Krishna
Johnny and Nancy stumble across a dead man in Hammock Beach.
Vince Teague and another man are interviewed by the reporter from the Boston Globe and when Vince tries to take the money left on the table, Vince grabs it. Stephanie McCann, the girl sitting with them is horrified. Dave Bowie is the other man.
They both are nice and Stephanie works with them in the local newspaper. The reporter from the Globe was looking for odd stories and was disappointed when he got only well known stories rehashed. But when Stephanie asks, they decide to tell her the one they had kept to themselves. This is about Johnny and Nancy – or more precisely Johnny Galvin and Nancy Arnault. They were going steady those days.
Stephenie is interested because that young Johnny is now the mayor of the city. Nancy was a stunning beauty and John was ordinary, with a buck tooth to boot – which he fixed later. But he was bright. They stumble on the dead man, as in the preface, but oddly at near zero degrees (centigrade and thirty two in Farenheit) he was found wearing slacks and pants, not anything warmer.
When the local doctor and the inspector arrive, they find the man had died hours earlier. He seems to have choked on something he was eating.
Finally, an intern detective, Paul Devine, who was so harassed by his ‘mentors’ the two senior state detectives that he quit to study law came up with a brilliant way to track the man (John Doe) through the stamp at the bottom of the cigarette case that was found with him and eventually they learn that he is a forty two year old illustrator in a magazine. His name was John Cogan, and he left behind a wife Arla and a small kid in Colorodo when he disappeared from their lives.
The mystery is that on the day he disappeared he was in the office and left to get a sandwich for lunch and never came back. It was in another city and surprisingly in just three hours, he was seen in Maine. He did not let anyone know that he was leaving so no one knew why he ended up where he ended up finally – dead on the beach.
The story is interesting so far, but it goes nowhere. What is more irritating is the ‘quiz questions’ the two old men give Stephanie and how they delight in having her match her wits against theirs. The problem is that most of the ‘quiz’ answers are just impossible to guess correctly and Stephanie instinctively comes to the right answer. No Shelockian explanations either.
If that was not irritating enough, the book seems to have no ending at all. The author in his afterword says that you either love it or hate it and I totally agree with me in the latter camp. You feel cheated after spending all that effort. Thankfully it is one of the smallest book from the author so your effort is not gargantuan.
2/10
== Krishna