A few months ago, I 86’d a whole bunch of books by Lawrence Block — so what am I doing with a new one now? Well, those books were from his really awful action/thriller series, but while perusing his bibliography, I saw that there was one final mystery series of his I hadn’t tried yet — the Chip Harrison books.
It’s so hard to find competently written trash, so I gave it a go, and here we are.
And this is a fun read. It’s explicitly a Rex Stout pastiche — the schtick is that Harrison’s boss is a detective who collects rare fish, and who believes that Nero Wolfe is a real person, and has (sort of) modelled his life after him.
The plot is satisfyingly loopy — up to a point. Block makes the rookie mistake of breezing past a bunch of different characters that could all be the killer, but the second we get to the culprit, he shifts mode and goes into more details. So I went “OK, that’s the murderer — I have no idea why, or how, but mystery solved”, and that turned out to be accurate. (And the why and how was probably the stupidest I’ve read in a mystery novel, and I’ve read a lot of stupid mysteries.)
But still — there’s repartee and amusing characters, and that helps a lot. It’s fun, and I think I’ll get the other two books in the series, and then I’ll be done with Lawrence Block.
Make Out With Murder (1974) by Lawrence Block (buy used, 3.46 on Goodreads)