Sleuth’s Wild Side Spices Up Mystery

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who tried in vain to kill off Sherlock Holmes, was the first to discover it: Writing a mystery series with a terrific main character is a mixed blessing. It’s like owning a St. Bernard. The payoff (fame and fortune with the character, love and security with the dog) is obvious, but there are liabilities too, and they mount up. The animal is always there, inescapable, shedding and drooling and chewing the furniture, and the food bills can be outrageous.

Lauren Henderson, known, her publisher tells us, as “the dominatrix of the British crime scene,” has come up with a terrific main character in Sam (definitely not Samantha) Jones, a tough-talking but tender-hearted sculptor whose life in London’s demimonde keeps being interrupted by murders to solve.

In Holmes’ cases, did we care about the victims? No, we read to see the master detective work his miracles of deduction. Similarly, we read “Black Rubber Dress” to enjoy watching Sammy Jones run. The murders are a conventional scaffolding on which Henderson can display her unconventional heroine, who likes men, lots of men (no strings attached), likes booze and isn’t above a sniff of cocaine now and then, but remains essentially uncorrupted no matter how much fun she has. Who wouldn’t fantasize about being like her?

Sam wears the raunchy costume of the title to a reception for the unveiling of her latest statue, “Floating Planet,” in the atrium of a London bank. A security guard she has befriended while hanging the massive assemblage (true to character, she isn’t a molder of clay but a hammerer and welder of metal) has a heart attack and dies. His last words hint that he’s been blackmailed. Days later, Charles de Groot, fiance of one of the bank chief executive’s two daughters, is also found dead--on the atrium floor, squashed by “Floating Planet,” which has fallen or been made to fall out of orbit.

Some blame Sam for failing to hang the thing properly. For this and other reasons--such as the contrast between the guard and the spoiled rich people he had to work for--she gets involved, which means leaving her own orbit, art and bohemia. Solving crimes was a vocation for Holmes; it’s a job for the heroes of police procedural. Sam isn’t one of them, and this is already causing Henderson some problems. Sleuthing isn’t what makes Sam interesting, but the hip outsider’s life she leads before the bodies start turning up. Accordingly, the first half of “Black Rubber Dress” is fresh and fun, the second half routine.

De Groot, it emerges, wasn’t killed by the statue. He had already overdosed on heroin. A social climber, he was blackmailing many of his colleagues to subsidize a lifestyle that would enable him to hang out with the chief executive, Sir Richard Fine, and Fine’s ditzy, drug-addled daughters, Suki and Belinda. Where did the drugs come from? Investigating, Sam has to mix with an unfamiliar tribe of savages, those who inhabit high places, and surveys and skewers them like a bemused anthropologist.

She also has an affair with--the shame of it all!--Sebastian Shaw, a suit-wearing, BMW-driving, albeit handsome, investment banker. Hot sex and snappy repartee flourish, but in mid-story Sebastian suddenly gets swamped by work, and Sam, chasing clues, seems almost to forget about him. He doesn’t belong in her world, after all, and the next mystery will require a new man or two. Chalk up Sebastian’s fade-out--after Henderson has gone to such lengths to make him a worthy love interest--to the St. Bernard syndrome: the price a mystery writer has to pay to let the big dog hunt.