Jeremiah Healy

• Born: May 15, 1948
• Birthplace: Teaneck, New Jersey
• Died: August 14, 2014
• Place of death: Pompano Beach, Florida

Types of Plot: Hard-boiled; private investigator

Principal Series: John Francis Cuddy, 1984–99

Contribution

During the 1970s, with the mystery novels of Robert B. Parker and William G. Tapply, Boston emerged as a fertile territory for the growth and development of detective fiction. Jeremiah Healy, who settled in Boston around that time after receiving a law degree from Harvard University, combined keen powers of observation and a strong sense of place to create novels that might be seen as the East Coast counterpart to the San Francisco–based mysteries of Stephen Greenleaf, featuring John Marshall “Marsh” Tanner. Like Tanner, Healy’s John Cuddy is a hard-boiled loner and bears the emotional scars of the Vietnam War. Significantly, both Tanner and Cuddy managed to hold their own against such emerging feminine competition as Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone and Sara Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski. These four writers, along with a handful of others, may be seen as the 1980s generation in mystery and detective fiction, producing novels that are often grimly realistic while remaining idealistic and that contain a strong element of social observation and criticism.

To an even greater degree than Greenleaf, Healy excelled at the creation of colorful, memorable secondary characters, from athletic trainers and journalists to prostitutes and gangsters. Rather early in the series, he provided Cuddy with a secondary love interest, Assistant District Attorney Nancy Meagher (pronounced “Mah-har”), who like Cuddy is a native of South Boston. As the series progresses, Meagher often acts as a foil for Cuddy, either questioning his judgment or causing him to avoid conflicts of interest between them.

Biography

Jeremiah Francis Healy III was born May 15, 1948, in the New York City suburb of Teaneck, New Jersey. After graduating from Rutgers, he attended law school at Harvard, receiving the Juris Doctor degree in 1973. He then served six years in the US Army Reserve. Like his fictional character Cuddy, Healy rose to the rank of captain of the military police. After five years with a Boston law firm, Healy spent eighteen years as a professor at the New England School of Law in Boston, an institution founded to promote the legal education and training of women. Married in 1978 to Bonnie M. Tisler, he left teaching in 1995 to become a full-time writer, dividing his time among Boston, south Florida, and a lakeside house in Maine. Over the years, he lectured extensively on the art and craft of mystery writing and served on a number of professional organizations for mystery writers.

As the twentieth century drew to a close, Healy concluded the Cuddy novel series and began to experiment with other fictional forms, initially with short stories featuring Cuddy and a legal thriller, The Stalking of Sheilah Quinn (1998), followed by Turnabout (2001), a mystery narrated from the perpetrator’s point of view. In 2001, he launched a new series of legal thrillers under the gender-neutral pseudonym of Terry Devane, featuring the young attorney Mairead (pronounced “Muh-RAID”) O’Clare, her boss Sheldon Gold, and private investigator Pontifico Murizzi, a former police detective. Like the Cuddy mysteries, the O’Clare thrillers are set in Boston, with a strong sense of place; however, they are told from a variety of viewpoints, including that of an omniscient narrator. In 2004, Healy was successfully treated for prostate cancer, an experience recalled at some length in an essay posted on his website for the edification of potential future patients. In addition to his writing, he served at points as the president of both the Private Eye Writers of America and the International Association of Crime Writers.

After reportedly struggling for a long time with depression, at the age of sixty-six, Healy took his own life on August 14, 2014. He had been living in Pompano Beach, Florida, and was survived by his fiancé, Sandra Balzo, as well as a sister.

Analysis

By his own account, Jeremiah Healy first became interested in crime fiction while in high school, but he did not attempt his first novel until he was well into his thirties, having practiced law for five years before becoming a law professor. By that time, he was extremely well versed in the mystery tradition and familiar as well with twists and turns in the law. From the start, his novels have been notable for their intertextuality, with frequent, often tongue-in-cheek allusions to the work of other mystery writers and shared thematic issues. Healy’s concern with troubled youth whose problems are frequently compounded by parental affluence recalls the later work of Ross Macdonald, as does his penchant for social criticism bordering on satire, with a focus on current events and sensitive political issues such as child pornography, spousal abuse, and assisted suicide.

