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INTRODUCTION

“On the Rails of Time” by Patricia Holt

It’s easy to get addicted to the writings of Richard Lupoff, a veteran quick-pace novelist who’s quietly written more than forty books, many of them with titles that appeal to the kid in all of us: Barsoom: Edgar Rice Burroughs and the Martian Vision, The Return of Skull-Face, The Black Tower, Circumpolar!

For mystery fans, though, the most delicious of Lupoff’s works must be the eight novels spanning twenty-two years that feature Hobart (“Bart”) Lindsey, a mild-mannered insurance agent, and Berkeley, California, homicide detective Marvia Plum.

We know from the outset that these two may never get together. An African-American cop raising her son as a single mother (Marvia) doesn’t usually hook up with a white insurance adjuster living with his mother (Bart). On the one hand, there is Marvia, who sees homicide as both art and career advancement, while on the other there is Bart, who wants simply to settle insurance claims honorably and honestly.

Yet gradually the two sleuths discover a subtle humor, an ability to outthink adversaries, a hidden spark of adventurism and a growing respect for each other—especially, for Bart, when murder occurs and complicates the claim form. Love becomes such an incendiary element that Lupoff reveals himself as much an incurable romantic as deft plotter and, in his way, scholarly researcher.

This last occurs because if you’re interested in popular artifacts from the past—World War II airplanes, rare comic books, antique cars—a big bonus awaits you throughout this series. With such novels as The Comic Book Killer (1988), The Classic Car Killer (1991), The Bessie Blue Killer (1994) and The Sepia Siren Killer (1995), Lupoff explores the fascinating history of populist art, parts of which might have been lost forever if Bart and Marvia weren’t searching for murderers among the remains.

Thoughtfulness fills these pages as much as intrigue. Of people who engage in the collectible arts, Bart observes, “Their minds all worked in similar ways. They felt that human achievement was bound in the artifacts of human creation, that the preservation and ownership of those artifacts kept civilization on the rails of time. To lose the things of the past was to lose the past itself, and to lose civilization’s compass.”

The compass in Lupoff’s latest, The Emerald Cat Killer, is the world of lurid paperback whodunits that used to belong to the pulp fiction genre. Although he doesn’t delve as deeply into publishing as much as he has in other fields, Lupoff has another, more cerebral job to do this time—to bring Bart Lindsey back from retirement after thirteen years out of the field, to dust off his “mental Rolodex” containing the entire casts of noir movies and books, and to reintroduce Marvia as a new kind of partner in emotional as well as professional doings.

And while this eighth installment (plus a volume of short stories featuring Lindsey and Plum) may be his last in the series, it’s also perhaps the purest crime-procedural novel Lupoff has written. Showing us how dogged Bart must be to follow one less valuable clue after another, Lupoff also reveals something earnest and formal about Hobart Lindsey that keeps us turning these pages.

Even now, after he’s been forcibly retired, then called back and ordered around by his old boss, it means something to Bart to represent International Surety. No matter how many adjusters do the same, Bart takes his role seriously. He is a special agent who follows company disciplines and acts with dignity and professionalism with villains and victims alike. When he prepares for an interview—“Lindsey took out a notebook and his gold International Surety pencil”—his subtle attention to decorum is touching.

Perhaps it is Bart’s old-fashioned dignity that makes Lupoff’s series as charming and durable as the antiques about which so much mayhem is committed.

Patricia Holt was book review editor for the San Francisco Chronicle for sixteen years, and is author of The Good Detective (Pocket Books).