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Kahlo and Crowe Mysteries #1
Girls in Pink
Santa Teresa, California, 1947: P. I. Nathaniel Crowe has extricated his client, Charlene Cleveland, from a bad marriage to a dangerous man, a local hood named Sal Cleveland. Her husband grants the divorce, but then runs her car off the road and shoots her to death. Crowe is shaken by news of the murder. He resolves to get justice for Charlene, even if it means working for free. He crosses paths with the beautiful and exotic Annie Kahlo, an eccentric artist, who has an old grudge against the gangster. Annie is more than a little crazy, but she knows a few secrets about Cleveland; secrets that might help Crowe bring the kingpin down. Despite all of his better instincts, Crowe finds himself falling for Annie...hard.
'Girls in Pink' is neon, wet streets, smoke, and ghosts in pink. It's echoes of Bogart and Bacall, the summer of 1947... LA noir with a fresh, contemporary feel.
'Girls in Pink' is neon, wet streets, smoke, and ghosts in pink. It's echoes of Bogart and Bacall, the summer of 1947... LA noir with a fresh, contemporary feel.
302 pages, Mass Market Paperback
Published November 25, 2016
1 person is currently reading
15 people want to read
About the author
Bob Bickford
13 books20 followersFINALIST: International Thriller Writers 2017 Best First Novel
When I was little, the library was my favorite place.
I was born in Lone Pine, California. My parents liked to move and so did I, for a while. I have roots throughout the United States, but I was mostly raised in Toronto, Canada.
My father was a psychiatric social worker who grew up in the slums of Boston. He was a tough guy who got an education on the GI bill and pulled himself out of his birthright. He married twice, the first time to a woman who left him a widower. Alone with a toddler, I suppose he was determined that it wouldn’t happen to him again, because the second time he married a woman much younger than he was.
She was the product of a Southern family; royalty that included the same Duke family that bought a university and named it after itself. Wilful and rebellious, she scorned Southern convention, rejected the closeted skeletons and wide streak of alcoholism that hid behind decorated formality. She disowned her family, converted to Catholicism, marched for civil rights, and married the older man from a poverty-stricken background. I am the oldest of the seven children she bore, one after the next.
We were brought up in curious contrasts. There were the economies that so many mouths to feed on a middle class income made necessary; (hand-me-down clothes, Tang and powdered milk, peanut butter for ten thousand consecutive school lunches), but my mother’s background dictated private schools, music and dance and art lessons.
I attended St. Michael’s Choir School and studied piano and organ at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. I hated studying anything at all; my mother was determined that I should be a doctor and despaired over my future. I only wanted to read fiction, and did so endlessly. The library was my favorite, enchanted place (it still is). I didn’t realize I was in fact studying for what I wanted to do most.
My father’s plan to not be widowed again fell through, and my mother was suddenly gone when I was 16. He had been ill equipped to raise one child the first time, and now there were eight of them; the youngest only three years old. In some sense we lost him, too.
Life changed, just like that. My behavior guaranteed me a quick expulsion from my exclusive school. I did manage a high school diploma (by the skin of my teeth) but I was mostly happy to leave school for good. I lost an early love, and wandered to Los Angeles. I learned about the streets, and about living in the places that cause most people to lock their car doors when they drive through. I was blessed with the same genes that took my father through life in the mean part of Boston, and survived.
Eventually, I grew up and moved again, first to Atlanta and then back to Canada. I made a living in the 'fixing cars' arena. I live in a very old house on a wooded lot that is infested by dogs and turtles and parrots, and perhaps the ghost of a young girl. My teen-aged son is a light in my life who wants to be an author and a professional football player. I never tell him that both are nearly impossible, because they aren’t.
The library has continued to haunt me. When age said the possibility of a university degree was long past, I decided to try my hand at a novel anyway. Somehow I finished it, and have produced one a year since. I’m working on my tenth.
When I was little, the library was my favorite place.
I was born in Lone Pine, California. My parents liked to move and so did I, for a while. I have roots throughout the United States, but I was mostly raised in Toronto, Canada.
My father was a psychiatric social worker who grew up in the slums of Boston. He was a tough guy who got an education on the GI bill and pulled himself out of his birthright. He married twice, the first time to a woman who left him a widower. Alone with a toddler, I suppose he was determined that it wouldn’t happen to him again, because the second time he married a woman much younger than he was.
She was the product of a Southern family; royalty that included the same Duke family that bought a university and named it after itself. Wilful and rebellious, she scorned Southern convention, rejected the closeted skeletons and wide streak of alcoholism that hid behind decorated formality. She disowned her family, converted to Catholicism, marched for civil rights, and married the older man from a poverty-stricken background. I am the oldest of the seven children she bore, one after the next.
