I first met Jerry Healy back in 2001 when I started going to Boston mystery writing events. At that time I'd had two stories published in small mystery magazines and had a couple of unpublished novels, and Jerry always treated me as if I belonged, which certainly wasn't true of many of the other established Boston mystery writers at that time. Whenever I saw Jerry at these events, we'd talk Red Sox, Patriots, about writing, etc., and he was more than just friendly--he was generous. He was also a bit of a character. He was someone who could be in a tux (and look damn good in it) while everyone else would be in jeans and tee shirts. He was also a dynamic (and fearless) public speaker, sharp-witted, and entertaining. And he helped out a lot of us newer writers.
In my early years as a struggling author, Jerry helped me a number of times. One of these times was when I started Hardluck Stories back in 2002. Jerry agreed to be one of my first guest editors, which gave the zine credibility, and allowed it to flourish. At the time I had one of my good friends (and best man at my wedding) Jeff Michaels, who was also a huge PI Cuddy fan, write the following essay for Hardluck. It's with great admiration that I'd like to republish Jeff's essays about one of Boston's best, and to a man who touched so many--both authors and readers. Jerry, you'll be missed.
A Look at Jeremiah F.
Healy’s John Francis Cuddy Series
by
Jeffrey Michaels, February 2003
If
you’re an avid mystery reader, you’ve probably already read Jeremiah Healy’s
work. If you’ve missed him for some reason, you have a great series awaiting
you. Six of his novels and five of his short stories have been nominated for
the Shamus Award (1), including a win in 1986 for his second novel, The Staked
Goat. He has published 13 novels featuring Boston private detective
John Francis Cuddy. He has also published a book of Cuddy short stories and a
few novels without Cuddy.
Healy’s Background
Jeremiah Francis Healy III was born in
Teaneck, New Jersey on May 15, 1948. He graduated from Rutgers University in
l970, got his JD at Harvard Law School in l973, and passed the Massachusetts
Bar in 1974. He was an associate with Withington, Cross, Park & Groden, a
Boston law firm, from l974 to 1978, gaining a lot of courtroom experience. The
Army ROTC helped pay for his education, and Healy served as a military police
officer, leaving the Army in 1976 as a captain. He married Bonnie M. Tisler on
Feb. 4, l978, the same year he began teaching at the New England School of Law
in Boston. He wrote his first novel during the summer of 1981. The book, Blunt Darts, was rejected 28 times
before it was published in 1984. The book is dedicated “To Bonnie, who is
Beth.” He has since come a long way. His writing has been positively reviewed
over the past 20 years, with his characters, plots and style singled out for
their quality.
John Francis Cuddy
A recent article on mystery writers in
Playboy ranks John Francis Cuddy #6 on a list of current fictional sleuths
titled "Ten Dicks Worth Hiring." The Playboy article says this about
Cuddy:
Boston
P.I. with law training. Uses attorney's skills in eliciting information. Not as
flashy as fellow Beantowner Spenser, nor does he eat as well. But he delivers
results. Widowed for more than 15 years, he still visits his late wife's grave
to discuss his cases. Even weirder, he follows her advice. (2)
This is
Cuddy's entrance in Blunt Darts:
"Name?"
"Cuddy, John
Francis."
"Address?"
"74 Charles
Street."
"In
Boston?"
"In
Boston."
Social Security
number?
"040-93-7071"
"Date of
birth?"
I told her.
She looked up at me,
squeezed out a smile. "You look younger."
"It's a mark of
my immaturity," I said. She made a sour face and returned to the form.
"Occupation?"
"Investigator."
"Previous
employer?"
"Empire
Insurance Company." I wondered whether Empire had to fill out a form that
referred to me as "Previous Employee."
The passage
shows Cuddy graduated from the Philip Marlowe wise-cracking detective school,
and we learn later that he was fired from his job as an insurance investigator
because of his honesty. We also quickly discover Cuddy was an MP [military
police officer] in Vietnam from 1967-68. Healy has said in interviews that
Cuddy’s MP experiences are based on those of his father and uncle, rather than
his own. Blunt Darts concerns the
teenage son of a prominent judge who disappears, but it is unclear if he was
kidnapped or ran away. The boy’s mother died four years earlier in an apparent
suicide, but does that death relate to the boy’s disappearance? It is well-plotted,
with a dash of Raymond Chandler and a shake of Ross MacDonald. The Boston
setting was introduced by Robert B. Parker in 1973, and obviously influenced
Healy. But while Parker’s Spenser was originally presented as a womanizer,
Cuddy is the opposite. He is still devoted to his wife, Beth, who died young of
cancer before the book opens. Cuddy’s first in a series-long string of visits
to her grave site is a one-sided conversation, unlike later books in which the
two talk over matters:
"Just
carnations." I set them down and stepped back. "Mrs. Feeney said the
roses at the flower market were
tired-looking." I felt too distant standing up, so I squatted down on my
haunches.
