the scum come out) than Philip Marlowe, but several tiers down from either. The suspiciously generic five-star reviews on Amazon aren’t particularly convincing, either.
Still, if John M. Dunlap proceeds as promised, the self-published The Case Files of Jack Sullivan, Private Eye, Volume One (2025), which contains two novellas, is just the opening salvo, with five more promised “novels” in “various stages of development.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The writer, director, and producer of several short films , John M. Dunlap is a graduate of the University of Missouri St. Louis, where he studied Film and Media. More recently, he’s focussed on literature, most notably detective fiction.
NOVELLAS
- “The Shopkeeper’s Secret” (2025, The Case Files of Jack Sullivan, Private Eye, Vol. 1 )
- “Date with Death” (2025, The Case Files of Jack Sullivan, Private Eye, Vol. 1 )
COLLECTIONS
- The Case Files of Jack Sullivan, Private Eye, Volume One) (2025) | Buy this book | Kindle it!
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
