Rob Kantner

Working in downtown Boston several years ago, I had a colleague who had a framed panoramic photo of old Tiger Stadium on his office wall. He had a few other Detroit tchotchkes kicking about as well, so one day I asked him when he had moved to Boston. He looked at me funny and said he’d been born and raised in Boston. So that begged the obvious question: “Why all the Detroit stuff?”

He laughed and told me a story, said when he was a kid, his first game at Fenway Park was to see the Red Sox against the Tigers. While there, he somehow not only managed to snag Al Kaline’s autograph, but said Kaline took the time to talk with him and make him feel really special. He’s been a fan of all things Detroit ever since.

No surprise then that when I bumped into him at lunch one day while browsing in (the late, lamented) Spencer’s Mystery Book Shop on Newbury Street, he walked me over to the used paperback section, picked up this book, and said I had to start reading Rob Kantner. And so, I did.

Rob Kantner’s Ben Perkins is unique in my reading experience, in that he’s both a hard-boiled P.I. who’s seen it all, and also a (fictional) real person. He does the P.I. stuff on the side, after he finishes his day job as maintenance manager at the Norwegian Wood apartment complex in an upscale Detroit suburb. When he’s not doing that, or solving mysteries on the gritty streets of an increasingly empty and down-on-its luck Detroit (sometimes using his ultralight airplane to solve them) he’s hanging out drinking Stroh's and smoking cork-tipped cigars at his favorite bar called “Under New Management” – the new management simply deciding not to rename the joint and just leaving the sign up.

Now, it’s been years since I’ve read anything by Kantner, but having read most everything BY Kantner (after finishing the novels, I haunted ebay and used bookstores for back issues of AHMM and Ellery Queen for older and out-of-print Ben Perkins short stories) I remember those details so vividly because Perkins is drawn in such vivid detail, you can’t not remember. That’s how good these stories are, and the reason Kantner won at least one Shamus Award for them.

Kantner himself was apparently a victim of the “mid-list author purge” that took place in the nineties as the publishing industry consolidated. Though both he and Perkins deserved far better, weep not for Kantner, as he turned himself into an in-demand management consultant and quality guru who, from all indications, is doing just fine.

He also gifted us this past decade with maybe the final Perkins novel, titled “Final Fling,” as well as (finally!) all those out-of-print Ben Perkins stories, in a hardcover collection called “Trouble is What I Do.”

In conclusion, you live in Detroit and are looking for a good private investigator who might also be able to fix that pesky dishwasher, you could do a lot worse than Ben Perkins.… (més)