If you’re a regular visitor here, then you’re familiar with Chadwick H. Saxelid, a frequent commenter on my posts and a man whose unusual name I have borrowed (with his permission, of course) for a murder victim in DIAGNOSIS MURDER: THE DOUBLE LIFE (coming in November 2006). Today, he reviews THE MAN WITH THE IRON-ON BADGE on his blog. He says, in part:
Lee Goldberg’s The
Man With the Iron-On Badgeis a fun little page turner that, on more than one occasion,
reminded me of Parnell Hall’s Stanley Hastings series. Like Stanley Hastings,
what Harvey Mapes thinks he knows about private detective work comes entirely
from television shows and crime novels. (Goldberg’s novel references so many
different television shows and/or books that it almost qualifies as an exercise
in metafiction.) Unlike
Stanley, when Harvey gets in over his head he finds an inner reserve of strength
and character that he never even knew existed within him. (Stanley usually
makes an ass out of himself, or he just gets lucky.)But Mapes amateurish fumbling and on-the-case training are just sly
misdirections on Goldberg’s part. While the reader is distracted by Mapes’s
growth from junk food guzzling slacker to junk food guzzling detective, all the
clues are artfully dropped. Another trick is how The
Man With the Iron-On Badge manages to spoof private detective story cliches
while letting Mapes discover that the reality of amateur detecting isn’t all
that different from what is on TV or in books, after all.
Thanks, Chadwick. Now I’m sorry I killed you.
Just finished IRON ON BADGE, and loved every page.
(facetious voice) “Although, Goldberg, I DO so wish you’d done a BIT more research….anyone who’s anyone knows it’s TANNA with two N’s, not TANA with one. Ye Gods man……..”
Actually, Lee, that was nonsense, one TV kid to another…:) I loved every page of the whole damned thing..:) When’s the sequel coming out???
I’m glad you enjoyed it! I’d love to write a sequel, but that won’t happen unless someone buys the mass market paperback rights to BADGE and asks for a follow-up as part of the deal.
I’m pretty sure that Five Star would be glad to publish a sequel but, as much as I love working with them, it doesn’t make a lot of financial sense for me to do that.
BADGE was a finished manuscript I wrote on spec and couldn’t find a home for…until Five Star (I posted some of the rejection letters here on the blog…you can find them in the posts under the MAN WITH THE IRON-ON BADGE category)