FFB Review: SWAN DIVE (1988) by Jeremiah Healy

This week for FFB, Barry Ergang reminds you of Swan Drive by Jeremiah Healy. Also, make sure you check out the latest FFB review and other stuff over on Patti Abbott’s blog as well as at Happiness Is A Warm Book where Aubrey Hamilton will have her FFB selection this first Friday in August.

SWAN DIVE (1988) by Jeremiah Healy

Hardback

Roy Marsh is well-off, big, mean, and abusive. His wife Hanna, mother of their five-year-old daughter Vickie, is divorcing him. Her attorney is the not-very-well-to-do Chris Christides, P.I. John Cuddy’s college chum. Because Chris has been paid a menacing visit by Roy Marsh the day before he and Hanna have a meeting with Marsh and his attorney, he asks Cuddy to partcipate in a body-guarding role.

        Cuddy soon discerns that Chris, though a tough offensive guard on their college football team, isn’t a very tough negotiator. He’s much too willing to accept Marsh’s settlement offer, tendered by Felicia Arnold, an expensive lawyer who, Cuddy later learns, offers more than legal services to some of her clients. Hanna Marsh refuses the solely monetary offer—and a relatively meager one, at that—wanting as well the house her daughter has grown up in. The meeting ends with no resolution but lots of flaring tempers.

        Chris has another appointment, so Cuddy drives Hanna and Vickie to their shabby temporary residence. The little girl can’t wait to show Cuddy the pet cat on which she dotes—the cat that sets off her screams when she discovers it skinned, mewing pathetically and bleeding profusely. Cuddy is certain Roy Marsh is responsible.

        As events unfold further, Cuddy is mugged and his gun stolen. It later turns up in a seedy twelfth floor hotel room from which Marsh has plummeted to his death. A prostitute has been shot to death in the same room.

        The Boston police don’t believe Cuddy is innocent of the murders, but they don’t jail him, either. He’s soon confronted by J.J. Braxley, a Caribbean drug distributor, and his noxiously odoriferous bonebreaker Terdell. It seems that a quarter million dollars worth of J.J.’s cocaine is missing, cocaine Roy Marsh had in his possession before he died. J.J. demands that Cuddy recover and return it, or he’ll take out his revenge on the innocent Hanna and Vickie. Thus, Cuddy has to play footsie with the police, who have an agenda of their own, while trying to clear himself by solving two murders and preventing two more. How he finally does guarantees some surprises, perhaps even shocks, for the reader.

Audio

        Swan Dive is the first of his novels I’ve read, and Jeremiah Healy is a writer impressive in his economy. He tells a rapid-paced, strongly plotted story in prose free of pyrotechnical flourishes, providing descriptions of people and places spare enough to allow the reader to exercise his imagination but still get the picture. The story is long on dialogue (sometimes laden with raw language—a warning to the prudish) that individualizes characters, eliminating the need for narrational analyses of their psyches. Cuddy himself, while able to dish out and take batterings when he has to, is also fairly cerebral. He reaches the solution by examining the information he’s shared with the reader along the way.
   
        Some of the review blurbs on the Pocket Books paperback edition I have compare Healy with Robert B. Parker. This was probably inevitable because both Cuddy and Parker’s Spenser work out of Boston. As far as I’m concerned there is no comparison; Healy has it all over Parker. Then again, I have to concede a long-standing bias against Parker, whom I gave up on after reading the first dozen or so Spenser novels, the insulting-to-Raymond Chandler Poodle Springs, and the godawful Perchance to Dream. I’ve never understood why reviewers and critics, let alone readers, find him so appealing. Spenser is frequently childish. Parker is pretentious: he once told an interviewer that although he knew he couldn‘t write The Sound and the Fury, he could write The Big Sleep.

        I can’t be the only one to notice he never came close.

        Enough harangue. Whether or not Parker suits your tastes, if you like modern private eye fiction, you’re apt to enjoy Jeremiah Healy.




Barry Ergang ©2007, 2020

Among other works, Derringer Award-winner Barry Ergang's own impossible crime novelette, The Play of Light and Shadow, is available at Amazon and Smashwords as is his recently released book of poetry, Farrago, and other entertaining reads. For more on Barry’s books as well as his editing services, check out Barry’s website.

FFB Review: BLUNT DARTS (1984) by Jeremiah Healy (Reviewed by Barry Ergang)

Friday means Friday’s Forgotten Books. Make sure you check out the list over at Patti’s blog after you read Barry Ergang’s review of Blunt Darts by Jeremiah Healy. Amazon says this is the first book in the John Cuddy series. I am pretty sure I have never read any of the series.

BLUNT DARTS (1984) by Jeremiah Healy

Reviewed by Barry Ergang

After working as a claims investigator for Empire Insurance Company for eight years, John Francis Cuddy was appointed head of claims investigation in Boston. Shortly after his wife Beth’s death after a long illness, Cuddy was approached by a colleague and asked to sign an investigation report of a claim that was never probed by the Boston office, and he refused. This resulted in his dismissal.

Paperback Blunt Darts

“Six years earlier the company had required all of us to obtain and maintain private investigator licenses from the Department of Public Safety. I knew three or four semi-reputable guys in the trade who could tell me how to get started and maybe even refer me a few clients. I decided it was time J.F.C. became his own man.”

When he receives a call from Valerie Jacobs, whom he met while at Empire because at the time she was dating a claims adjuster there, Cuddy agrees to meet her for lunch. A schoolteacher, Valerie is concerned about a former student, Stephen Kinnington, and wants Cuddy to meet with Eleanor Kinnington, who lives in the town of Meade and who is the mother of Judge Willard J. Kinnington, “one of the youngest men ever to go on the bench, and his family has sort of, well, ruled Meade since long before I arrived,” Valerie explains. “Anyway, Stephen’s mother, Diane Kinnington, killed herself about four years ago by driving her Mercedes off a bridge and into the river. Apparently she boozed it up a lot, so no one knows whether it was accidental or suicidal. It hit Stephen pretty hard, as you can imagine.”  Hard because he was catatonic when he went into and spent time recovering in the sanatorium Willow Wood.

Hardcover Blunt Darts--Import

Convinced that the young man has run away rather than been the victim of a kidnapping, his grandmother, Eleanor Kinnington, wants Cuddy to find Stephen and bring him home to resume a normal life. She has a strong sense of where he might have gone, and Cuddy sets out after him—but not without complications. Among the latter are Judge Kinnington and his court officer and right-hand man, a brutal giant of a disgraced cop named Gerald Blakey, neither of whom want Cuddy’s intrusions.  

While dealing with personal issues, not the least of which is his relationship to wannabe-lover Valerie Jacobs versus loyalty to his dead wife, Cuddy’s quest to find and bring Stephen home results in revelations about the Kinnington family, among them the judge’s brother Telford, who died in Vietnam while leading “his company in a counterattack from an American position against a much larger Vietcong force.” The overall quest is not without violence and disclosures, plausible if unexpected, by both Cuddy and the reader.

Blunt Darts is the first novel in the John Francis Cuddy mystery series and the second one I’ve read, the other being Swan Dive. Like the latter, Blunt Darts is a stellar example of economical prose that conveys a powerful, fast-moving narrative and character-delineating dialogue. I look forward to reading still more in this exceptional series and would not dissuade other hardboiled mystery fans—at least, those who aren’t squeamish about occasional moments of street language—to do the same. Jeremiah Healy is an author well worth a reader’s time.

© 2016 Barry Ergang


Some of Derringer Award-winning author’s Barry Ergang’s work is available at Smashwords and Amazon.