"Remember Valerie Jacobs, Chuck
Craft's friend? Well, she's brought me a case, and it's a beaut! Rich family
and all kinds of troubles. The grandmother you’d like. Good Yankee, you'd call
her. The grandson I haven't met yet, and won't, if I don't roll pretty hard and
fast on finding him. Still, he sounds like the type you'd have liked too.
Serious, studies, and quiet. Just like me." We laughed.
I stared at the carnations for a
while. I began blinking rapidly. We talked inside for a bit.
"So, I'm afraid I won't be back
for a while. I'll see you when the case is over. Or sooner, if I hit a problem.
Just like always."
I straightened up and turned around
to walk back down the path. A teenager holding a rake and wearing a maintenance
shirt and dungaree cut-offs gave me a funny look. I didn't recognize him.
Summer help, probably, and young. Too young to know anything. Especially about
cemeteries.
[Blunt Darts, chapter 4]
In a 1997
interview, Healy said the idea for the continuing dialog between Cuddy and his
dead wife came to him while at a funeral:
"At the funeral, I noticed an old man holding a hat
and rotating it by the brim, rocking back and forth, clearly talking to a headstone...In
a sense it was odd, but in a way it wasn't. If you're used to talking to someone every day then wouldn't
you continue even after they had died?" (3)
The visit
shows Cuddy to be a sensitive fellow, and later in the book we see how much he still loves Beth. The young school teacher who got him into the
case tries to seduce him, but he spurns her advances. He tells her it's not
there for him, that he and his wife had something special. Valerie, the woman,
tells him he should move on with his life and that it takes time to create a
new relationship. He replies:.
"But that's just it, Val. After Beth died, and in
between binges with the booze, I read all sorts or articles, whole books even,
on the need to rebuild, to start over in your life, block by block. The problem
is, it's wrong. Those writers were wrong, and you're wrong. There really are special people in the world, people
who are special to other people from the word go, and that's the way it was
with Beth and me. She was the only woman I'd ever loved. She was the only one
who knew me, who knew what I was thinking and could anticipate what I'd be
doing. It was magic between us from the first time I met her."
[chapter 21]
The Staked Goat (1986), the award-winning second
novel, is much more violent than Blunt Darts, and teaches us about
Cuddy’s experiences in Vietnam. The plot involves one of his fellow MPs from
his time “in country,” who is murdered in what is made to look like a sex
crime. Cuddy vows to find the killer, and the trail leads back to his years in
Vietnam. There is also a secondary plot involving arson and the murder of
witnesses. Unlike Blunt Darts, in
which he is surprised by the murderer and almost killed, in The Staked Goat Cuddy acts as
executioner when he finally tracks down the killer. In the book he also meets,
and is immediately attracted to Assistant DA Nancy Meager, who grew up as he
did in South Boston. Sparks fly, though Cuddy still distances himself from her
in memory of his wife. Nancy is disappointed when he acts as executioner, but near
the end of the book Cuddy brings her to the cemetery to meet Beth:
We walked the right path, then eased left. We
stopped a few steps later at the familiar marble stone. Nancy slid her arm out
from mine.
“Beth,” I said, “this is Nancy.”
Nancy didn’t say anything. She
didn’t look at the stone or at me. She just stared down at the ground, where I
used to look. Where Beth was.
I said nothing. Nancy glanced up at
the inscription, then down again.
“Thirty was too young, Beth,” she
said…
[The Staked Goat, chapter 26]
I recommend
reading the books in order, because unlike some series, Healy’s connects the
plots somewhat, and events carry over from book to book. Cuddy’s relationship
with Nancy grows over the books, and unlike some detectives Cuddy gets a little
older in each book. Cuddy and Nancy are nearly killed at the end of The Staked Goat, and the scene is
recalled in the visit he makes to his dead wife toward the beginning of book
three, So Like Sleep (1987). Unlike
in Blunt Darts, Beth now keeps up her
end of the “conversation,” and offers guidance on Cuddy’s advancing relationship
with Nancy:
"I don't know if I like the
green paper as well."
