Tag Archives: Richard Helms

‘Wet Debt,’ by Richard Helms

Reynard had hired some old white-haired shill to stand out front of the bar in a tuxedo and drag in the out-of-town pigeons. He thought it gave the place some class, the same way some people try to dress up toilet lids with fuzzy covers.

New Orleans jazz cornet player and occasional detective Pat Gallegher rides again in Wet Debt (which is, I think, the last of the series). Wet Debt delves into one of my favorite sub-genres – the very cold case, resurfacing from long ago.

The bar where Pat plays and lives takes up half of a building. His boss, Shorty, is having the other half renovated. But work stops when workmen discover a desiccated mummy buried in the concrete floor. It’s a man, and judging by the clothing he’s been there since the 1930s. Those were the days of Prohibition and gangsters, high times for New Orleans’s bottom dwellers.

Shorty’s in a hurry to get the property ready for a new tenant, but the police are in no hurry to close such an old mystery. Could Pat do him a favor, and look into it? Pat agrees.

His investigation leads him to a place where the city’s upper crust and its dregs once crossed paths, in the speakeasies of old. An old newspaper photograph displays two criminals in the company of two beautiful young society girls. Pat knows one of the criminals, a recently deceased gang lord with whom he had an uneasy relationship. Now he’ll learn how that man came to New Orleans in the first place, and what he did to earn his power. The dead man in the concrete was never greatly missed, and nobody alive could possibly worry about his murderer being unmasked… Or could they?

Not quite as suspenseful as the previous books in the series (though not without suspense), Wet Debt is an enjoyable and atmospheric cold case story. Cautions for the usual. I’m going to miss Pat Gallegher.

‘Juicy Watusi,’ by Richard Helms

“People see too many movies. They expect the bad guy to be some kind of evil genius. You and I, though, we know better. Most of the bad guys we run across have all the brains of wallpaper paste. The blinder the violence, the more likely it’s some kind of stimulus-response event that, given the opportunity, the perp would refer to down the line as just one of those things. You take some of the most prolific killers of the last twenty years, and toss them in a room, and it would look like just a bunch of dumb losers in a room.”

And the saga of Pat Gallegher, New Orleans jazz cornetist and avocational detective, continues with Juicy Watusi, in which author Richard Helms, himself a forensic psychologist, tackles a subject he knows pretty well – serial killers.

Pat’s bar-owner boss gets a new girlfriend – a stripper. Pat withholds judgment and wishes them well. But it turns out even worse than you’d expect – the girlfriend is found murdered in an alley behind the club where she works. And she’s not the only one. Somebody’s carving up strippers all over the city.

The local police request that the FBI send in a profiler to help them, but none is available just now. However, a noted profiler happens to live right there in New Orleans, teaching at Tulane. The trouble is, he’s burned out – he refuses to do that work anymore.

The police offer a compromise – the profiler can work with them incognito, and another local man with profiling experience can operate as a “beard” – pretending to be the profiler in front of the news cameras.

That other profiler is Pat Gallegher. He too quit the job, years back, when it started messing with his head. He doesn’t like the deal, but it seems a small price to pay for stopping this guy.

It gets tougher, though, when Pat’s girlfriend is kidnapped by the killer. Now he’s on a deadline, and faced by an impossible moral choice.

Juicy Watusi is another cool hard-boiled from a solid writer who knows his stuff. I figured out the big plot twist ahead of time, but I enjoyed it anyway, and recommend it, with the usual cautions.

‘Voodoo That You Do,’ by Richard Helms

“It’s like this,” I said. “I’m not mad at the world. I just see things that stink, and I feel like hitting them with a little air freshener. Most poor suckers have too much to lose, or a lot more of them would do what I do…. The average guy on the street has a family or a mortgage, or he’s six months from a peachy promotion he doesn’t want to risk, so he sees a punk muscling some old lady and he turns his head. I guess I just don’t have that much to lose. I see that punk, and I don’t mind jamming him up a little.”

