Carl's Cases

Carl's Cases

Ham & Eggs

Raymond Chandler, in an interview described his every-man detective, Philip Marlowe:

“He will always have a shabby office, a lonely house, a number of affairs, but no permanent connection... I see him always in a lonely street, in lonely rooms, puzzled but never quite defeated.”

Carl Lehman is a new and unorthodox figure in the detective story arena. Created by Richard N. Meyer, Carl is at once an homage to the characters of Chandler, Hammett, and Nathaniel West, as well as a modern day Ulysses navigating the best and worst of LA (and of modern world events) as he tries to make a living.

The story Ham & Eggs begins when two gorilla-sized thugs kick the crap out of Carl Lehman while he's on an assignment (one he didn't want) from an old Harvard Law schoolmate. Carl, not one to let a beating go unexplained, is determined to find out the "who and why" of the attack that plopped him in a hospital emergency room.

Quickly, large numbers of arguably unrelated leads point Carl toward the realization that he has stumbled onto a colossal, yet murky conspiracy. His investigation leads him along a trail of political, financial, and criminal misdeeds which winds from LA and its Jewish mob to Washington DC, the White House, back to a Hollywood power player and on to the Middle East…ending in a climax which even Carl could never have envisioned.

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Psych 101

Fabri Literary Prize — Finalist

In this yarn, Carl takes a long walk on the dark side and returns to his would-be alma mater, Harvard Law School; a place from which he was unceremoniously expelled over 25 years before.

It all begins when unsuspectingly and just for kicks, Carl attends a Harvard alumni banquet at the Los Angeles Biltmore. During the festivities, a very classy, old gentile Angelena (Mrs. James Lundquist AKA Mrs. L) strolls up to the keynote speaker (a Nobel laureate psychiatry professor from Harvard) and accuses him of murder.

Against all solicited and unsolicited advice, Carl takes on the septuagenarian schicksa’s case and travels back to his old stomping grounds of Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts to investigate the demise of Mrs. L’s son; a PhD candidate in psychology and student of the good Doctor David J. Baranofsky. As an adversary, the Doctor is a triple threat: an expert in hypnosis, psychopharmacology and dream interpretation. Plus, this research cash cow has more heavy hitters and spin doctors protecting him than Cher did after she divorced Greg Allman for a second time.

Choosing to go undercover as Jerry Golden, Carl takes on the labyrinthine power structures and players of what locals call “The Crimson Cult” AKA Harvard University, only to discover the obvious; he is the odd man out… way out. Carl winds up so far out in fact that when he finally returns to his City of the Queen of the Angels; there are significant parts of his psyche mangled or missing in action.

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Friends Downtown

While mining the Internet for prospective clients, Carl comes upon news clips of five separate suicides. He determines all were leaps from high places, all were gay men and all took place within 12 square blocks of each other in Downtown, Los Angeles. Economic hard times notwithstanding, even Carl could do the math… The proximity and timing of the suicides ruled out random coincidence.

Self-admonishingly, Carl takes the largely unbeaten path toward determining what and/or whom the suicide victims shared in-common. This path leads Carl through the “Throne rooms” of public and private Downtown power. Along the path, Carl briefly becomes a murder suspect when a longtime flame is found brutally slashed to death in her offices. Later, the murderer begins to stalk Carl. All the while, Carl must rely upon his own set of friends, Downtown, to survive.

For more information about Friends Downtown, Contact Us.

Ham & Eggs, Psych 101, and Friends Downtown are works of fiction. Any similarity between their contents and actual events or individuals, living or dead, is purely coincidental. © Copyright 2002 and © Copyright 2004 - Richard N. Meyer