Slice of P.I.: “The Autumn Dead”

(Part of a series celebrating fictional private eyes.)



The Autumn Dead, by Ed Gorman (St. Martin’s Press, 1987). Dust jacket illustration by Joanne Pendola.

Not long before he died in 2016, at age 74, Iowa author Gorman sent me a copy of this novel with an inscription declaring it “the best of the Jack Dwyers.” Dwyer, you will recall, was Gorman’s long-running cop turned private eye (and aspiring actor), a guy who worked the streets of a barely disguised Cedar Rapids, beginning in the 1986 novel Rough Cut. Over just six more years, he produced a total of eight Dwyer investigations, The Autumn Dead being the fourth of those, “a thoughtful, melancholy journey that is heavy on working-class angst,” to quote critic and short-story writer Ben Boulden.

Of the book’s general plot, Publishers Weekly explained:

The sequel to Murder Straight Up and New, Improved Murder will add to Gorman’s laurels and the popularity of his Midwestern hero-narrator, Jack Dwyer. Private detective Dwyer agrees to help Karen Lane, his high school crush, to recover a lost suitcase. Still lovely after 25 years, Karen is also greedy for money and status, but the disillusioned Dwyer takes the assignment, which puts his life in danger. When Karen dies suddenly, the detective goes after evidence that she has been murdered, and perhaps others with knowledge of the facts behind the death of their schoolmate, Sonny Howard, whose drowning has been officially declared a suicide. The tensions multiply, with Dwyer baiting a trap for criminals willing to buy the suitcase holding the source of blackmailer Karen’s wealth. The author’s salty humor and fast, tuned-in dialogue quicken the pace of a dandy mystery with no contrivances, even in the startling finale.

“There’s a solid mystery here, full of murder, rape, blackmail and old secrets,” Kevin Burton Smith observed in a review for Mystery Scene magazine, “but the real mysteries lie within the complicated relationships between men and women, between past and present, between what we want and what we have. Through it all, Jack displays considerable empathy and a gentle humor as he plies his trade, and brings things to an emotionally satisfying ending.”

The intimidatingly prolific Gorman fielded at least three different fictional gumshoes over the decades, with Dwyer and Sam McCain, the latter of whom starred in 10 Iowa-based mysteries set during the 1950s (The Day the Music Died, Riders on the Storm, etc.), gaining the greatest renown. However, he also gave us sexagenarian Jack Walsh in 1991’s The Night Remembers, which Smith calls “his masterpiece, a quietly powerful gem of a novel.” If you haven’t tried any of these books yet, it’s time to add them to your reading list.