Created by Michael Mallory
“I can’t say I’m hard-boiled.. I’m two minutes at best.”
PERENNIALLY out-of-his-depth (and possibly slightly detached from reality) rookie private eye and old movie buff DAVE BEAUCHAMP at least had the good sense (or good luck?) to make Los Angeles his hometown.
Well… not exactly Los Angeles. More like the San Fernando Valley, with an office full of secondhand furniture in a slightly rundown building near Sherman Oaks and an apartment in Studio City. Still, as a failed lawyer, at least the Valley’s affordable.
And he’s close enough to Hollywood that the ghosts of Tinseltown’s Golden Age (Robert Mitchum, Humphrey Bogart, John Huston, Clifton Webb, Bette Davis, etc.) don’t have to travel far to whisper in his ear, offering unsolicited but occasionally helpful advice and (more frequently) scornful criticism.
So… is our friend Dave just imaging these voices in his head, or is he really hearing these voices in his head?
Like, should we be alarmed?
He also has this weird thing about people mispronouncing his name. He insists it’s pronounced BEACH-um, not Bow-chaum. Tabarnacle! He probably thinks Bellanger rhymes with “Coat hanger.”
So far, Dave has bumbled his way through a half-dozen tongue-in-cheek, exclamation-marked mysteries, starting with Kill the Mother! (2013), full of offbeat characters and oddball cases, investigating everything from a national burger chain suspected of selling nicotine-laced burgers to tracking down a long-lost, life-sized plaster sphinx used as a prop in a 1929 film.
If you got a kick out of Stuart Kaminsky‘s Toby Peters series, you might enjoy these as well — they seem like an obvious influence.