Private Investigator Lee Baron relocates to his Florida past to take over his now deceased father’s one-man agency. He explains his approach to a couple of local cops who think he’s holding out on them:
“My old man was a lummox. He was a great guy, but he believed the book. Sometimes the book isn’t right. You go through life believing every word in the book, that’s all right. You live it your way. It’s not my way.” I stopped talking, and they didn’t speak. I said, “It’s not that I don’t want to come to you. You have facilities, means of operations I’ll never have. But I can’t always come to you.”
It’s an anemic explanation of Baron’s hardboiled detecting style, but then it wouldn’t be wild if it wasn’t.
In true 1958 PI rogue, an old flame walks into Baron’s office with a heap of trouble—most of it below her surface story—giving him just enough to set the hook. This is a juicy, messy, murder mystery with a cast of untrustables who leave more cuts than clues. The wild cover girl is one of two sisters, both hot, but one far reckless than the other. What begins as one sort of case soon reveals a more complex chain-of-trouble underlaid by a high-stakes robbery.
Gil Brewer was a top-tier paperback original author, and Wild is a worthy entry on his impressive bibliography of hits.
