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.