Miami Mayhem by Marvin Albert

As hurricane Irma approached Florida, even though I was a good distance inland, it was a bit unsettling.

Tony Rome with Frank Sinatra turned up on the broadcast TV channel Movies!, and I recorded it and watched it Saturday afternoon Sept. 10 as the storm neared Florida.

It had been a while since I'd seen it, having first learned of it in Jon Tuska's The Detective in Hollywood when I was a kid. It came in the wake of Paul Newman's Harper as part of a mini-detective cycle in the late '60s. I caught it finally on cable years after that.

I'd forgotten much of it as I re-watched the film, which was about all I could really focus on that pre-Irma afternoon with all the hurricane prep I could manage already accomplished. 

Maybe the Miami setting played a small role. It was kind of relaxing watching Sinatra drive Jill St. John around in a convertible on happier and sunny Florida days.

The storm passed through in the wee hours of Sept. 11-12 , bringing us a lot of wind, but we survived and were lucky. We lost power 36 hours or so and had water and canned ravioli, so we fared OK.

I plucked the novel the movie was based on from my shelves. Somewhere along the way I picked up a tie-in edition of the 1960 book but had never read it.

I was pleasantly surprised. The novel's really deftly plotted and fairly character rich. I suspect Albert was a Raymond Chandler fan, but resemblances are really a tip of the fedora, I believe.

Anthony Rome, the hard-boiled narrator protagonist, is an ex-Miami cop with a gambling problem. He lives on a houseboat called the Straight Pass from the craps game that won it for him, and Travis McGee's Busted Flush is possibly a tip of the fedora to that even though McGee didn't wear one.

Anthony aka Tony's slightly less cool than Sinatra is in the movie. He gets rattled a little more, but the movie's fairly faithful to the novel's plot.

Rome is called on by an ex-partner to drive a missing heiress home from a seedy hotel where she's wound up at the end of a drinking binge. When he arrives at her dad's house, he's promptly hired by her businessman father, Rudy Kosterman,  to find out what's troubling his daughter, his only heir from a first marriage.

By the time Tony makes it back to the Straight Pass, thugs are waiting, in search of a daisy-shaped diamond pin the daughter, Diana Pines, should have been wearing.

Tony's situation gets worse from there. That ex-partner's murdered soon after Tony asks about the missing pin, and he's off to figure out what's up as his efforts lead to word of a swindler named Nimmo and his henchman named Catleg.

From ruined-mansions to secret gambling dens and redneck shanty towns, Tony dodges bullets, outmaneuvers cops, including pal Lt. Santini, and encounters drug dealers. He finally figures out what's up with the pin and the Kosterman family as the tale winds down. It really all ties together in a tight package.

I need to look up the other Rome books including Lady in Cement, which was also adapted into a film about a year after Tony Rome. Albert moved on from Rome after three titles to craft a longer series about a hero named Pete Sawyer. 

Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death by Tucker Coe aka Donald E. Westlake

I discovered Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death first on one paperback rack or another when the Charter edition appeared. I'd read Chandler and MacDonald by then, so a tale of an unlicensed private detective looked like an interesting one to peruse.

The edition was apparently issued in 1976, but I'm not sure it was that early that I ran across it. Paperbacks floated around in news service vans, finding their way to random corners of the universe in those days.

I didn't realize in that moment that Tucker Coe was a pseudonym for Donald E. Westlake, creator of Dortmunder, the hapless robber, and as Richard Stark, Parker, the much more grim and professional thief.

As I recall my dad read it around the time I did and liked it also, but recently I realized I could remember little more than the fact that Mitch Tobin, the ex-cop hero was building a wall around his back yard as he investigated a murder case.

As with many things I read when I was young, I suspect many of the subtleties of character were lost on me the first time around.

I still had the paperback amid private eye novels on my shelf, so I decided to re-read it the other day after plucking it out to share a photo with other Tsundoku types in a Facebook group, and it was great to revisit it with mature eyes.

Secrets and lies
The story seems deceptively straightforward at first. Tobin, booted off the force following his partner's death is approached to conduct a murder investigation even though he holds no investigator's license.

Tobin, we learn, was seeing a mistress while on duty and failed to provide backup for his partner on a police call that turned deadly.

Months into exile from the force though still married, Tobin's approached by a representative of "the corporation" for help. He's building the above-mentioned wall as a way of metaphorically putting his life back together and would rather keep building, but he sees the investigation as perhaps a path to some form of redemption, maybe both professionally and spiritually. His wife Kate's been supporting the family with extra shifts at a five and dime.

The mob of the Tobin world is indeed very corporate with dark-suited managers interacting with union representatives and quasi-legitimate business executives.

Corporate intrigue
Married mobster Ernie Rembek, sort of a regional manager for the corporation, has lost his girlfriend, Rita Castle. She left the apartment he provided with a suitcase full of cash. A note states she's found a "real man" to help spend it. Unfortunately for her, she got only as far as a mob-connected Allentown hotel before being murdered.

Ernie's a sentimental guy and wants Tobin to find the killer, even if he feels the need to turn the killer over to the authorities for justice to be done. While it's not ideal, Tobin agrees to the job and the payday especially after his wife gives it a blessing.

Soon he's set up in an office and interviewing others in the corporation who can't provide an alibi for the time of death.

For a while it seems Tobin's just going to be cataloging information and ferreting out the culprit, but then office explosions and other threats arise, and he begins to gain understanding and insight into Rita Castle that reveals all is not as it seems, not with Eddie or other corporation members.

With a plot that zigs and zags and many surprises, Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death turns into a character-rich mystery that proves just as 361 had before it, that Westlake was as comfortable with a circuitous murder case as he was with a heist or caper.

It stands up well to a contemporary reading. Only the dollar values and the view of the mob hint that it's from another era, and it can be had in an ebook edition.

A great entry in the private eye realm, and a solid mystery as well.