Cooperman Variations (Paperback)

Benny Cooperman's favourite lunch counter and diner have closed down and the fittings have been sold to Americans. The nation mourns the accidental death of its greatest artist, cellist Dermot Keogh. It's April and there's already a heat wave. Things are just not the way they used to be.

Alas, not just the plots and settings have changed in Howard Engel's 10th Benny Cooperman mystery. While Canada's favourite fictional detective is still his smart-alecky but unsophisticated self ("Dim Sum may be unknown in Grantham, Mr. Cooperman, but we in Toronto have had it for nearly forty years"), his talents seem washed out, if not washed up, in this nasty little mystery set in the high-tech, high-pressure world of a Toronto TV station far up the road from his native Grantham. All the stock figures are there: the former high school love goddess who calls at the detective's office wondering if she's in the path of a killer, the small-town lawyer, the slobbish cops, the heavies in dark glasses. What's missing are the gritty small-town ambience and naked class antagonisms that drive best hard-boiled detective fiction, including Engel's early novels. Burdened with the bland homogeneity of the contemporary city and with convoluted literary references, the tale becomes progressively less gripping. In fact Cooperman hasn't been himself since 1990's Dead and Buried, when his creator first fell for the suits and the happy ending. The warning of his first sentence--"I should have seen the writing on the wall"--should have been a message to readers as well. --Robyn Gillam

Howard Engel certainly knows how to entertain. He ought to. For many years, he was a producer for the CBC. He uses that setting to its best advantage in a thoroughly enjoyable tenth outing for his P.I. Benny Cooperman, in The Cooperman Variations.
Benny's old high school friend, Vanessa Moss, is now the head of entertainment at The National Television Corporation. It's a working environment "as packed with false friends as a pinata." Vanessa suspects her head might be the next one to be cracked open. She has good reason to worry. She enlists Benny's undercover investigative services after a colleague of hers is killed while staying at Vanessa's and wearing one of her dressing gowns.
It's good timing for Benny. He's at loose ends. Diana Sweets, his favorite restaurant source where "gossip was retailed, deals made, plots plotted," has shut down. Anna Abraham, "the light of his life," is "tramping over Tuscany with graduate students." And his case load has dwindled enough so that he has instituted "summer hours" and spends that time reading mystery novels. Hired on as Vanessa's "new executive assistant"/bodyguard, it's not long before Benny is immersed in the cut-throat television industry. The technicians at the studio see him as one of the guys and provide him with insider gossip. One odd piece of information that keeps cropping up involves a deceased cellist, Dermot Keogh. Keogh can "out Casals Casals." He dies in what appears to have been a rare diving accident involving a faulty aqualung.
It's up to Benny to make the connection between Keogh's accident, a legacy of a new concert hall, and Vanessa's heightened fears of being murdered. In the process, Engel relies on a good deal of local color and regional details when he takes a side trip north to Vanessa's summer cottage on Lake Muskoka. Though the conclusion happens in one of those conveniently confessional conversations, Engel does manage to provide an ingenious manner of death and choice of weapon before calming Vanessa's nerves. The Cooperman Variations is a speedy enjoyable read, certainly worthy of a reader's summer down time. Robert Allen Papinchak (Books in Canada)