The debut cozy crime novel by Jack Adler, Ditzy and Champion (ISBN978-1934041406, 176pp) was published by Swimming Kangaroo Books in October 2007, and is reviewed here.
Jack Adler
Ditzy and Champion opens with a single word: “Sex.”
It’s repeated four times, before we’re introduced to Faye Boucher, a working wife in Los Angeles, with a taste for internet chat rooms. As far as she’s concerned, they’re harmless entertainment, right?
That strange opening, with a series of seemingly random postings by a user called Forgasm should be enough to convince Ditzy (as Faye calls herself on-line) that there are some very strange people inhabiting internet chat rooms, including the relationship-themed one that she spends most of her on-line time in. But amongst her group, ‘Champion’ seems OK – in fact, he’s one of the more thoughtful men in her group. That is, until he sends her an instant message asking if they can meet for coffee the next time he’s visiting LA from Tucson, Arizona.
Ditzy immediately senses alarm bells ringing in the back of her mind and says ‘no,’ but it’s already too late. She’s been far too trusting, far too open with the information that she’s given out, and with some serious digging for information, Ray Shapp the executive from Phoenix behind the ‘Champion’ handle, is able to track her down. She’s as gorgeous as he hopes she is, but seems happily married.
But on a later business trip Shapp has time on his hands, and on a whim follows her husband, who it emerges is having an affair. Shapp still has some vestiges of decency for all his obsessiveness, and besides, if Ditzy were to find out, she might finish with her husband. Before he makes his final decision, he takes up with Melissa, a student financing her college tuition by practicing the Oldest Profession in the World. Melissa has a boyfriend called Mario with a serious gambling problem, and before long things start to get very nasty in Ditzy and Champion’s world….
Cozy Mysteries
Ditzy and Champion is full of topical subjects; internet chat rooms, escort agencies staffed by university under-graduates and the risk of STDs, and Adler handles his varied materiel well, weaving it in expertly. If the pace is slower, its tone less unrelentingly grim than fans of hardboiled thrillers like Kathy Reich’s novels would like, that is deliberate, for Adler is writing in a lighter vein, often verging on that classified (somewhat patronisingly) as cozy mysteries, and avoids the inevitable Perils-of-Pauline denouement that still seems to overtake female practitioners as diverse as Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski and Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta.
Ditzy and Champion is an interesting debut from a freelance writer based in Los Angeles who has previously written both travel books and historical novels, and his fans will doubtless await his next novel with interest.
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