Customer Reviews

Death Bed

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Death Bed by Stephen Greenleaf has the flavor of a Chandler
novel and the credibility of a police report. If you like
unending monologues about clothes, cats, chocolate, refried
beans, gourmet coffee, or obscure musical instruments dating
from the Rennaisance--save yourself the time. Do not read
this book.

Greenleaf's protagonist, John Marshall Tanner, a San Francisco
PI, is primarily concerned with chasing down leads and getting
to the bottom of things. The streets may at times get
mean and gritty. Tanner may occasionally barge in where
he is not welcomed like your dear Aunt Sally. He may ask
difficult questions and sometimes insists on answers, even
at the risk of speaking impolitely.

The case in Death Bed contains at least a few echoes of
Chandler's The Big Sleep. The client is a rich old gent
who is literally on his death bed. The mystery revolves
around the wayward son (rather than daughters), and whom the
client wants found. Along the way we encounter a variety
of credible characters, not the least of which is the
Serpico-like reporter who loses himself for months
at a time on the trails of his own investigations, and
may have finally gone too far.

Greenleaf's prose is smooth and craftsman-like and full of
artful touches of metaphor and simile. There is a decided
lack of emoting on the part of his PI, but in this hand-wringing,
anxiety-laded, compassion-bloated epoch of amateurs masquerading
as pros the absence comes as something of a relief.

"We had been sitting in the room for close to an hour,
talking about this and that--the Warriors, the Democrats,
Mozart, Montaigne. I was a nondescript private eye who
could stuff all of his assets into some carry-on luggage
if he owned any carry-on luggage, and he was one of the
ten wealthiest men in the city if you didn't count the
Chinese. He had everything money could buy and most of
the things it could rent. In a while he would be renting
me....."

Stephen Greenleaf's John Marshall Tanner detective series has always been dependable, but never quite on par with luminaries such as Lawrence Block's Matthew Scudder or the great Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlowe. "Death Bed" was the second novel in the series, and it suffers a bit from the sophomore slump. It delves into subject matter that includes a dying multi-millionaire searching for his estranged son, and the dying embers of 1960s radicalism in the early 1980s. Throw in a subpolt about a missing hotshot investigative reporter and a disillusioned physician, and things get complicated enough. The story's main problem is that the 60s radical angle doesn't come off that well. James Crumley did a much better job examining that theme in "The Last Good Kiss" and "The Wrong Case." And the ending is not the most plausible that Greenleaf has ever come up with. Overall, the Tanner series is a good one, but this is not one of the better entries.