The Hotel Dick by Axel Brand
The Hotel Dick is the first of a series of four detective novels that follows the exploits of Lieutenant Joe Sonntag of the Milwaukee Police Department and are set in the late 1940s. The novel starts off when a hotel detective named J. Axel Brand is shot in the hotel brbershop while getting his morning shave. The only witness to the crime is the barber who swears that the movie actor Spencer Tracy is the shooter. A quick check with Tracy's studio reveals that he has an alibi and could not be the murderer, leaving Sonntag to puzzle over the eyewitness account as they begin questioning anyone who might have had a reason to dislike the hotel dick.
Full of atmospheric references to Milwaukee in the late Forties supplied by the author who grew up there, this is a puzzling mystery and a good introduction to this series.
Axel Brand is a pseudonym for Richard Shaw Wheeler (1935 – 2019) who is known for his award winning novels set in the American West.
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