We were brought up in curious contrasts. There were the economies that so many mouths to feed on a middle class income made necessary; (hand-me-down clothes, Tang and powdered milk, peanut butter for ten thousand consecutive school lunches), but my mother’s background dictated private schools, music and dance and art lessons.
I attended St. Michael’s Choir School and studied piano and organ at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. I hated studying anything at all; my mother was determined that I should be a doctor and despaired over my future. I only wanted to read fiction, and did so endlessly. The library was my favorite, enchanted place (it still is). I didn’t realize I was in fact studying for what I wanted to do most.
My father’s plan to not be widowed again fell through, and my mother was suddenly gone when I was 16. He had been ill equipped to raise one child the first time, and now there were eight of them; the youngest only three years old. In some sense we lost him, too.
Life changed, just like that. My behavior guaranteed me a quick expulsion from my exclusive school. I did manage a high school diploma (by the skin of my teeth) but I was mostly happy to leave school for good. I lost an early love, and wandered to Los Angeles. I learned about the streets, and about living in the places that cause most people to lock their car doors when they drive through. I was blessed with the same genes that took my father through life in the mean part of Boston, and survived.
Eventually, I grew up and moved again, first to Atlanta and then back to Canada. I made a living in the 'fixing cars' arena. I live in a very old house on a wooded lot that is infested by dogs and turtles and parrots, and perhaps the ghost of a young girl. My teen-aged son is a light in my life who wants to be an author and a professional football player. I never tell him that both are nearly impossible, because they aren’t.
The library has continued to haunt me. When age said the possibility of a university degree was long past, I decided to try my hand at a novel anyway. Somehow I finished it, and have produced one a year since. I’m working on my tenth.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 6, 2017
Echoes of Chandler, Girls in Pink
The year is 1947. The place is somewhere just north of Los Angeles, California. The war is just over and many who fought it and survived are home again and busily reintegrating themselves into civilian life and trying to forget the war. We begin with an unlit and serpentine mountain road; a convertible speeding along it. Its single occupant headed for celebration and newly won freedom from a brutal husband and constant fear. All thanks to the Private Detective whom she had hired to help but, at the end, had turned her invitation for him to join her down cold. Still stinging from the rejection, she thought he didn’t know the first thing about love. She barely noticed the dark sedan that had pulled out some distance behind her and slowly made pace and then gained on her. In just a short while Charlene Arnott Cleveland would be lying dead in her crushed automobile at the bottom of a ravine with a bullet in her brain for good measure and Private Investigator Nathanial Crowe, would be faced with finding out who killed his client and paying them back for it. This is how it begins. A story of murder, new and old, love lost and found and lost again, ghosts of the past, and even a little magic. “Where there are cards, there are tricks.”
Girls in Pink, an early effort by promising new author Bob Bickford, is a well crafted story with solid characters and a most pleasing read. Mr. Bickford has a very descriptive style. He sets a good scene and paints a vivid picture of his characters and their surroundings. One can easily see in the mind’s eye the town of Santa Teresa and the scenes in which the story is set. The characters are also richly described leaving nothing to chance. But I find that occasionally the author trips over this descriptive style. While it is wrong not to have enough information available to the reader, it is equally as bad to have too much information. It is a small flaw to be sure, but one character in the tale is described as possessing a sickly sweet smell of almonds or marzipan; an almost cyanide like quality. From the point he is introduced, we the readers are told about this smell and each time the character appears in the story thereafter, the reader is greeted with another description of the odor It becomes a bit of a joke after three or four appearances.
The other small problem I noticed is the author’s tendency to recap the action from earlier in the story. This is a mistake many new authors make that they will grow out of as their writing matures. Mr. Bickford is certainly talented enough as a writer to outgrow this tendency quickly and I expect it is already gone in his later books.
His prose is sporadically punctuated by tough guy phrases that are somewhat Raymond Chandleresque in sound. Pronouncements like: “I checked my pistol. It was full of bullets but empty of promises.” Or “She looked into her glass and into the past.” And, Bourbon… “No sugar. No Bitters. Just a glass. That sometimes passes for civilized where I come from.” are just some examples of the kind of talk one might read in the hard boiled detective thrillers of the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties. And like Chandler’s famous detective Phillip Marlowe, Bickford’s Nate Crowe is a tough guy, but also a man of honor and principle. He certainly is as Chandler describes the character of the Detective in his essay The Simple Art of Murder, “In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world .”
The love interest in this story is the beautiful but enigmatic Annie Khalo. Annie is haunted by the past and her mysterious fascination with her sister’s disappearance proves irresistible to Nate. But she also is a piece of the puzzle caught in the ever widening web of mystery and murder in which Nate also finds himself ensnared. Nothing is ever as it appears to be.
