Lost Daughter

by Michael Cormany

When private eye Dan Kruger is hired to find Asia, a missing teenager, and quickly brings her back to her suburban home, things look too easy--until a murder is commited, Asia becomes the chief suspect, and Kruger is back on her trail

224 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published September 1, 1988

Reviews

[Jack Tripper · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cover of the 1988 Lyle Stuart hardcover. Thanks to Jordan for the rec.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's hard to find much information about author Michael Cormany, but Lost Daughter (1988) appears to be the first of five novels in his Chicago-set Dan Kruger private-eye series. The novel is in first-person, and we learn from Kruger that he's 35; that he was once a cop and then a rock musician, before becoming a PI. Jordan West, Jack Tripper and now myself are the only people in the world who have ever read this novel. And as you can see, the mass-market paperback has one of the coolest covers of all time.

I read the first 62 pages back in January or February, sipping coffee late one night in the kitchen (early in the morning, actually) when I already knew the next day's classes were canceled because of snow. I remember that night fondly, but didn't get back to the book until the end of June. Now I'm writing about it in July. That's the kind of reading year it's been, my focus as erratic as the signal of the local college station once you hit the interstate (this kind of fiction reminds you that similes are fun).

It may look like a beat-up mass-market paperback with a generic mystery, and maybe it is. But the spirit of the age is contained within. Maybe that's always the case, even if the author isn't trying for that. Maybe especially if the author isn't trying. The original pub date is '88 and the Leisure paperback is '91, but I lost track of the number of details that felt like they'd come out of a different world. '73 Skylarks, Black Beauty speed, David Bowie on vinyl, smoking indoors, leaving your apartment to buy the newspaper and thereby check the baseball scores (except for the games that were on Pacific time, of course- then you've got to wait till the next day), laying bets with an actual bookie, playing Solitaire with actual cards, not having a digital dashboard in the car. The idea that someone could just casually become a cop, then a touring musician, then a private-eye (though I think that even in the 80s there was probably a degree of fantasy to that conceit). A world in which, alone at night, the only possibilities for company were the radio, the TV, the telephone, and dreams.

I was going to include Stroh's beer on my list of things that don't exist anymore, but google tells me it's still available, especially in the upper Midwest. Where I have not spent much time. Now that I'm staring at an image of the lion logo, it looks familiar. But maybe I'm thinking of one of those German beers instead. I can't say for sure that I've ever tasted Stroh's in my life.

A friend who's a few years older than I am, and who has always been a little more chemically inclined, told me he was certain that pills branded Black Beauties were available OTC at New Jersey gas stations in the last years of the twentieth century. But a little research suggests that these were not the same as Dan Kruger's speed tablets; rather, my friend was remembering a line of knockoffs made with ephedrine. So the street name of the prescription pills became the brand name of the OTC knockoffs. Then ephedrine was scheduled, sometime in the early 2000s, and that was the end of that.

The novel assumes you are conversant with baseball. It might not seem worth mentioning, but I know quite a few people who would be totally flummoxed by these esoteric references to "the American League" and "the National League." Don't worry guys, these are not far-right white-supremacist groups, but the two leagues of Major League Baseball. The novel actually starts with Dan Kruger tailing "The Kid", a young Cubs pitching phenom whose performance has been suffering as a result of his taste for the sordid Chicago nightlife (we get updates on "The Kid" throughout the novel, but he's not the main story- it's a nice touch, that c- or d-plot in the background). Of course, tailing "The Kid" puts Dan in just the right place at just the right time to be approached by a wealthy businessman whose teenage daughter, Asia, has disappeared.

It'd probably also be helpful to know that the Cubs and the White Sox are both baseball teams in Chicago. And that the Cubs were under a curse throughout most of the twentieth century, before finally winning the World Series in 2016 .

