Die Again, Macready (1984) by Jack Livingston

A strange, but fascinating, passageway in the locked room-and impossible crime genre is a dark, grimy alley that opens onto those mean streets of Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer. A narrow passage connecting the cerebral detective story with the world of the tough, gruff and grizzled private dicks with the locked room puzzle serving as a linchpin between the traditional and hardboiled styles – an unlikely combination that can be magical when done right. Bill Pronzini's Hoodwink (1981), Scattershot (1982) and Bones (1985) are perfect examples of blending hardboiled story-telling with a puzzling impossible crime plot.

Thrilling Detective Website has a whole page dedicated to these cross-genre composites, "And Throw Away the Key! Locked Room P.I. Mysteries," listing such titles as Jonathan Latimer's Headed for a Hearse (1935), Roman McDougald's The Blushing Monkey (1953) and Tucker Coe's Murder Among Children (1967).

There are, however, some (notable) omissions like Anthony Boucher's The Case of the Solid Key (1941), Manly Wade Wellman's Find My Killer (1947), Fredric Brown's Death Has Many Doors (1951), Stephen Mertz's Some Die Hard (1979) and Pronzini's Schemers (2009). Recently, I found another little-known title that enjoys an equal amount of obscurity as both a locked room and hardboiled P.I. novel, but deserved some kind of recognition. More so as a dark, gritty, but well-written, crime novel than as an impossible crime story.

James L. Nusser penned a handful of private-eye novels during the 1980s, published as by "Jack Livingston," starring a stone-deaf detective, Joe Binney, who lost his hearing during the Korean War when a placed a shaped charge on an enemy gunboat with a "delay fuse that didn't delay" – practically turning his skull inside out. Binney was patched up at a Navy hospital where he learned lip reading and bookkeeping. So he could work as a free-lance bookkeeper and wouldn't have to talk to anybody, but, when he "chased down a few skips and swindlers" for his clients, Binney began to work as a private detective.

Die Again, Macready (1984) is the second of only four titles in this series and was listed by Robert Adey in Locked Room Mysteries (1991).

Adey summed Die Again, Macready as a "perfectly reasonable private-eye yarn" written by an author who, for some reason, "does not seem to command the attention of a lot of his peers" and appears to be largely forgotten today. And very little can be found about him online. Nonetheless, the introduction of a deaf, lipreading private-eye appeared to have made somewhat of a splash at the time. I think this one is as good as any I have read by the likes of Latimer and Pronzini.

Joe Binney is hired by a rising actor, William Macready, to track down his business manager, Arnold Pelfrey, who "absconded with about two-hundred and fifty thousand dollars" of employers money and the trail leads to a seedy, rundown Times Square hotel – where he finds Pelfrey hanging from an ancient gas pipe. The door of the room had been locked, as well as bolted, from the inside and the closed window "hadn't been dusted in centuries." So everything appears to point towards suicide, but the problem of the locked hotel room is only a minor part of the overall plot. Binney wastes no time in explaining how the murderer locked and bolted the door from the inside with an old, shopworn trick ("the impossible takes a little longer, but locked-room puzzles we solve immediately, sir, compliments of Joe Binney, Esq., Private Investigations at your service."). So this is only a very minor impossible crime novel. However, the story has more to offer than just a simplistic locked room puzzle.

The next couple of chapters are actually some of the best in the book as Binney, according to the tradition of the hardboiled crime novel, finds himself on the receiving end of a beating.

A beating that leaves him with partial amnesia and has to convalescence at the home of his client, Macready, who lives in a penthouse situated in a bad neighborhood and they have some interesting conversations – talking about how they had overcome their wartime injuries and "the TV racket." An important plot-thread in the story is why Macready turned down an important role in a new TV-series, which is neatly tied to the problem of the stolen and now missing money. And I wonder if the unnamed TV network here happened to be the same one from William DeAndrea's Matt Cobb series. I like to think so.

But these chapters also have a really strange, comic book vibe to them recalling Daredevil and Watchmen. A part of the story takes place in Hell's Kitchen, "a screwy part of the world," which Binney described as "becoming more like Hell itself." And observed how there seemed hardly “a pervert, degenerate, or miscreant” in New York who did not eventually found their way to Macready's doorstep in this bad part of the city. Funnily enough, Macready tells Binney a slight variation on the joke Rorschach told in Watchmen, but here the joke was about The Great Deburau instead of Pagliacci the Clown. However, the punchline was exactly the same.

I suppose these comic books and characters came to mind, because I always viewed these lonely, hardboiled private-eyes as these darker, incorruptible capeless crusaders who stand vastly even when the odds are stacked against them. And that is certainly the case here. Once he recovered, Binney is back on the street to find the money he had been hired to find and, along the way, he encounters some truly appalling and disgusting crimes involves children and teenage boys – as well as having a hard-to-hard with Pelfrey's murderer. Slowly, but surely, he uncovers a plot involving millions of dollars and the people responsible handed down a death sentence, which forced him to fight for his life. Or, in this case, relied on his wits and military background to outwit his would-be murderer.

This is what often makes the private-eye novel superior to their bleak, overly pretentious cousin, the literary crime novel, because they lack one thing that is nearly always present in even the gloomiest private-eye tale – namely a flicker of light and genuine humanity. A shining light in a pitch-black world. In this case, it's not just Binney who presents that light, but Macready also turned out to be surprisingly human character. And there's splendid side-character, known only as Anthony, who's a retired, acid-scarred police-detective supplementing his "well deserved police pension" as a bill collector. What a warm, human character he turned out to be. And what a shame he only appeared very late into the story. These characters are flickering lights in a pitch-black corner of the world that reminds everyone around them that not all hope is lost. And that there's always something worth fighting for.

On a whole, Die Again, Macready is not as good as a puzzle as some of the other hardboiled locked room stories, but, solely as a private-eye yard, it can stand shoulder to shoulder with its better known counterparts and how the deafness of Binney is handled even makes it standout a little bit – which is more than just a gimmick. The deafness is very well-handled and presented in a believable way, which is shown to have both its advantages and drawbacks.

So I might return to this series, because the synopsis of the third title in the series, The Nightmare File (1986) is intriguing to say the least ("deaths of men who seem to die from fear in the throes of violent nightmares").

On a final note, I noted earlier that there's scarcely any information available about Livingston on the web, but, when I finished writing this review, I found a piece of background information in a very obvious place – inside the back-flap of the dust-jacket. Livingston was "an ex-merchant seaman" who worked "as a medical editor and lives in upstate New York." A Piece of Silence (1982) was "nominated as the best hardcover private-eye novel" of '82 by the Private Eye Writers of America.