The roses were yellow, small but
open flowers, sharp but widely spaced thorns. I bent over and laid them
lengthwise to her.
"Mrs. Feeney says the company that manufactured the white
tissue went bust, and the new outfit would charge her fifty percent more for the
white."
I smoothed the paper down. It
crinkled. The old paper, the white, sort of whispered.
Don't
worry about it, said Beth. What do
you think you're doing, working a toilet paper commercial?
I laughed. I looked past her stone
to the Daugherty plot. His monument was granite, not marble, and some of the
blood from last March was still dried dark on it. I stopped smiling and
repressed a shudder.
Have
you heard from Nancy?
"No. I thought about calling
her, but..."
You're
probably right not to push it.
"I know."
She
needs time, John.
"I know that too."
There was nothing more to say on
that subject. The sky was overcast, the air still. No sailboats in our part of
the harbor. Two Boston Whalers raced on a near-collision course, both heading
toward an anchored third, already bucking, its fishing rods bending.
[So Like Sleep, chapter 5]
It takes
until the end of book 4, Swan Dive (1988),
before Cuddy gives in to his feelings and sleeps with Nancy, after Beth says
it’s okay. An excerpt from that book shows that although Cuddy is a sensitive guy,
he’s also the traditional tough guy P.I. who can take and give a beating. A
lawyer who objects to Cuddy’s questioning asks her assistant/boyfriend to kick
Cuddy out of the office. We learn the man, Paul Troller, was a finalist in the Golden
Gloves before going to law school and is anxious to take Cuddy on:
The door
to the adjoining office flew open and Troller burst into the room. He was wearing
suit pants, a long-sleeved oxford shirt, sleeves rolled up, and a handsome regimental
tie. He grinned at me and started bouncing on the balls of his feet and shaking
out his shoulders.
Cuddy tells
us he respects boxers for their strengths, but has also noticed their limitations
over the years:
Boxers have a weakness, too, however. They tend to think
they're invincible in close. Even when wearing a tie.
I gambled Paulie's first punch would
be a feint. He jabbed with his left at my eye, then pulled it short, instead
driving a good right up and into my body. I caved, keeping my elbows and hands
tight to protect my ribs and face. He followed with a left to the body,
stepping forward to really bury it. I folded so that most of the force was
spent in the air, leaving him near enough for me to grab his tie. I yanked the
shorter end down with my right hand, my left forcing the knot high and hard
into his throat. His face bulged, both his hands scrabbling to the front
of his collar. I let go of the knot, clamping both my hands on the insides of
his wrists and pulling his hands apart to benediction width. I had a feeling my
grip would outlast his air.
[Swan Dive, chapter 20]
In book 5, Yesterday's News (1989), Cuddy is hired
by a reporter to investigate happenings in Nasharbor, a city not unlike Fall
River, Massachusetts. Nancy is mostly “off camera” in the narrative, and as a
result the book is more hard-boiled than the previous two. Yesterday's News offers a
good example of Healy’s strength in drawing characters. Here’s how he
introduces a local pornographer:
Bernard
"Bunny" Gotbaum sat like a Buddha in a large judge’s chair behind a
desk piled high with paperwork. Obese, his sausage-like fingers played with the
collar of a long-point sports shirt that bulged at each vertical seam. Wearing a
toupee the color of cream soda, overall he gave the impression of a man who
hadn't burned twelve calories since kindergarten. The teeth, however, earned
him the nickname. The upper two front ones bucked out far enough to open beer
cans.
[Yesterdays’ News, chapter 10]
Yesterday's News is close to a Hammett story, since
almost everyone is bad. The book ends with Cuddy watching a Red Sox game on the
TV with a new male friend. He has solved the case, killed one person, but left
another bad guy alone for lack of evidence.
In book six, Right to Die (1991), Cuddy is hired to
protect a right to die activist who is receiving death threats. Much of the
book deals with Cuddy's advancing age and his desire to run the Boston Marathon
once before it’s too late. He trains for the race throughout the book, and even
after he is shot working on the case he still enters the marathon. The marathon
is described very realistically. Healy’s Who's
Who biography says he is a jogger, and that experience is evident in the
book:
Mile twenty
one. Boston College and the top of Heartbreak. Exhilaration, then the incredible
bunching pain in the backs of the legs from going downhill. My calves went
mushy, and my feet kept tangling. My left side felt like somebody was plowing
it with baling hooks.
No
functioning water stations for two miles until just below Coolidge Corner,
where a guy my age and his kids braved the rain outside a majestic
synagogue...The marker said "25" at Kenmore Square. Every joint below
my waist had tossed in the towel, the bones sawing and grading against each
other. The crowd chanted a single phrase. One more mile, one more mile.
[Right to Die, chapter 31 ]
Skipping
ahead to book nine, we see Cuddy’s continued aging. In Act of God (1994), Cuddy hurts himself helping his girlfriend bring
a huge mahogany dresser up a flight of stairs and visits doctors, eventually suffering
an MRI chamber:
We went
into a large room. There was very little in the way of furnishings beyond a big
metal cylinder like an iron lung from the fifties and a fancy gurney table in
front of it.
"Please
sit on the end of the table."
When I
did, Maureen used a strip of cloth maybe six feet long to bind my shoulders
back. I suddenly had a vision from Saigon during the Tet Offensive, suspected
Vietcong, on their knees in the street, their arms bound behind them at the
elbow, causing them to arch forward, like--
"Am
I hurting you?" said Maureen.
"No."
You
just grimaced, and I was afraid--"
“No,
thanks. I'm okay."
The MRI
chamber brings back memories:
Maureen
moved me headfirst into the iron lung. The first impression was being inside a
coffin...Then I noticed the semicircular top and the indirect lighting and the
metal buttresses. Suddenly it felt like a day when I got back from the service
and a friend took me through the Callahan Tunnel in his new convertible, my
head lolling on the backrest, watching the roof of the tunnel as we went by
underneath it. Now I had maybe eight inches of airspace between my face and the
walls and roof of the machine Above me, a white disk and then two red dots flashed, and I was aware of the whirring of a
small fan somewhere. Then, over a muted public address system, I heard
Maureen's voice in my ear.
"Are
you all right in there, Mr. Cuddy?"
"Fine."
"Please
stay completely still. The first imaging lasts for just three minutes."
[Act of God, Chapter 15]
Act of God also has a pretty good mystery, one
of Healy’s most complex, with well-plotted twists and turns. As in The Staked Goat, Cuddy metes out justice
his way. Cuddy solves the case and decides to execute the killer himself. He
confronts the man with the facts and tells him he hasn't yet told the police. Cuddy
then urges him to pick up a shovel so they can go dig up the body together. Cuddy
wants the killer to swing it on him:
I'd
tipped him, but the way he kept his eyes on me while reaching out and grabbing
the handle told me he'd been thinking of it before I said it. He brought the
shovel into both of his hands, first like Little John with a quarterstaff,
which would have been a lot more trouble. Then he switched to a baseball grip,
a leftie, and swung at me forehand. I jumped back, the knee twinging as I
torqued it. He swung backhand, striking me on the left bicep and knocking me
downward as I drew the Smith & Wesson Chief's Special worn over my right
hip…From the ground, I could see [the killer] raising the shovel above his
head, like a man with a maul to split firewood. When the shovel came forward, I
fired three times into his chest and rolled left, the shovel hammering my right
shoulder as [killer's] face thumped into the lawn about where my head had been.
[Act of God, chapter 29]
I omitted the
killer's name in case you haven't read the book yet, since the mystery is rather
complex and deserves to be savored.
Skipping
ahead again to the latest Cuddy book, Spiral
(1999) the reader is shocked in the very first chapter. Cuddy's girlfriend
flies off on a business trip, and her plane crashes, killing all aboard. The
two had been talking about moving in together, and Cuddy would have flown with
her except for a previous job commitment, which it turns out had been cancelled
before he left to drive Nancy to the airport.
He gets drunk and mourns her in his own fashion. After a few days he
talks the situation over for the first time with his dead wife, who is shocked
and saddened to hear the news. She says:
This
may not help, but there's a reason why you weren't on that plane.
"Sure there is.
I didn't check my messages in time to--"
Not
what I mean, John. There's some reason why you were spared.
I thought back to one
of the first visits I'd made to the graveyard after Beth had died. "You
know that."
I do.
"Mind letting me
in on it?"
A short
pause this time that passed for a small smile. If only I could.
Suddenly, I started
to feel the cold. "Do me a favor?"
What?
"Keep an eye out
for Nancy. I think you'd like her"
[Spiral, chapter 1]
Nancy was
disposed of because, as Healy has said in interviews, he had to either arrange
a wedding or a funeral for her. Her death brings Cuddy back to the beginning of
the cycle of mourning he was completing in Blunt
Darts. The Cuddy series lies at the intersection of hardboiled and puzzle
mystery fiction, with Nancy's presence a major factor in humanizing Cuddy and
allowing him to be seen as a person and not just a detective. But after 13
novels there was probably little left for Healy to write about the two.
In Spiral, Cuddy is hired by his old
commanding officer, just a week or so after Nancy’s death, to solve the murder
of his 12 year old granddaughter. Spiral
is set mostly around Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, where Healy apparently now lives half
the year as a snowbird. He dedicates the book to his "friends at the
Tennis Club", a setting in the book. Florida flora and atmosphere give the
book a different feel, and provide refreshing plot elements, since all the
previous Cuddy novels were set in New England. Spiral continues the Vietnam themes found in the series, and the
client calls Cuddy “Lieutenant” throughout the book.
When Cuddy
reports on a barroom brawl he was involved in to his client, he reminisces
about his time in Vietnam, and this internal dialogue causes him to zone out,
which is noticed by the client:
I thought
back to Saigon, the dozens of times I watched my MPs -- our MPs -- crawl on their
hands and knees into bars. Inside, combat troops from the bush on two-days
passes did their best to drink a month's worth of booze and forget what they'd
just been through and would be going through again. Forget by starting a
free-for-all fistfight with whomever supposedly slighted them, any opponents
having roughly the same attitudes.
The MPs would crawl into the bars
because the safest way to break up a brawl was to sneak up below the revelers'
line of sight and whack them behind the knees with a nightstick, causing the
muscles back there to spasm so badly that nobody could get to their feet for
fifteen minutes, by which times the desire--the raw need--to swing on somebody
would have--
"Lieutenant?"
The concussion, or just me since
Nancy? "Sorry sir."
[Spiral, chapter 15]
The
zoning out is noticed by a few other people in the novel, but it doesn’t stop Cuddy
from solving the case, which has more suspects than any previous book in the
series. But here’s where I must confess I don't generally care about the
"mystery" in a mystery novel. Healy's novels appeal to me because he
combines hard-boiled with enjoyable writing, strong characters and lively dialog.
His books are very well-written
puzzles, however, and I haven't provided the details on any endings because
readers who care about such things deserve to view Healy's plots for themselves.
Hopefully there will be future Cuddy adventures to savor, with hard-boiled
Cuddy for readers like me, and a finely plotted mystery for another part of the
book buying public.
Healy
has recently published under the name Terry Devane, but I lack space herein to
discuss those or the non-Cuddy books published under his own name. The Cuddy
series offers enough to write about, and I urge you to give them a read. Healy’s
legal background gives them added depth, as Cuddy smoothly draws out facts in a
lawyer-like fashion from witnesses and suspects who expect to tell him nothing.
If you like the honest, brave, loyal knight-in-shining-armor version of the hard-boiled
detective hero, Cuddy is worthy of your time. If you want your detective to
have a significant other, Cuddy and Nancy are far more realistic than any other
couple I've encountered in detective fiction. And make sure you watch out for the series’
inside jokes, like Cuddy watching the filming of the Spenser TV show, reading a
Robert Randisi novel, or driving by the site of Travis McGee’s houseboat.
- Blunt Darts (1984)
- The Staked Goat (1986)
- So Like Sleep (1987)
- Swan Dive (1988)
- Yesterday's News (1989)
- Right to Die (1991)
- Shallow Graves (1992)
- Foursome (1993)
- Act of God (1994)
- Rescue (1995)
- Invasion of Privacy (1996)
- The Only Good Lawyer (1998)
- The Concise Cuddy (1998) -- short stories
- Spiral (1999)
References
(1) The Shamus Award is
given by the Private Eye Writers of America to honor excellent work in the
Private Eye genre. The award was created by Robert J. Randisi in 1981. To see
the list of winners and nominees go to:
(2)
Lochte, Dick. “The Return of the Private
Eye.” Playboy, March 1, 2000: 96.
(3)
Snell, George. “Mystery writer in love with Boston'” Worcester Telegram
& Gazette, October 15, 1997: B1.
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