Mark Sullivan wrote:
> I'm about a third of the way through Prather's
Darling It's Death and I
> have some questions:
> 1. Is it ever explained how/why Scott's hair and
eyebrows turned white?
I have never seen any explanation of this. Let me try: his
name - Shell Scott
- sounds a bit like "shell shock", maybe his hair turned
white in the war, in the trenches. Was Prather in the war?
Does anyone know? He was born in, what, 1922, so he should've
been there.
> 2. This one takes place in Acapulco. Is this
typical? Does he travel
> around? I must admit, I prefer PI stories set in the
cities the PI
> knows so well. Are other books set in his hometown,
LA?
Scott travels around a lot. One book - forgot the name, one
of the most amusing though, he has to check the butts of
twelve beautiful model girls to find out the witness - is set
almost solely in Hawaii. In the beginning of the book Scott
drinks so much with one of the girls he falls out from the
tree and suffers from amnesia throughout the book.
> 3. Do all of the books revolve around Scott fighting
Commies? This one
> hinges on a Communist takeover of US unions. (The
"Maffia" -- was this
> once the preferred spelling, with two Fs? -- is also
interested in
> control.) I vaguely remember another Prather I read
long, long ago also
> pitting him against Commies.
Not all of them, some of them do. Some books are pretty much
marred by Scott's remarks about Commies and others. I
couldn't get through "The Trojan Hearse", because Scott is
all the time mumbling about psychoanalysis and the Democratic
candidate and stuff. Some of that is funny, some just
isn't.
Juri
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