Before the Maltese Falcon

Reviewed: Spade & Archer, Mortal Friends, Too Many Murders, Long Time Coming

Reviewed: Spade & Archer, Mortal Friends, Too Many Murders, Long Time Coming

Spade & Archer By Joe Gores Orion 337pp, $32.99
IF any writer can pull off a forerunner to Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, it is Joe Gores. This stunning prequel begins in 1921 as Sam Spade opens his own detective agency in San Francisco, clients tumbling through his door. The next seven years see him dealing with booze runners, waterfront thugs, gold smugglers and bumbling cops. He brings in Miles Archer, who stole his girl while Spade was fighting in World War I, as a partner, and becomes the hard-boiled dick of the Falcon case. Gores gets Hammett's clarity and compactness just right.

Mortal Friends By Jane Stanton Hitchcock HarperCollins 336pp, $32.99
WASHINGTON'S Beltway Basher strikes again in this witty read, the capital's "local Ted Bundy", seemingly obsessed with his female victims. Antiques shop owner Reven Lynch finds herself involved in the hunt for the killer who may just be one of Washington's prominent people. She is persuaded by investigating detective George Gunner to become his "ersatz Mata Hari" as he negotiates the rarefied world of embassy dinners and symphony balls in search of the murderer. It's like a Washington Sex and the City, without the droll profanities. 

Too Many Murders By Colleen McCullough HarperCollins 371pp, $49.99
COLLEGE student Evan Pugh blackmails someone called Motor Mouth, but he doesn't expect to die as he reaches into a bear trap for his plastic-wrapped packet of money. Police find him gripped in the jaws of something akin to a great white shark's business end. But Captain Carmine Delmonico is even more shocked to realise this is the 12th death on April 3, 1967, almost all different. McCullough's second thriller is a perfectly respectable effort but lacks the hard edge and sardonic knowingness of the best practitioners such as James Patterson.

Long Time Coming By Robert Goddard Bantam 389pp, $32.95
IT turns out Stephen Swann's uncle Eldritch, of the raffish reputation, had not been among the thousands of Londoners killed by the Luftwaffe in 1940. His death was a lie and possibly his life too. Swann's uncle returns after 36 years in an Irish prison offering no explanation. Then the visit of a solicitor with a mysterious request transports them both back to the past and the disappearance of a priceless collection of modern art. What is the truth behind Eldritch's incarceration? Goddard writes rather classically nuanced mysteries, intricately plotted.