Dorothy L. Sayers was one of the founders of the British “Detection Club,” a group of mystery writers. They enforced certain rules on their membership, including one against allowing their detectives to solve crimes through “jiggery-pokery.” Jiggery-pokery included spirits, magic, and psychic powers.
The rules of detective writing have changed since then (like all the rules), so that now and then we do encounter a mystery book where psychic powers play a part. However, it doesn’t work in practice to make those powers too effective. That ruins the whole point of a mystery. When a “real” psychic appears in a mystery, their gift is generally obscure, constituting a puzzle in itself.
That’s the case with Jack Lynch’s Die for Me, another in his Pete Bragg series. San Francisco PI Bragg, who flourished back around the ‘80s, gets a call from Maribeth Robbins, a woman he’s only encountered once before – over the phone. On the very last day of his newspaper career, then-reporter Bragg took a call from a profoundly depressed Maribeth. He realized he was talking to someone suicidal, and stayed on the line with her until she’d calmed down. Then he referred her to counselors. That call, she tells him now, saved her life. Today she’s a psychic, but a low-key one. She avoids publicity and the media.
She’s learned that Bragg has become a private eye, and she wants to talk to him about a vision she’s been having. She sees a rural location where – she is certain – several bodies are buried. These people were recently murdered and one of them, she thinks, is a child.
It’s pretty vague evidence to go on, if it can be called evidence at all. But Bragg teases some further details out of her, and then gets a pilot friend to fly him and a friendly medical examiner to a particular area along the California coast. In Jack London State Park they find a spot that matches the description. And the M.E. notes that the vivid green color of the grass could well be a sign of burials.
They land and examine the place, and immediately call the county sheriff. This is indeed a burial site. Just as Maribeth feared.
The story that follows mixes Bragg’s involvement with the case with his struggles in his relationship with his girlfriend, who’s increasingly distant. In the end he’ll face a showdown with a hostage-taking killer, in the ruins of Jack London’s house.
I don’t believe in ESP. If it exists, I consider it probably demonic. But suspending my disbelief on that point, I very much enjoyed Die for Me. It was an engaging and engrossing story that kept me turning the pages.
One thing that dated it, I thought (and being dated is no drawback in a book for this reader), was the treatment of feminism. Bragg encounters a female police detective back when such creatures were a rarity. He demonstrates his openmindedness in his conversations with her, but those conversations are cringe-inducing by the standards of the 21st Century. I think that’s because back then we thought feminism was really about fairness, not just about finding ways for men always to be in the wrong.
Anyway, Die for Me was a pretty good, old-school mystery, and I enjoyed it. Recommended unless ESP is a deal-breaker for you.