This will come as a shock to those who don’t already know, but Robert Dietrich was a pseudonym used by E. Howard Hunt, before his stint as Richard M. Nixon’s hotel breaching black bag operative. 1957’s Murder on the Rocks is the first entry in his nine-part franchise about a Washington, D.C. based accountant, lawyer, and ex-military tough guy named Steve Bentley. Here he’s entangled in the search for a priceless emerald called the Madagascar Green, which he somehow needs to locate and exchange with the fake in order to save the owner the embrassement of knowing he was ever robbed. Quite a task.
Hunt makes the title character Bentley a cunning, smart-mouthed upsetter of applecarts and damager of delicate sensibilities. He seems to particularly dislike dishonesty and insiderism. You can’t be more dishonest or inside than breaking the law for the president the way Hunt did, so it goes to show that fictional characters are not always analogous to their authors. But Hunt certainly wasn’t the first or last writer to morph into a destructive political tool. The past is prologue, and all that. In any case, though Murder on the Rocks loses some momentum toward the end, for the most part it’s not unlike the Madagascar Green—colorful, multi-faceted, and hard-edged. We have a feeling the Bentley series is good.
