William L. DeAndrea

• Born: July 1, 1952
• Birthplace: Port Chester, New York
• Died: October 9, 1996
• Place of death: Bethel, Connecticut

Types of Plot: Master sleuth; historical

Principal Series: Matt Cobb, 1978-1996; Niccolo Benedetti, 1979, 1992-1994; Lobo Blacke and Quinn Booker, 1995-1996

Contribution

Before his early death from a blood infection after a tumor on his appendix had been misdiagnosed, William L. DeAndrea emerged as one of the most prominent of the hip new writers of classic-style detective works and was among the heirs apparent to Ellery Queen, Agatha Christie, and Rex Stout. DeAndrea’s defining detective, the highly literate Matt Cobb, often draws on his familiarity with the classic detective canon in a kind of postmodern self-reflexivity that gives the series its wry comic feel. That Matt Cobb works in television adds to DeAndrea’s unsettling sense of how appearances deceive and how truth is often an easily spun commodity.

DeAndrea’s interest is not in the psychological exploration of criminals but rather in the intricacies of a well-plotted detection exercise. His master detectives operate through painstaking analysis until, in a moment of inspiration, they see the solution. DeAndrea provides a collection of clues that allows the diligent reader to share in the pursuit of the solution. The reader must consider numerous possible killers, second-guess the inevitable false arrests, and gather the slenderest clues dropped at the most casual moments. Typically, DeAndrea orchestrates a closing scene that gathers the suspects for a classic drawing-room revelation of the real killer, most often the least suspected among the ensemble.

Biography

William Louis DeAndrea was born on July 1, 1952, in Port Chester in affluent Westchester County along Long Island just outside Manhattan. His father was an engineer and his mother a nurse. DeAndrea grew up in a period of prosperity, happily discovering the new medium of television. After working briefly as a journalist for a Westchester County newspaper (1969-1970), a job that trained him in diligent observation and the importance of fact gathering, DeAndrea graduated with a bachelor of science degree from Syracuse University in 1974 and worked for a time with Electrolux. Finding himself restless within a scientific-technological environment, bored by the relentless routine of factory work, and drawn by his own love of mysteries, DeAndrea quit his job to pursue writing.

DeAndrea’s first mystery, Killed in the Ratings (1978), which introduced Matt Cobb, drew on his childhood love of television (although DeAndrea himself had never worked in the medium). The book found immediate success. DeAndrea was hailed as a promising new voice and earned an Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America for outstanding first novel. The urban-cool network vice president Matt Cobb proved particularly resilient; the series came to include eight titles.

In 1979, before beginning a second Cobb title, DeAndrea introduced another signature detective: the formidably cerebral Professor Niccolo Benedetti. In contrast to the breezy postmodern feel of the Cobb books, the Benedetti series proved far darker in its speculations about the corrupt human heart. The first volume, The HOG Murders (1979), about a calculating killer who manipulates a series of accidents to convince a small town in rural New York that it is being terrorized by a serial killer to hide his murder of a corrupt police officer, garnered DeAndrea’s second Edgar, for outstanding paperback.

Now a success and married since 1984 to Orania Papazoglou, who published her own mysteries under the name Jane Haddam, DeAndrea extended his narrative range to historic mysteries—most successfully The Lunatic Fringe (1980), a political thriller involving terrorists in Theodore Roosevelt’s New York City—and a highly respected series of Cold War espionage thrillers. DeAndrea’s conservative bias against what he perceived to be the liberal tolerance of communist principles tends to make the books seem quaintly nostalgic now. In addition, assisted by his son Matt, he completed three children’s books that featured extravagant and often fantastic elements. A lifelong fan of detective fiction and a longtime columnist in Armchair Detective, DeAndrea published the massive Encylopedia Mysterioso: A Comprehensive Guide to the Art of Detection in Print, Film, Radio, and Television (1994), for which he accepted his third Edgar, for best critical/biographical work.

In the mid-1990’s, the Lobo Blacke and Quinn Booker trilogy, set in the Wyoming Territory in the closing years of the frontier, placed DeAndrea’s fiction in an entirely new landscape brought to life by his meticulous research. Ironically, the narrative thread that was to have compelled the series—the discovery of who fired the shot that put Marshal Blacke in a wheelchair—would remain a mystery, as DeAndrea died without completing the series.

