Find The Don’s Daughter

Find The Don’s Daughter, by Jeff Jacks
January, 1974  Fawcett Gold Medal

Not much is known about mysterious author Jeff Jacks, but one thing we can certainly say is he wasn’t prolific. Find The Don’s Daughter was the second and final novel he published, coming two years after his previous novel, Murder On The Wild Side. This one also features Jacks’s narrating protagonist, ex-cop turned P.I. Shep Stone, and it picks up shortly after the previous book, set in early December of 1970. More adventures for Shep seem to be promised in the climax, but sadly none were forthcoming, and Jacks slipped into the aether, ultimately becoming such a mysterious figure that it was at one time rumored that “Jacks” was just a pseudonym of Lawrence Block (which Block denied).

I had little expectations going into this one, and mostly just got it years ago due to the title and the great cover art (which thanks to Lynn Munroe we know is by Elaine Duillo). But it turns out to be more of a rock novel than some actual “rock novels” I’ve read, with more rock-world and music description stuff in its first half than the entirety of, say, The Rock Nations or Rock & Roll Retreat Blues. This is because Shep’s latest case has him investigating the titular “Don’s daughter,” who happens to moonlight as the singer for a rock band in Greenwich Village. There’s a part where Shep watches the band in action, and Jacks does a great job of capturing what the group actually sounds like, something most of those other rock writers don’t even bother trying to do. In this regard it’s a shame that the rock stuff fades away and is gradually replaced by a sort of espionage plot with maniacal CIA agents and black militants.

At 223 pages of fairly small print, Find The Don’s Daughter is a bit too flabby for its own good, with the cumulative effect that the snappy, proto-Shane Black vibe of Shep’s narration and rapid-fire dialog exchanges gradually lose impact. This too is a shame, because there is some excellent dialog here, with laugh-out-loud smart assed comments from Shep throughout. Jacks also has a great skill with characterization, bringing to life a host of unusual figures. This is particularly true of our narrator, a former alchoholic private eye who lives in near poverty in SoHo and mostly works in the Greenwich area, chasing down runaway hippie kids.

Despite the suave gent on the cover, Shep in the book has long “hippie-dippy hair” and never carries a gun – we’re told he actually hides his revolver “behind the old socks” in a drawer in his SoHo apartment. He doesn’t retrieve it in the book. We learn in brief backstory that he was once a decorated cop, on his way to becoming the youngest captain in NYPD history, but then he was caught taking payoffs or somesuch. After a battle with the bottle, which presumably was part of the plot of the previous book, he started to make his wretched living as a gumshoe. But we aren’t given much info on Shep’s P.I. biz; he doesn’t have an office, and seems to just take jobs on the fly.

At any rate, per tradition, he’s given a case at the start of the book; three hoods come in and round him up in a Lower East Side bar, claiming to be messengers from Mafia Don Marco the Carpenter. One of the hoods was arrested by Shep back when he was a cop, and the thug gets some punches in as they’re taking Shep out to the limo. Surprisingly, Shep will not exact his revenge, and just rolls with the punches and then washes them down with some booze in the limo. This is just the first indication that we are not dealing with a Spillane-esque hardboiled hero. Shep doesn’t do anything physical in the novel and, when he decides to mete out justice very late in the novel, he has someone else do the actual dirty work for him.

The Carpenter, who knows and respects Shep from his days as a cop, wants to hire him to find his “niece.” When Shep bulks at the job, given that he’ll be paid ten thousand for it – he figures he’s being paid to find someone for the mob to kill – the Carpenter admits that it’s actually his daughter, hence the high pay. Her name is Melinda Rossi, but her performing name is Melody. There’s a belabored backstory on this, how he sired the girl with some other woman and thus no one knows that the Mafia don has a daughter. Now she’s a hotstuff blonde in her twenties and into that whole rock scene; the Carpenter insists she’s not on any hard drugs. The problem is she’s gone missing, last seen a few days ago – when she walked out of her day job at the bank with eighteen thousand bucks in her purse, lifted right out of the vault.

With the Don’s inability to understand the girl and this new era, Shep ruminates that he’s witnessing “A Mafia kingpin being victimized by the Generation Gap.” He takes the job, mostly because this is what he does – finding runaway kids in the hippie slums of Greenwich. He heads over to a psychedelic nightclub in the Village owned by an old acquaintance named Carney; this is where Melody’s group, The Riders of the Blue Bus, has a regular gig. I believe this is a double Doors reference, as in “Riders of the Storm” and “The End” (ie, “the blue bus is calling us/meet me at the back of the blue bus”). I wouldn’t be surprised, as Jacks is familiar with the rock scene, given that Shep tells us: “I happen to like Santana. Consider it about the best of the current scene,” and also mentions a Mick Jagger wannabe on stage at the club who is feverishly whipping the floor with a studded belt, a la the real Jagger was fond of doing at this time.

At the door Shep encounters the wonderfully-named Gutbucket, guitarist for the Blue Bus and also a heroin junkie, as Shep discovers after monitoring the long-haired punk. Gutbucket doesn’t seem much concerned that Melody’s gone and in fact bluntly tells Shep he thinks she’s dead. Later we get to see the Riders in action, sans Melody, with Gutbucket leading them through an hour-long jam session. As mentioned Jacks does a good job recreating what rock sounds like, with Gutbucket coming off like a junior grade Pete Townshend. Though you’ve gotta wonder how good the Riders of the Blue Bus really are, given that one of the members plays french horn. This reminded me of an old SNL skit where Phil Hartman (a former rock album cover artist, by the way – he did Steely Dan’s Aja, for example) portrayed “fifth Beatle” Albert Goldman, who was notorious for a mean-spirited John Lennon bio at the time (1988); the skit had it that Goldman had a grudge because Lennon had kicked him out of the group in the early days...saying the Beatles didn’t need a trombone player.