John Cuddy’s career as a private investigator gets off to a running start in Blunt Darts (1984) when barely two months after his wife’s death, he refuses to sign off on an insurance claim that he knows to be fraudulent and is terminated by Empire Insurance after eight years of service including a recent promotion. After consulting a lawyer, Cuddy chooses unemployment compensation over filing a wrongful-termination lawsuit and strikes out on his own, having acquired a private investigator license as part of his job with Empire. Healy thus establishes the guidelines and framework for the entire Cuddy series: Cuddy is a man of strong convictions who does not suffer fools gladly. The dialogue is tart and crisp in the hard-boiled tradition of Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett. Cuddy is a man of few words, all of which hit their mark. As an investigator, he is persistent to the point of impertinence, frequently making enemies with whom he will later clash in some form of physical combat. Trained in several martial arts as well as conventional boxing, Cuddy frequently provokes potential bullies into attacking him to humiliate them with his superior force and skill, a tendency that does not sit well with his friend Nancy Meagher. Intensely loyal, Cuddy will vow to avenge a client or witness who has been killed in the course of his investigation, even when the case itself has apparently collapsed. As a rule, Cuddy’s cases end with violent confrontations, not infrequently featuring such bizarre weapons as crossbows and spearguns.

To counteract the effects of advancing age, Cuddy takes on a series of physical challenges that come to form an integral part of the plot in certain novels. At the start of Rescue (1995), for example, both he and Meagher take up scuba diving, their training described in such detail as to constitute a brief how-to manual. In Right to Die (1991), Cuddy, who is around the age of forty and beginning to feel it, trains to run the Boston Marathon for the first time, much to Meagher’s disapproval. Cuddy’s account of the training, conducted with the help of an acquaintance known only as Bo, a former coach who is now among Boston’s homeless, competes for the reader’s attention with the central plot of the novel. Bo, meanwhile, is only one of several dozen colorful, if enigmatic, characters who populate the Cuddy novels, adding mainstream dimensions to the traditional mystery genre.

From the start of the Cuddy series, Healy took great pains to showcase his adopted city, taking his readers on extended tours of Boston’s nooks and crannies, including the notorious Big Dig highway project. As the series progresses, Cuddy’s cases lead him increasingly afield in search of background or evidence, to locations described with great attention to detail, including the inhabitants. Healy’s readers thus get detailed guided tours of such far-flung locales as the Maine woods, the Florida Keys, and Big Sky country. Cuddy’s trips also allow Healy to make incisive observations about such phenomena as air travel and suburban development.

Like most fictional private detectives, Cuddy is frequently at odds with the local police, either at home or on the road. In Boston, he has managed a reasonable working relationship, perhaps even a grudging friendship, with Detective Lieutenant Robert Murphy, a physically imposing African American, who owes his post to a bigoted superior who thought he was promoting an Irishman. To be avoided is Murphy’s female colleague, Bonnie Cross, a white woman whose demeanor more closely matches her last name than her first. Once out of Boston, Cuddy is very much on his own, frequently detained by the authorities and often suspected of the very crimes he is attempting to investigate.

In Blunt Darts, the supposed victim of an abduction turns out to be the perpetrator of the multiple murders eventually committed, and Cuddy becomes the most likely suspect in the eyes of the police. In Shallow Graves (1992) and Invasion of Privacy (1996), he finds himself working in uneasy concert with a mid-level mobster, Primo Zuppone, with whom he shares an interest in New Age music and progressive jazz.

An occasionally heavy drinker, Cuddy is notable among fictional detectives for his frequent and sometimes tearful visits to the grave of his wife, Beth, who died of a brain tumor at the age of thirty. At the start of the series, with his grief still fresh, Cuddy appears to be merely unburdening himself about the pressures of work, but as the series progresses, his visits take on the shape of real conversations, with feedback from Beth that may cause Cuddy to take a fresh look at the evidence at hand. Also memorable is Cuddy’s evolving relationship with Nancy Meagher’s cat Renfield, named for the Englishman in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) who devours small animals. At the start of Shallow Graves, Cuddy drops Renfield a foot or two onto the floor, provoking a severe reaction that makes Meagher suspect Cuddy of handling the cat too roughly. Over the days and weeks to come, it develops that the cat, by then nearly a year old, suffers from a congenital deformity requiring surgery to break and reset his hind legs.

