Digital Sextant

I just finished reading McNally’s Luck, the third (?) book in the Lawrence Sanders series about Archy McNally, a South Beach dandy who does ‘discrete inquiries’ for his father’s law firm.

Detectives have often been hollow characters with amusing habits: Holmes did coke, Poirot dandies around England, and so on. McNally’s twist amuses because it provides both the dandy-ness of Poirot and a pleasant use of particular phrasing and dialog. Some excerpts:

I was familiar with W. Scott’s warning about tangled webs….

The menu, taped to the wall, was a dream come true. We studied the offerings with little moans of delight. Dishes ranged from piquant to incendiary, and I recoked that we might have been wise to wear sweats. The stumpy waiter who came bustling over to take our order had a long white apron cinched under his armpits. He also had a moustache that Pancho Villa might have envied….

[The linen berets] were soft enough to roll up and tuck in a hip pocket, yet when they were donned and the fullness pulled rakishly over to one side, I felt they gave me a certain devil-may-care look….

I went directly to my rooms when I arrived home. I stripped off the dull costume I was wearing and donned my favorite kimono, a jaunty silk number printed with an overall pattern of leaping gazelles….


“I’ve got to be completely honest with you, Archy,” she started—and my antennae stiffened. When people say that to you it’s time to button your hip pocket and make certain your wallet is secure….

As I neared the end of the book, I marvelled at the marketing department’s chutzpah in producing the cover pictured here: the plot involves neither a missing fancy car nor any diving at all. Generally, when the cover art depicts a diver swimming around a coral-covered car, one expects to encounter those elements in the book. Alas, this story revolved around a kidnapped kitty-cat, a pair of murders, and a psychic named Hertha. I can’t help but imagine the broad swath of diving-mystery readers who finished McNally’s Luck and threw it down in disgust.

On the plus side, Sanders did work in a McLuhan reference:

…So Hertha Gloriana is the only lead I have.”

“It’s not much,” he said.

“No,” I agreed, “it’s not. But they do say the medium is the message.”

He gave me a dour smile.