Pat Gallegher, hero of these novels by Richard Helms I’m following right now, is (as I mentioned yesterday) a former Catholic seminarian who lost his faith. But that doesn’t mean he’s abandoned Catholicism. He still goes to mass occasionally, and makes confession to his friend, Father “Dag” D’Agostino. He and Father Dag understand each other – Pat’s a recovering gambling addict, Dag a recovering alcoholic. It seems to me that Pat’s struggles with God allow him to talk more about faith than a Christian character could get away with.

Though his main spiritual belief seems to be in karma. Voodoo turns up in this one too.

In Voodoo That You Do, the second book in the series, Pat is strolling down a New Orleans alley with a friend, an old mobster named Hotshot Spano, when Hotshot is murdered by Haitian gang members. Pat feels an inarticulate obligation to do something about it. He learns that the hit was ordered by a Vietnamese gangster who controls a number of Haitian gangs.

Meanwhile Pat discovers a little girl rummaging in the dumpster behind the bar where he lives and plays jazz cornet. Patiently he gains her trust with gifts of food – like a wild animal – until he’s able to take her to a shelter recommended by Father Dag. There he meets a lovely social worker with whom he begins a flirtation.

Turns out that the little girl, Louise, is not just any little girl. She’s connected to the very gangs Pat’s trying to bring to justice. And if he isn’t very careful, Louise may suffer for his windmill-tilting.

Fascinating, masterfully written, atmospheric and intense, Voodoo That You Do is a cracker jack mystery in the old hard-boiled style. Highly recommended, with the usual cautions, plus an extra for questionable metaphysics.

‘Joker Poker,’ by Richard Helms

Sam Spade, Mike Hammer, and Philip Marlowe notwithstanding, you don’t ship one off to that undiscovered land from whose bourne no traveler returns without paying the freight in sleepless nights.

Pat Gallegher is a big Irishman who plays jazz cornet in a seedy New Orleans bar. Once, long ago, he studied for the priesthood, until he lost his faith. Then he got his doctorate in psychology and became a forensic psychologist and then a college professor. Those jobs didn’t work out for him. Eventually he floated into the Big Easy and gave free exercise to his gambling addiction, until he joined Gamblers Anonymous. But a local loan shark still holds his note. To pay it off (which isn’t likely to happen in this lifetime) the shark sends him out now and then as a collector.

Pat doesn’t like being a collector, and so he does the occasional “favor” for friends. These favors generally involve recovering lost property or scaring off dangerous people. Pat feels these actions help balance out his karma.

All the above is not the plot of Richard Helms’s Joker Poker, just the back story. We’re talking dense back story here. Which all adds to a solid quality I appreciated in this book.

Doing a favor is how Pat’s lawyer comes to bring Clancey Vancouer, a wealthy society lady, to see him. Clancey has been having an affair, and her lover has disappeared. She wants to know that he’s alive and all right. Pat warns her that the guy was probably just a gigolo, but she doesn’t care.

Pat agrees to look into it, but has trouble seeing the point. His interest acquires fresh urgency, however, when he is set up for a murder, and has to figure out who among a large group of suspects (including a leggy redhead, a friend of Clancey’s, with whom he has an affair) is the real culprit. The climax will be explosive, shattering for some, and deadly for others.

I loved this book. I read it with a sense of homecoming, of old comforts. It occurred to me that this book (first published just before the turn of the millennium) represents a lost style of writing. In today’s books, even in the hard-boiled genre, political correctness has infected everything. The characters in Joker Poker use offensive language. There isn’t a kick-butt female sidekick in sight. And men are permitted to protect women.

Lots of cautions are in order for language and disturbing material, but I highly recommend Joker Poker to fans of the genre. I can’t understand why this series isn’t famous, and author Helms isn’t better known. The prose is vivid and original. The ambience is thick as New Orleans humidity. There are whiffs of all the old great hard-boiled writers in evidence, but I was particularly reminded of John D. MacDonald.