Edged in Blue

Gerald So tagged me last week for Patti Abbott’s Friday Forgotten Books. So for my pick, I choose Jeremiah Healy’s Blunt Darts. It’s Healy’s debut work and the debut of his John Francis Cuddy. Cuddy, we learn, is a former MP who had it all. He could have been a top executive at an insurance company, except he had this thing called… um… What’s the word I’m looking for?

Oh, yeah. Ethics. They fired him for having ethics.

The story itself is one you’ve heard before. Wealthy family, lots of secrets, corrupt small town police force. But all that serves to introduce us to one of the PI genre’s best characters. We meet Cuddy in the unemployment office, BSing the entrenched bureaucrat about his employment prospects. At first, it seems he’s given up and is milking the system. As it turns out, he’s just become a private investigator, and revealing that might cost him his unemployment check before he can build a client base.

It was that initial scene that endeared me to Cuddy. His MP past serves more as background fodder than a means to make him a tough guy. (Lee Child successfully takes the opposite tact with Jack Reacher, but then we want Reacher to be a tough guy, don’t we?) Cuddy also has an unusual conscience in his late wife, whom he regularly converses with at her graveside.

Cuddy is very much a work in progress in this one. We don’t hear his wife’s side of the conversation, a surprisingly believable plot device in later books. Cuddy’s new lover, Nancy Meagher, does not appear. And Healy spends more time differentiating his creation from fellow Boston PI Spenser.

I always thought the Cuddy series, and its Detroit counterpart, the Ben Perkins series, were grossly underrated and underappreciated. Alas, both series are out of print. Too bad, because I think it’s time to revisit Cuddy’s Reagan-era Boston.