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Charlie Bradshaw #4
Saratoga Snapper
After Victor Plotz becomes the victim of a hit-and-run and his camera is stolen by the driver, Charlie Bradshaw finds himself between the police and an armed robbery scheme in his efforts to track Victor's assailant
- GenresMystery
272 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1986
2 people are currently reading
46 people want to read
About the author
Stephen Dobyns
82 books206 followersDobyns was raised in New Jersey, Michigan, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. He was educated at Shimer College, graduated from Wayne State University, and received an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1967. He has worked as a reporter for the Detroit News.
He has taught at various academic institutions, including Sarah Lawrence College, the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers, the University of Iowa, Syracuse University, and Boston University.
In much of his poetry and some works of non-genre fiction, Dobyns employs extended tropes, using the ridiculous and the absurd as vehicles to introduce more profound meditations on life, love, and art. He shies neither from the low nor from the sublime, and all in a straightforward narrative voice of reason. His journalistic training has strongly informed this voice.
He has taught at various academic institutions, including Sarah Lawrence College, the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers, the University of Iowa, Syracuse University, and Boston University.
In much of his poetry and some works of non-genre fiction, Dobyns employs extended tropes, using the ridiculous and the absurd as vehicles to introduce more profound meditations on life, love, and art. He shies neither from the low nor from the sublime, and all in a straightforward narrative voice of reason. His journalistic training has strongly informed this voice.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
December 21, 2025
While I did like this one, I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as the two previous instalments. I’m not sure why; I just wasn’t as engaged with the story. Perhaps it was because Charlie’s sidekick, Victor, was sidelined for most of this book.
December 5, 2013
Charlie is a misanthrope. When his mother, who owns the hotel where he works as the house dick, asks him what he would do with a million dollars, his response is that he'd like to buy a boat, anchor it offshore, and fish and read. (Sounds good except for the fishing.) If people wanted to come visit they could wave and he'd row over in the dinghy to get them, or not. His girl friends drop him because he's "not bold."
Charlie vows to find out who injured Victor, his friend, by running him down and stealing his camera. He discovers during the course of his poking around that an old mobster has been hanging around the hotel. That leads him to suspect the guy is planning to heist an armored truck that carries a substantial amount of money on a regular basis from the track. The police chief, when informed, scoffs, since it's the best protected run around and besides, there are so few roads for the thieves to escape on. Well, of course, Charlie has it nailed, but the links are not what he expected.
Mildly entertaining. Not as good as some of the other Dobyns I've read. 2.5 stars. really.
Charlie vows to find out who injured Victor, his friend, by running him down and stealing his camera. He discovers during the course of his poking around that an old mobster has been hanging around the hotel. That leads him to suspect the guy is planning to heist an armored truck that carries a substantial amount of money on a regular basis from the track. The police chief, when informed, scoffs, since it's the best protected run around and besides, there are so few roads for the thieves to escape on. Well, of course, Charlie has it nailed, but the links are not what he expected.
Mildly entertaining. Not as good as some of the other Dobyns I've read. 2.5 stars. really.
November 26, 2007
Charlie Bradshaw, Saratoga Springs detective, race-track hanger-on, hopeless romantic. Great stuff.
October 15, 2020
"There’s a way that you’re outside of life. I’m not sure how to say this but it’s like you’re on the periphery, on the outside looking in. You sort of skirt the perimeter, asking questions and wondering what it’s like instead of diving in and becoming a part of it. Maybe even living out at the lake is an example of that. You live out there and watch Saratoga from a safe distance.”
“Is that why you won’t go out with me?” asked Charlie, uncertain what Doris was saying.
“That may be one of the reasons. I mean, what makes you good as a policeman or a detective is that you’re curious and ask questions, but then you do the same thing with life itself, as if you’re in a store deciding whether to buy or not to buy. You can’t do that with life. You have to jump into the middle and take what comes.”
Private-detective novels are often built on fantasy projects of the sort of man men are supposed to want to be: tough, stoic, skilled, capable of righteous savagery, psychological acute, unerringly judgmental, and therefore irresistibly attractive (usually) to the opposite sex. And when a woman hurts a private detective, they do so because they're liars, cheaters or otherwise morally, one-dimensionally dismissible, and worthy only of ferocious violence, verbal or otherwise. This is supposed to represent some sort of masculine ideal, but I've always found it sad and pathetic, even as I've nursed my own wounds over women and sometimes firehosed my wounds in their faces because I was unable to face the man in the mirror.