As it happens, Meagher is away on business when Renfield is released from surgery, and it falls to Cuddy to pick him up and look after him until her return. Over the next several volumes, Cuddy frequently (and ruefully) recalls a veterinarian’s comment that the cat has imprinted on him, that he has in fact become the cat’s best friend, like it or not. In any case, Meagher’s furry companion remains a fixture in the Cuddy series.

From the start, the Cuddy novels have seemingly dared the reader to solve the mystery at hand, with a multiplicity of misleading clues and with criminals’ motives that may remain implausible to the reader even when fully explained by Cuddy in the final pages. Not infrequently, the perpetrator appears to be certifiably insane, defying all efforts on the part of Cuddy—or the reader—to follow a logical trail of deduction. For Healy, at least in the Cuddy series, the art of deduction is less important than is exposition and exploration of those social problems or issues that might, or might not, have caused a particular crime to take place, along with the simple pleasure of telling a good story.

Shallow Graves

In Shallow Graves, shortly after running the Boston Marathon, an event described in detail in Right to Die, Cuddy is hired by his former employer, Empire Insurance, to investigate a claim filed by a modeling agency in the mysterious death of Mau Tim Dani, a young Amerasian model. Having left Empire on less than the best of terms, he is reluctant to take the case, all the more so when he learns that the case was assigned to Detective Lieutenant Robert Holt, with whom he has tangled in the past. Holt, for his part, is not about to tell Cuddy that Mau Tim Dani was the granddaughter of mob boss Tommy the Temper Danucci, born to the Vietnamese wife of his son Joseph. Cuddy, however, takes on the case as a favor to Harry Mullen, a former subordinate subsequently promoted into his old job. Before long, Cuddy is caught in a squeeze play among the mob, the police, and the top management at Empire, forging an uneasy alliance with mob enforcer Primo Zuppone as he proceeds in search of Mau Tim Dani’s killer. There is no shortage of suspects, from the modeling agents to former boyfriends and drug dealers, not to mention other mobsters. Cuddy, meanwhile, cannot help but wonder why he is being set up and by whom.

Rescue

In Rescue, Cuddy takes on a case with no client in his search for a young boy known only as Eddie Straw because of the strawberry birthmark on his right forehead and cheek. Days earlier, Cuddy had stopped to change a flat tire for a couple of young apparent runaways, teenage Melinda and ten-year-old Eddie. When Melinda turns up dead not long thereafter, Cuddy, haunted by memories of dead soldiers in Vietnam, becomes nearly obsessed with finding Eddie. After locking horns as usual with the local police, Cuddy follows a murky, treacherous trail into New Hampshire, then as far south as the Florida Keys, tracking the murderous religious zealots to whom Eddie has been turned over by his own parents, who mistook his birthmark for the mark of Cain and believe that he is ripe for exorcism. Traveling under the name of John Francis, having already killed one man in self-defense back in New Hampshire, Cuddy attempts to infiltrate the Church of the Lord Vigilant, where he believes Eddie to be held captive. His Florida venture is facilitated by Miami attorney Justo Vega, a former fellow military police officer in Vietnam. Cuddy also makes the acquaintance of retired Marine Colonel Howard Greenspan and his wife, Doris. In time, Greenspan, mortally ill with cancer, will give his life helping Cuddy in a daring underwater midnight raid on the church compound, and Doris Greenspan will volunteer to explore her options for adopting the newly freed Eddie rather than returning him to the parents who banished him. Rescue is also notable for Cuddy’s visit, en route to Florida, to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC.

