Deceit And Deadly Lies, by Franklin Bandy
No month stated, 1978 Charter Books
I picked up this fat paperback original many years ago, excited to read it, and typically it took me all this time to get to it. Running over 400 pages, Deceit And Deadly Lies won the Edgar Award and was the first of two novels featuring protagonist Kevin MacInnes, a former Army Intelligence officer who now makes his living as “The Lie King,” going around the world with a lie detector and working for high pay.
I believe it was the 1980 Mystery Fancier review for the second MacInnes novel, The Blackstock Affair, that made me aware of this book several years ago; it’s hosted at Mystery*File. (The reviewer mentions an earlier review for this first MacInnes novel, but I don’t think that one has ever been uploaded.) Anyway what got my interest was the note that author Franklin Bandy (real name Eugene Franklin) included “all the sex and violence modern readers want,” which of course set my sleaze instincts a-tingling.
Well, folks, maybe that’s true for The Blackstock Affair. As for this first book, Deceit And Deadly Lies, both the sex and the violence are nil. Indeed, I ultimately found the novel a chore to read, wondering why a few hundred pages hadn’t been cut from it. More than anything else I got the impression that Bandy was another contemporary author influenced by Lawrence Sanders; there is the same clinical prose style, the same meshing of the crime genre with the trappings of the standard “airport fiction” of the day, and of course there’s the bloated page length. The big difference is that Sanders’s novels are, judging from the ones I’ve read, entertaining and fast-moving. (And also I’ve come to rank The Tomorrow File as my favorite novel ever.)
What makes it most egregious is that the potential is there. MacInnes, in his 40s and wealthy, goes about the world with his mistress, a stacked blonde named Vanessa. There is not a single sex scene between the two, and Vanessa is not exploited at all; the most we get is that she’s beautiful. This is acceptable, but where the problem arises is that Bandy spends the narrative having MacInnes wonder if Vanessa is in love with him. There are entire chapters where he will sit around and ponder whether Vanessa truly loves him; he even secretly records their conversations and plays the tapes back on his Psychological Stress Evaluator (PSE), trying to gauge whether or not Vanessa is lying to him. Lame!!
Bandy works a host of “crime novel stuff” around this main story – MacInnes figuring out if his mistress loves him, because he loves her – and none of it is compelling enough to save the book. One big demerit is that a lot of it takes place in Mexico, with MacInnes talking to a lot of Spanish people with easily-confused names who speak in the polite, formal diction that Spanish people use in novels of this type. The main “crime” plot has to do with MacInnes stumbling on to a plot to assassinate a major political figure, but the setup for this plot – a taxi driver overhearing two guys discuss the plan in a Bowery bar – is so ludicrous that the believability factor is ruined.
Well anyway, MacInnes is incredibly wealthy; he rents out his services to all and sundry, and his prices are high. Probably the highlight of the book is the first sequence, where we see MacInnes at work; a group of businessmen have hired him to find out the rock-bottom price they can pay for some land they want for development, land that is owned by a man who claims he wants ten million dollars. Here we see that MacInnes doesn’t parse truth from lies, per se, but uses his machine to detect stress levels, allowing his instincts to figure out whether the person is lying or not. In this way it is made clear that the PSE is more so an instrument, and how well it performs relies on the skill of the user.
It doesn’t sound like the setup for an action-packed novel, and Deceit And Deadly Lies certainly is not. MacInnes carries around a .45 and we are reminded of his Army background, but the action scenes are usually over and done with quickly, and more time is spent on introspection and pondering. Folks I kid you not, there’s a part in the final quarter of the novel where MacInnes is bored and he’s suffering from inexplicable impotence, and it goes on and on and on. I mean if you’re writing a 400+ page crime thriller, never have a part where your protagonist is bored…it’s like even the character himself is letting you know your novel is too long.
After dealing with the land-buying job – and later on MacInnes reads in the paper that the dude selling it has killed himself, and MacInnes brushes off any sense of responsibility – we get to the main crime plot, the assassination. An Assistant DA in New York calls MacInnes and brings a taxi driver over to his hotel, and there the guy tells a ludicrous story about hearing two men discuss killing someone “big” in a bar. MacInnes judges the cab driver to be telling the truth, and ultimately this will take us into a storyline involving a “Hitler” of a third-party candidate who is the target of assassins.
But this is not the only lie detecting work MacInnes does. There’s also an overlong sequence where he goes to Mexico to find out whether a man in prison killed the son of an influential crime boss, or if it was an accident, or whatever. Bandy works in the assassination plot with MacInnes also tracking down one of the men the cab driver saw in the bar, an Australian who serves as the novel’s main villain, even though most of his appearances feature him slipping into wherever MacInnes is staying, trading banter with him, and then slipping off. Truly the novel is nothing but 400 pages of stalling.
Action is infrequent but at least handled well, like a part where one of the Mexican gangs adbucts MacInnes and takes him out to the countryside, where they’ve dug him a fresh grave. Working with the CIA on this caper, MacInnes has been given a bunch of spy tech out of a Eurospy flick, like for example a pen that fires projectiles. What’s interesting is that the action scenes are over and done with quickly, and Bandy will spend more time on MacInnes brooding over whether his mistress Vanessa really cares about him.
Even more ridiculous, MacInnes finds out that Vanessa is a best-selling author, and indeed has been publishing books the entire time she’s been with MacInnes, but “The Lie King” was oblivious to all this, just thinking of her as his deluxe mistress. I mean WTF?? And then there are all these parts where he sits around wondering if Vanessa is writing about him in her books, and then he goes out and buys one of them, reading it to see if there are any parts that seem to be about himself(!).
This is the sort of thing I mean when I say Deceit And Deadly Lies is such a misfire. It’s stuff like this that takes the center stage, and MacInnes’ lie detector work is not interesting enough to salvage the novel. I mean for that part, Bandy even repeats himself with the setups; there are two different jobs MacInnes is hired for that concern a murdered child. And there are a lot of sequences of him just talking to cops, feds, CIA agents, or district attorneys.
The climax plays out in Madison Square Garden, where MacInnes has discovered the assassination attempt on the third-party candidate will occur. MacInnes at least is personally involved in the finale, blowing away one of the main villains, but a curious note is that MacInnes himself is shot in the chest at the end of the book, and the novel ends with Vanessa appearing there, crying over him (yes, friends, she does truly love him!!), and telling him to keep breathing. Bandy ends the novel by informing us that MacInnes does exactly that, but it could in fact be taken the other way: that MacInnes does not keep breathing.
But the dangling cliffhanger is moot, as MacInnes returned two years later in another papberback original, also published by Charter Books. I have that one too, and here’s hoping it’s better than Deceit And Deadly Lies.
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