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Michael Brennen "Playing detective is like being a gravedigger. There's always dirt to be dug up, people willing to pay to have it dug up. But what kind of a man wants to spend his life scrounging for human rot six feet underground?"
Actually, it's a little bit of both. He's recently out of a job and out of a marriage. His PI ticket is about to die, and he's collecting unemployment. And he feels he's gotten what he deserves. He was cheating on his wife and he doesn't seem too upset that he was canned from Pacific-Continental Investigations (Pac-Con) either. After all, he just wandered into the job after a stint as an MP. With a wife and two kids to support, he just "grabbed the first job (he) could get." Likewise, in Cocaine and Blue Eyes, which has become something of a lost classic of the P.I. genre, not to mention a dead-on dissection of seventies cultire, he stumbles into a case, and takes it on because he has nothing better to do, he suggests at one point, and then later confesses that he's "tired of being poor." It's certainly not because he feels he's got any natural talent for detective work--"As if (solving cases) had anything to do with ability, talent, good detective work. I got lucky...I was grateful. Only the lucky solve cases." Me thinks the dick doth protest too much. Nevertheless, Cocaine is an excellent book, gathering praise from Time, the Boston Globe and blurbed by Ross Macdonald himself, who had become something of a mentor to the young author. "Powerful...I recommend it with pleasure." And I liked it too. In fact, I thought it was a real Macdonaldesque toot for the snoot. I only regret I haven't been able to dig up the sequel. Brennen's an interesting character, brooding, cynical, griping his way through his investigations. In 1983, Cocaine and Blue Eyes was released as a television movie, intended as a pilot. It boasted (if that's the word) O.J. Simpson as Brennen, which really took me for a loop. Was Brennen black? Am I that sloppy a reader or am I going colour blind in my old age? I rushed to the bookshelf and double-checked. Turns out I wasn't mistaken. Brennen was born poor, white and Irish in the Mission District of San Francisco. The film didn't impress the critics as much as the novel upon which it was based. Still, I eagerly stayed up late one night to watch the flick. Suffice it to say that when it was all over I, too, was rather underwhelmed. Author Fred Zackel, on Rara-Avis, once admitted "We spent a year negotiating the deal. During the entire time my wife and my agent refused to tell me who was the other party; they both knew I'd be upset. I wanted an actor to play the part. I was very upset. We visited the set two, maybe three times. We have photographs with him, arms around each other, grinning at the camera. (My son now thinks they're hysterical.) For years whenever the movie was mentioned, friends would try cheering me up, "Well, at least the checks cleared." Very sympathetic. These days, well, no one talks much about it." Or at least until O.J. was charged with murder. After that, the flick briefly became a staple of late night television, although it's currently unavailable on DVD or VHS. In 2006, Point Blank reprinted Cocaine and Blue Eyes. No word yet on whether they'll eventually do Cinderella After Midnight, but I've got my fingers crossed. Besides the Brennen books, he's responsible for Murder in Wakiki, a novel which sparked the author's fascination with Hawaiian culture. His short story collections include The Bicycles Were Gravestones and Creepier Than a Whorehouse Kiss.
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