But the ubiquity of and talk about baseball may actually be one of the most nostalgic things about the book. Back when it was still the national pastime, before it had fully diverged from mass-culture. I guess it doesn't mean anything, but I keep glancing at the name of the publishing imprint here- Leisure Books. Before the leisurely (that is to say, the fun) and the "literary" went their separate ways, never to meet again. Before everything became specialized, before it was impossible to believe that a rock musician could just casually morph into a private detective by the age of 35. On one hand, I can imagine a lot of people in the early 90s picking this up at the pharmacy and reading it over the course of a weekend. On the other hand, it sits almost alone here, gathering digital dust on its Goodreads shelf. And if Jack Tripper (or was it Jordan West? Sorry guys, correct me in the comments) hadn't found it on one of his subterranean journeys into obscure bookville, I never would have read it either.

In retrospect, maybe there were a few reasons I let it sit so long after that early morning in January or February. The plot is a little overstuffed. I half-read and half-skimmed the first 62 pages this time, using my notes and underlinings and smiley faces to guide me, and remembered that by page 62: Asia, the titular lost daughter, had already been lost and found and lost again; asshole cops had already leaned on Dan Kruger a few times for withholding evidence and for finding him suspiciously at the scene of like three different crimes; unknown goons had already warned Dan off the case and beaten him up (I should actually say they "warned" him off the case by beating him up). The same goons or possibly others had also called him up and told him to, what else, Stay Off the Case.

Far be it from me to reference "first-novel problems" like I'm some old hand at it. I'm currently dealing with first-novel problems myself. But maybe it's because I am that the density of characters and schemes contained within a brief 210 pages stood out to me. There's a lot here that's clearly homage to/update of Chandler, including that density. But it doesn't go down as smoothly as in Chandler (not that that's any great sin), and I felt that a few of the plot threads could have been eliminated or pared down a little.

There are some tense moments in the climax, and now I've got a great idea for what to do if I'm ever being pursued down a highway by killers; but I would say Kruger makes two big mistakes towards the end, mistakes that are a bit disillusioning for the reader who likes a fictional detective to always be one step ahead. For one mistake he pays dearly, for the other he's bailed-out- but in both cases I couldn't help thinking that even a wimp like me would've been savvier. The mistakes (and their consequences) therefore felt a little unconvincing, a little contrived. Both consequences happened because the writer wanted/needed them to, which is of course always the case, but I guess the trick is to not make that so obvious.

On the other hand- you write a book like this, and you're up-front acknowledging your intention to imitate, update and modernize the classic noir/PI story, and Cormany overall does a very honorable job at that. Don't sleep on this guy's one-liners, some of which are laugh-out-loud funny: "I kicked with the power and precision of a tubercular wino." This is the punk variation on the classical, speed tablets and The Replacements instead of whiskey and big-band music; and also in the sense that Dan Kruger, who at 35 is probably just on the cusp of realizing that you do actually get old if you live long enough, is clearly still on the side of the young and the stoned. The title "lost daughter" is not some lament for the nuclear family. Or if it is, Cormany clearly puts the blame on the suburban adults who've screwed up the world, ensuring that the innocent will continue to suffer. That is, in turn, very much in keeping with Chandler.

A friend once pointed out that character names are rarely random. Sometimes a writer even highlights his or her own limitations, without meaning to. Take the lost daughter, for example, named Asia. Well, for most Americans, Asia is an abstraction. An idea. There are scenes where she becomes something of a real character, but ultimately we have no access to her inner life the way we do Dan's. What Cormany really wanted to communicate, I'm pretty sure, and what was most convincing in the novel, was Dan's daily routine of music (both playing and listening), driving around Chicago, smoking, taking speed, listening to baseball on the radio. And that rhythm is the main reason I'm going to read another of these. Pure experience, '88. Nothing quite like it when it hits the dopamine receptors flush. And there'd be a huge market for it in the suburbs, by the way. They should get some Cormany paperbacks in the gas stations before those get scheduled, too.