Fred Zackel

In January 1978 Ross Macdonald wrote, "Fred Zackel's first novel reminds me of the young Dashiell Hammett's work, not because it is an imitation, but because it is not. It is a powerful and original book made from the lives and language of the people who live in San Francisco today."

TIME magazine described it as "A spectrum of sex, aging flower children, mafia money, houseboat life in Sausalito, booze, barbituates, bitterness, incest and greed ... as nerve-rattling as a full-throttle auto chase!"

When the novel was reprinted in 2006, Loren D. Estleman, the author of NICOTINE KISS said,
"The American private eye story was in the Dumpster when Fred Zackel fished it out at the point of a gun. He revived the form, electrified readers and critics, and started the juggernaut that shoved aside the paperback romance to establish the mystery as the most popular category in the world. Finally, the generation that grew up since COCAINE AND BLUE EYES has the chance to meet Michael Brennan. An event like this ought to have a national holiday connected with it."

Tom Nolan, author of "Ross Macdonald: A Biography," wrote that "The American private-eye novel enjoyed a resurgence in the 1970s, and Fred Zackel's "Cocaine and Blue Eyes" was a unique part of that literary blossoming. Set in the Bay Area of Northern California, this fast-moving 1978 novel speeds through an eventful Christmas and New Year's season with all the energy of a classic genre bursting with new life. From page one, it's clear the book's author is a born storyteller, one who brings a personal vision to the templates of the past.

"Cocaine and Blue Eyes" - the tough tale of a semi-pro detective hunting high and low in San
Francisco society for a missing person who maybe isn't missing, on behalf of a client who is
without a doubt dead - evokes some of the tone and terrain of Dashiell Hammett, some of the
seductive cadences of Raymond Chandler, and some of the poetic flashes of Ross Macdonald (who enthusiastically supported its publication.) What seems most Zackel's own is the sensibility of investigator-protagonist Michael Brennen: a man coming up through the underside, to find his own moral center.

Fred Zackel's novel reads today with the same raw vigor as when it was written. If some of its slang, social-sexual attitudes, and pharmacological lore now ring out of date, such jarring notes only validate the book's integrity as an honest time-machine: a beat-up-cab-ride back some 30 years to when parking-meters took pennies, cigarettes were smoked in restaurants, cocaine was thought to be neither addictive nor fatal; and when - then as now - "Only the lucky solve cases."

Fred Zackel has a Ph.D. in English and has taught literature and the humanities for the past two decades at a Midwestern state university. He has also published over 90 short stories and essays.

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