Golden Age of Detective Fiction

Katie Spinner disappears off the Golden Gate bridge during a particularly nasty bout of fog. Her Ford Model T- is left behind on the bridge with her keys and handbag. The police believe she jumped, but her family and friends believe she was kidnapped. Pat & Jean Abbott long time friends of Katie Spinner’s aunt, Liz Brown, go to to toe with Detective Sam Bradish to find out what happened on that fateful bridge.

The Review

Death-Wish Green is a sixties-period piece for good and for ill. When Katie Spinner goes missing, she is surrounded by a duplicitous friend group who are all secretly dating each other, dressing up as beatniks, dabbling in reefers, and associating with anarchists and drug pushers.

There’s a lot of commentary on how everybody is hiding their past and pretending to be a lot richer and whiter, that nosing around in the past is going to reveal a lot of dirty little secrets about unsavory associations, and that it’s all fun and games until the stakes are high enough to kill for.

Katie Spinner finds herself at the center of these hidden agendas when she is accidentally abducted in the fog. Her kidnapper mistakes her for her vampy wealthy friend who has been a little too friendly with a pot dealer who is pretending to be a Zen Buddhist who likes to collect secrets.

When Pat and Jean get a little too close to finding out the reason for the kidnapping and where Katie Spinner has been stashed away, another of Katie’s friends is pushed off a balcony before she can give her vital information to the duo. She’s found dead wearing the latest fashionable color, which the friend, an up-and-coming model, dubbed “death-wish green.”

The night grows deadly when the killer follows Jean in a fatal car chase and then attacks her home, with only her elderly dog and an old gun for protection.

Death-Wish Green is a wild book; it has so many weird ideas about the counter-culture movements of the sixties and a rather strange decision to try and make the villain a Zen Buddhist who dabbles in Japanese spiritualism- none of those words make sense together. Also, there’s a lot of discussion about mixing with beatniks who all wear horrible black and lots of half-baked ideas about drugs, especially weed, which is weirdly called “pod.” It’s like asking your straight-laced grandma all of her worst fears, and all of them come out in a word salad.

Another huge theme in the book is people from working-class or immigrant backgrounds changing their names to hide their origins to better succeed in the dog-eat-dog world of city life. I’m not sure Crane approves of this choice since nearly all characters who change their names end up embroiled in criminal activity or dead.

All of this is sort of grafted onto what could have been a rather compelling case of kidnapping or suicide with two parallel investigations going on simultaneously, which is what the book promised and then quickly abandoned for….the other way more convoluted plot.

I like Pat and Jean in Death-Wish Green, and Pat shows his chops as a private investigator since he is always one step ahead of the police. His interrogation style and quick thinking give him much more oomph than the previous, more milquetoast husband that gets roped into investigations by his brassy wife, Jean. Jean is much more subdued and vulnerable in Death-Wish Green and leaves most of the sleuthing to Pat, but comes in clutch at the end of the book fighting the killer.

I liked going with Pat and Jean on their interrogations and, for a good portion of the book, was baffled as to where Katie Spinner was and why she was still being held captive, if not for ransom or to murder.

This is a tale of two books—an intriguing and genuinely dangerous investigation into a missing girl and another Crane trying to determine if Beatniks are Bolsheviks, pot dealers, or Zen Buddhists. The latter is laughable but drags down the overall pacing and my enjoyment of the book

Spring 2024 TBR Announcement

Spring 2024 TBR #1: Behind the Green Door by Mildred a Wirt

Spring 2024 TBR #2: The Applegreen Cat by Frances Crane

Spring 2024 TBR #3: The Green Mill Murder by Kerry Greenwood