On Crime

Frothy mayhem for a steamy season

By Hallie Ephron, published in the Boston Globe June 28, 2009

JUMP

By Tim Maleeny
Poisoned Pen, 250 pp., $24.95

THE EXTRA
By Elizabeth Sims
Minotaur, 400 pp., $25.95

THE BAKER STREET LETTERS
By Michael Robertson
Minotaur, 288 pp., $24.95

It’s officially summer, and many new crime novels will make great beach reads - they keep you entertained but won’t keep you up nights.

If you threw in the air the pages of Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express’’ and Elmore Leonard’s “Get Shorty,’’ and then invited Monty Python to stitch them back together, you might end up with something like “Jump,’’ Tim Maleeny’s hilarious novel. Its cast of characters - residents of the top floor of the Bay Area’s tony Golden Towers Apartments - are an idiosyncratic bunch.

Larry and Jerome, aka the Sandwich Brothers, deliver corned beef sandwiches with a side of hashish to well-heeled Bay Area office workers. The intoxicating Shayla and Tamara are amassing a fortune by hanging out half dressed in their apartment while a camcorder beams their every move and jiggle across the Internet. Walter is an alcoholic producer of B-movies who consults “Scarface’’ to find out whether the middle man (which he aspires to become) in a drug deal ever comes out on top. Add a middle-aged witch who is a matchmaker and purveyor of home-baked cookies, and a sad-eyed divorcee with a voice “like a fallen angel,’’ and you have hardly the usual suspects. Finally there’s Sam McGowan, a burned out retired cop and grieving widower with nothing left to lose.

Then, toss from the roof Ed Lowry, the landlord whom every resident has a reason to despise. In a memorable opening scene, Lowry screams “like a pregnant nun on her way to confession’’ as he falls, and his body ends up impaled on the upturned bill of the penguin that adorns the fountain in the building’s courtyard.

Elizabeth Sims’s “The Extra’’ is another mystery that doesn’t take itself too seriously. In this second novel in the series featuring Rita Farmer, the impoverished young single mother and erstwhile actress studying for her law degree at UCLA takes a job as a movie extra. She suits up to act the part of an LAPD cop in a crowd scene.

Things get ugly when, during lunch break, a big fat cockroach jumps out of her sandwich. Rita freaks and hoofs it to the nearest, not-so-nice neighborhood. There she finds more than she bargains for when she witnesses a crime. Still in costume, she is taken for a cop.

The young boy whose life she barely saves is the grandson of Amaryllis Cubitt, Los Angeles’s “Iron Angel,’’ a formidable, street-smart Mother Teresa who runs the ABC Mission, offering food and lodging and a firm helping hand to L.A.’s down and out. It turns out that back when Rita was scraping bottom, Amaryllis gave her a $10 McDonald’s card and a stern lecture on saving herself.

Meanwhile, Rita’s main squeeze, private investigator George Rowe, an accomplished impersonator and lock picker, gets hired to find Ernest (aka Ch. Ernest Jiggs Cognac V), a champion beagle who, according to his owner, “transcends the animal kingdom, but his line is straight to enlightenment.’’

Straight from central casting, side characters include: Rita’s loopy sister, a would-be torch singer saddled with a soprano voice; an animal trainer whose specialty is working with dogs and rodents; and gangstah Dale the Whale with an armada of drug-dealing thugs.

The two leads, Rita and George, save the day. They are engaging and surprisingly believable in a novel where the story, to say the least, jumps the shark and stretches credulity with a virtual train wreck of coincidences.

An apparently endless source of inspiration, the Sherlock Holmes canon sparks the setup for Michael Robertson’s debut novel “The Baker Street Letters.’’ Fussy barrister Reggie Heath has leased offices in a building at 221 Baker St. For years letters addressed to Holmes have been arriving there. The rent is so reasonable that Reggie is only too happy to assign one of his clerks the task of responding to the correspondence by form letter, as the lease requires. When the clerk gets hit by a bus and dies, Reggie hires his brother Nigel to handle the correspondence - at least until outstanding assault charges against Nigel have been settled and his license to practice law is reinstated.

Impulsive and emotional, Nigel is Reggie’s polar opposite. He becomes intrigued by the letters. When one arrives referencing a map received years earlier from an 8-year-old American girl, Nigel goes digging. It turns out the map contained a geologic survey, and before you can say “Dear Sherlock,’’ Nigel and the map disappear. Reggie finds Nigel’s office tossed. In the debris is the body of Ocher, a senior clerk. Nigel is the prime suspect, but as Reggie’s sharp-tongued girlfriend, Laura, observes, “any number of people might have wanted to bash [Ocher] with a blunt instrument.’’

Reggie takes off across the pond to Los Angeles in search of Nigel. With his raincoat and umbrella, Reggie is truly a stranger in La-La Land. He navigates the sprawling city by cab following clues that take him from movie studio to skid row, from clogged freeway to underground subway tunnel, driven as much by sibling rivalry as by brotherly love.