I like to think I gave Ed Gorman a fair shake. He’s honest enough to admit his political leanings (liberal), but he makes a genuine effort to humanize his characters, even those awful Republicans. I have to give him credit for that. He tries. But I didn’t like this second book (actually two books; it’s a double volume) of his that I’ve read, and I don’t think I’ll read any more. The Original Sam McCain Mysteries fails, in my view, for two reasons. One is an inadequate main character. The other is, if not a plain political lie, at least a definite—and surely conscious—misstatement of historical fact.

First of all the main character. As the title suggests, he’s a guy named Sam McCain. Gorman gives what seems to be his inspiration for the character in a passage where McCain meditates on his favorite mystery writer, the pre-Travis McGee John D. MacDonald:

There are no heroes in John D. novels, and that’s probably why I like them. Every once in a while his man will behave heroically, but that still doesn’t make him a hero. He has a lot of faults and he always realizes, at some point in every book, that he’s flawed and less than he wants to be.

If Gorman’s goal was to create a character who isn’t heroic, he’s succeeded. Sam McCain is a short young man, a poor lawyer in a small Iowa town in the mid-1950s, forced by penury to do jobs for the local judge, an elitist woman who delights in humiliating him in small ways. He talks a lot about his love for the town beauty, who is herself in love with a rich guy. Meanwhile another girl, apparently just as pretty and with more personal substance, loves Sam and he doesn’t reciprocate. In this he’s clearly an idiot.

He’s also a punching bag. People beat him up a lot in these stories, and he just endures it. When he finally overcomes the murderers, he ought to be grateful to the God he claims not to believe in, because without a deus ex machina or two he’d be long dead. I think he won one fight in the second book.

The first book, The Day the Music Died, concerns an apparent murder-suicide on the same day that Buddy Holly, Richy Valens, and the Big Bopper were killed in a plane crash not very far away. Wake Up Little Suzy deals with the murder of a woman found in the trunk of a brand new Edsel, on the day that ill-starred automobile was first revealed to the public.

I wasn’t very taken with the characters, as you may have noted, and I guessed the murderer in the second book.

It appears that author Gorman is conflicted about Iowa in the ’50s. He clearly remembers the time and place with great fondness, and even compares it favorably to the present in some respects. But as a good liberal, he has to constantly remind us that the environment was full of racism, sexism, and homophobia. (He refers to African Americans as “blacks” a lot, which is an anachronism. They were called by everyone, including themselves, “Negroes,” at the time. Gorman uses that word at least a couple times, but clearly feels guilty about it.) As he recalls the period, everybody except extreme Puritans understood that nobody could possibly wait for marriage to have sex, and that abortion is the only reasonable solution to unwed pregnancy.

But my big beef with Gorman is what I cannot see as anything but a premeditated falsification of fact. McCain identifies himself as a Democrat, and (of course) he is in favor of equal rights for black people. He doesn’t state it specifically, but the clear implication all through is that Republicans are racists, and Democrats are not. This is most clearly seen in his description of the local barber shop.

Bill [is] the conservative of the pair. You can tell that by looking at the photos he’s got up on his barber’s mirror behind the pump chair: Joe McCarthy. John Foster Dulles. And the mayor of Little Rock, Arkansas, who wouldn’t let Negro students into an all-white high school….

Phil is the Democrat. His photos run to Jackie Robinson, FDR, and Adlai Stevenson.

Get that? The conservative (who must be Republican, since the other guy is the Democrat) is a racist. The Democrat, obviously, is unprejudiced.

Reading that passage, you’d never know that it was the Democratic Party that blocked Civil Rights legislation in congress for years. That it was the Democrats of the “Solid South” who drafted and enforced the Jim Crow laws. That Martin Luther King was not a Democrat, but a Republican.

It’s a lie, in other words.

If you’re interested in these stories, I can’t criticize them much on language, sex, or violence. They’re relatively mild in that regard.