“Maddox looked at Rodriguez. It was, indeed, so much neater between the book covers: the problem posed, the problem neatly solved. People in real life somewhat different. Often, somewhat dirtier: often, somewhat messier: often, you wondered just exactly how far Homo sapiens had progressed from the cave with the bones scattered round the fire and Neanderthal squatted grunting over his kill. You wondered.”


The third book in the Ivor Maddox series, which would soon become the Ivor Maddox/Susan Carstairs series once Maddox realized what was right in front of him, is breezy yet richly layered with insight into people. Maddox has settled in to the Hollywood Wilcox station and found a home. The rather average-looking mystery-book collector who drives a red Frazer-Nash still can’t understand why women always seem to make a play for him — and he’s not the only one. César Rodriguez is still hooked on mystery books, thanks to Maddox, and does as much reading as he does detecting. D’Arcy is still prone to fall in love with every pretty woman he meets on a case. And the wonderful Susan Carstairs is still single, but decidedly — and perhaps deliberately — not making a play for Maddox, who thinks she’s a fine officer and all-around great gal, but hasn’t yet realized she’s the one.

It’s early November at the Wilcox station in Hollywood as this one opens, and two very different cases pop up. The first is more amusing than menacing, as a pink pig painted with blue polka dots has been set loose. It was a lot of trouble for someone to go to, but there seems to be a point, which becomes clearer as more pranks occur, each designed to make the people being pranked realize their shortcomings. But who in the world could know each of the “victims” so intimately?

The second case is anything but amusing. A young man named Ronald Morgenstern and his bride-to-be Ruth Evans are gunned down in her driveway after returning home from the movies. Ronald was by all accounts a good egg, attending a lesser college on the cheap. Ruthie comes from a family with money, but she’s also a good egg, working as a social worker despite her family’s position in the community. Who was the target, Ronald or Ruthie, or was it both? Ruthie’s address book gives Maddox a long list of suspects. Yet every time Maddox and his pals think they have someone who looks good for the killings, it washes out. Linington makes it incredibly entertaining to be in the shoes of Maddox and the police as they attack every new lead. And as always, we get both humor and pathos, and sometimes tragedy. On one occasion Maddox is confronted with the heartbreaking situation of a teenage girl living with a terrible secret:

“Maddox found the kitchen: everything needed painting, everything was very old, enamel chipped off the ancient stove and refrigerator, but everything was very clean. Trying to keep a home together for the younger kids, that girl; she was doing a job of it maybe. And that drunken old bum — And because, probably, she was under age, no way to kick him out and still get the supplemental relief checks to keep the family together. The rules sometimes didn’t allow for individual circumstance.”

Linington always gave the reader more than a mystery, more than just an entertaining police procedural, but a look at people and psychology and the tiny things in the lives of people, often suspects, which mean so much. Cops were real people with real lives, hopes and dreams and silliness just like everyone else. And in this one, we learn — not for the first time in one of Linington’s novels — just how cops doing a tough and dirty, all-too-often thankless job, feel about the do-gooders, who don’t have a clue about what really goes on out there. Also, though it’s too lengthy to quote, in a section of chapter five Linington captures the older, run-down section of 1960’s L.A. County as strikingly and stunningly as Raymond Chandler captured postwar Los Angeles. And in the situation noted by the passage quoted above, she uses her deft ear for dialog to write exactly as a girl of that age, in that situation, might when it all comes out, in fits and spurts, and tears.

While Maddox and the boys are chasing their tails on the prankster case and the double homicide, Carstairs, thanks to Maddox-no-thank-you, goes undercover in a hotel being used as a cathouse. Linington shows there are racial tensions in mid-’60s Los Angeles, and not just between blacks and whites — a book shop owner hated Ronald because he was Jewish as much as he hated a couple of his black friends. Yet no one who had a motive for killing either Ronnie or Ruthie appears to have the means and opportunity. A bank robbery with casualties, and a few other cases pop up, and Maddox begins to wonder if the double-homicide will have to go in the unsolved file. But a casual remark by someone will finally lead him down a sad, lonely road to the killer. The ending to one case will be sad, the other, more humorous, because life goes on, whether we want it to or not.

Date with Death is a terrific writer at the top of her game. Linington, who also wrote under Lesley Egan and Dell Shannon monikers, was the queen of the police procedural for good reason. In a wonderful moment in real time — which seems classily nostalgic in ours — Linington gives a nod to Ed McBain, the king to her queen, by having Rodriguez finally finish up Carr mysteries and begin reading the 87th Precinct police procedurals. Linington was a writer so good, and with so much talent, she could be magnanimous and give her “rival” in the burgeoning genre some good press. A terrific third outing for Maddox and Carstairs, with this one very much rooted in 1960s Los Angeles. ( )

Dell Shannon ( )