Spiral

The thirteenth and final volume in the Cuddy novel series, Spiral is longer and more intricately plotted than Rescue and more than twice as long as Blunt Darts. The action begins with a rude shock, the sudden death of Nancy Meagher in a plane crash en route to San Francisco. Initial plans called for Cuddy to make the trip with her but a prior work commitment kept him in Boston. Only after liftoff did Cuddy retrieve a voice message that the job had been canceled; in short, he could and probably should have been on that flight himself. Working through his grief at the grave of his wife, Beth, he is startled when Beth “tells” him that he has been spared for a reason. Not long thereafter, he is summoned back to Florida by Justo Vega, the Miami attorney and former army buddy initially featured in Rescue. Their former commanding officer in Vietnam, retired Colonel Nicolas Helides, wants Cuddy’s help in a matter that cannot be discussed over the telephone. Arriving at the colonel’s estate in Fort Lauderdale, Cuddy finds his former boss, now over seventy, considerably weakened by a stroke and surrounded by an entourage of servants, bodyguards, and a flirtatious second wife. His mission for Cuddy at first seems simple, to find out who murdered the colonel’s barely adolescent granddaughter, whose body was found in a swimming pool on the premises. Born Veronica Helides, the child was better known as Very Held, a pseudonym chosen for her role as lead singer in the revival of Spiral, a rock band originally formed by her father Spi (short for Spiro) in the 1960s. A portrait soon emerges of a spoiled, difficult, and precocious child, indulged by her father to suit his own ambitions, already familiar with drugs and sex and well aware of her seductive charms, as revealed in videotaped performances.

As in Shallow Graves, which likewise deals with the death of a young woman rushed into adulthood, there is no shortage of viable suspects, and more bodies are found as Cuddy and Justo Vega move closer to the truth. Returning to Boston at the close of the case, Cuddy learns from Meagher’s landlord that he and his family can no longer keep Renfield because of his mother’s cat allergies. In a final scene, Cuddy agrees to keep Renfield, as they face an uncertain future together. Healy has told interviewers that it was time to arrange either a wedding or a funeral involving Nancy Meagher and that what he chose was best for Cuddy.

Principal Series Character:

• John Francis Cuddy , a native of South Boston, graduated from Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, and served with the Military Police in Vietnam in the late 1960s, mustering out with the rank of captain. After returning to Boston, he tried a year of law school, married Elizabeth Mary (“Beth”) Devlin and went to work as a private investigator for the Empire Insurance Company, only to lose his wife to cancer and his job not long thereafter because of his personal code of ethics. Self-employed as an investigator, Cuddy tends to specialize in cases that fall into gray areas of the law. A fitness enthusiast, he is not above resorting to violence, yet frequently visits his wife’s grave, bearing flowers, to confer with her about his ongoing cases.

Bibliography

Healy, Jeremiah. Jeremiah Healy, www.jeremiahhealy.com. Accessed 21 Aug. 2017. Author’s website collects articles and comments by and about Healy. Also contains information about books written as Terry Devane.

Healy, Jeremiah. “Plot and Structure in the Mystery Novel.” Writer, vol. 103, no. 11, 1990, p. 11. Healy discusses the importance of plot and structure and suggests that writers use an outline. Sheds light on his own writing process.

Healy, Jeremiah. “Writing Effective Dialogue.” Writer, vol. 108, no. 10, 1995, p. 4. In this how-to article, Healy demonstrates some of his writing techniques and approach to fiction writing.

Herbert, Rosemary. The Fatal Art of Entertainment: Interviews with Mystery Writers. G. K. Hall, 1994. Healy is one of thirteen mystery writers interviewed in this work. Contains a brief introductory essay and photograph besides the interview of Healy, which describes the writer’s character and work habits.

Lochte, Dick. “The Return of the Private Eye.” Playboy, 1 Mar. 2000, p. 96. Places Healy within the context of late twentieth century detective fiction.

Pierce, J. Kingston. “Cuddy Edge.” January Magazine, 2000. Good retrospective on the Cuddy series, including an informative interview with Healy.

Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction. Routledge, 2005. Contains a chapter on hard-boiled fiction that takes a close look at the subgenre that Healy favors.

Snell, George. “Mystery Writer in Love with Boston.” Worcester Telegram and Gazette, 15 Oct. 1997, p. B1. Explores Healy’s ongoing, if stormy, relationship with his adoptive city.

Yardley, William. "Jeremiah Healy, Who Created Boston Private Eye, Dies at 66." The New York Times, 28 Aug. 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/08/29/arts/artsspecial/jeremiah-healy-who-created-boston-private-eye-dies-at-66.html. Accessed 4 Aug. 2017.