BINGO RIGGS AND HANDSOME KUSAK MYSTERIES : the sunday pigeon murders

Bingo and Handsome are trying to make money with their photography business: they photograph people in Central Park, then hand over their business cards and offer to sell the photographs to the subjects themselves. Thanks to Handsome's photographic memory, they realize that they have a picture of a man who has been missing for almost seven years and is about to be declared dead. The missing man, S.S. Pigeon, leaves behind an insurance policy that is worth $500,000 to his former business partner, Harkness Penneyth. Bingo and Handsome cook up a plan to kidnap Mr. Pigeon just long enough for his death to be declared, hoping that the heir will kindly split his wealth with them. Before long, things go wrong. First of all, they decide that they like their kidnap victim. This is not too big a problem, because Mr. Pigeon is willing to be held, and Bingo and Handsome don't think that they are committing a serious crime by holding him. However, when other players in the game start turning up dead all around them, Bingo and Handsome have to solve the crime in order to save themselves and Mr. Pigeon from the same fate. Beautiful women, gangsters, a missing butler and a dramatic Latin American revolutionary poet all enter the story. Two New York City street photographers develop a deadly get-rich-quick scheme in this novel from “the grand dame of mystery mixed with screwball comedy” (Ed Gorman). Resourceful Bingo Riggs and his partner, Handsome Kusak, are in the sucker-bait business, snapping candid pics of tourists off Central Park. Their fly-by-night enterprise can be irresistible to souvenir lovers, but with one camera in a pawnshop and their developing room in the bathtub of a two-room dump near Hell’s Kitchen, their venture is wretchedly underexposed—until they stumble upon an insurance fraud scheme between the allegedly dead eccentric Mr. S. S. Pigeon and his business partner and beneficiary. There’s only one way for Bingo and Handsome to muscle in on that half-million-dollar claim: Kidnap Pigeon and blackmail his coconspirator. Unfortunately, their foolproof plan comes with mobsters, a dodgy chorus girl, multiple murders, a refrigerated corpse, and the strange Mr. Pigeon himself, who, it seems, likes being a hostage. In fact, he has no intention of escaping. It’s the surest way to protect his own secret—which could be Bingo and Handsome’s biggest threat. The first mystery writer ever to make the cover of Time magazine, Craig Rice is a “composite of Agatha Christie’s ingenuity, Dashiell Hammett’s speed, and Dorothy Sayers’s wit” (Louis Untermeyer, Gold Medal Award–winning poet). The Sunday Pigeon Murders is the 1st book in the Bingo Riggs and Handsome Kusak Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.