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the complete review - fiction

Deadfall
(Fat Chance)

by
Keith Laumer

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B : solid imitation-Raymond Chandler

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "The book follows the established traditions so closely that it is something of a caricature, but it is nevertheless fun to read." - Newgate Callendar, The New York Times Book Review

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Deadfall -- re-issued in a would-be movie-tie-in edition as Fat Chance (would-be because the producers pulled the rug out from under the publishers and released the film as Peeper ...) -- comes with a dedication: "to the incomparable Raymond Chandler and to his peerless private eye, Philip Marlowe". Incomparable, perhaps, but Laumer nevertheless tries his best to follow as closely as possible in Chandler's footsteps here. The P.I.-narrator is a different one -- Joe Shaw -- but the locale is still Los Angeles, and though set in the 1960s the case he gets involved in has its roots in a 1942 adoption; the tone and attitude (and somewhat convoluted plot) -- indeed, pretty much everything else, tries very hard (and reasonably successfully) to be straight out of Chandler.
       The novel begins with Lou Anglich coming to Shaw and trying to convince him to find the long-lost not-quite-daughter, Anya, he gave up when she was a baby and hasn't seen in a quarter of a century. The couple he had entrusted her to had sold her to another couple who apparently moved out West; Anglich has a name -- Conroy -- but not much more -- but he does have a picture of the man.
       Shaw takes the picture and the case, peculiar though it all sounds. A local newspaperman helps him identify the man in the photograph -- not named Conroy after all, but rather likely that it's Harvey Wade Prendergast, a wealthy, married man with two daughters in their twenties -- and a man who happened to have died of food poisoning just two years earlier.
       Shaw sniffs around, finding not just the widow and two daughters at the Prendergast estate but also Harvey's brother Frank, who settled in here around the time of Harvey's death and has made himself comfortable ever since.
       As Frank observes, about Shaw and the case:

I know something of you; I've done some checking. You're a man who probes -- and probes. This situation can't stand probing.

- M.A.Orthofer, 19 July 2026

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Links:

• Bill Crider
• mobilemojoman

• IMDb page

• See Index of Mysteries and Thrillers
• See Index of Contemporary American fiction

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About the Author:

       American author Keith Laumer lived 1925 to 1993.

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© 2026 the complete review

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