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Dead in the Frame

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Sooner or later, in the lives of all private investigators, they always get arrested for a murder they didn’t commit. At least the fictional ones do. It’s apparently a requirement of the genre.

And sure enough it happened to Lillian Pentecost.

Following the conventions of the genre*, her sidekick Willowjean Parker is obligated to investigate in order to find the real murderer and thereby free her boss from the Women’s House of Detention. The year is 1947, a critical one in my life (as it was the year of my birth). The story line of Dead in the Frame and most of the characters in it are fictional, but the Women’s House of Detention was very much real, operating as a New York City women’s prison from 1932 to 1974. You can look it up, as Casey Stengel used to say. So that’s what I did: I have started reading The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison, by Hugh Ryan.

Anyway, I don’t want to repeat myself, so you can just read my reviews of the previous four books in the series:

Or you can actually read all four novels! In order, please. I think Dead in the Frame is probably the best of the five, but feel free to disagree.

*As Sam Spade said, “When a man’s partner is killed, he’s supposed to do something about it.” Just add three letters, changing “man” to “woman” and “he” to “she.”

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