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Amnesia victim, Pete Ingalls wakes up in the hospital with one thing on his mind, that he's a PI, circa 1940, the time of the hard-boiled PI, the time of Dashiell Hammett and Phil Marlowe. And that's who Pete figures he is, a PI hurt on a job gone bad. Unfortunately the 1940s was over 60 years ago. Taking the check he gets from a lawyer for his last job (actually for the bookstore accident that sent him to the hospital) he sets himself up in a dive of a PI office, gets himself some broad-shouldered, broad-lapeled, gumshoe clothing with matching fedoras, advertises for a gal Friday, (who shows up in the person of actress wannabe Stephanie Constantino, a good-hearted broad with a bad girl mouth on her, but Pete likes her moxie, and she has good insights into his female clients) and sets up as a working PI. Luckily two clients show up right away and ask for Pete's help. It seems the PI business is good these days. Celeste Vroman, a woman of dark mystery, mainly because she refuses to be seen in anything but dark restaurants, asks Pete to find her missing married boyfriend, mouthpiece attorney Jeffrey Litman. Funny, as Pete finds out the next day that the boyfriend isn't missing, just in hiding from the mysterious Celeste as he dallies with his new skirt, meek and quiet Olivia Cartwright. But then mouse Olivia shows up dead and all bets are off. At the same time another women client arrives in the office and asks Pete to follow her famous newscaster husband to see if he's two-timing her. With the client giving him the time and dates to use to tail her hubby, the job seems easy - maybe too easy? Ellis Weiner has, in DROP DEAD MY LOVELY, set up the situation of a confused bookseller conked on the head and believing he's a PI, the last genre of books he'd absorbed himself in. The film noir PI of the forties, out of water in modern NYC, has its funny lines, very funny lines - at first. But because this is really a one-joke book, it gets a little stale after the first few chapters and constant fast hard-boiled flying witticisms. The fact that Pete knows about cell phones and modern life and yet can't fit in with the contemporary world isn't easy to swallow. He lives his life by a convoluted code of PI and meek bookseller when it comes to women and sees life in black and white. He dismisses his old friends who knows that something terribly off with him, and happily for the book, they also don't care much to set Pete straight. His lack of detecting knowhow (and PI license) doesn't worry his clients, his secretary, or the obscene Sydney Greenstreet-like homicide policeman Pete comes into contact with. Very convenient. A 288 page novel with the makings of a good short, story inside it, DROP DEAD MY LOVELY is fun reading at first, but then starts to drag as the leading man shows us no new interesting facets in his PI persona. If you're in the mood for a funny PI satire, DROP DEAD MY LOVELY will entertain you. But only for the first few chapters.
Reviewed by Sharon Katz, April 2004
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