Calamity Fair

Wade Miller (actually two men writing together) was one of the shining lights of the paperback original. Their creation, the San Diego detective Max Thursday, was a somewhat standard yet memorable addition to the cycle of PIs filling up millions of pages in the 1950s. Thursday didn't carry a gun, due to some incidents told in his first book, but was a hard-boiled kind of guy struggling to do a job and make a buck and see right win out somehow, whether or not the law would see it his way. His personal demons never seemed like whining, and his sensitive romanticism successfully toed the line, leavened as it was with a healthy cynicism as well.This book sees him take on an organized blackmail ring. In addition, the DA, a recurring character who is not happy Thursday has previously gotten away with four killings on self-defense rulings, thinks he may be involved. The blackmail involves everything from illicit photos of a society gal to gambling debts racked up by the DA's own wife (who Thursday agrees to help in order to protect the career of the man who is trying to ruin him). Thursday has to sort through various suspects to find out who is behind it all, including a thug who winds up dead in an alligator farm, a seductress in charge of the office Thursday knows fronts for the blackmail ring, a former actor, a funny little weasel who runs a fortune telling service out of a building shaped like an upside-down ice cream cone, and several others.A series of unlucky events seem to implicate Thursday in three more murders as he chases down clues; he has a serious knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Yet with all these intricately plotted coincidences and divergent elements, the book never seems like a series of gimmicks arrived at first with a mystery filled in around them later (though that may have been exactly how it was done). The well-written climax comes in a meat locker, after the head criminal makes a mistake allowing Thursday to deduce where the blackmail evidence is kept.I am always skeptical of PI novels that do not utilize first-person narration. But Miller managed to write this tale in an entertaining voice. There is some nice dialogue, and some plot ideas that I had not read before. One of the best things is the recurring set of characters, including a spunky lady reporter with whom Thursday enjoys an on again/off again tease of a romance. The reporter would seem to be his bantering soul mate, and helps him out unofficially on his cases, adding an air of humor and sophistication to the works, a la Nick and Nora.One small thing that didn't gel was Miller's idea of beginning the story near the end, where Thursday is a fugitive, then flashing back to the start. It was a move designed to grab the reader with a bolt of suspense from the get-go, but it was just disorienting to me. The first couple of chapters did not improve much. But then things settled into a rhythm, the book soon gathered momentum and had me flipping pages.Thi