The Fourth Dimension Is Death by Donald Westlake writing as Samuel Holt

I didn't expect to re-read the whole "Sam Holt" series in 2024, but I guess I just did. (I am writing this the morning of December 14th, though you are reading it in the future. Hello, future!) It's a four-book series, written by Donald Westlake under a pseudonym in the mid-80s: Westlake wanted to see if he could have a successful new launch that wasn't tied to his existing career, but "Holt" was revealed to be Westlake pretty much immediately, which soured him on the project. He'd already written the first three books - Westlake was always prolific and productive - and cranked out this fourth one to finish up the contract. He'd originally hoped to write more, but the reveal put him off that idea, and so that was it.

The first three are One Of Us Is Wrong, I Know a Trick Worth Two of That, and What I Tell You Three Times Is False. Sam Holt himself, the character supposedly writing and narrating these mysteries, is the former star of a TV action/mystery, Packard, which I like to describe as "what if Magnum, P.I. was Quincy, M.E.?" Holt got rich from the show, which ran five years and is still syndicated now, a few years later. He has semi-palatial houses in New York and LA, with supporting casts in both places, and no worries in life...except that he'd really like to keep acting, for busyness and doing-things-with-his-life reasons, but the entertainment world has comprehensively typecast him as Packard, and he can't get any jobs to save his life. Meanwhile, in the way of the amateur sleuth, murders happen around him now and then.

The Fourth Dimension Is Death has the title least connected with the story of the entire series; perhaps Westlake was already sour at this point. (Westlake was good at souring on things; check out his kiss-off to the SF field from the late '60s for an earlier, even sourer, example - it's available in the fanzine collection The Best of Xero.) This is also the most amateur-sleuth of the four books, though it takes a while to get going.

You see, a regional supermarket chain ran a series of ads featuring a "parody" of Packard, which Holt and the owners and syndicators of the actual show took objection to, and some unpleasant litigation ensued. The actor who played the parody, Dale Wormley, was a hothead who was offended by what he saw as an attack on him and his ability to work, and ran into Holt twice in New York threatening violence but was quickly shut down by ex-cop Holt.

And then Wormley turns up dead, stuffed into a doorway down the street from Holt's New York home. Holt is an obvious suspect...except that he doesn't really have a motive, and has a decent alibi, and we the readers know he didn't do it. Soon after, there's a second, oddly related murder, which doesn't help but doesn't really put Holt in more jeopardy, either.

It all looks like the whole thing will just move to the back burner and never be actually solved - until Wormley's mother hits Holt with a civil-rights lawsuit for depriving her of her son by killing him. (I don't know the legislative or litigation history, though I am dubious about this plot: I suspect there wasn't generally a private cause of action for civil rights lawsuits - it was always something the federal government could bring on a prosecutorial level.) Anyway, the burden of proof for a civil suit is lower than that for criminal, so Holt faces the possibility he might have to settle, or could even lose the case and be tarred in the public's mind as the famous TV actor who got away with murder. (This is about fifteen years before Robert Blake, to be clear.)

So Holt decides he has to investigate the case himself, and dresses up in a goofy disguise to do so. Does he find the real killer? Is this a series mystery? Yes and yes. There's a rushed ending that leaves Holt battered but alive, and the series could have continued, but, obviously, didn't. This is also probably the least successful of the four books, for all the obvious reasons. If Westlake had stayed energized, it could have been better, and he could have written more, but those are solidly counterfactual at this point. So "Samuel Holt" is a short, mostly fun, clearly minor series by Westlake, most interesting for a look at the entertainment biz of the '80s by a writer who did a fair bit of scriptwriting in the '70s and '80s and was writing under a pseudonym to use some of his unkinder ideas and not be tied to them.