Books: Dead Skip By Joe Gores (1972)

DKA stands for Dan Kearny & Associates. DKA is a car repo company that tends to get involved in mysteries as a consequence of its business. Founder Dan Kearny comes across as a complete jerk, but deep inside, he loves his team. And he’s always happy to jump into a case when the knowledge of a wise elder is needed to guide his young guns through solving the crime. When repo man Bart Heslip, a former boxer, is found in a coma in a wrecked, repossessed Jaguar, his college, former cop Larry Ballard, can't shake the idea that someone staged the accident to cover something up. Armed with only his wits and Heslip's last two days worth of cases, Ballard goes up against a three day deadline to find a would-be killer.

I, of course, read this book due to its link to the Richard Stark/Donald Westlake Parker novel Plunder Squad. Parker’s cameo appearance takes place late in Dead Skip, and is now from the viewpoint of Daniel Kearny. The cross-over works here, as both books are grim tales, one with a cadre of hardboiled repo-detectives who go after bad people and who end up involved in other crimes, and Parker who steals money for a living. Westlake and Gores did one more cross-over event, but this time it was in Westlake’s more comical Dortmunder series, Drowned Hopes. Gores did the same, with appearance of Ken Warren in a much lighter tale from the DKA files, 32 Cadillacs. While I liked the book, as the characters are vividly drawn and the mystery features the typical genre twists, and it comes to a satisfying conclusion, but I found the whole procedural aspect of the repo business dull. But Dead Skip was the first in a series of six, so maybe Gores was able to feature more of the story than the detailed mechanics of repossessing a car.  

Joe Gores DKA crew appeared mostly in short-stories before Gores released the first DKA novel in 1972, with Dead Skip. Six more novels would be published through 2001. He would publish eight other mystery novels between 1969 and 2006, with his first novel, Time of Predators winning the Edgar Award winner for Best First Novel. 1986’s Come Morning would be nominated for Edgar Award, as would 1992’s DKA novel 32 Cadillacs. He also was nominated for a 1975 episode of Kojack (and would go on to pen a few episodes of such mystery TV series as Remington Steele, B.L. Stryker, Mrs. Columbo, and Magnum, P.I.). He also wrote the novel Hammett in 1975 that would be turned into the 1982 film of the same name. 2009’s Spade & Archer served as a prequel to The Maltese Falcon. He died in January of 2011 at the age of 79.