New PI on the block, John Ewing is trying to be the hard-boiled shamus his reluctant mentor, Philip Marlowe trained him to be.
Who is John Ewing? I always let him do the talking.
"I'm twenty-five years old, footloose, fancy free and the despair of my parents. I bummed around after college, taking odd jobs to fund my travels, and saw myself as some sort of wandering poet suffering for my art. That's how much of a sap I was. Really, I guess I was nursing a broken heart. After writing a good deal of bad poetry, I came home to Los Angeles to get a real job. I finally figured all the poet's life was buying me, was a one-way ticket to Poverty Creek.
My old man used to be the District Attorney here in LA, and when I told him what I wanted to do with my life, he arranged for me to shadow the number one Private Investigator in town. Quite how he managed this I'll never know; it was obvious that old PM wasn't too happy with the arrangement, though in the end, things worked out reasonably well for everybody.
I spent six months learning the business, PM got free labour and Pop was happy I was settling down to a 'real job' instead of 'that writing foolishness'.
I neglected to mention I also hoped to get some great material for the book I planned to write in my spare time.
It was January 1935; a new year, a new beginning and the hope we'd finally turned the corner on the Depression. I felt buoyant as I said goodbye to life as an intern and struck out on my own as a fully licensed PI."
John finds it easier said than done to maintain distance between himself and the client, especially when his first big case has him cosying up to Zelda Zee, Hollywood's hottest star. It seems straightforward, fairly routine in fact: a washed up grifter peddling the kind of pictures no actress wants to star in.
Meanwhile, Lawrence T. Croft is in town to search for his fifteen-year-old runaway daughter. John tracks her through Tinseltown's darker waters, where predators feed on the steady stream of young hopefuls searching for the Hollywood dream.
By investigating the missing runaway, he discovers more about Zelda Zee and her motivation for employing him.
At times. John likens himself to "that crazy Don Quixote" riding to the rescue with inadequate resources. When people associated with the case begin to die, he doubts he can ever develop the "hard shell exterior" needed to survive in this newer, darker world he has begun to inhabit.
Yet he finds allies along the way and meets one or two who restore his faith in human nature. He has a horror of ending up as cynical and world weary as the older cops he often deals with.
With help from friends, John tries to right the wrong being done to the young girls in the private club he discovered. When new information comes to light about the Zelda Zee case, John finds himself in a dilemma, and does what he can to make amends to the one man who might care: the father of the man who has been accused of murder.
