The Blue Door

THE BLUE DOOR (Unlicensed Investigator-Eddie Cero-Philadelphia-1962) - VG Fulmer, David - Standalone Harcourt, Inc., 2008, US Hardcover ISBN: 9780151011810 First Sentence: At ten thirty on the night of March 24, 1962, Eddie Cero walked out the back door of the Southside Boxing Club in Philadelphia with a bloody bandage over his eyebrow and forty dollars cash in his pocket. Welter-weight boxer Eddie Cero, leaving a less-than-successful bout, rescues a man from being beat up. -Salvatore "Sal" Giambroni, private investigator. Sal immediately offers Eddie some work as an investigator. While on the job, Eddie comes across Valerie Pope, sister of Johnny Pope, the leader of a black rock group who suddenly disappeared three years before. Eddie's love of music motivates him to find out what happened to Johnny, in spite of the resistance and that the other members of Johnny's group are being murdered. I didn't care quite as much for this book as I have all of Fulmer's previous books, but I think that's more my fault than the author's as the early 60's are not my favorite time period, although I remember it very well. That said, Fulmer conveys the time beautifully, particularly the racial tension of the time. This book, for me, did lack the strong sense of place his other books have created. Still, Fulmer is a wonderful writer. He is a craftsman of plot and character. Eddie is wonderful with a touch of self-deprecating humor, and his mentor, Sal, may be my favorite character of all. Reading a book by Fulmer is always a delight, and this was no exception.

"Award winning author mystery writer Fulmer, combines his knowledge of jazz and murder and has created a great detective story about music in Philadelphia in the 1960's."

The year is 1962 and in Philadelphia, welterweight boxer Eddie Cero is depressed as the throbbing cut over his eyebrow still bleeding which means the probable end of his boxing career as he lost to cheap shot artist T-Bone's head butt. When he leaves the Southside Boxing Club where he trains, Eddie wants to avoid everyone he knows until he has at least two drinks; one to numb the physical pain; the other the mental. He cuts across a dark alley only to come across two street punks roughing beating up an elderly man. Unable to stay out, Eddie intercedes and prevents Sal Giambroni from receiving a horrific beating. Sal buys Eddie a drink at the Corner Bar & Grill explaining he is a professional private-investigator. He offers Eddie work and although he thinks snooping is lower than boxing on the employment ethics scale, he needs to eat so he accepts with great reluctance case work with SG Confidential Investigations; his prime tasks being surveillance and occasional muscle. He proves quite good, but soon becomes involved with the cold case disappearance in 1959 of Johnny Pope, lead singer of the Excels over the concern of Sal. As he remains their biggest fan, Eddie meets group member and Johnny's sister Valerie and investigates what happened to the lead singer of the Excels. THE BLUE DOOR is an exciting historical private investigative tale. Eddie is terrific as he holds the story line together; his hunk lit asides add depth to 1962 when Bandstand ruled Rock and Roll. Readers will enjoy Eddie working the case, but it is the underbelly of the short-lived Camelot era that comes to vivid life that makes this a strong Philadelphia Noir. Harriet Klausner

Changing venues and eras, Fulmer's latest novel is set in 1960s Philadelphia, welterweight boxer Eddie Cero taking one last beating at the hands of T-Bone Mieux, a dirty fighter who wins any way he can. Nursing his latest round of cuts and bruises, Cero stumbles home, stopping along the way to rescue Salvatore Giambroni from the flying fists of two thugs. Sal, as it turns out over drinks, is an ex-cop who now runs his own detective agency, SG Investigations. Before he knows what happened, Eddie finds himself a new hire at Sal's agency, sent out on a few surveillance gigs to get his feet wet. As Eddie gradually accepts the fact that he won't fight professionally again, working with Sal becomes an acceptable alternative, especially when an apartment is provided that offers some privacy and its own bathroom. Eddie's life is looking up. It is a cold case that finally captures Cero's attention, the disappearance of a pop soul singer, Johnny Pope, Eddie's interest further piqued by Pope's blues singing sister, Valerie, who performs at a local club, The Blue Door. Unfortunately, Pope's disappearance isn't on Sal's radar, but eventually the older man agrees that Eddie can pursue the case on his own time. As the last of the current cases winds down- a young woman sneaking away from high school for afternoon trysts with a local ladies' man- Eddie becomes more deeply involved with an investigation that will bring him face to face with murder and dark secrets meant to be kept that way. Drawn to the beautiful Valerie Pope, Cero focuses on the likely suspects, a record producer, an agent, ex-band members, anyone who had a stake in Pope's success. But Eddie narrows the list down when two more murders occur and he still hasn't gotten answers to his questions. Delving into a recording industry haunted by the Payola scandal and the corruption of organized crime, Cero recreates Pope's last troubled days. The racial attitudes of 1962 Philly exacerbate Eddie's predicament, his attraction to Valerie blinding him to any possible complicity, a blonde bombshell promising secrets and a rendezvous and unfinished business with T-Bone Mieux that almost takes Eddie down for the count. Peopled with cops, crooks and regular citizens in need of a PI, the landscape of Eddie's world changes radically with Sal as his mentor, in a field where the ex-boxer may have a natural talent, where people's motives are often obscured by their actions and nobody really tells the truth. Valerie's sad songs in his head, Cero plunges into an ugly, dangerous underworld, where murder is incidental and greed is normal, surprising himself by his willingness to take another direction toward a life he can barely yet imagine. A new sleuth, in a troubled time and place with a rock n'roll backbeat, Eddie Cero has just begun. Luan Gaines/ 2007.

Apparently David Fulmer is a music aficionado. He wrote three wonderful mysteries in a series set in turn-of-the-last-century New Orleans. All three featured, at least in the background, the founding of Jazz. There's apparently a fourth book that I missed set in Atlanta in the `20s, which uses the inception of the Blues as its background. This latest book is set in Philadelphia in the early `60s, and takes as its setting the start of the Doo Wop era. The main character is a retired boxer named Eddie Cero. Eddie stops two guys from beating on a third, older man, and then discovers that the guy he rescued is a private detective. Since Eddie's unemployed (his fighting career having come to an end) he agrees to help the older man in several of his investigations, and then, whimsically, begins one on his own. The investigation he conducts himself turns out to be the central part of the book. Three years earlier, the lead singer and founder of the singing group known as the Excels disappeared. There have been rumors ever since as to what happened to him and why, and now Eddie, seeing the guy's little sister sing in a bar, decides to find out what happened to him. It's sort of strange to read a nostalgic treatment of the era you grew up in, when you don't think of yourself as truly old yet (I'm 48). Eddie's world of furnished apartments and cars with tail fins seems so foreign now. The Excels were black, and at one point the little sister says something to Eddie about how he's white. His response tells you a lot about how the world viewed ethnic groups back then, and how it views them now: "I'm not white, I'm Italian." The author does a wonderful job of evoking the world of the early rock-and-roll artists, and especially the world in which they lived. I enjoyed this book a great deal, and would recommend it.