QUICK SHOTS: Max Roper #1: The Pushbutton Butterfly by Kin Platt

Whoa, I dipped right back into Kin Platt territory. I recently read and reviews one of his Hitman series and I guess his work was still on my brain when I put on my helmet and went down to the book mine that is my library to dig out something to read. I sorta forgot I had finally tracked down the Pyramid paperback edition of the first in his Max Roper series. The Roper books were hardcovers originally, so they are a little classier with more effort and thought put into them his rush-job Hitman books. Not that I'm not a fan of rush-job novels. Stream-of-consciousness can produce some wild shit. The Roper's where the first Platt books I ever read, though it's been about 15 years since I read one. Yikes. Time. 

The later Roper mysteries have a sports gimmick. They each revolve around a different sport, baseball, horse-racing, basketball etc. etc. I'm not too much into sports other than baseball, so that's what probably kept me from diving back into the series. The first two are devoid of any athletics, besides fisticuffs that is, so I was interested in trying #1. Max Roper is one of those private eye/spy-types, an agent for a big national security firm called EPT. A little more high-tech than your average gumshoe but still very much a hard-boiled-school guy. He's appropriately tough, appropriately fond of women and booze, appropriately dumb when the plot calls for it and appropriately sarcastic. My kinda guy. 

I have a real fondness for the 70's era detective novel, you get the hippie angle, a lot of cult/spiritual communes, drugs and just a general shmear of grooviness. This one's got all that. Roper is assigned to find a missing rich-man's daughter (classic) and what follows is a twisting tale of murder, drugs, hippies, communes, stolen cars, switchblades, moider and quite a bit of Roper getting drugged. Platt is a good writer, he's got a fun, slightly tongue-in-cheek style that doesn't take itself too seriously. Probably a hold out from his comic book days. This novel reads like it was a newspaper detective comic strip. Roper could hang out with Rip Kirby or Secret Agent X-9 without skipping a beat.

These kinds of novels are comfort food for my soul at this point. When they are done slickly it's just page after page of feeling at home on those mean streets. This one's "light" hardboiled mystery, not quite as loopy as a Shell Scott but nowhere as tough as a Mike Hammer, its somewhere along the lines of one of M.E. Chaber's Milo March books. I had a good 'ol time with this one, though it's a little longer than it needed to be. This is a 170-page mystery in a 240-page package. Roper and Platt spin their wheels a bit too much in the middle, but they are both pleasant enough to pal around with, so I didn't mind too much. 

All the Roper books have been eBooked by Prologue and that's pretty sweet. Pick one of them up if you're a fan of Mike Shayne or Carter Brown and I'll probably enjoy yourself. Platt had a nice, clean style of writing. He could spin a good version of the standard mystery/adventure story with wit and style and make it look simple.