Rex’s reviews of anything (but mostly books)

“My blood runs cold, my memory has just been sold
My Angel is a centerfold…”¹

For John Blake, the revelation was even more blood-chilling: the ten-year-old high-school graduation photo of a stripper found murdered in NYC was undeniably that of his first love, Miranda Sugarman. How could the shy, pretty blonde he’d last seen heading west with dreams of becoming an ophthalmologist have ended up shaking her booty for dollar bills tucked into a G-string? How, indeed…

The same ten years have treated Blake only slightly better; he’s finished an apprenticeship with ex-cop Leo Hauser to become a private investigator. Privately, this is one murder the baby-faced Blake fully intends to investigate; so he packs his kit and treks into the silicon mountains on a trail that leads back to Miranda’s freshman year in college. There he learns that Miranda and her roomie Jocelyn had dropped out in Spring semester, never to be heard from again – at least not until Randy, as she was calling herself, had performed one last bump and grind on the roof of a titty bar called the Sin Factory.

The cops didn’t seem interested in the death of a stripper (everyone knows they’re just hos) – but Blake felt he owed the Little Girl Lost one last bit of dignity. Little did he realize…

Richard Aleas – the alias (get it?) of Shamus-nominated mystery writer and editor Charles Ardai – gets on the board for the first time as a novelist with his 2004 novel Little Girl Lost (a second John Blake novel, Songs of Innocence was published in 2007). Both Aleas books are part of the decidedly “pulpy” output of Ardai’s own publishing house, Hard Case Crime (Little Girl Lost is number four). Other novelists who’ve penned mysteries for the imprint include Lawrence Block, Donald Westlake, and Stephen King; and the house also reprints novels by Spillane, Gardner, and other crime luminaries.

True to its billing as “hard case,” Little Girl Lost takes place in the gritty streets of Gotham, showing the wormy side of the Big Apple where some of its seamier citizens cavort. Blake’s investigation into Miranda’s death involves plenty of trips to bars that don’t quite meet the minimum cutoff for “gentlemen’s clubs,” where he meets more than one hard-eyed (and hard-otherwised) young woman. True to the form, Blake spends about as much time unconscious as Mike Tyson’s sparring partners, copious amounts of blood are spilled, and more than one reference to jazz is tossed out. Mike Hammer would feel right at home (except maybe with the unconscious part). Blake’s an interesting deviation from the tough-guy PI image fostered by Spillane and others, however, what with his glass jaw and baby face.

Though decidedly nostalgic in theme and texture, Aleas’s novel is nonetheless up-to-date in its references to cell phones, iPods, and the internet: what would Erle Stanley Gardner’s characters have done with that kind of technology, one must wonder.

For all its noir, pulp-fiction roots, Little Girl Lost is – unfortunately – just not that good a mystery. Aleas’s insertion of critical clues is heavy-handed, and more than once I found myself wondering how the hero could have possibly missed that one. The crucial plot twist had been telegraphed at least three times by the time I saw it on the page, and that’s just not a good thing.

For his homage to those mysteries of yore, kudos to Aleas; but I wish that the mystery had been more… more mysterious, if you know what I mean. It’s not a bad mystery, mind you; just flawed.

Buy Little Girl Lost at amazon.com

¹ “Centerfold,” ©1981 by The J. Geils Band