In the sleepy and generally crime-free town of North Holford, New England, a series of unusual killings baffles the local cops. First Billy Zoots, a small-time thief, is found stabbed by the side of a lake. Then the body of Julia Naundorff, a Hollywood star, who has fled the bright lights (and maybe the Mob) for the solitude of her sister’s farm, is dragged out of the same lake, having apparently drowned. Finally Zoots’s accomplice, Elroy Green, is found strangled in his apartment. The victims, so differently dispatched, have one thing in common; dyed blonde hair.
Parker “Boomer” Daniels, a quiet ex-lawyer, is the unlikely police chief who has to discover how the crimes are related, and who committed them. As he never fails to point out, “I’m not a real policeman. I’m an invention of the mayor’s”, hired to clean up corruption in the force. In fact, few of the pleasantly eccentric suspects and characters are quite what they seem; one is “like an entertainer who’s losing his audience”, another is “like an actress playing a big Southern momma”, another “an obvious character, behaving as if he wasn’t in real life in a real police cell, but was an actor playing a part”. Performance and credibility are persistent and emphatic themes in this deadpan novel.
Although set around the millennium, Death Dyed Blonde has the feel of a much earlier decade, serving up a softer-boiled version of classic American crime fiction and adding many of the features of English village-based crime fiction of the 1920s and 30s; so much so that the observation “There was a desk in the corner with a new computer on it” is startling. There is even a final gathering, at which all the suspects hear the loose ends tied up.
Stanley Reynolds, a former literary editor of Punch and a humorous columnist, delivers an entertaining pastiche in an unfussy, flattened style. But he also creates an unusual atmosphere of stoic melancholy – a sense of people unsuited to their allotted roles, of quiet lives briefly excited by some exotic but inconsequential fuss from Hollywood: “A man who can have something in his life like a scene out of the movies hasn’t lived in vain”.