A Classic??? Dead in the Frame

 

 

DEAD IN THE FRAME

By Stephen Spotswood

Doubleday, 2025, 355 pages

★★

 

I often consult lists when I’m searching for blog themes and recently ran across one for “Classic PI Books.” I’ve already read some of them, like Dashiel Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon and Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, but I had never read Stephen Spotswold or Dead in the Frame. I was also curious how a book published in 2025 could be a classic, so I gave it whirl.

 

The skinny is that it shouldn’t be on a list of classics. I presume it was considered a classic for politically correct reasons as all of his PIs are women and the bulk of them are lesbians. That could be a unique selling point, but Spotswood’s Pentecost and Parker series is clearly set in the 1940s and, even in New York City, few would have been as out and bold as those in Dead in the Frame.

 

Lillian Pentecost is sometimes compared to Sherlock Holmes in that she’s a cerebral detective rather than a swashbuckler, but she’s actually fairly passive in this novel as she is in jail by page 8.  Proving her innocence is the task of her assistant “Will” Parker, as in Willowjean, the sexual partner of crime writer Holly Quick. Pentecost is accused of murdering Jessup Quincannon, a millionaire with the odd hobby of maintaining his “Black Museum,” a collection of murder paraphernalia and artifacts. He and Lillian have long maintained a relationship of mutual contempt for each other, but is this a motive for a rationalist such as Pentecost to eliminate him?

 

Against her better judgment Pentecost accepts an invitation to visit Quincannon and before the night is out, Jessup is dead with a bullet in his head that matches Lillian’s gun. No one else is in the room but the corpse and Lillian when the police arrive at the behest of Silas Culliver, Quincannon’s lawyer. His bodyguard, the stunning Alathea, tells police that no one else went in or out of the room once the shot was fired. Lillian is cuffed and taken off to the Women’s House of Detention on Greenwich Avenue, a once-real place famed for housing “deviants” such as transexuals and lesbians. Will is dumbfounded and knows she has to get Pentecost out soon. One of her male jailers in bent on revenge for a past case, plus she has multiple sclerosis and is growing progressively weaker.

 

A cast of other oddballs enter the case: Dr. Ryan Backstrom, a lobotomist; Judge Mathers, a lecherous friend of Quincannon’s father; Max Roberts, a pain-in-the-butt reporter; Timothy Novarro, a huckster preacher and his wife Elaine; and the elusive Billy Muffin, a (perhaps) former hitman. As if Will doesn’t have enough on her plate, Lillian insists they keep open office hours to help others in distress such as a photographer hellbent on finding his wife’s murderer and a Chinese toymaker’s widow without money who’d like to solve her husband’s demise. Several of the women also have trouble keeping their libidos in check and the office is so short-staffed that Holly takes on the role of helping Will investigate. Even one of Lillian’s investigative antagonists, Dr. Olivia Waterhouse, voices doubts that Lillian killed Quincannon.

 

As in most detective novels, odds are strong that the mystery of Quincannon’s demise will be solved. I confess, though, I did not see the solution coming. That’s due in part to the fact that Spotswood’s writing is often more convoluted than it should be, but it’s also due to too many characters dropping in and out of the narrative and a “solution” that isn’t particularly believable.

 

It would be fair to say that I didn’t care much for Dead in the Frame. I might, though, go back to Spotswood’s Fortune Favors the Dead, Book One of the Pentecost and Parker oeuvre to get a better handle on the major characters. But that’s down on my reading list for now.

 

Rob Weir