Ron Goulart, who has an extensive bibliography including both science fiction (or do we now call that speculative fiction), action heroes, and mysteries for a total of 180 books, put out four books in his John Easy private eye series, including “If Dying Was All” (1971), “Too Sweet to Die” (1972), “The Same Lie Twice” (1973), and “One Grave Too Many” (1974). The original Ace editions contain cover art by Elaine Duillo is terrific, truly capturing the style of the early 70’s era, and the newer cover art of later editions can’t hold a candle to her artwork.
“Too Sweet to Die” opens with Easy, “a tall wide-shouldered man, two years over thirty” with “darkwood brown” hair and a face with “an outdoor, knocked-about look” and who has a private investigations office in Hollywood with all the usual street weirdos parading in front of his door. Easy is called onto a studio lot by commercial producer Marco Killespie who is trying to make a root beer commercial with his primary actress missing in action. His “jungle princess” has vanished, Killespie complains, and wants Easy to find her. “Jill Jeffers was a slim coltish blonde of twenty-five, freckled and faintly sad-looking even in her glossy smiling publicity photos.” Although looking at the publicity handouts, Easy wonders if Jill even existed before 1970, which makes him a bit curious particularly when he realizes that she is really Jillian Nordlin, daughter of the once-powerhouse State Senator Nordlin who has now retired to an estate in Carmel, but still wields power throughout the state.
This means that Easy must hotfoot it up to northern California to find out if she visited her father -though rumor has it they’ve been estranged for years, but first he visits the friend Jill claims to have visited, chubby leather-clad Mitzi Levin, who runs an X-rated movie theater in San Francisco. That leads to one brush off after another and his trip to Carmel somewhat less fruitful considering the men who run Nordlin’s estate not only give him the brush-off, but beat him to a bloody pulp for not minding his own business. He does find that at one point she had been shipped off to a psychiatric facility which specialized in naked howling therapy, but he declines to participate.
Easy’s investigation leads him around the Monterey Peninsula and across the Golden Gate Bridge where he sees firsthand how cold and cruel the hippie-life has become with self-indulgent artists, parties where no one knows who has been there or when they left, motorcycle gangs, and other people. He knows he is on to something when he is run off the road and shot upon.
“Too Sweet to Die” is a fast-moving absorbing private eye tale, offering the reader a walk through the excesses of Seventies California where Life in the Fast Lane nearly proves too much for sweet little Jill.
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