Friday's Forgotten Book: Trace

Reading this week of Gregory McDonald’s death, I remembered how startling the first sighting of Fletch on the paperback rack at the supermarket or drugstore, in the late ‘70s, was. What the hell is this? I thought. Dialogue on the cover? I was 10 or 11 at the time, but I knew that covers were for sexy illustrations or for photo still-lifes of handguns & drug paraphernalia.

But those Fletch covers had the immediacy of a great newspaper headline. There was no need to pick the book up and thumb through it. You knew you were going to buy the book before you ever touched it. Probably the only pure true case of a book you could judge by its cover.



Of course, when the Fletch books became best-sellers, the text of other books began leaking out onto covers, but years went by before the design was applied to anything I considered reading. And then the Trace books started showing up.

The dialogue on the covers of the Trace books was nowhere near as good as Gregory McDonald’s, but I was all caught up with Fletch and wanted something similar, and these books were doing back flips to look like McDonald’s stuff. On some level, too, I think I wanted to see how you might go about ripping off work you admired and tweaking it enough to make it your own, and something told me the Trace books accomplished this.

The author Warren Murphy is best known as the author or co-author of the three thousand books in the Destroyer series, but I haven’t read any of them. I don't know if the emulation of Fletch stretches far beyond the cover; at any rate, the Trace books are quite different.

Here is what I remember: Devlin Tracy is an investigator for an insurance company. He hates the company he works for, and is tired of doing investigative work for a living; he constantly daydreams of making a big score by inventing something, but his only real skills seem to be 1) the ability to tell when someone is lying, and 2) the ability to drink astonishing quantities of alcohol.

The cases he works on bring him into contact with wealthy families right out of Lew Archer Land, and he alienates nearly everyone he meets (with the exception of his faithful girlfriend -- who, if I remember correctly, solves the mystery in a couple of the later books, while Trace nurses a hangover somewhere.)

Darker (or more depressive) than the Fletch books, lighter than Charles Willeford’s Hoke Mosley, the Trace books would probably appeal to a fan of either. Find one and save it for next summer: Trace’s drink is gin, I believe.

for all of Friday's Forgotten Books, see Patti Abbott's blog.