Analysis

Although William L. DeAndrea wrote with a keen eye for comic effect, clever puns, and tongue-in-cheek allusions to Golden Age detective classics, at the center of his fiction is a profound concern for the search for objective truth and his deep faith that, despite the moral chaos of a modern world, truth can still be found. Enthralled early on by television, DeAndrea brought to his fiction not only a gift for storytelling honed by his familiarity with the electronic medium but also a sensibility sharpened by a visual medium that so freely manipulates truth. Also, DeAndrea was raised under pre-Vatican II Catholicism and was versed in the absolutes of the Baltimore Catechism, which explained the dark heart of humanity as part of the Roman Catholic Church’s vision of humanity as good people living in a fallen world. Further, as a child of the Cold War, DeAndrea grew up tuned into the deep paranoia of the era, which shaped world events into the tidy logic of an accessible truth. Finally DeAndrea’s interest in the shattering intrusion of violent death into ordinary people’s lives and in the intricate work of puzzling through a situation to achieve a satisfying closure was shaped by his generation’s struggle with the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the authorities’ failure to deduce any satisfying truth about the killing despite significant gathered evidence.

DeAndrea’s fiction is a search for truth. He is most interested in empowering readers to assemble the puzzle that he constructs. With his signature style of reportorial accessibility (disciplined by his apprenticeship in journalism), his pitch-perfect ear for dialogue (honed by his passion for television), his keen sense of breakneck pacing and narrative momentum, and his fondness for twists and the apparently insignificant clue that comes to crack the case, DeAndrea found a natural rapport with his readers. However, far more than just engaging the readers, he sought to share with them the complex joy that comes from wrestling a slender but viable truth in a world otherwise rank with deceit and illusions and peopled by the shadowy and the mercenary.

Killed in the Ratings

Killed in the Ratings introduced master of spin Matt Cobb, who must deal with cutthroat television executives who rig industry ratings to achieve selfish career objectives. An ambitious network executive’s wife pays a computer specialist, who has a large gambling debt, to rig the ratings for a promising show, a revolutionary genre-bending drama, so that it is canceled. The woman is trying to achieve career success for her executive husband by catapulting him over another executive who had pinned his career hopes on the new show’s success. Eventually this intrigue involves the network’s respected chief executive officer, the father of the ambitious wife. As Cobb investigates, he unearths a crime syndicate that has been manipulating ratings to extort money from hapless television executives whose careers live—and die—by the ratings their shows receive. Given DeAndrea’s unapologetic love of television, such chicanery at the expense of quality programming is an unforgivable betrayal. As the conspiracy is finally revealed in a board-room variation of the drawing-room revelation, it becomes evident that love motivated the mayhem: the love of a wife for a middling success of a husband, the doting love of an aging father convinced that his perfect daughter had married the wrong man, and ultimately the love of television itself. Matt Cobb, beneath his smart-alecky cool, very much believes in television and is determined to protect the integrity of the medium.

The HOG Murders

The darker side of DeAndrea’s conviction that truth must be sought in the quagmire of modern life dominates the Benedetti series. In The HOG Murders, the first Niccolo Benedetti mystery and in many ways DeAndrea’s finest work, a respected investigative reporter is driven to kill a corrupt police officer, who through a brief stint in jail, learned about the reporter’s southern roots, which include his family’s prominent role in an underground racist organization. The irony, which DeAndrea manipulates even as the reader begins to suspect the crusading reporter, is that the reporter is driven to kill because revelation of his past would jeopardize the only chance he has to secure his family’s trust fund, which will permit him to pour his considerable resources into revitalizing the southern town where he was raised. In the Benedetti series, good and evil are inextricably bound in ways that the Cobb mysteries merely suggest.

Indeed, the violence in the Benedetti books is more brutal, the series’ characters driven by deep-seated hatreds that render inexplicable the psychology of the criminal. In The HOG Murders, for example, to mask the killing of the corrupt police officer, the reporter mimics the taunting letters typical of serial killers to create the appearance of a psychotic killer on the prowl, taking what are otherwise random accidents and suggesting to the police that a single killer was involved. He dubs himself the HOG Killer and only at the end is it clear that the letters stand for the fickle and often harsh hand of God. There is a chilling feel to the mystery, which is set against an oppressively harsh central New York state winter, unlike the Cobb mysteries where terrible things happen, certainly, but amid the carnival atmosphere of television. Unlike Matt Cobb, who is ably assisted by colorful New York detectives, Benedetti works apart from the much-vaunted judicial system. He solves the mystery through an inward process of analysis and intuition as he paints canvases that inevitably come to reflect his approaching realization. As Benedetti philosophizes, detectives, not criminals, are the actual authors of crimes. Detectives are given the ending—that is, the dead body—and must patiently backtrack until an inevitable narrative emerges, an epiphany that reveals the killer. Although Bendetti is assisted by a willowy criminal psychologist and a streetwise private eye, he works through the evidence largely unassisted, delighting in coaxing his less-gifted assistants to see finally what is right in front of their eyes.

