There have been plenty of attempts in the last twenty years to bring the old-style private eye of the Hammett and Chandler era into the modern world but few have been as engaging and entertaining as G.M. Ford's shot at it in his novels featuring the Seattle-based investigator Leo Waterman. Half wisecracking smartass and half unreconstructed hippy still in thrall to the ideals of the sixties, Waterman ambles through a series of unlikely and often very funny adventures in his native city. Aided, and occasionally impeded, by his sidekicks, a gang of 'residentially-challenged devotees of cheap alcohol' (i.e. drunken bums), he succeeds, despite the odds, in triumphing over the bad guys. Waterman made his first appearance in Who in Hell is Wanda Fuca?, a book which Ford claimed, as others have done before him, that he wrote after reading a particularly poor crime novel and deciding that he could do better. Given the job of tracking down the runaway granddaughter of a local bigshot, Leo stumbles into a plot that involves polluters dumping toxic waste illegally and environmental activists prepared to go to almost any lengths to stop them. Both sides seem equally unenthusiastic about his enquiries and he and his dysfunctional bunch of boozers have to sharpen what wits they have as they look to unearth the truth.

Sadly, Leo Waterman's career seems to have come to an end. The sixth book, The Deader the Better, appeared in 2000 and there are no signs of more to come. His creator's career, however, has continued apace and Ford has published several books in a new series featuring a true crime writer named Frank Corso. They are excellent examples of a darker brand of crime fiction but fans of Leo Waterman will none the less mourn the departure of one of the most memorable PIs of recent decades.

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