Crown Vic
is
different from what novelist and screenwriter Lee Goldberg is known for writing
– easy going, well-plotted, and general audience mysteries like his brilliant Eve
Ronin series – but the two villain-as-hero tales included in this collection are
hardboiled and naughty fun. In the novelette length, “Ray Boyd Isn’t Stupid,” we
find the eponymous character rolling into a lakeshore resort, Granite Point Park
Resort, in Washington, fresh out of prison for stealing cars in his used police
cruiser Crown Vic Interceptor. He takes a liking to the place (after some
persuasion) and accepts a job: $10 an hour, along with room and board. The
local Sheriff’s Deputy takes an immediate dislike to Ray, but the women all love
Ray, including his boss’s wife, which is where all the trouble starts.
The
second, and the shorter of the two stories, “Occasional Risk” begins where the
first left off. Ray is back in his Crown Vic moseying around Arizona’s southern
desert and killing time at a seedy roadside motel in a nothing town. Ray Boyd
isn’t stupid, and so when a glossy big-moneyed woman seduces him in the motel’s
swimming pool he knows she wants something more than sex from him, but he’ll
take the sex just the same.
Crown
Vic’s
stories are a marvelous mash-up of Dan J. Marlowe’s early Earl Drake novels – The
Name of the Game is Death, Endless Hour – and the erotic thrillers
so popular in video stores during the 1990s. But Ray, even with all his
failings, is a Lee Goldberg character: observant, witty, at times downright funny
– for the reader at least – and a heck of a good escape for all of us drab work-a-day
slobs.