Detective Comrade (seriously, that’s his name!) Flynt is part of the police force in a small, fictional California city. He is known to the other cops as “the leprechaun,” because he’s short, ugly, and his red hair is always unkempt. He was traumatized in a bad shooting some years ago, and his old partner covered for him ever since.
But his partner is dead now, and as Micheal Maxwell’s Dead Beat begins, Flynt is partnered with Lieutenant Noah Steele (Flynt and Steele, get it?). Steele is an up-and-comer, and their commander has tasked him, among other things, with finding a reason to fire Flynt, whom he considers (not without cause) dead weight.
But then they’re called to investigate the murder of a teenage drummer from a punk rock band, found stabbed to death with his drumsticks in a storage locker. As they proceed, Steele gradually discovers that, in spite of his partner’s eccentric and even repulsive personal habits, he has genuine gifts for investigation. And they start to form a bond.
When I find an ineptly written book these days, my inclination is to drop it quietly without ragging on the author. But author Micheal Maxwell describes himself as an “Amazon bestselling writer,” and that annoys me in a petty way. The fact that this kind of writing can generate bestsellers is painful to contemplate for someone who’s worked hard to improve his skills.
What was wrong with Dead Beat? Let me list some of the problems:
The prose was awkward – a representative line runs, “She was both maternal and attention-starved at the same time.” Or, “A mad array of pushing and shoving…”
In describing life in a Catholic orphanage, the author indulges in extreme stereotyping: All the nuns are cruel and abusive. Even as a Protestant and a well-known misogynist, I find that implausible. Women, in my experience, tend to be pretty sympathetic people – I find it hard to believe that, in any group of women, every single one could be a sadist.
In general, the writing here is amateurish. The author describes his characters to us (at excessive length), rather than revealing their personalities through their actions – and their actions, in fact, seem inconsistent and pretty much random.
I found an odd continuity problem in one particular scene, where the characters are described getting ready to sit down in a room, and then suddenly they are back in the hallway, walking toward the room.
Police procedures (I won’t describe them in detail) seemed implausible and unprofessional.
And finally, the big, brilliant deduction that impresses everybody at the climax turns out to involve a very obvious technical matter that I’m certain any crime scene technician would recognize in a minute.
In short, Dead Beat was a book that any pulp publisher back in my day would have shot back to the author before he’d finished reading the first page. I do not recommend it.
