It’s September, 1960. Kennedy’s on the campaign trail. The Russians are threatening to put missiles off the coast of Cuba. Young women are curled up with Kinsey’s “sex” books and whispering about the new birth control pill. Absurdist plays like Waiting for Godot are starting to make sense.
Fifteen year old Dewey “Doc” Ruggles doesn’t give a rat’s rump about world affairs, shifting mores or existentialism. All he wants is to be in a band called “Jimmy and the Gigolos.” For that to happen he needs to find some wide-eyed girl he can bamboozle into babysitting his little sister Snowball. He wants to Rock-maninoff, be popular, be cool. He just wants a girl to love him for the man he’s pretending to be.
But there are obstacles, complications, down-right dangers. He finds himself at war with communists who plan to kill the future President, the psychotic bully Junior Mentz, a ghost who masquerades as the legendary “Girl in the Pink Formal,” and the unforgettable, irrepressible, two-grades-ahead-of-him Margaret Ann. She’s Detective Quinn’s annoying daughter and she won’t stop pestering ‘til Doc solves the cold case murder of his best friend’s sister.
A Bonafide Detective is a 100,000 word comedic romp, romance and mystery with comic book inserts. It’s a hard-edged adventure, frosted in magical realism, an improbable journey that never would have begun if Doc, in his search for true love, hadn’t gone “skyfishing,” hadn’t climbed to the top of Saint Mary’s Catholic Church to retrieve Lancelot his runaway kite.
But he did climb up. By the time he’d made it back down the whole world had changed.