One Murder at a Time

INTRO…, by Gordon Van GelderI don’t think I’m divulging any great secret if I tell you that Hobart Lindsey, like Dan Rowan and Bud Abbott, is a straight man par excellence. If you’re familiar with this insurance claims investigator’s previous cases—perhaps the incident involving the World War II airplane, or maybe that time he had to find the woman who modeled for the cover of Death in the Ditch—you might be bristling a bit at this characterization of the man. Doesn’t “straight man” suggest that Sergeant Marvia Plum of the Berkeley Police Department is some sort of a comedian making funny faces as she delivers zingers? She hardly seems the type—a single mother struggling to bring her son up right, a blues aficionada, and a stolid investigator. She might occasionally crack wise, but she’s no d**k Martin or Gracie Allen. Nor would one rush to apply the label of “comedian” to any of Mr. Lindsey’s other cohorts. Sure his boss Desmond Richelieu (a disciple of J. Edgar Hoover—now there’s a true comic genius) is a bit odd, and perhaps his fellow claims adjuster Artemis Jansen deserves to be called “quirky,” but none of them, nor Lt. Dorothy Yamura nor Attorney Eric Coffman are likely to be opening for Jerry Seinfeld at Caroline’s next week. Perceptive reader that you are, you’ve probably already grasped my point. Hobart Lindsey plays the straight man to the funniest comedian around: our modern world. Consider this comment of his: “I don’t think I’d find anything surprising any more. In the business I’m in I’ve seen people who would kill over an old comic book or a candy dispenser. Why would people astonish me by dressing up in costume and playing games once a year?” That, in the proverbial nutshell, about sums it up. Nothing makes sense. (Camus and Sartre, the French existentialists, loved hardboiled fiction—they thought it addressed the fundamentally absurd question of what has meaning in a world that makes no sense.) But Richard Lupoff does not seek out to the same abyssal depths that Jim Thompson and David Goodis plumbed. Existence is not a cause for anguish. Rather, it’s a cause for joy. Enter Hobart Lindsey, straight man. The stories in this collection focus mostly on middle-class California, late twentieth-century, or perhaps early twenty-first. They’re peopled not with distant strangers about whom we read in hopes of never coming to be like them. They’re our neighbors, friends, and business associates, they’re people who seem unremarkable when we see them in line when buying groceries. The gimmick that the world uses here, the reason it gets the big bucks, is that here and now—U.S.A., front end of century number twenty-one—what was once weird is now the norm. Baby boomers have made pastimes into professions and games into careers. The mailman delivers trivia about Joan Blondell along with the latest Wireless catalog and your attorney’s just as likely to know about the history of Pop Tarts as she is to know about torts. What better foil has it than that mild-mannered adjuster of insurance claims, Hobart Lindsey of Walnut Creek, California. With his conservative car, his suit and tie, and his gold International Surety pencil, he looks every bit the part of the quintessential 1950s businessman. When he investigates a convention of Edgar Rice Burroughs fans and the question of the 1914 McClurg acorn, that’s the modern world mugging for the camera. Lucky for us, d**k Lupoff knows his way around a variety of such milieux. He knows books, he knows magazines, he knows Pez collectibles, he knows Berkeley, he knows radio stations…and he knows them in the way a surgeon knows the body’s secrets. Lupoff can spot the heart of the matter at once. The eight stories collected here aren’t all funny—in fact, intrepid SPUDS investigator Hobart Lindsey doesn’t even feature in them all—but every one of them addresses the question of what in the world is important. What makes us tick, what spurs us on? And most importantly, what makes us smile, what brings us joy? I don’t know about you, but I put Mr. Lupoff’s stories in the list of answers to that last inquiry. Thank you for playing it straight, Bart.