Books: The Dead Are Discreet (Jacob Asch #1) By Arthur Lyons (1974)

“When Jacob Asch takes a job investigating the gruesome murders of socialite Sheila Warren and her boyfriend, film producer Randy Folsom, all clues point to Sheila's distraught husband as the obvious killer. At least until Asch discovers that Sheila had been attending séances and dabbling in witchcraft prior to her death. Using information coerced from Sheila's associates in the California black magic scene, Asch learns of a porno film starring Sheila, now in the possession of an arcane sect of Satanists, whose uncanny rites suggest a completely different motive for the crime.”

1970’s noir doesn’t get any creepier than this debut novel by Arthur Lyons. The Dead Are Discreet –the first of eleven books- introduced readers to 34-year-old Jacob Asch, an embittered but nonetheless witty and compassionate, half-Jewish former investigative reporter for the (fictional) Los Angeles Chronicle. After being jailed for six months because he refused to rat out a story source, Asch drifted reluctantly into a gumshoeing career, and found that it fit him.

Arthur Lyons was born January 5, 1946, in Los Angeles. His family moved to Palm Springs at age 11. He graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1967 and worked in his family’s restaurant business in the town before becoming a writer. Lyons published a nonfiction work in 1970, a study of Satanism and cult development in America called The Second Coming. However, it was this novel which would mark the course of his writing for the next 20 years.

The Dead Are Discreet is seemly an outgrowth from the authors research on cults, as it leads Jacob “through the underground of Los Angeles of the 1970s, from its arcane religious sects of Satanists and Jesus freaks to the kinky sexual pleasures of the wealthy who could callously destroy the life of a teenage girl for the sake of a roll of bizarre movie films.”

Lyons was one among a cadre of talented young American detective novelists of that era and into the early ’80s, all vying to wear the crowns once sported by earlier stars of the genre such as Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Ross Macdonald. The New York Times called Jacob Asch “one of the more convincing private eyes in the business, thanks to Mr. Lyons’s skill at characterization.” Dorothy B. Hughes of the Los Angeles Times complimented Lyons on his “true ear for everyday dialogue.” And no less a critic than fellow author Charles Willeford commended Lyons as a “master of plotting.” Asch found himself involved in a wide range of criminal settings, and Lyons researched all of them so thoroughly that he alternated his crime novels with nonfiction studies of cults, devil worship, pornography, and other nefarious activities.

After 1994’s False Pretenses, Lyons turned his attention to noir motion pictures, an interest that led him to produce one last book, a nonfiction work titled Death on the Cheap: The Lost B Movies of Film Noir, as well help co-create the annual Palm Springs noir film festival, which celebrated its 25^th Anniversary this past spring (and which is now named for him). All of those books are currently out of print, and thanks to Tony, who runs @SideshowBooks here in Los Angeles, and who is a noir fan, I’m going to start reading some. Sadly, In March 2008, after suffering head injuries from a fall, followed by a stroke and then pneumonia, he passed away at 62.