Then there's Charlie Bradshaw, the central character in eleven mystery novels by Stephen Dobyns set in Saratoga Springs, New York (a series that started in 1976, with its most recent entry published in 2013 after a fifteen-year absence). Charlie is poor and dresses like it, with cheap sport coats with flapping linings and Hush Puppies sporting crushed heels. He isn't handsome; he's a little overweight, with thinning hair, a round face and "a nose like a grape." He's not particularly feared, and he's not respected by the most respectable members of Saratoga society. What is he is observant and stubborn.
In SARATOGA SNAPPER, Charlie has dated Doris Bailes, a bar waitress, for a number of years, and even fallen in love with her, without ever being able to get comfortable in their relationship. And when she breaks off their relationship to see another man more aligned with her outlook on life, Charlie is driven to hangdog reflections on who he is, how he lives his life, and if those things could ever be appealing to anyone but himself: "The trouble was that Doris didn’t even dislike Charlie. She just liked Roger Phelps more. He played squash and had a sort of ruddy vigor. If he could just forget her, Charlie told himself, he could continue with his life and maybe meet other women—women who liked him and didn’t mind if he wasn’t too tall and was a little overweight and getting bald. The awful truth was that despite his age he was still liable to the paralyzing crushes which had plagued his high school years. These were never appropriate. Nor had he much interest in 'sensible' women."
I found this storyline tremendously appealing. Charlie is a real person, and as I've often said, I read crime fiction not to escape from reality but to escape INTO it. I'm kind of a Charlie myself, and when I read a story about a Spenser or an Elvis Cole or a Jack Reacher, I never think: "I want to be THAT guy." What I want is to be more comfortable with the me that I am, and when I see people like me working through their stuff, even in fiction, with great authority and plausibility, it gives me ideas and how to do that for myself. And ideas often lead to hope, and that leads to a positive experience, especially when the fictional version of me is somehow able to overcome the obstacles in spite of their perceived shortcomings and gain a little respect, self-induced and otherwise, along the way. And when that's just one component of a well-crafted story, that's just about as positive an experience as one can have with a book, in my opinion.
But SARATOGA SNAPPER has a lot more going for it. I like it when a series uses a setting nit just for selective lifestyle porn, but bothers to unpack its history and culture without losing a single MPH of plot momentum. Every SARATOGA novel does this to some degree, and its anecdotal look at Sarataga's intersections with gambling and crime are especially entertaining and informative. In SNAPPER, Charlie is pursuing an octogenarian bank robber in the mid-1980s, a legend from the days of Dutch Schultz and Arnold Rothstein and Murder Incorporated named Tommy Polanksi, who's making one last bid for lasting respect as he stares down his terminal cancer. When Charlie finally crosses paths with Polanksi, the old man has enough left in him for one last speech:
"'I really liked Saratoga,' said Polanski. 'Not now, of course, now it’s just a developer’s paradise, but way back before they caught me and stuck me in prison.' He struggled again to sit up. Charlie leaned forward to help him, lifting him up in the seat and surprised at how light he was. 'I remember when they repealed the old Agnew–Hart Law,' Polanski continued, 'and all the bookies came back to the betting ring at the track. That was probably in ’34. A great bunch of people—Blue Jaw Magoon, Jenny the Factory, the Dancer, Irish John Cavanagh. Then at night you could go over to the Chicago Club or one of them other places. It’s all gone now, but that one hotel, you know, the Bentley, I mean it’s not really the way things were but it looks a little like it.'"
All the SARATOGA mysteries are at least above average, but SNAPPER in particular is a high point in the series. I reread them every few years and find new Easter eggs in them each time. "Character counts" is a cliché, but in this case it speaks loudest and longest.
“Is that why you won’t go out with me?” asked Charlie, uncertain what Doris was saying.
“That may be one of the reasons. I mean, what makes you good as a policeman or a detective is that you’re curious and ask questions, but then you do the same thing with life itself, as if you’re in a store deciding whether to buy or not to buy. You can’t do that with life. You have to jump into the middle and take what comes.”
Private-detective novels are often built on fantasy projects of the sort of man men are supposed to want to be: tough, stoic, skilled, capable of righteous savagery, psychological acute, unerringly judgmental, and therefore irresistibly attractive (usually) to the opposite sex. And when a woman hurts a private detective, they do so because they're liars, cheaters or otherwise morally, one-dimensionally dismissible, and worthy only of ferocious violence, verbal or otherwise. This is supposed to represent some sort of masculine ideal, but I've always found it sad and pathetic, even as I've nursed my own wounds over women and sometimes firehosed my wounds in their faces because I was unable to face the man in the mirror.
Then there's Charlie Bradshaw, the central character in eleven mystery novels by Stephen Dobyns set in Saratoga Springs, New York (a series that started in 1976, with its most recent entry published in 2013 after a fifteen-year absence). Charlie is poor and dresses like it, with cheap sport coats with flapping linings and Hush Puppies sporting crushed heels. He isn't handsome; he's a little overweight, with thinning hair, a round face and "a nose like a grape." He's not particularly feared, and he's not respected by the most respectable members of Saratoga society. What is he is observant and stubborn.
