This dark-hued "cozy" murder mystery ushers into the world of the amateur sleuth Sidney Hirsch, a fiftysomething, long-haired, long-bearded, jeans-clad but aristocratic Sherlock who, in this opening appearance, comes complete with a formidable if circumstantial female Watson: his sharp-witted M.A. candidate daughter, Margaret Anne.
Although set in the urban 1990's and no innocent romp, there's nothing conventionally noir or hard-boiled gritty about A Deed of Dreadful Note — no sex, fisticuffs, shoot-outs, explosions, wild vehicle chases, weird/menacing underground bad guys, hard-boiled/duty-weary detectives or cops with unhappy wives and/or girlfriends, etc. A Deed of Dreadful Note owes far more to Conan Doyle and Christie than it does to Hammett and Chandler in its storytelling style and substance although it's in imitation of neither.
And there's nothing conventionally noir or hard-boiled gritty about Sidney Hirsch, equity options trader for his own account, and sometime consultant-without-portfolio to the local gendarmes, the Philadelphia Police Department. He's gifted, wealthy, cynical, and an unapologetic elitist. He's also a man devoted to his daughter, Bach's keyboard works, and the joys of cooking, in that order.
Margaret Anne has arrived home unexpectedly from Brandeis where she was supposedly hard at work on her master's thesis on the symbolist poets ("Or was it twentieth-century didactic poetry? He wasn't sure. She kept changing her mind and he got confused"), declared a school break ("We're doing English Romantic poetry this week, and I decided to take a pass. I can't endure slogging through that turgid crap, or dealing with the lives of the fey creatures who wrote the stuff"), and informed her father they're going on vacation together (there is no mother; Mother is ten-years dead).
Her little vacation scheme, however, won't play out as she planned it. She'd arranged to have the vacation on neutral turf, far from the home in which she was raised, to ease the delicate task of informing her father of her decision to leave academe, where she felt the perpetual student, to become a part of the "real world." But she's about to get a dose of that world and a testing of her inner mettle she could never have anticipated or even imagined.
On the way to their vacation destination, Hirsch, on a whim, makes a detour to a small seaside town in southern New Jersey where they soon find themselves enmeshed in a grotesque case of murder. The execution-style killing has all the earmarks of a professional hit, and using that as his springboard and applying some imaginative thinking, Hirsch proceeds to solve the bizarre if apparently clueless murder until he's seemingly dead-ended by an inconsistency he can't resolve that threatens to consign his entire chain of inductive reasoning to the proverbial toilet. As for Margaret Anne, thrilled at first to be part of it all, she slowly learns that the real world exacts a price, and in paying it, solves the more personal case of herself.
If a cats 'n quilts cozy murder mystery is what you were looking for, you're looking for it in the wrong place.
A Deed of Dreadful Note is presently available as a trade (6"x9" format) paperback. The full text of Chapter 1 of A Deed of Dreadful Note can be read here (Adobe Reader required which can be downloaded for free here), and the trade paperback edition of A Deed of Dreadful Note can be purchased here, here, here, or here.
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