Written in Fire

Toward what would prove the end of his career, DeAndrea fused the murder mystery and the Western with Written in Fire (1995). The Lobo Blacke and Quinn Booker series is a cleverly executed and highly entertaining homage to Nero Wolfe. Marshal Blacke uses a wheelchair, therefore Quinn Booker serves as his investigative legs—much as Archie Goodman helps the overweight and apartment-bound Nero Wolfe. However, the series is also an intricately crafted search for truth and moral accountability in a forbidding landscape long defined by American pop culture for its wholesale abandoning of law and order. That DeAndrea places in the Wyoming Territory two characters who together represent the unswerving dedication to truth marks his signature interest. That the series was never completed and the secret of the marshal’s shooting never revealed is an appropriate testimony to DeAndrea’s own restless search for an elusive truth.

Written in Fire, the first volume in the series, centers on the newfangled camera. A cache of photographs taken by a highly successful photojournalist on assignment to the Western frontier includes an unflattering prison shot of a murderer. This murderer is masquerading as a cultured British aristocrat so that he may marry the daughter of the same powerful land boss Blacke suspects of shooting him. When the photojournalist is found dead, Blacke and Booker must sort through an elaborate frame-up of a local thug to unearth the real killer. DeAndrea uses the medium of photography (much as he did television) to suggest the deceptive quality of surfaces. The eventual clue is an overexposed photographic plate left in the camera in which the photojournalist, certain he was to be killed, used the tip of his lighted cigar to “write” in fire the name of the killer.

What compels the narrative, however, given the sobering question of who shot Marshal Blacke, is the intriguing friendship Blacke maintains with the land boss he is sure is responsible for shooting him. They engage in tense checkers matches that suggest with eerie effect their underlying psychological dynamic. Within that dynamic, DeAndrea, after a twenty-year career delighting in finding truth, introduces a character-driven narrative that relies not so much on clues and solution as in the far more disturbing truth available only when the reader confronts the stark mystery of human behavior itself.

Principal Series Characters:

• Matt Cobb , former college basketball star, is a network wunderkind, vice president of special projects for a Manhattan media conglomerate, a vaguely defined job that puts him in charge of managing embarrassing incidents involving high-maintenance and highly paid executives, eccentric media gurus, network divas, and even demented fans. An English major with an intolerance for grammatical errors and a fondness for jellybeans and leggy women, Cobb is a no-nonsense type.
• Professor Niccolo Benedetti is less an investigator and more a philosopher who studies evil, who paints abstract canvases as a way to guide himself through his byzantine speculations. Fascinated by the impulse behind criminal activity, he demands as part of his fee for solving a mystery a session with the killer before the arrest to better understand the perplexing nature of evil.
• Lobo Blacke is a celebrated frontier marshal wounded by a cowardly shot in the back. He now uses a wheelchair and has “retired,” working in the newspaper business to keep an eye on the corrupt landowner whom he believes responsible for his injury.
• Quinn Booker is an East Coast dime novelist who made considerable money writing about Blacke’s adventures. When he relocates to the Wyoming Territory, he becomes the legs of Blacke.

Bibliography

Carter, Robert A. Review of Written in Fire, by William L. DeAndrea. Houston Chronicle, July 7, 1996, p. Z31. A favorable review of the first book in the Lobo and Blacke series.

DeAndrea, William L. Encyclopedia Mysteriosa: A Comprehensive Guide to the Art of Detection in Print, Film, Radio, and Television. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1994. An invaluable one-volume compendium, written without scholarly pretense, that helps sort through DeAndrea’s own arcane allusions to Golden Age texts.

Library Journal. Review of Killed in the Ratings, by William L. DeAndrea. 103, no. 9 (May 1, 1978): 998. A contemporary review of the first in the Matt Cobb series.

Priestman, Martin, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Illuminating essays that explicate the intricacies of constructing a mystery.

Van Dover, J. Kenneth. At Wolfe’s Door: The Nero Wolfe Novels of Rex Stout. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1991. Accessible guide to the series that influenced DeAndrea.