Re: RARA-AVIS: unbilled cameos

From: JIM DOHERTY ( jimdohertyjr@yahoo.com)
Date: 14 Jul 2004


John,

Re your comment below:

> I'm reading my books in paperback these days, so I'm
> a book behind on the
> currents. When posting about Mike Connelly's LOST
> LIGHT, I didn't mention that I
> enjoyed Elvis Cole's unnamed walk-thru.
>
> I'm now about a third of the way thru Robert Crais'
> THE LAST DETECTIVE and
> see that he's done likewise with Harry Bosch.

There are other examples. In one of Warren Murphy's
"Trace" novels there's a scene in which an unnamed Boston PI comes into a bar that Devlin Tracy frequents, orders an obscure foreign beer, gets drunk after one sip, and attempts to engage the barkeep in a discussion about the meaning of courage.

Robert J. Randisi used to like using other writers' characters in his books, too. In his early PI novels like THE DISAPPEARANCE OF PENNY and EYE IN THE RING, Dan Fortune, "Nameless," and (IIRC) Amos Walker all make brief appearances.

In DOUBLE by Bill Pronzini and Marcia Muller, in which both "Nameless" and Sharon McCone attend a PI convention and collaborate on an investigation, there are walk-ons by Brock "The Rock" Callahan, Kinsey Milhone, and (again IIRC) Randisi's own Miles Jacoby.

In one of Benjamin Schutz's later Leo Haggerty books
(MEXICO IS FOREVER, I think), the big DC security agency that Haggerty managesneeds something looked into in the Bay Area, so Haggerty contacts Dan Kearney at San Francisco's own DKA to look into it for him.

Finally, one of my favorite examples. In a SAM SPADE radio episode called "The Khandi Toothe Caper," Spade calls a colleague in LA to check on a lead. The colleague is named "Phil Marlowe," and the actor who plays Marlowe in this brief sequence is Robert Montgomery, one of the "Gang of Four" who portrayed Chandler's detective on film during the 1940's.

JIM DOHERTY

                
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