Dare the Devil by Roger L. Conlee, © 2014, Pale Horse Books, ISBN 978-1-939917-11-9, 264 pages, $13.95
By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO –This mystery novel is set in the late 1940s in Los Angeles, and author Conlee, a public relations man and former journalist, has researched the venue and era to provide verisimilitude for a story about Jake Weaver, an investigative reporter, former spy, and family man. The fictional Weaver interacts with numerous historical figures of the period including mobsters Bugsy Siegel and Mickey Cohen, atomic scientist Robert Oppenheimer, publisher William Randolph Hearst, and the famed, hard-bitten newspaper city editor Agness Underwood.
Weaver is married to Valerie, who is a devoted stepmother to his German-born daughter Ilse. Gretchen, a former love interest from the days Jake was spying in Germany, has come to Los Angeles to hunt down a sadistic, misogynist Nazi war criminal known as “the Butcher of Buchenwald” who likes to inflict pain on females. Gretchen’s whereabouts are of interest to the British Secret Service, which sends an agent named Travis to keep tabs of her. Jake hopes Gretchen and Valerie won’t compare notes about him.
Meanwhile, in his role as an investigative news reporter, Weaver has been keeping the public informed about the misdeeds of local hoods, Jack Dragna and Bugsy Siegel. This causes great satisfaction for Jake’s publisher, William Randolph Hearst, who believes such coverage will boost circulation numbers, but it gives Jake a bad name with the mob – and you know where that can lead.
With so many plot lines and possibilities for subplots, Dare the Devil reminded me of the various television shows that people enjoy watching today such as Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, Modern Family, Parenthood, Nashville, and Chicago Fire, to name a few, in which writers have so much potential material they need to restrain themselves from going completely off-topic.
To Conlee’s credit, Weaver somehow is able to stay on the scent of the mob, notwithstanding the fact that his old girlfriend is trying to track down a Nazi murderer, and his teenage daughter, now blossoming into womanhood, is beginning her dating career. Is it simply the hard-bitten newspaper reporter’s imagination, or do these sub-plots seem at times to be converging?
While two well-known Jewish mobsters, Mickey Cohen and Bugsy Siegel, are integral parts of the plot, and another one, Meyer Lansky, is several times referenced, you won’t be learning much about them that you didn’t already know, except perhaps that Cohen’s way of ending a conversation was with the ironic phrase, “See you in church.” Otherwise, all three of these gangsters are one-dimensional props in this fast-moving mystery story which had me staying up late one night determined to learn how it all would turn out.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com