There are a million injustices in the mean streets of Publishing Town. The greatest of all, it goes without saying, is my own failure to find a new publisher. But not far behind is the tragic fact that Bill Pronzini is not a major, bestselling mystery writer.

He’s published and respected and he wins awards, but he’s never broken out as I think he should. He has everything I want in a mystery writer. He sets out a good puzzle, but he also paints a good character, which is what I really want.

I realized years ago, reading Science Fiction, why I don’t care for most Science Fiction. It’s because the authors treat their characters like specimens on a dissection tray. “Let’s poke the subject here, and see what its reaction is.” They had no compassion for their characters, and I put down their books with relief.

There are mystery writers like that too, but Bill Pronzini isn’t one of them. His characters are 98.6 F warm. They act like real people, for real motives, and Pronzini has compassion on them—even the bad ones.

His continuing character is known as “The Nameless Detective,” not because he’s a man of mystery, but because Pronzini started writing about him in short stories without giving him a name, and once he’d established him that way it would detract from the stories to suddenly drop a name on him (although he did let us know, some years back, that Nameless’ first name is Bill).

Nameless has grown over the years. He started out as a young San Francisco private eye who consciously modeled himself on the hard-boiled sleuths of the old pulp magazines, of which he is a collector. He was also a heavy smoker at the start, which gave Pronzini the chance to kill him off from cancer in one memorable short story. But (like Conan Doyle) he succumbed to the temptation to bring his detective back. Nameless had a remission, and has taken care of himself since then.

He’s middle-aged now, and married to a woman named Kerry. They’ve adopted a little girl. He’s planning to semi-retire soon, and has taken on a partner, a young black woman named Tamara whom he mentored. In this book they also hire an operative, a former cop named Jake Runyon. Runyon has many personal demons, which helps him fit right in.

In Spook, the agency is hired by a San Francisco film company to discover the identity of a homeless man whom everyone called “Spook,” a gentle, mentally disturbed man who was shot to death in an alley behind their studio. It’s not supposed to be a Whodunnit. It’s just that the filmmakers liked the man, and would like to notify his family, or arrange for burial themselves.

Following the clues they turn up, the detectives send their new operative, Runyon, out to a small town in the Sierras to discover the tragic story behind “Spook’s” decline. Runyon doesn’t mind. He has absolutely nothing in his life anymore except for his work, and he provides an empathetic eye as he turns over the old log he finds, to see what worms writhe underneath.

But there’s more than just worms there. There’s a wasp—someone very angry and very crazy, with a brainful of hate and resentment. And a gun.

Pronzini is a fine, professional storyteller who draws you in and makes you care. Profanity and sexual situations are on the low side for the genre. I recommend Spook, and all Pronzini’s novels.