The rest of the usual suspects are here as well. The shrewd but friendly police detective is present. The sociopathic mob boss is there also as is a whole range of thugs and sadistic mobsters there to complicate matters as is the dirty cop and the good friend with a checkered past.
Overall I recommend reading Girls in Pink. It is a refreshing flash out of the past with echoes of Chandler, Hammett, and a bit of Ross MacDonald on the side and just a fun read with a few surprises along the way. Bob Bickford is a gifted writer and one I look forward to reading in the future.
--James C. Aker- March 2017 --
The year is 1947. The place is somewhere just north of Los Angeles, California. The war is just over and many who fought it and survived are home again and busily reintegrating themselves into civilian life and trying to forget the war. We begin with an unlit and serpentine mountain road; a convertible speeding along it. Its single occupant headed for celebration and newly won freedom from a brutal husband and constant fear. All thanks to the Private Detective whom she had hired to help but, at the end, had turned her invitation for him to join her down cold. Still stinging from the rejection, she thought he didn’t know the first thing about love. She barely noticed the dark sedan that had pulled out some distance behind her and slowly made pace and then gained on her. In just a short while Charlene Arnott Cleveland would be lying dead in her crushed automobile at the bottom of a ravine with a bullet in her brain for good measure and Private Investigator Nathanial Crowe, would be faced with finding out who killed his client and paying them back for it. This is how it begins. A story of murder, new and old, love lost and found and lost again, ghosts of the past, and even a little magic. “Where there are cards, there are tricks.”
Girls in Pink, an early effort by promising new author Bob Bickford, is a well crafted story with solid characters and a most pleasing read. Mr. Bickford has a very descriptive style. He sets a good scene and paints a vivid picture of his characters and their surroundings. One can easily see in the mind’s eye the town of Santa Teresa and the scenes in which the story is set. The characters are also richly described leaving nothing to chance. But I find that occasionally the author trips over this descriptive style. While it is wrong not to have enough information available to the reader, it is equally as bad to have too much information. It is a small flaw to be sure, but one character in the tale is described as possessing a sickly sweet smell of almonds or marzipan; an almost cyanide like quality. From the point he is introduced, we the readers are told about this smell and each time the character appears in the story thereafter, the reader is greeted with another description of the odor It becomes a bit of a joke after three or four appearances.
The other small problem I noticed is the author’s tendency to recap the action from earlier in the story. This is a mistake many new authors make that they will grow out of as their writing matures. Mr. Bickford is certainly talented enough as a writer to outgrow this tendency quickly and I expect it is already gone in his later books.
His prose is sporadically punctuated by tough guy phrases that are somewhat Raymond Chandleresque in sound. Pronouncements like: “I checked my pistol. It was full of bullets but empty of promises.” Or “She looked into her glass and into the past.” And, Bourbon… “No sugar. No Bitters. Just a glass. That sometimes passes for civilized where I come from.” are just some examples of the kind of talk one might read in the hard boiled detective thrillers of the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties. And like Chandler’s famous detective Phillip Marlowe, Bickford’s Nate Crowe is a tough guy, but also a man of honor and principle. He certainly is as Chandler describes the character of the Detective in his essay The Simple Art of Murder, “In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world .”
The love interest in this story is the beautiful but enigmatic Annie Khalo. Annie is haunted by the past and her mysterious fascination with her sister’s disappearance proves irresistible to Nate. But she also is a piece of the puzzle caught in the ever widening web of mystery and murder in which Nate also finds himself ensnared. Nothing is ever as it appears to be.
The rest of the usual suspects are here as well. The shrewd but friendly police detective is present. The sociopathic mob boss is there also as is a whole range of thugs and sadistic mobsters there to complicate matters as is the dirty cop and the good friend with a checkered past.
Overall I recommend reading Girls in Pink. It is a refreshing flash out of the past with echoes of Chandler, Hammett, and a bit of Ross MacDonald on the side and just a fun read with a few surprises along the way. Bob Bickford is a gifted writer and one I look forward to reading in the future.
--James C. Aker- March 2017 --
May 16, 2017
Disclaimer: I worked on editing this book, but loved it from the first moment it came across my desk. I enjoyed the noir settings and characters, plus the twist at the end, which I won't reveal. I look forward to seeing these characters again - I hope.
December 29, 2021
If you're into noir mysteries with a very vintage feel, then this is an author and a book for you. It held my attention which is saying more than several books I have tried to read lately. It would not be my steady diet, but I will read more of Bob Bickford's novels. His wording is beautiful and evocative of a bygone time and place, although I wish for him a competent editor.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews