A hardboiled blast from the past
When you call yourself a writer you frequently find yourself reading books not for the pleasure of reading them, but for things to mock and, with luck, the short-term reassurance of feeling that if this guy can sell books, you can too. That was the reason I picked up the 1987 paperback Hot Summer, Cold Murder by one Gaylord Dold. A friend loaned it to me with the endorsement that it wasn't terrible, that it was crime novel and it was set in Wichita. He didn't have much else to say about it. Now, there are a lot of not-bad crime novels, but very few set set here in the Paris of the Plains. I can think of only one other, offhand ( The Ice Harvest , by Scott Phillips). In Hot Summer , Gaylord Dold introduces the brooding PI Mitch Roberts, who drinks muscatel and smokes Lucky Strikes and exchanges improbable repartee with an improbably beautiful femme fatale. I know: the last thing crime fiction needs is another hardboiled private investigator. And the painfully titled Hot Summer ...