It was time to return to one of my favorite gumshoes, and that would be Stanley Hastings, the literary creation of author Parnell Hall. Hastings belongs to the anti-hero group of private eyes, for he is just about the most bumbling and insecure investigator there is. The guy has the opposite of street smarts. What do you call this? Street dumbs? The cops laugh at him, but worry behind his back that he is going to muck up their case. Hastings realizes this, so he is always second guessing himself. However, like the proverbial blind squirrel, he occasionally stumbles across the acorn. 

Stanley's strong suit is that he is relentless, and he has a loving and forbearing wife in Alice, who will fill in the blanks for him when necessary. The two have a delightful relationship. He is also honest and he has a good heart. The middle aged Stanley would never think of carrying a gun or getting into a fight. In short, a private eye anti-hero similar to Kaminsky's Lew Fonesca, with the difference being that Stanley is happily married with a wife and family and reasonably content with his lot in life with the exception that he never has enough money. We want the guy to succeed even though he is a schlepp because there is something so endearing about him. 

Parnell Hall is a member of the Writers Guild of America East with several screenplays to his credit. He is a former President of the Private Eye Writers of America and a member of Sisters in Crime. He is an Edgar, Lefty, and two time Shamus nominee and he currently lives in New York City where he was once a full time detective for two years.  

Now he has 34 novels under his belt. A slim majority of these are about Stanley Hastings while the rest star either Steve Winslow in courtroom dramas or Cora Felton as the nationally famous "Puzzle Lady" who couldn't construct a crossword puzzle if her life depended upon it. Instead, she depends upon her niece to construct them for her while she is off doing what she really loves to do, which is solving crime. 

I don't know about Steve Winslow, never having read him, but it seems to me that Hastings and Felton share the commonality of having "fish out of water" career experiences. Felton's living a lie might get her fired, but Hastings' lack of street smarts might get him killed. Fortunately, they both share a creator who is not about to kill off his bread and butter.

I selected "Client," a novel published in 1990, because I wanted to go as far back as I could to see where Stanley Hastings began his dubious career. The summary for "Client" states that it is Stanley's first case as a gumshoe, which is a little surprising since it was the fifth in this series of novels. Anyway, this was the earliest book available, and the fact that it was about his first case made it as good a place to start as any.

Stanley's first case does not have an auspicious beginning. He is desperately in need of money to fund his $3,200 dental surgery bill because Rosenberg and Stone hasn't been paying him enough for his ambulance chasing work. Now set up in his new low rent office on West 47th Street, he waits for the first client to call or walk in the door. 

Marvin Nickleson is that first client, assuming that Stanley will take his case, and he is a rather unprepossessing client. Short and slight of build with a long mustache he continually pulls, he talks about his wife and the fact that they are separated even though he loves her and wants her back. Her name is Monica Dorlander and of course he moved out and left her in their apartment after four short years of marriage. 

Marvin wants a reconciliation, but he needs to know if there is someone else, so he wants to hire Stanley to shadow her. Since her building is secure, Stanley is only to follow her when she leaves in the afternoon, either for lunch from her office or from her apartment. This part of the job appeals to Stanley, because this means that he can ambulance chase clients for Rosenberg and Stone in the morning.

She is far younger than Marvin and a picture shows her to be far more attractive than what Stanley would have expected. Following a separated wife to dig up possible dirt is not what Stanley had hoped his first case would be, but he thinks to himself, "The whole thing reeked of sleaze. But I have bad teeth." 

Then Marvin puts him off by not offering any personal contact information. No, he is not to contact him at his place of work, and, no, he is staying in a rented room without a telephone. Right there, Stanley should have told him to take a hike, but then there are those bad teeth... Yes, Marvin will call at his office in the morning to pay him his daily wages, so Stanley bites his tongue, buries his suspicions, and takes the case for two hundred dollars a day plus expenses.

After a few days and a few hundred dollars paid each morning at nine am, Marvin misses a meeting on a crucial day when Monica Dorlander takes off on a state highway out of the city. Marvin begs him to follow her, and promises that he will reimburse him in full when he returns. Stanley tails Monica to a motel halfway to Albany, so he checks into another room a few doors down in the L-shaped building. His new career as a private eye looks like it will be aborted the next morning when Monica Dorlander turns up dead in her motel room and he becomes the prime suspect when the murder weapon is found in the glove box of his rented car. Not helping matters is the fact that police can't find anyone by the name of Marvin Nickleson.

248 pages, published in 1990. Note that currently Parnell Hall is handled by Random House, whereas formerly he was handled by Pegasus Books. I cannot ascertain his publisher in 1990, and this book most likely is out of print but it may be available at your library or as an e-book.