The D.C. Man #1: Top Secret Kill - James P. Cody (Peter T. Rohrbach)

I vaguely remember seeing copies of the original editions of the D.C. Man series in used bookstores back in the Seventies, but I never bought or read any of them. I guess they just didn’t stand out enough from the many, many men’s adventure and mystery series being published then. But they resurfaced a few years ago when my friend Tom Simon of the Paperback Warrior website and podcast became interested in them and decided to find out the true identity of the author of those four novels, who was by-lined as James P. Cody. (To digress for a moment, I was asked once by a fan if I was James P. Cody, given my first name and the fact that the protagonist of my first novel is named Cody. I answered honestly that I had nothing to do with those books and hadn’t even read them.)

Well, to sum up what you can read in Simon’s entertaining and informative introduction to these new reprints of the series, “James P. Cody” turned out to be Peter T. Rohrbach, a former Catholic priest from Washington, D.C., who left the priesthood, married and had a daughter, and wrote the four novels in the D.C. Man series as well as numerous works of non-fiction. Simon’s investigation into the author led, in turn, to the series being reprinted by Brash Books, and that led to me reading the first novel, TOP SECRET KILL, fifty years after it was first published.

The D.C. Man is Brian Peterson, former football player and member of Army Intelligence. Having married the daughter of a politician, he becomes a lobbyist in Washington, D.C., only to have his comfortable life shattered by tragedy when his wife and infant daughter are killed in a car crash. After a period of mourning and generally going to seed, Peterson resumes his career as a lobbyist, only he has a sideline now: he's a fixer for anybody who has an embarrassing and/or dangerous problem they need taken care of discreetly. And since he operates in Washington, there’s never a shortage of dangerous jobs for Peterson to take on. This set-up allows him to put his physical toughness and his investigative background to work.

All this is back-story, which Rohrbach takes a while to set up, but he does it painlessly enough that it’s easy to keep reading. Peterson, who narrates the story in first-person, has been a behind-the-scenes troubleshooter for a while when TOP SECRET KILL opens. After a brief sequence to set the stage and show us Peterson in action, he’s hired by a senator to investigate a leak in a committee dealing with military expenditures. This serves as a fairly low-key Macguffin, since the whole thing doesn’t really amount to any sort of earth-shaking threat, but it works well enough to get Peterson involved in some tough-guy stuff and a couple of murders. There’s also a beautiful blonde along the way to liven things up for him.

As you can tell from that description, TOP SECRET KILL is pretty much a private eye yarn in everything but name. As such, it reminds me of a couple of other tough guy series set in Washington, Stephen Marlowe’s Chester Drum novels (and Drum actually is a private eye) and the Steve Bentley novels by E. Howard Hunt writing as Robert Dietrich (Bentley is a two-fisted CPA). Rohrbach wasn’t as polished a writer as Marlowe or Hunt, but he spins this yarn in entertaining fashion and it moves along quite nicely once everything is in place. I enjoyed this one enough that I’m sure I’ll read the other novels in the series, and if you’re a fan of Seventies men’s adventure or hardboiled detective fiction, I certainly recommend getting to know the D.C. Man. This one is available in paperback and e-book editions from Amazon, as are the others in the series.