I Know a Trick Worth Two of That by Donald Westlake writing as Samuel Holt

This is the second book in a series Donald Westlake wrote in the '80s - it appeared under the pseudonym "Samuel Holt," also the first-person narrator and the amateur sleuth hero - that was supposed to be a test-case to see if he could be successful a second time under a different name. As it happened - as it always happens, since publishing sales forces want to sell books, and asking them to avoid talking about a book's biggest selling point is irrational - his name leaked out, and Westlake considered the experiment spoiled.

The first one was One Of Us Is Wrong, which I read recently. The second one is I Know a Trick Worth Two of That. There were two more following immediately, and then it stopped. If the series had continued and flourished, perhaps Janet Evanovich would have had to find a different gimmick, which probably only amuses me.

This second time out, the book is a little flabbier, with a somewhat flat ending. The stakes are lower - though there's still international intrigue lurking behind the plot. It's strengths are, like the first, Westlake's always-smooth prose, the voice of Holt, and the mildly jaundiced sidebar comments on Hollywood gleaned from Westlake's time as a screenwriter. (He notes in his foreword that he would have never used "that material" under his own name, but it seems incredibly tame - maybe some of the characters were drawn more closely from life than I realize, but there are no hatchet jobs here.)

Sam Holt was a cop on Long Island when he got hired as an extra for a movie, decided he liked the work, and eventually found himself starring as Packard, which seems to be the answer to the question "What if Quincy, M.E. was played by Magnum, P.I.?" The show ran five years, making Holt successful and rich enough for the rest of his life, while also making him both want to do more acting and utterly typecast as the one role he doesn't want to do anymore. So he has money and free time, friends and lovers on both coasts, and an English butler.

In this book, his old partner from the Mineola PD gets in touch: Doug Walford moved into private security and stumbled into a gigantic criminal enterprise. Doug doesn't know all the details - and can't prove any of it - but it involves the mob, international trade, major drug companies, and at least a few highly-placed US government officials (and probably electeds, as well). Doug has been targeted - an "accident" took out his girlfriend and child already, which he barely survived.

Sam agrees to hide Doug in his New York townhouse, for at least a little while, and to try to help him get to a point he can blow the whistle on the conspiracy. Sam also has a big annual party coming up at his house, and goes to some effort to conceal Doug's identity from his guests.

But Doug is killed at the party, in a way that looks like suicide and hints at a semi-locked-room mystery. Sam is sure it was murder, and has to investigate his friends to find out which one of them did it.

There is a big gathering of the suspects at the end, and Sam does the j'accuse thing. It works OK, but it's not as flashy as the action sequence that ended the first book, and it's a bit of a dying fall. The murder is solved, but the conspiracy is as strong as even - though a subplot did put some official investigative folks onto it, so we readers can assume it will be fixed by someone, eventually.

I still don't think you really want to have a book with a global conspiracy that potentially goes high up in your nation's government and just let it drop at the end of a book, though. It feels like an unfired Chekhov Gun. But this is a forty-year-old book from a writer now ten years dead, so it is what it is.