Dead Skip – Joe Gores, 1972 ★★★

The Streets of San Francisco

In detective fiction, sometimes it’s less the destination than the journey getting there. The same can be said of repo-man fiction, if this noted mystery is any indication.

Dead Skip is the first of six novels about a San Francisco-based repossession agency that works some crime-procedural mojo into the private-eye realm. Not a great novel if you go by endings, but there’s a nifty build-up and some spicy, sharp-tongued characters to enjoy.

We open with repo man Barton Heslip smoothly handling a car owner whose attitudes about race are as backward as his credit history. A veteran of one of the best repossession agencies in the business, DKA, the black Heslip shrugs it off:

Threats were cheap in Heslip’s business. He had started as a field agent with Daniel Kearny Associates three years before, when he had realized he wasn’t going to be middleweight champ of the world after all; it was the only profession he knew which could give him the same one-on-one excitement he’d found in the ring.

Too much excitement. Heslip turns up unconscious and near death in a repo-ed Jaguar. The police smell whisky and say he was joyriding, but partner Larry Ballard isn’t buying and sets out to get the truth. He has 72 hours to sort through a list of characters whose cars were on Heslip’s to-do list and thus make possible suspects in Heslip’s assault.

The 72-hour deadline may come off a bit arbitrary, but it pushes the drama. Ballard, working on little sleep, meets up with all kinds of people, law-abiding and otherwise, like the 30-something woman who left her husband to shack up with a teenage boy, the movers who loll around their office drunk as skunks on a weekday morning, and a brawling rocker who plays at a dive called “Freaks.”

A repossession in progress. Today the repo people have many tools at their disposal. In 1972, a memory for license plates was critical. Image from https://www.hq-law.com/blog/consumer-law/car-repossession/.

I didn’t mind the long time it took for Ballard to get to the bottom of things; I was enjoying the ride. Gores gives you just enough story with each person to give you a sense of life’s richness and cruelties, then moves on to the next one as Ballard keeps on the clock.

Gores is not only deft at building a multi-faceted plot, he is funny, too. “Why do those middle-aged swingers, when they start swinging, always buy a T-Bird?” one guy asks Ballard. “He had a VW before his ma died.”

Joe Gores’ DKA series occupies a unique perch in crime fiction. The website thrillingdetective.com calls it “the closest anyone has ever come to a private-eye version of Ed McBain’s famed 87th Precinct procedural novels,” using an office of investigators the same way the 87^th employs a squadroom of detectives.

In fact, McBain, whose legal name was Evan Hunter, was the first person to tell me about Gores, in a newspaper interview I did with him back in 1995. Hunter was complaining to me about a then-new series of television movies based around the 87^th Precinct novels, specifically the quality of the writers they had working on the teleplays.

“I told them to get someone who knows crime fiction, like Joe Gores,” I can hear Hunter saying now. “Not that Gores would write it himself. But someone like him. Someone good.”

Joe Gores later in life. In addition to novels and short stories, his list of television credits include episodes of "Kojak," "T. J. Hooker," and "Magnum P. I." Image from https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/books-obituaries/8277252/Joe-Gores.html.

Earning the respect of Evan Hunter was no small thing. Part of that was mutual appreciation; Dead Skip employs devices faithful McBain readers will recognize, like multiple investigation arcs unfolding simultaneously, long narrative digressions that wind up in dead-ends, and characters that come alive in two pages and are never seen again.

It could be a parole supervisor talking about his job: “The rules say they must ‘maintain gainful employment’ – so what do you find for a sixty-five-year-old man with an eighty-five IQ who’s only good at exposing himself to little girls?”

Or a landlord of a rundown apartment house who improbably resembles the Good Witch Glenda from The Wizard Of Oz, yet goes from sweet to sour when a couple of DKA men press her for information on a suspect, sending them on their way with two short words.

As with McBain, verisimilitude is a core component of Dead Skip. A former repossession agent in real life, Gores immerses the reader into the intricacies of the job. In the first pages, we see Heslip break into a car, tow it to a garage, write up his report, and then call it in to police:

“Busy downtown?”

“Sitting on our cans drinking coffee. At the moment.”

“Think I’ll be a cop so I can quit work.”

One big difference between the two authors is the city they use for a backdrop. McBain’s Isola is a somewhat fictionalized version of Manhattan; Gores’ DKA series is set in a very real San Francisco.

