{"id":15890,"date":"2021-10-18T20:02:27","date_gmt":"2021-10-19T00:02:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=15890"},"modified":"2021-10-18T20:02:27","modified_gmt":"2021-10-19T00:02:27","slug":"the-dead-never-forget-by-jack-lynch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=15890","title":{"rendered":"‘The Dead Never Forget, by Jack Lynch"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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I had never heard of the author Jack Lynch<\/strong>, or his private eye character Pete Bragg, who flourished in the \u201860s and \u201870s, roughly contemporary with John D. MacDonald and the Travis McGee books. But The Complete Bragg<\/a><\/em> compendium (final collection in a series reprint) became available at a low price, and I downloaded it to my Kindle. I was pleasantly surprised. The first book in this volume is The Dead Never Forget.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pete Bragg was once a newspaper man in Seattle, but now he\u2019s a private eye in San Francisco. When a large, dangerous-looking man comes to invite him to talk to Armando Barker, a retired mobster now gone legit (or so he claims), he can\u2019t afford to turn down profitable work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Barker explains that he\u2019s been getting cards threatening him and his employees. He wouldn\u2019t worry about that, but now they\u2019ve threatened his 11-year-old stepdaughter, whom he\u2019s maintaining in an expensive private school. Bragg takes the job, and then one of Barker\u2019s employees is murdered, raising the stakes considerably. Bragg is certain the background of the threats must be hidden in the casino town of Sand Valley, Nevada, where Barker used to operate. Barker doubts that, but Bragg follows his instincts and visits the town.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Homages <\/em>to Akira Kurosawa\u2019s film \u201cYojimbo\u201d are almost a subgenre in several different storytelling genres. Most famous of the homages <\/em>is probably the film, \u201cA Fistful of Dollars.\u201d But (or so I\u2019ve read) the original inspiration for that movie was Dashiell Hammet\u2019s novel, Red Harvest. <\/a><\/em>So mystery homages <\/em>are a kind of closing of the circle. I saw a lot of \u201cYojimbo\u201d in this book, where the criminals who run The Truck Stop whorehouse at one end of town go to war with the criminals who run the Sky Lodge casino at the other end, and the bullets fly fast and thick enough to call down government intervention. And in the middle is Bragg, trying to make sense of who\u2019s actually profiting from all the chaos. Deduction is not Bragg\u2019s strong point \u2013 he\u2019ll only figure it all out when it\u2019s pretty much laid out for him by the last person he suspected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Dead Never Forget<\/em> was a lot of fun to read, for this reader. Uncomplicated by political correctness, with an engaging narrator and lots of action (and sex, though it\u2019s not explicit), it was pretty much exactly what the doctor ordered. Reminiscent of MacDonald, but a little shallower, I think. My only grumble is that I learned at the end that Bragg\u2019s a casual pot smoker. I always dislike that in my heroes. But I paid for the whole collection, so I expect I\u2019ll read the rest, and even have a good time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I had never heard of the author Jack Lynch, or his private eye character Pete Bragg, who flourished in the \u201860s and \u201870s, roughly contemporary with John D. MacDonald and the Travis McGee books. But The Complete Bragg compendium (final collection in a series reprint) became available at a low price, and I downloaded it … Continue reading ‘The Dead Never Forget, by Jack Lynch<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7,15],"tags":[3898,3899,3900],"class_list":["post-15890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","category-reviews","tag-jack-lynch","tag-pete-bragg","tag-the-dead-never-forget"],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15890","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15890"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15890\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15892,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15890\/revisions\/15892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}