Customer Reviews

Hitman: A Stanley Hastings Mystery (Stanley Hastings Mysteries)

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Stanley Hastings is, like his creator Parnell Hall, smart and funny. Hastings is a New York Private Investigator, like Hall. He doesn't carry a gun, he goes home to his wife, and he tries to do the right thing. In Hitman, Hastings finds himself embroiled in a case far from the usual slip and fall investigations. With a cast of fascinating characters, plot twists, and crisp and amusing dialogue, Hitman will entertain new and old fans of the Stanley Hastings series, and encourage Hall's readers to check out his other work as well. Read it where you can, even if it's not at the Silver Moon Bakery.

Hall's forte (at least in this series) is speedy repartee. His efforts to obtain information, "hypothetically" from his detective friend McAuliffe sound like the Abbott & Costello "Who's On First?" routine (which still cracks me up after some 70 years). His discussions with Alice, his wife, remind me of a Burns & Allen skit. The plot is sufficiently rational, though nothing to brag about. A fast, easy, often hysterically funny read. I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

By page 24 I was wondering at the premise - a hitman who wants to retire means to hire PI Stanley Hastings for some unclear reason - and so were most of the peripheral characters in this novel: Stanley's wife Alice; his lawyer Richard Rosenberg; and his policeman friend MacAullif.

And surely when your even own characters are asking "What the Hell?", as an author you stop and think "Hmmm, maybe this plot is not such a good idea after all?"

But Parnell Hall clearly did not and pages 25 - 53 did not get much better, and neither did page 54 to the end of the novel.

Not that the writing style is bad, or the characters particularly poorly written, though Stanley's shift from "trip-and-fall" PI to the faster paced world of hitmen and your more typical PI seems a bit of a stretch, and his wife is painted with a whiff of misogyny that seemed more down-at-heel Philip Marlowe than white collar Stanley Hastings.

But really, this is pretty typical PI fare, skipping quickly from situation to situation, throwing in the expected world weary reflections on life, and with a body count that would see Law & Order's Jack McCoy put Stanley away for "Twenty to Life" in no time flat.

Sadly, I did not find Stanley Hastings "very funny" as the 'New York Times' apparently suggests that I should have. Instead, I found the idea off-center and the story not particularly engaging.

Parnell Hall writes a couple of series, one featuring Stanley Hastings, the P.I. who works for an ambulance chasing lawyer, and the Puzzle Lady series with Cora Felton who pretends to write crossword puzzles and winds up solving crimes. Both can be quite humorous, especially because of the repartee between the characters, with short, loaded sentences, that rarely fail to evoke a grin on the reader's face. As one reviewer noted the dialogue is reminiscent of Abbott and Cistello and Burns and Allen. I agree.

In Hitman, the plot is, as usual, rather zany. Stanley is asked by a local school teacher (he thinks), who happens to be a hitman (or shooter or shitter if you need to combine the terms), to watch his back as he wants to get out of the business. Stanley soon realizes that by following the man, he is preventing the man from following through on the hit, but it puts him in an awkward position that he and his friend Seargeant Macauliff, have to wiggle their way out of. The hitman gets killed and turns out not to be the teacher who turns out to be friends with another teacher with "perky breasts," who turns out to be..... Well, you'll find out.

Welcome once again to the wacky world of Stanley Hastings, a private investigator who works for a negligence attorney who reaps in loads of slip-and-fall cases through TV advertising. Stanley does nothing more exciting than sign up clients to a retainer agreement and take pictures of broken steps and potholes and the like.

That is until one day a hitman comes in to hire Stanley to prevent him from killing the person he has been hired to kill. The only problem is the "client" gives a false name and fails to identify the victim. Stanley undertakes the task, but then the hitman is shot dead and the person Stanley thought was the target also is shot and killed. From that point the plot gets more and more complicated and confusing.

However, the story, writing and dialog are very funny, in keeping with the tenor of the earlier entries in the series. Stanley's wry comments are multiplied by those of his wife and favorite police officers, as well as his attorney-employer. Fun to read, and recommended.

The description of this mystery was very enticing. I couldn't wait to get the novel. But the authors style does not make what is happening in the plot very clear. Everything is jumbled. I guess I was expecting Rex Stout. So at about the 125th page, I just lost interest and stopped reading. Maybe I'll try again.