Review: "We'll Always Have Murder" by Bill Crider

 

We’ll Always Have Murder A Humphrey Bogart Mystery by Bill Crider iBooks, 2003   We’ll Always Have Murder by Bill Crider is a snappy hardboiled detective novel about old Hollywood. Terry Scott is a low-rent private eye working as a fixer for Jack Warner, of Warner Brothers. Scott is called into Warner’s office to help the studio’s biggest star, Humphrey Bogart, dodge a blackmail scheme. A sleazy P.I., Frank Burleson, is threatening to go to the press with damaging information about Bogart’s ex-wife, Mayo Methot—Bogart calls her “Sluggy”—unless he pays up. But Bogie has no plans of paying Burleson a dime. So Bogart wants Scott to be there when he tells Burleson to take a hike. While Scott prefers working alone, he agrees to go along with the plan; but things unravel quickly when a simple blackmail scam turns into murder. And Bogart is the prime suspect. Scott, with Bogart on his wing, follows the clues from Hollywood’s glitzy eateries and studios to its underground clubs where they uncover secrets that some would kill to discover and others would kill to conceal. We’ll Always Have Murder is a breezy and entertaining walk down Hollywood’s golden age. Crider captures the Studio era in vivid splashes; from restaurants like The Brown Derby to Romanoff’s and Chasen’s to the studios, and even some inside dope on filmmaking and Bogart himself. According to Crider, Bogie made terrible coffee and he clears up, Bogie that is, who killed Sternwood’s chauffeur in The Big Sleep. As Bogart tells Scott, “I don’t know [who killed the chauffeur]…and neither did Chandler when we asked him about it.” Crider paints Bogart perfectly, too. He is likable, tough, but not so tough as his screen presence, and the kind of guy anyone would want to hang out with. As I always expect from Bill Crider, there is also a touch of humor woven into the tale. Like this snippet of dialogue from Bogart telling Scott why he, Scott, doesn’t look like a detective: “You’re young, you’re bald, you’re ugly, you’re short, and you’re a little chubby.” The mystery is solid and the prose is strong and spare, which all adds up to—We’ll Always Have Murder is the sort of novel that passes too quickly and leaves the reader a little melancholy when the last page is done.

According to Bill Crider’s blog, he wrote We’ll Always Have Murder as “work for hire” and any chances of a sequel died when Byron Preiss—the publisher of iBooks—was killed in a car accident in 2005. Click here for the Kindle edition of We’ll Always Have Murder at Amazon.