In SARATOGA SNAPPER, Charlie has dated Doris Bailes, a bar waitress, for a number of years, and even fallen in love with her, without ever being able to get comfortable in their relationship. And when she breaks off their relationship to see another man more aligned with her outlook on life, Charlie is driven to hangdog reflections on who he is, how he lives his life, and if those things could ever be appealing to anyone but himself: "The trouble was that Doris didn’t even dislike Charlie. She just liked Roger Phelps more. He played squash and had a sort of ruddy vigor. If he could just forget her, Charlie told himself, he could continue with his life and maybe meet other women—women who liked him and didn’t mind if he wasn’t too tall and was a little overweight and getting bald. The awful truth was that despite his age he was still liable to the paralyzing crushes which had plagued his high school years. These were never appropriate. Nor had he much interest in 'sensible' women."
I found this storyline tremendously appealing. Charlie is a real person, and as I've often said, I read crime fiction not to escape from reality but to escape INTO it. I'm kind of a Charlie myself, and when I read a story about a Spenser or an Elvis Cole or a Jack Reacher, I never think: "I want to be THAT guy." What I want is to be more comfortable with the me that I am, and when I see people like me working through their stuff, even in fiction, with great authority and plausibility, it gives me ideas and how to do that for myself. And ideas often lead to hope, and that leads to a positive experience, especially when the fictional version of me is somehow able to overcome the obstacles in spite of their perceived shortcomings and gain a little respect, self-induced and otherwise, along the way. And when that's just one component of a well-crafted story, that's just about as positive an experience as one can have with a book, in my opinion.
But SARATOGA SNAPPER has a lot more going for it. I like it when a series uses a setting nit just for selective lifestyle porn, but bothers to unpack its history and culture without losing a single MPH of plot momentum. Every SARATOGA novel does this to some degree, and its anecdotal look at Sarataga's intersections with gambling and crime are especially entertaining and informative. In SNAPPER, Charlie is pursuing an octogenarian bank robber in the mid-1980s, a legend from the days of Dutch Schultz and Arnold Rothstein and Murder Incorporated named Tommy Polanksi, who's making one last bid for lasting respect as he stares down his terminal cancer. When Charlie finally crosses paths with Polanksi, the old man has enough left in him for one last speech:
"'I really liked Saratoga,' said Polanski. 'Not now, of course, now it’s just a developer’s paradise, but way back before they caught me and stuck me in prison.' He struggled again to sit up. Charlie leaned forward to help him, lifting him up in the seat and surprised at how light he was. 'I remember when they repealed the old Agnew–Hart Law,' Polanski continued, 'and all the bookies came back to the betting ring at the track. That was probably in ’34. A great bunch of people—Blue Jaw Magoon, Jenny the Factory, the Dancer, Irish John Cavanagh. Then at night you could go over to the Chicago Club or one of them other places. It’s all gone now, but that one hotel, you know, the Bentley, I mean it’s not really the way things were but it looks a little like it.'"
All the SARATOGA mysteries are at least above average, but SNAPPER in particular is a high point in the series. I reread them every few years and find new Easter eggs in them each time. "Character counts" is a cliché, but in this case it speaks loudest and longest.
April 13, 2023
This is a very good detective novel in the genre of the 'old-fashioned classic' detective stories. When someone runs over a photographer and tries to kill him, his detective friend tries to find out who did the deed, and during his investigation, discovers a group of criminals who are going to pull off an impossible armored car heist. He doesn't know if that group is responsible for running over his friend, but he must keep investigating. As he finds out more and more, the police unfortunately do not believe him. This is a definitely good read.
June 15, 2017
This has been on my TBR pile/shelf for years. I'm finally trying to read and rid myself of old paperbacks. I did enjoy this although I'm not sure I'll be searching high and low for more, if there are more. Charlie Bradshaw is one strange dude!
February 24, 2018
Book 4 in the series(1986 publication), best to date. The main character is becoming better defined and a lot more Saratoga feel to it. I am on to book 5
October 12, 2014
An entertaining installment in the Charlie Bradshaw series who is a very likeable small-town detective. When his friend, the town photographer, is run down by an unidentified person, Bradshaw finds himself investigating a hit-and-run case which seems to have deeper connections with master criminals of the past. An old-fashioned mystery with a compassionate study of the protagonist's character. Good stuff.
August 1, 2013
Read this because it was in the bookshelf of the cabin where we were staying at Tupper Lake. It passed the time, that's about it.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews