When Sheila Sharp Became
The New Sheriff In Town -One Last Tidbit On The Fate Of Famed California
Private Detective Lew Archer -Out Of Sorts With His Times
By Seth Garth
[Over the past few years I
have spent plenty of cyber-ink on the rise and fall of 1950s California private
detective Lew Archer who as it turned out only recently died in 2019, a fact
which surprised me and started me rethinking what I had done about him in the
past. That work is pretty well documented in a few pieces published recently (as
well as the earlier work).
One of the points that I
made constantly, and which applies here as well is the role Sheila Sharp played
in trying to get Lew back on his feet once he started crashing and thrashing
around on cases letting the body counts get out of hand. At a point when it was
clear to everybody in California that Lew was a has-been, had fallen down she
offered him, and he accepted repo and key-hole peeping work from her agency in
San Francisco. That work the lowest of the low in the profession at least kept
him in coffee and cakes, kept him in touch with the profession. After a while
though he screwed up royally on a repo case where he grabbed the wrong guy and
the wrong car and Sheila had all she could do to fix the mess up. That and the hard
fact that the key-hole peeping business which centered on getting enough adulterous
dirt on somebody for the client to get a divorce dried with the increase in
no-fault divorces and a lightening up of the divorce laws in most jurisdictions.
It is not clear why Sheila
had a soft spot for Lew (although her Boston copper father had worked with Lew
on a couple of cases the few times he headed east) but she kept him on as the office
go-fer. You know take the coffee and orders, lunch stuff like that. Kept on
until she found out he was hanging around with notorious junkie private eye
Kenny Millar, working as his bag man. Worse starting to get a little horse
habit and spiraling down even further grabbing the petty case dough meant for coffee
and stuff. She gave him a fast boot then.
But enough of the
Sharp-Archer connection because what I want to discuss today is how new private
detective style Sheila prospered in her time when the whole profession was
moving away from male hard-boiled stuff, the stuff Lew grew up with and could
not shake when things changed.]
Like a lot of private
dicks Sheila started with the public coppers (as mentioned above her father was
a Boston copper which smoothed the way for her*), got tired of the police bureaucracy
runaround and general bullshit and decided to go private. She had a few missing
person’s cases which she solved, at least the ones who did not really want to
stay missing and a few ordinary trace the theft and recover cases from private
parties. Par for the course starting out. What got her off the humdrum heap was
hammering the Doyle case which included murder, craziness and guns not necessarily
in that order. That case is also instructive not only because he set her on a
path to eventually become the first female member of the P.I. Hall of Fame but
about the dramatic change in style and working habits the 1970s and later brought
with them.
(*Sheila is not going to
lie this although we have talked about it before on many occasions but her
father Frank was such a crooked cop he needed somebody to help him put his
pants on. Sheila idolized her father and either never knew or never wanted to
know what Frank was really like. I knew him a little from guys I grew up with
who had become lawyers in Boston who had to deal with him when they were
looking for parking stickers. Those were supposed to be freely given when available
for businesses and professionals who needed spaces on an on-going basis. Frank strong-armed
his way to a thou per for the privilege of parking on the streets of Boston.
Sheila is really not going
to like this but beyond the traditional graft and pay-offs from gangsters and others
Frank had a little “collection” racket going. In the 1980s, the time of
troubles in Ireland, many bars and other establishments in Irish neighborhoods
like Southie and Dorchester would have a bowl or a box located in some prominent
location but with no designation on it. Guys would stop by and throw a few
dollars or whatever they had in and that was that. The cause was to aid the
boyos in the North, the IRA guys, in their struggles against the bloody British.
Frank would come on say late Friday afternoon and “skim” his share from the
pile. Of course the owners weren’t going to squawk since he was “protecting” their
various operations. If they had known though I bet more than a few longshoremen
and other hefty types would have had their noses bent out of joint and done
something about it. The late Frank Sharp was certainly not one of nature’s
noblemen.)
Sheila when she told me
the Doyle case mentioned that she had been having an affair with one of the
Doyle sons, Richard. This is important because what happened was that he was
target number one in what turned out to be an old-fashioned powerplay ethnic
rivalry between the Irish and Italian bad guys who ran the various illegal operations
in southern New England. The way she got involved was that this Richard was supposed
to be out of the line of fire, was supposed to be kept clear of his family’s “businesses.
Somebody broke what was essentially an armed truce by taking on Richard, a
couple of his uncles Fritz and Freddie , a few of Desmond’s (his father) employees
and assorted flak-catchers.
Nobody could figure out
why until somebody told Sheila to look for the money trail, look to what the
Doyles were spending their hard cash on to make even more cash. Naturally it
turned up to be illegal, illegally gathering up every available stock of guns
on the East Coast. For starters though guns were supposed to be under Italian
control according to Richie Rizzo, the kingpin of that crowd (not Mafia but close).
Still blowing away a bunch of Irish guys when some arrangement could be made
didn’t stack up. Sheila sensed something more was at play-something that was
superheating the ethnic rivalry thing. Of course this had to about women, about
sex but in an odd way.
Nobody can blame an Irish
guy for not chasing the Irish colleens with their stiff white shirts, their rosary
beads in hand and their Bible between their knees. What the tow bad ass Doyle brothers,
Desmond and Freddie did though was fall, fall hard for a beautiful Italian dish
and do something about it, at least one of them. That doing something about it meant
having sex and having a child with that woman. An unknown child of sorts in
that nobody knew that the kid had grown up to be a gangster with a serious
grievance on his shoulders about being abandoned by his fucking Irish dad.
Put guns and grievances
together and you get a possible war without end-except here is where Sheila
really did learn a few lessons at the police academy. If you want to roll up a
hard ass gangster with a serious piece of weaponry in his hands then hire a hitman,
hire Vinnie Morris if you can get him, can afford the gaff. He wasted the
sullen kid without working up a sweat. Saved the day for Sheila and Richard too.
Then it was up to Desmond and Rickie Rizzo to figure out the gun monopoly and
go back to that armed truce that had held so long
No comments:
Post a Comment