About five years back I picked up a Best Mystery Stories collection, as I was looking for a new series author to follow. I was fairly unimpressed, but liked a fellow called Jeremiah Healy very much. He mostly wrote about a Boston detective named John Francis Cuddy. The series, the character and the author were all fairly popular during the '90s. However, fame and popularity in the book trade are transitory and by the mid-oughts his work was pretty hard to find, even when I looked in New England used book stores. I only ever found one of his novels. I liked it but not to the point of Tolkien-level rereadings.
His schtick was that Cuddy's wife had died, and Cuddy still carried a torch. In fact, he would go to her grave and carry on conversations with her, including about his new girlfriend. It sounds twee; hell, it is twee. But it's also surprisingly effective, and affecting. I wish I could write about feelings a tenth as well.
I don't know why it took me so long to think, "What if I look in the library?" When I did, I found that nearly all his books are there. It turns out that he quit the Cuddy series in 1999 (after killing off the girlfriend, too), and started writing a different series under the name Terry Devane. I haven't looked at those yet, but they have a female protagonist. I'll look forward to finding out if she does any grave visiting.
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