Books: Dead Ringer (Jacob Asch #4) By Arthur Lyons (1977)

“Jacob Asch is called in by boxing promoter Jack Schwartz to help out Carlos Realango, an Argentine heavyweight whose career is on the skids. Carlos has been receiving threatening phone calls, and his manager and mistress, brassy blonde Susan Mezzano, thinks her husband is responsible. It seems a routine case until the down-and-out boxer is shot at Moonfire Ranch, a fancy brothel owned by Susan's husband. The police are calling it justifiable homicide, but Asch smells murder and something more than a lovers' quarrel.” 

The fourth Jacob Asch novel follows the same sort of set-up the three previous has, which has him be hired to investigate a person who generally ends up dead. And while investigating, Jake not only seemly gets beat up a few times, but as well, the murder becomes less important (though it’s still front and center) as writer Lyon’s leans into all the “guest-cast” so to speak, and their dark and mostly icky moral codes. 

But here, in Dead Ringer, the story is a bit overspun and goes on longer than seemly necessary. Yes, we get long-winded takes and Chandler-esque prose, but a lot of it seems designed to make the tale longer and much deeper than it really is. The problem with some of these nior thrillers is everyone are just horrible, trope filled people. Take the city of Reno, which is seems like a dead end town, mashed with potential mob influences and dirty cops who can (and probably do) get away with falsifying records, arresting and beating up people they don’t particularly like – it’s all something we’ve seen before. 

In Lyon’s universe, there is not much good, which sort of puts Asch above everyone. It’s a little odd that no matter where Asch goes, who he investigates, he is the Angel among the dirty devils of the world.

Since this was the last book I owned, I may be a while before I revisit and purchase the seven remaining volumes. But this is not a happy world and maybe it’s time to find something a little less nihilistic.

Books: The Killing Floor (Jacob Asch 3) by Arthur Lyons (1976)

“David Fein has a problem -he's a compulsive gambler. Lately, gambling has completely taken over his life. By the time he takes in Tortorello as a business partner, he is in big trouble. Like all men who are like this, he’s taken out a "quick loans" but even that has gotten out of control and now he can't cover his debts. Jacob Asch is contacted by Fein's wife, who hasn't come home for four days and she's frantic. Jacob figures Fein's probably sleeping off a four-day drunk. What he hadn't counted on was the body on the killing floor” 

All is not what it seems here in the third book featuring Asch. We open with a visit to the city of Vernon, a town five miles south of Los Angeles proper and id the nearest separate city to downtown Los Angeles. The population was 112 at the 2010 United States census, the least of any incorporated city in the state. Its population nearly doubled to 222 by the 2020 census, making it the second least populous city in the state, after Amador City. This makes me wonder how many people lived there in the mid-1970s when this book was written. The city is primarily composed of industrial areas and touts itself as "exclusively industrial". Meatpacking plants and warehouses are common. “Vernon stinks. It always stinks,” Jacob muses as he drives into the town in the opening chapter. 

Anyways, I know the publishers continued to sell Lyons as a more modern Raymond Chandler and with a panache style of Ross MacDonald, but I still see Jake as Jim Rockford – well, the R rated version of The Rockford Files. There’s just something about our smart, empathic hero with a wisecrack here and there that makes me feel this is more Rockford than Travis Magee. It’s all sexist as well – the women are drawn pretty horrible here, both the bad and the good ones, and that can be distracting. But Asch’s work is through, smart, and more logical than the way the police approach these crimes. Even the plot is plausible, but then there is another scene, like in book two, where two thugs (and a half a dozen from book two) are easily defeated by a wispy 180lb private investigator. So, somewhat plausible. 

I will add that I think a pattern is developing here in Lyons writing. We get the set up, then the investigation, have Asch ask all sorts of questions, go up avenues that seem to point in the right direction, only to find out what you thought was connected, really isn’t. He pulled that in book two and did it again here. We’ll see what happens in book four (and the last one I currently own) to see if he continues this style.

 

Books: All God's Children by Arthur Lyons (Jacob Asch #2) (1975)

“Jacob Asch, the out-of-work reporter turned detective. Asch is hired by Robert Haynes to find his eighteen-year-old step-daughter, Susan Gurney. The search for her leads Asch into Los Angeles' fringe population: first to the Word of God commune where Susan lived among "Jesus Freaks," then to the man who "deprogrammed" her and brought her home just a few days before her disappearance, finally to her boyfriend and the members of his motorcycle gang known as "Satan's Warriors." 

When I read the first book in this series, The Dead Are Discreet, back in November 2024, I assumed that 2025 would be filled with reading all eleven books in the series. But it’s July 2026 and I’m finally getting to the second book (and own two additional ones as well).

A quick recap: The Dead Are Discreet 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. 

As I read, (and not sure I saw this with the first book), I was struck by how much Jacob Asch in All God’s Children could be a cousin to Jim Rockford –well, a more put together and less snarky Jim Rockford- if only because the plot borrows a villainous trope that most cop and detective shows of that era used as storylines from the mid -1960s through the 1970s: the dangerous, murderous outlaw biker gangs and religious cults (which sprung up in California due its cooperative weather). Asch is a fairly ordinary guy working as a private investigator, but is also somewhat out of depth and when you mix a rich family searching for a runaway child, along with a cultish commune, and a thuggish motorcycle gang (the sequence at the Chop Shop set in Culver City is a prime example of Asch being a bit naïve and outright dumb – something James Gardner did in The Rockford Files for six seasons. That action sequence alone shows you how much Asch is more a thinking detective) things are bound to go sideways. 

Asch is also cynical (perhaps why I like him), does hard work, has the somewhat required smart mouth, but ultimately he is a detective who stumbles along as the clues dictate until, finally, something begins to break and the picture comes into focus.

There’s a bit more violence than I generally like, and even in 1975, foul language rolled off everyone’s tongues easily, but despite the sort of trope-filled story, it’s still worth a read.

 

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.