Crossover Cover: Too Old a Cat

Devlin “Trace” Tracy and his girlfriend Michiko “Chico” Mangini join the New York private investigation agency run by Trace’s dad, ex-cop Patrick “Sarge” Tracy. Sarge’s office is above Bogie’s Restaurant & Bar. A Mafioso who hires Sarge to look into his wife’s involvement with a cult says, “I heard there were some private eyes hung out downstairs in the restaurant.” Sarge replies, “One’s a broken-down pug and the other one’s a one-armed communist.” Detectives William “Tough” Jackson and Ed Razoni investigate the murder of the cult’s guru. The “broken-down pug” is Robert J. Randisi’s private eye Miles Jacoby, while the “one-armed communist” is Michael Collins’ P.I. Dan Fortune. Both detectives hung out at Bogie’s (a real restaurant popular among mystery writers) in their respective series, and ran into each other there in Randisi’s novel The Steinway Collection. Razoni and Jackson were featured in another series of novels by Murphy that were published from 1973-1974.