The french horn player is named Sheri, a 30-something lady who shared an apartment with Melody. It’s in her place that Shep peruses the record collection, informing us that he likes Santana; he also finds a hash pipe with a sweet smelling substance in it. Later we’ll learn it’s opium. Sheri’s in the process of showering when Shep visits her, but there isn’t one iota of exploitation throughout Find The Don’s Daughter. Shep in fact is curiously asexual, for the majority of the book, at least, with little of the customary “breasts” fixation one expects (nay, demands!) of the hardboiled pulp genre. But anyway Shep’s interests in Sheri are solely due to the case, and here we learn she plays french horn for the band and also spotlights as a session musician.

But sadly after this the rock stuff fades away. Shep heads back over to Carney’s nightclub and the novel’s only real “action scene” occurs here; after a spirited performance with the Riders, Sheri tells Shep that she’s found some letters of Melody’s that give a clue where she’s gone. But when Shep goes to find her later, he of course finds Sheri’s corpse, an icepick in her back. Then Shep is attacked from behind by a pair of “black hands.” He rushes from the crime scene and heads for Sheri’s apartment to find the letters, but instead finds a black ‘Nam vet waiting for him there. This is the guy who knocked him down in the club and presumably killed Sheri, something he denies. His name is Raymond Jefferson and he’s an old flame of Melody’s, and he’s looking for her too. Then someone blows Raymond’s head off with a shotgun and Shep is knocked out in the blast.

Here’s where some of the fat could be trimed from the novel, as Shep spends several days in a private hospital room, recuperating from his shoulder injury. He’s visited by his old police partner, as well as a shady spook type: this is Zara, a CIA agent who for some reason is conducting an assignment here on US soil (something Jacks doesn’t address in the narrative…but technically Zara should be FBI). Zara has it that Melody was involved with the Dusters, an offshoot of the Black Panthers, and that the case involves some mortars stolen in ‘Nam and smuggled here to the US to be used in radical terrorism. A heroin pipeline also factors into it. It’s kind of a big, complicated mess, and you wish it had just been a murder or kidnapping mystery set in the rock scene.

Zara now pretty much takes over the narrative; he’s a whackjob who has been working this assignment for the past year, having trailed Raymond Jefferson, the Duster who stole the mortars, from ‘Nam to New York. Zara wants Shep to work for him, prowling the kid-frequented areas Zara can’t access; to ensure Shep’s complicity he hangs a murder charge over him, as Zara saw Shep rushing from the scene of Sheri’s murder. There’s some fun, proto-Lethal Weapon dialog between the two throughout; Shep’s no shrinking violet and never refrains from telling Zara what he really thinks. But gradually the reader begins to resent Zara’s presence (as does Shep), as he takes the spotlight away from more interesting characters.

Once he’s out of the hospital Jefferson begins getting back together with Joan, a Village-based playwright whom he must’ve been friendly with in the previous book. The two also know a character named Gene Hilliard, who is now a member of the Dusters, and I assume he also appeared in the previous book, given how Shep introduces him to the reader. It just sort of goes into a stall here, with Shep and Zara searching for clues, only livened up when the latest body shows up – like poor prick Gutbucket, who is found dead in his crummy apartment, every bone in his body apparently broken. And also, the killer took a shit by the body(!). There’s more fun dialog here courtesy the female Medical Examiner on the scene; Jacks has a skill for bringing even minor, one-off characters to life. 

However this is not an action-packed novel by any means. Shep doesn’t do much of anything but walk around the city and ask questions. Even the sex is off-page; Shep and Joan get together again and the dude actually falls asleep on the night they’re about to have sex again for the first time since they broke up, or whatever. So again, neither sex nor violence is much on the mind of this particular private eye. There’s a fairly emotional romance story here as well, with the two characters embittered loners who make a stab at developing into an item, though Joan complains how ridiculous it is given that they’re both close to forty. This subplot has a bummer capoff, though – Shep’s car is blown up at the end thanks to a car bomb, but luckily neither Shep nor Joan are in the car at the time. Joan takes one look at the burning car and takes off, and that’s that.

I was also kind of bummed with how the main plot panned out. Skip to the next paragraph if you don’t want spoilers. But anyway, Shep’s whole job is to find Melody. And the reader wants to meet her, too. But after various subplots and red herrings have taken up the brunt of the narrative, we learn in the final pages that some random guy discovers Melody’s body one day, shortly after Christmas. She’s been dead for weeks, likely killed as soon as she left work at the bank that day, and Shep’s been chasing a ghost all along. Instead the whole “mortars” plot takes center stage, and even here it has a bogus payoff, as it turns out nutjob Zara has been behind most of the kills (even setting that bomb in Shep’s car as a lark!). Shep at least gets revenge for this, but as mentioned the vengeance is delivered by some other character.

The impression I most got from Find The Don’s Daughter was that the writing, the character, and especially the dialog were all strong, but the plotting left a little to be desired. I also think that it could’ve been a little more streamlined, and the reveal of the “main villain” was a bit hard to buy. Not that it much matters, as Find The Don’s Daughter proved to be the last the reading public saw of Shep Stone and Jeff Jacks.