Items related to Merry Christmas, Murdock
Synopsis
Christmas in California and the happy sound of God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen, booming through Xanadu Mall, shopping depot for the fat cats of Newport Beach, California, when a runaway teen gets slammed in a hit-and-run. The cops are slow. The girl’s mother, a power Senator, hires Murdock, PI, to probe the case. The trail leads from posh Xanadu to the upper world of SoCal society. Murdock finds dirt that gets him a bullet. Wounded, he solves the case and saves Cindy Duke, who we first met in Bloody Murdock. Merry Christmas, Murdock launches the Murdock PI series into the Cyber Age. Five Murdocks—California to Seattle—with a new Murdock mystery, set in New Mexico. The dormant detective is delighted at being re-Kindled.
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About the Author
I had written five Murdock books when Jack Remick and I teamed up to write The Weekend Novelist Writes a Mystery. Digging up the secrets of the genre, we tallied the victims in Gorky Park—3 German officers, 3 young fur smugglers, one snitch, one NYC cop, 3 FBI guys, 2 KGBs—which gave us an ironclad writing rule: build your Killer First. This single rule—Build Your Killer First—lays out a trail of victims that leads the sleuth through crime’s gritty landscape to the climactic Killer Confrontation. As the bodies stack up, the manhunt changes temperature: cold trail, lukewarm witness interviews, hot pursuit. At the climax, the tally of the dead justifies the sleuth’s vengeful payback. (Bonus: victim-placement structures the book.) I had a cool villain in Bloody Murdock. His name was Philo Waddell. He got high on bloody cockfights staged in the monster basement of his sumptuous villa in Laguna Beach. But when Philo got himself executed, I had to conjure another bad guy for Murdock Two. And yet another for Murdock Three. Therefore, if you want to write a mystery, despite your recipe for a sleuth—a hard-boiled PI, a big city lady lawyer, a small-town sheriff, a Midwest cop, a Village Marshall on a tourist island off the Carolina coast—your task with each book is the same: conjuring evil, placing the bodies, keeping the pace with action and dialogue. For a writer, all in a day’s work. -- Robert J. Ray, Ph.D.
Review
"What a find author Robert J. Ray is . Perhaps best of all, Mr. Ray has the rare ability to build tension bit by bit by bit and keep much of this throughout the last two-thirds of the book, almost without pause .... A crackerjack piece of plotting and writing and unhesitatingly recommended."
--Mystery News
"
L. A. private eye Matt Murdock is back, celebrating a holiday in decidedly unfestive fashion in Merry Christmas, Murdock. Here the past rises up before Murdock in two ways.
Cindy Duke, a teen-ager who had maybe saved his life a couple of years earlier by driving him out of a burning canyon, asks him to find her father. He teaches in Wisconsin and came to L. A. in response to Cindy's cry for help, raged at his ex-wife, battered her brother's car with a baseball bat, ranged through a shopping mall in a failing search for Cindy, and disappeared.
Meanwhile, another teen-ager, Heather Blasingame, lies in a coma from a hit-and-run encounter with a vehicle at that same mall. She's the daughter of Jane Blasingame, feisty Texas state senator, and the senator (though with considerable reluctance) hires Murdock to supplement what seems an inept police investigation.
These two cases are of course related, and powerful interests -- not only Cindy's grandfather Wheeler Duke and Duke Construction -- are willing to go to about any lengths to keep Matt's nose out of these matters.
Vivid, active tale.
-- THE ARMCHAIR REVIEWER, Allen J. Hubin, Reprinted from The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 12, No. 4, Fall 1990.
Bloody Murdock: "The story never stops and the lushly decadent southern California life was never more so." --Publishers Weekly
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- PublisherCreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
- Publication date2011
- ISBN 10 1466245603
- ISBN 13 9781466245600
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages236
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