Mitch Roberts
Created by Gaylord
Dold
Brooding, philosophic MITCH ROBERTS is the hero of one of the best, and one of the most criminally overlooked, private eye series of the 1980's. The first six books in the series were all paperback originals that seemed to vanish without a trace. Hopes that once the series was (finally) picked up for hardcover publication and would receive the attention it deserved turned out to be wishful thinking.
Mitch works the Witchita, Kansas area, in the late fifties. He's a solitary kinda guy, with simple pleasures-baseball, chess, fishing, reading. He has an office next to the local barber shop and he lives across from the local ballpark. He enjoys a good game of poker with the boys or a doubleheader on a warm summer evening. Simple pleasures, but not a simple guy. In Mitch's case, still waters run deep. He reads heavy-handed philosophical texts by Heidegger et al, and is haunted by his World War II experiences and the violence that surrounds him. A finely detailed rendering of a time and a place, that we take for granted as being quieter and calmer, somehow more innocent than the present, and of a man trying to come to grips with the underlying violence and corruption that turns our easy nostalgia into a lie.
Perhaps author Gaylord Dold was growing frustrated, because by the time of the last PBO, 1990's Disheveled City, he had more-or-less brought the series to a close. Mitch had more-or-less found his peace, or at least a reasonable facsimile, packing it all in for a small place in Colorado, where he raises a few horses, works irrigation and "tries to keep busy," occasionally taking a job in town to make ends meet. So, suddenly, St. Martin's Press gives Dold a hardcover contract, and it's back into the breech.
Only problem is that Mitch had been put out to pasture. So, what to do? Well, in the first hardcover, A Penny for the Old Guy, Mitch travels to England to investigate the murder of his godchild, the son of an old army buddy. And he travels even further in latter books, including a stint in Africa in The World Beat. The bleak, claustrophobic smalltown cynicism of the earlier books has been replaced by a more bouncy, globetrotting sense of world-weariness. Somehow, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore.
Lately, Dold, a practising criminal lawyer in Kansas, has been writing some non-private eye crime fiction, expanding his boundaries, with cop dramas Bay of Sorrows (1995) and Schedule II (1996) , and more recently a legal thriller, the upcoming Devil To Pay. He's even written a travel guide, 1997's Dominican Republic Handbook .
UNDER OATH
NOVELS
COLLECTION
Report respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
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