How real? I felt at times like I was getting a Google Maps view of the city, circa 1972. Entire paragraphs are devoted to depicting actual streets, dead-end ones as well as thoroughfares as his characters wend their way through them, looking for leads. He even offers up some streetwise sociology:

A street in central San Francisco as it appeared in 1970. Off in the distance, behind the new Transamerica Pyramid, one can just barely make out the Golden Gate Bridge. Image from http://footage.framepool.com/en/shot/442316727-golden-gate-strait-san-francisco-bay-area-northern-california-city-centre.

They were old single-residence dwellings, mostly stucco, mostly set back from the street behind narrow lawns. Concrete drives led to under-the-house garages. A standard construction of the 1920s and ‘30s, the houses rubbing shoulders as did most houses in San Francisco; it was a city of long, narrow building lots.

A little later on:

The 500 block was a steeply slanted street sliding over an arm of Bernal Heights toward the incredible maze of overpasses and underpasses, ramps and cloverleafs which marked the confluence of the Interstate 80 and Interstate 280 traffic streams. Houses crowded down the hill waist-to-shoulder, all of them needing paint, all of them with garages on the ground floor, short steep drives, and tiny slanted squares of lawn just big enough to blow your nose on.

All this Baedekering would be less charming and more annoying if Gores didn’t build a meaty crime story around it. Another reason McBain respected Gores was because the man could write crime. As thrillingdetective.com notes, Gores won three Edgar Awards, crime fiction’s version of the Oscars, and in three different categories: Best First Novel (A Time Of Predators, which he published three years before this), Best Short Story, and Best Television Series Segment.

The idea of running checks on a random group of deadbeats to figure out which one might have attacked Heslip is a clever framing device for a mystery. More importantly, it sets up a method for introducing us to the DKA cast and their chosen career.

Dead Skip wasn’t the first DKA story; Gores had been turning out short stories about them for Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine since December 1967. But he sets about reintroducing his cast in Chapter 2, headquartered in what Gores describes as a quaint old building that had been a cathouse back in the early part of the 20^th century.

San Francisco's East Bay as it appears today. Cue Gores: "The Mysterious East Bay, as Herb Caen always called it in his daily Chronicle column. Ha. About as mysterious as a bag of dirty laundry. A big hot sprawl of nothing, like L. A., with all those cute names the subdividers loved. Glorietta. Saranap. Gregory Gardens. Housewives driving around in shorts and hair curlers, men drinking beer at the drags on Sunday. " Image from https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2019/01/03/habitat-for-humanity-bay-area-low-income-housing.html.

As with McBain’s 87^th, we are given a core group of principals, specifically hard-nosed boss Dan Kearny and Ballard, a 26-year-old whose diligence may be undercut by some excess sensitivity.

Ballard runs down a possible lead by talking to a woman with whom one of the suspects had been involved. Only we are told after he didn’t push her hard enough:

Larry just wasn’t that good with women. The best way was to push them fast and hard to where they started crying but before they got stubborn. It was an art.

Gores’ depiction of women is probably where he would get the most flak today. It just may be a question of judging yesterday’s standards through today’s less-forgiving lens, but every time a woman appears in Dead Skip, we get a full rundown of her sexual charms, or lack thereof, whether or not it has anything to do with the story:

She was absolutely the ugliest woman he had ever seen, at least from the neck up. He actually found it hard to believe that somebody, sometime, hadn’t stuck her in the dog pound by mistake.

Sure, it’s in the spirit of Mickey Spillane, not to mention McBain, but it feels crass and reductive, regardless of era.

How wide-ranging is the action in Dead Skip? So much so it takes us into another novel, Plunder Squad, which Donald E. Westlake wrote under the pseudonym "Richard Stark" and was also published in 1972. There we meet the imposing Parker, who both menaces and aids Daniel Kearny in his investigation. In Plunder Squad, the same scene unfolds from Parker's perspective. Image from https://thewestlakereview.wordpress.com/2015/07/24/review-plunder-squad/. 

Overall, though, the story is a good one, with many trails that connect upon reflection. Gores, who passed away in 2011, reveals himself here as a master of story construction.

My only major beef with Dead Skip was the ending. Gores develops his mystery well enough that it would work fine enough with a conventional ending, but instead he pulls out some surprises in the last pages. It’s a taut, suspenseful finale, set in a dark house where our hero Ballard suddenly realizes he is not alone. But the way Gores brings everything to its resolution is the one part of the book where his craft falls short.

Still, the novel works as a book-length introduction to a unique series that has many fans. I only know I want to read more about them; so I suspect will you.