In Miami, Comedy Mixes With Clues

“A fop but not a fool,” Palm Beach, Fla., lawyer Prescott McNally says of his son, Archy, head of the Discreet Inquiries division of McNally & Son and hero of seven previous Lawrence Sanders mysteries. A bachelor, a clotheshorse and a wit, Archy would seem to be the American equivalent of Bertie Wooster, except that he unravels high-society murders with an acumen worthy of Jeeves.

The P.G. Wodehouse comparison is deliberate. The world in which Bertie and Jeeves flourished might have reflected changing times superficially--a character in several Wodehouse stories was a parody of Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Fascist movement during the 1930s--but in its essentials it was timeless, a pre-World War I idyll in which the empire was forever at high noon, an Edwardian daydream unshadowed by Depression or doubt.

So too here. “McNally’s Dilemma” touches, at one point or another, on sex gay and straight, “party houses,” drugs, the Miami mob and media overkill--a full range of ‘90s phenomena--but it touches them with white gloves on. Both Archy’s character and the fastidiousness of his narration, long on innuendo and short on the brute facts, hark back to Palm Beach’s heyday, the ‘20s.

One of his father’s clients, John Fairhurst, engages Archy to foil a blackmail attempt. Somebody has uncovered a family secret--that Fairhurst’s grandfather didn’t die on the Titanic but ignobly donned women’s clothes to get a place on a lifeboat--and is demanding $25,000, an oddly small sum considering Fairhurst’s wealth.

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The prime suspect, chauffeur Seth Walker, was recommended for the job by playboy socialite Geoff Williams, and Williams has just been surprised in flagrant adultery and shot dead by his wife, Melva, so Archy is drawn into that case as well. Melva is an old friend of the McNallys, and Archy is a natural choice to shield her daughter, Veronica, from the press in the weeks before the trial.

Archy and Veronica. The comic-strip parallel isn’t lost on Archy, but she is 22 and gorgeous, and seems to be in love with him. For most of the story, McNally’s dilemma is this: Should he give up his life of independence, “my club, my clothes, my pandering and philandering,” and his long-suffering fiancee, Consuela Garcia, for “a spoiled rich girl who liked attention and would keep me on a short leash--albeit attached to a diamond-studded collar”?

Sanders, the bestselling author of 23 other novels besides the McNally series, gives Archy plenty of time to work it out. Complications multiply. Melva freely admits killing Geoff, but her story fails to mesh with the testimony of the servants, with whom Archy is as intimate as he is with the rich, the cops and the demimonde. Somebody is lying, but why? Also, the “Mystery Woman” who was allegedly making love to Geoff when Melva shot him is nowhere to be found. A reward publicized by Archy’s partner, gossip-mongering society columnist Leonard “Lolly” Spindrift, only attracts a crowd of phonies.

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Meanwhile, we are treated to running jokes about Archy’s wardrobe (lime-green sports jackets and tennis shoes), the menu at the Pelican Club (where a hamburger is “steak tartare medium rare”), Prescott McNally’s mercenary nature, the limits of Consuela’s patience and the schemes of lusty 70-something Lady Cynthia Horowitz, who bedded Prescott in a previous episode and currently has an eye on Archy. All this slows down the story, if by “story” we mean the mystery, but for Sanders fans it’s probably the main attraction.

In the end, it’s a matter of taste. If you prefer your whodunits hard-boiled rather than poached, give this one a pass. If, on the other hand, you’re willing to swap verisimilitude for fun (not of Wodehouse quality, but fun nonetheless) and the credibility of the puzzle for its intricacy, then you’re just the sort of reader Sanders has in mind.