"The Dark Mirror" by Basil Copper was the first of 52 (count them) Mike Faraday PI novels that he published between 1966 and 1988. It was also Copper's first published novel, although he had previously published numerous short stories and collections of such. The cover of the book contains the phrase "Move over Marlowe, there's a new P.I. in town" and there is little question that Copper's Faraday is a take-off on Chandler's Philip Marlowe as dozens of PIs invented in the fifties and sixties and even later were. In homage to Chandler's vision, Copper, a British writer who had never been to Los Angeles, placed his own PI in Los Angeles. This city is filled with drinks that taste of limes and bourbon and dusk and neon signs and smog. "The Dark Mirror" also pays homage to Hammett's "Maltese Falcon" by centering part of its plot around a fabulous statute that everyone seems to want to get their hands on.

Copper was not Chandler or Hammett, not by a long shot, but "Dark Mirror" is still a fun, enjoyable read for hardboiled fiction fans. Faraday as a PI fits all the stereotypes. He is not that successful monetary- wise. He is cynical. He cooperates with the law, but doesn't tell the law everything that goes on. The ladies seem to swoon at his presence. He has a terrific sense of humor that neither the lawmen nor the hoods seem to enjoy as much as the reader does.

The book begins with a typical cliched hardboiled atmosphere: "It was hot in Jinty's Bar, a damned sight too hot for my comfort. Even the ice in my drink looked too tired to compete any more by the time it reached me." Besides being a scorcher, there's little to do in the office he shares with another PI. They take turns walking around the block when one of them has a client there. When he goes to the office, he adds scratch marks to his desktop and counts the stains on the ceiling. But, when someone phones, he can "smell the folding money clear across from where he was phoning." What sets his office apart is Stella, the secretary, "a honey-blonde with all the right statistics." When he is not busy, Faraday occupies his time watching her figure.

The descriptions, particularly of the female species, are a bit more risqué than one would find in Chandler's work. This series, after all, started in the mid-sixties, in the post-Spillane world. When Faraday sits in the library, he notes that: "A pert little librarian with a high, tip- tilted bust clip-clopped out." It is amazing how often the women in this book manage to stand by lighted windows with almost transparent dresses on and how often their dressing gowns fall open.

The book also has humorous descriptions that refer to movies and such. For example, a rich man's home is described thus: "The whole place was like Xanadu in Citizen Kane and I kept waiting for the camera boom to come down out of the ceiling." There is also an apple- eating police detective who Faraday becomes buddies with as well as other officers who work him over into a pulpy mess. When Faraday visits a woman, he notes that her bedroom was like a movie set: "To complete the M.G.M. touch there was a blue fox fur coat laid casually across the bed." One landlady he encounters "had iron-gray hair, a face like Joe Stalin and a cigarette burned in a corner of her mouth."

There are points in the novel in which the plot gets a bit convoluted and Faraday jumps from one line of investigation to another without explanation, but that is not unusual for the genre. In the end, while this clearly is not a classic, it is a fun romp with a PI that is little known in America, although with 52 novels in the series, the British must have eaten this stuff up. ( )