Pursuit without arms

Press, 29 April 1978, Page 17

Pursuit without arms

Jay J. Armes Investigator: The World’s Most Successful Private Eye. By Jay J. Armes (as told to Frederick Nolan). McDonald Raven Books. 233 pp. $11.50. We have read about, or seen on elevision. “private eyes” of ail colours — blind ones, crippled ones, homosexual ones, criminal ones and here, to add to the collection, we have one who lost both his hands while playing with dynamite as a boy. This does not stop Mr Armes from having a highly sophisticated agency with every electronic aid imaginable to help him solve crimes that the police find opaque.

His highly flamboyant private life includes a private zoo (containing lions and cnimpanzees), helicopters, huge artificial water-falls and private lakes, a unique collection of firearms with each of which he is expert. Mr Armes also has secret guns hidden in

his artificial limbs. He is able to do with his hooks far more than the ordinary man can do with normal hands and. in tact, becomes a junior version of the six million dollar man Unfortunately the “capers" he describes, which are the contracts he carries out for various clients, are inclined to be fairly humdrum even when such well-known names as Marlon Brando are involved. It is mostly shadowing of soouses ascertain what their spare time activities amount to and the occasional situation in which some lovely woman throws her body at him, but tie resists, still giving a tenth of his income to

his church There is no doubt that Mr Armes enjoys his life and has compensated for the loss of his hands. But the simple, expansive vagaries of a selfmade man do not make absorbing true life adventures. — RALF UNGER.