Wet Debt

Pat Gallegher #4

by Richard Helms

The fourth book in Richard Helms' Pat Gallegher Mystery Series. Gallegher investigates the seventy year old murder of a man found entombed in a concrete floor next to Holliday's, and discovers that this murder is deviously connected with his own recent violent past.

272 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2003

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

aka Eric Shane and Noah Roarke
Three-Time PWA Shamus Award Nominee. Author of the Pat Gallegher series set in New Orleans, and the Eamon Gold series set in San Francisco. Editor and publisher of The Back Alley, a webzine featuring hardboiled and noir fiction for a new century.
On May 2, 2008, he became the only author ever to win TWO Short Mystery Fiction Society Derringer Awards in the same year, for THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO GORDON BLACK, which was published under his own name in Kevin Burton Smith's Thrilling Detective Website, and for PAPER WALLS/GLASS HOUSES, which was published under his pseudonym Eric Shane in his own Back Alley Webzine. It's been a big year!

Series:
* Pat Gallegher
* Eamon Gold
* Judd Wheeler

Reviews

[Carl Brookins · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s the middle of the nineteen-thirties in New Orleans and it’s hot. Pat Gallegher, cool jazz cornetist, former gambler, occasional enforcer, and even occasional amateur detective, is in a spot of trouble. An acquaintance of Gallegher’s has been caught with his hand in a cookie jar. Trouble is, the cookie jar is really a money laundering scam run by the mob. They aren’t happy. Gallegher’s friend is scheduled for cement overshoes—or worse—and he’s got Gallegher to try to fix things. That puts Gallegher at odds with the local mob boss. It’s a neat way of introducing several characters who become important to the real plot of this fine novel.

The real story is the discovery of an old mummified body unearthed during the destruction of a vacant office building next to the club where Gallegher works. The body is really old, maybe seventy years, give or take. Shorty, Gallegher’s boss who owns the property wants his cornetist-cum-detective to sort out who the guy was and how he came to be buried in concrete to avoid delaying new construction. What happens next is unusual, strange and more than a little dangerous.

The novel is fast paced and well-written with the gritty kind of straight-up dialogue one expects in noir detective fiction. Readers will notice echoes of Hammett here. Gallegher quickly becomes enmeshed in a task that builds tension because he hasn’t much time, and he’s caught between a cop, some independent thugs and local mobsters. On the up side, he’s being pressured by his main squeeze to join her in San Francisco for some dalliance and needed R&R.

Well, it all works out, of course. This isn’t the first Pat Gallegher mystery and it won’t be the last, but there’s no lack of mystery and action. For readers of the hard-boiled genre, I recommend Pat Gallegher, and friends.