Castrato

Dan Fortune #14

by Michael Collins

One-armed detective Dan Fortune, searching for cowboy Frank Owen, finds Owen's dead coworker and the corpse of Owen's brother, and sets out cross-country to find the motive and the murderer.

Genres: Mystery

292 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Michael Collins was a Pseudonym of Dennis Lynds (1924–2005), a renowned author of mystery fiction. Raised in New York City, he earned a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart during World War II, before returning to New York to become a magazine editor. He published his first book, a war novel called Combat Soldier, in 1962, before moving to California to write for television.

Two years later Collins published the Edgar Award–winning Act of Fear (1967), which introduced his best-known character: the one-armed private detective Dan Fortune. The Fortune series would last for more than a dozen novels, spanning three decades, and is credited with marking a more politically aware era in private-eye fiction. Besides the Fortune novels, the incredibly prolific Collins wrote science fiction, literary fiction, and several other mystery series. He died in Santa Barbara in 2005.

Reviews

[Tony-Paul Vissage · Rating 5 out of 5]

One-armed PI Dan Fortune has moved from New York to Santa Barbara, settling in with his lady love, Kay, and getting licensed to work in California when Kay refers a friend to him. The friend, Diane Owen, wants Dan to help her ex-husband, Frank, find his brother Billy who's missing. Dan agrees, meets Frank, and is soon up to his missing arm in murders, FBI, CIA, Ponzi schemes, Central American terrorists, and general all-around greed and corruption. Floating above it all, and permeating every act is the odd belief, held-over from another time, the wish by Frank and his brother, and quite a few other men in the story, to be unbound and not fenced-in, to be able to commit outrageous acts, and hold, brash deeds, before riding off as a solitary hero, into the sunset...men who love their women while at the same time seeing them and anything pertaining to home, family, and settling down, as emasculations of their free spirit...the castrato of the title.

This is an entertaining story, interesting in its conceptions of the freewheeling spirit of the Old West, of men who love their women while at the same time seeing them and anything pertaining to home, family, and settling down, as emasculations of their free spirit...the castrato of the title. The current mystery and how it and the other elements relate to each other, perhaps answered the question of whether someone believing in that spirit is facing reality or is merely a cop-out.


This novel is owned by the reviewer and no remuneration was involved in the writing of this review.

[Sarah Sammis · Rating 1 out of 5]

I normally enjoy thriller mysteries and this one should have been a good one with its location: Santa Barbara but it just didn't do it for me. There is a certain amount of machismo built into the detective story and it can work with the story or it can hinder it. Castrato is all macho and not much of anything else.

Dan Fortune the private investigator in this tale is working on a missing persons case gone horribly wrong. While he skirts around the darkest alleys of Santa Barbara he laments how forefoot State street has become by 1989 He wishes for the dangerous days of the 1980s.

I know Santa Barbara of the 1980s and the 1990s. The biggest change to State Street came when the 101 freeway was turned from a five stop light road to a proper highway, raised above the city rather than running right through it. That process finished in 1991 with the opening of the State Street overpass.

A more realistic (though still flawed) depiction of Santa Barbara in this time comes in Sue Grafton's alphabet series, first published in 1982. Even though Kinsey is now living in the past, in her first book, her cases were contemporary.

My favorite depiction of Santa Barbara, though, is in the much sillier Christopher Moore book Coyote Blue.