Slice of P.I.: “Grave Error”

(Part of a series celebrating fictional private eyes.)



Grave Error, by Stephen Greenleaf (Dial Press, 1979).

At the time of this book’s publication, Greenleaf was 37 years old, a child of the American Midwest who’d graduated from Minnesota’s Carlton College, earned a law degree from the University of California at Berkeley, and was enrolled at the prestigious Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He’d already determined that storytelling as a career was far and away better for him to lawyering. And indeed, despite his workshop instructors frowning upon detective novels as “commercial fiction,” Greenleaf would go on to pen 13 more of them beyond Grave Error, all starring a San Francisco gumshoe named John Marshall Tanner.

The Thrilling Detective Web Site’s Kevin Burton Smith describes Tanner as “a loner, almost a recluse. He’s middle-aged and single, and painfully aware of both facts. He seems to be working his way to achieving full-curmudgeon status, albeit in the political left division. And his gloom ’n’ doom isn’t helped by a profession he feels ‘traffics in misery.’ When he’s not out doing his job, he prefers to stay at home, reading, listening to music or watching sports on television, a stiff drink and a bag of Oreos by his side. He occasionally heads out to his favorite watering hole, but he maintains he’s a drinking man, not a drunk.” Like his creator, Tanner was formerly a lawyer. He has an office over an antique store and, in the beginning, an adoring secretary named Peggy Nettleton. Most of his income is made from “small businesses and law firms that can afford me on a daily rate …” Other clients, the more interesting ones with more dangerous problems, don’t come as frequently or request such straightforward results.

In Grave Error, writes Aubrey Hamilton in Happiness Is a Book,

Tanner is retained to find out what the leader of a private consumer advocate institute is up to. Roland Nelson, a Ralph Nader-like individual, is revered by thousands as an incorruptible rooting out venal corporations everywhere. His wife reports that he’s been siphoning off money from the institute and he disappears evenings, declining to account for his time. She wants to know if he’s being blackmailed and if so, why. If he’s having an affair, she wants to know with whom. She is well aware that any adverse publicity will destroy her husband and the work he’s done. Tanner’s investigation crosses the path of his fellow P.I. and good friend Harry Spring, whose current case seems to intersect with Tanner’s but how isn’t clear. Harry turns up dead, and Tanner’s focus changes to supporting the widow and finding the killer, which may not be altogether separate from whatever is occupying Roland Nelson.

Years ago, Greenleaf told Mystery*File’s Ed Lynskey that “I made Grave Error as much like a Ross Macdonald book as I could make it. I’m surprised he didn’t sue me. I liked his style, less operatic than Chandler and less apocalyptic than Hammett, a startling and penetrating vision of [private eye] Lew Archer’s time and place. I also liked his focus on the psychological genesis of the murderous impulse …” This and subsequent Tanner tales were cogent, smoothly composed, daring with their character development (at one point, Tanner—like his creator—was forced to deal with depression), and often creative in their plotting. Smith opines that, by seeking “alternatives to murder as the engine for his novels, [Greenleaf] has added considerable depth to them, and they often pack an emotional and moral wallop. Death Bed, in particular, has always struck me as one of the most powerful P.I. novels I’ve read, and the murderer’s M.O. is one of the nastiest imaginable.”

Greenleaf has explained before that he knew Tanner’s time was up when his 13th book in the series, the Edgar Award-nominated Strawberry Sunday (1999), failed to find a paperback publisher. Sadly, only one additional entry made it into print: 2000’s Ellipsis.

William Schmidt is credited with painting the front of Grave Error displayed atop this post. I don’t see much information about him online, other than mentions of his art having decorated works by John D. MacDonald (Contrary Pleasure) and Brian Daley (Han Solo and the Lost Legacy), as well as assorted monthly issues of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine during the 1970s.