HOOKS DEVLIN

Armitage X. 'Hooks' Devlin is a private investigator.

When we first meet him, he is locking the door on his office in San Fransisco with the thoughts "and so Armitage X. Devlin, private investigator, goes out of biz ... for the duration". He is obviously anxious for his new life because he is dressed in his Marine Corps officer uniform even though he tells a friend on the city police force that he does not report to San Diego for duty for a month.

Devlin wants to join the fight as a normal Marine but life, and his investigative abilities, will constantly stop that from happening. He is just too good at being a private detective to let such talent go to waste and when there are all sorts of spies and saboteurs and criminals operating during wartime, someone has to catch them. Devlin is one of those catchers.

Eventually he will be moved to Marine Intelligence HQ (thought they were part of Naval Intelligence but not here) but even then he hoped he would be sent overseas to get into combat but always something happens that urgently needs someone with his skills to suss it all out and there go his chances of seeing "normal" duty. One thing Devlin never quite realized in all his frustration about not seeing "action" is that each case he handles for the government invariably involves people knocking his out, throwing a knife at him, or shooting at him. Toss in bombs and car crashes and femme fatales and Devlin will see far more "action" than many regular Marines.

When the War finally comes to an end, Devlin receives his discharge and returns to his old office and picks up his life as a private eye. The kind of cases he handles stays similar to those he took care of while in the service. At his side during this transition is the lovely and interesting Peaches, as devoted to him as always and just as certain to be unhappy about the many beautiful but invariably deadly ladies he encounters.

To Peaches when she tells him about his assignment to find her kidnapped father, "Let's whirl, squirrel". He has a number of different terms of "?endearment?" he uses for her from time to time but his most commonly used is "birdbrain". Oddly enough, for a woman who at times demonstrates how ditsy she can be, she does have a pretty good brain on her shoulder and it seems she is well off thanks to her father and she even saves his bacon a time or three so why she doesn't brain him is not known and hard to believe. This is especially puzzling because he promises on more than one occasion to stop calling her that and yet ...

Hooksie. That is what the lovely and vivacious and eternally put-upon poor Peaches calls Devlin. She is so cute.

This is a really fun series that starts out with Devlin, a cop turned private detective deciding to join the Marines to fight for his country but then landing in intelligence work and spending his time being a detective working with the cops. He would stay so for the war years and then, obviously because he was still popular, he would go back to his old job of private eye.

And he would do all this with tons of action, lots of witty remarks, and the ever lovely Peaches.