Books: Skinflick By Joseph Hansen (1979)

“Lon Tooker certainly fits the profile: big, strong, a Marine Corps veteran, and recently the target of evangelical crusader Gerald Dawson’s wrath. Tooker’s adult toys and pornography store on the local skid row has recently become the target of Dawson’s church men’s group and their destructive masked raids on “un-Christian” businesses. When Dawson is strangled to death by someone of Tooker’s size and ability, the police see a smut-peddler with a motive. Case closed. But death claims investigator Dave Brandstetter doesn’t like it. By all accounts Tooker is a softy incapable of such a crime. Actual evidence is nonexistent and assumptions many. And Dave particularly doesn’t care for assumptions based on someone’s sex life.”

Book five of the Dave Brandstetter series sees our “hero” at the crossroads, as his father’s death has left him wealthy, but bereaved and for the first time in a long time without a job. He has now quit the insurance company his father built and has struck out on his own as a private investigator. Add in his breakup with his recent partner and he’s a man unencumbered. But, as with any good P.I., the job always comes first.

It's a tight plot, with characters that are interesting and, as always, Dave's humanity shows through from beginning to end. Much like the last book, the ending is bit anticlimactic, but it’s a well constructed noir thriller that has gone relatively unnoticed over the decades. While the twelve books in the series have been reprinted in colorful trade paperback format that gives them a less kitschy 1970s or 80s look –thus probably more appealing, I guess, for readers who love the genre but don’t happen to want the world to see them reading a gay detective tale, the versions I’ve been reading, the Owl Books editions, are fun and rather weird.

Anyways, It’s the late 1970s and Dave may be aging a bit but he’s still handsome, newly wealthy, and recently in possession of a new convertible Triumph. Cue the cheesy soundtrack.