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Super Detective Honey East: ABOVE AND BEYOND

Honey East is a private detective. Her boyfriend is a cop, Detective Strong. He'd like to get married, but she won't tolerate anything more than necking.

She's exploring a routine complaint of marital infidelity. The target is August Carver a well known painter of nudes. The wife suspects her husband is getting it on with a model. Honey sneaks into the artist's studio. On her first foray she is mistaken as a model and poses for the artist.

On later surreptitious break - ins, Honey isn't so lucky. Taken by thugs working for the suspected paramour Rita Evans. Not killed on the spot, she is forced to work in a whorehouse. A chance meeting with a friend leads to a police raid. Honey is saved by Detective North, but that doesn't lead to the happy ending. Instead, with her car and property restored, Honey is furious with her rescuer.

The case was really closed and her fee earned, but Honey decides to continue the investigation to nail the bad guys. That's pretty much the feel good ending preferred in American melodrama.

It's a good pi story, certainly one which displays Wifetheifs' talent of using the Literotic form to tell a story. But I might have preferred the more disappointing ending. With the case concluded without hope of more fees, Honey declares a success and closes the file.

There was a SHERLOCK HOLMES short story where AC Doyle in a "dear reader" passage, recites the ending a romantic reader might have liked and then tells you the characters were so exhausted by the ordeal, they simply went back into their humdrum lives.

Still as told, THE CASE is an item which towers above.

THE ROLE OF THE PRIVATE DETECTIVE

From the time of AC DOYLE's Sherlock Holmes, the private detective has won a firm place in literature and on the small and silver screens as the penultimate "good guy." Holy East follows in that tradition. Investigating a outine assignment, marital fidelity takes her on a path. through nude modelling and through misadventure enforced prostitution. In the course of the misfortune that befalls her, Holy East through the "big mouth" of the bad guys learns of their drug smuggling ring.

Fate swings in her direction. A trick turns out to be an old friend summons police. Her annoying boyfriend, the police captain, raids the House of Prostitution, springing her and sending her captors off to the pokey. The smugglers are still at large. Naturally, she's completed her assignment, makes her report and, her job done, is entitled to be paid.

But she goes beyond all that to nail the smugglers.

That follows in the path of all the private detective yarns in the movies and on TV.

DOG THE BOUNTY HUNTER used to exude that sort of self righteousness in the Evangelical Christian overtones of his pitches to his subjects. His son Leland foams at the mouth with how much they want the bad guy or gal. But it's all business, there is no commitment to an ethereal good. They'll bail the malefactor out again.

Holy East is our hero. She'll fight for the right, even though there's no profit in that. Great story!