When Sheila Sharp Became The New Sheriff In Town -One Last Tidbit On The Fate Of Famed California Private Detective Lew Archer -Out Of Sorts With His Times  

By Seth Garth

[Over the past few years I have spent plenty of cyber-ink on the rise and fall of 1950s California private detective Lew Archer who as it turned out only recently died in 2019, a fact which surprised me and started me rethinking what I had done about him in the past. That work is pretty well documented in a few pieces published recently (as well as the earlier work).

One of the points that I made constantly, and which applies here as well is the role Sheila Sharp played in trying to get Lew back on his feet once he started crashing and thrashing around on cases letting the body counts get out of hand. At a point when it was clear to everybody in California that Lew was a has-been, had fallen down she offered him, and he accepted repo and key-hole peeping work from her agency in San Francisco. That work the lowest of the low in the profession at least kept him in coffee and cakes, kept him in touch with the profession. After a while though he screwed up royally on a repo case where he grabbed the wrong guy and the wrong car and Sheila had all she could do to fix the mess up. That and the hard fact that the key-hole peeping business which centered on getting enough adulterous dirt on somebody for the client to get a divorce dried with the increase in no-fault divorces and a lightening up of the divorce laws in most jurisdictions.

It is not clear why Sheila had a soft spot for Lew (although her Boston copper father had worked with Lew on a couple of cases the few times he headed east) but she kept him on as the office go-fer. You know take the coffee and orders, lunch stuff like that. Kept on until she found out he was hanging around with notorious junkie private eye Kenny Millar, working as his bag man. Worse starting to get a little horse habit and spiraling down even further grabbing the petty case dough meant for coffee and stuff. She gave him a fast boot then.

But enough of the Sharp-Archer connection because what I want to discuss today is how new private detective style Sheila prospered in her time when the whole profession was moving away from male hard-boiled stuff, the stuff Lew grew up with and could not shake when things changed.]  

Like a lot of private dicks Sheila started with the public coppers (as mentioned above her father was a Boston copper which smoothed the way for her*), got tired of the police bureaucracy runaround and general bullshit and decided to go private. She had a few missing person’s cases which she solved, at least the ones who did not really want to stay missing and a few ordinary trace the theft and recover cases from private parties. Par for the course starting out. What got her off the humdrum heap was hammering the Doyle case which included murder, craziness and guns not necessarily in that order. That case is also instructive not only because he set her on a path to eventually become the first female member of the P.I. Hall of Fame but about the dramatic change in style and working habits the 1970s and later brought with them.      

(*Sheila is not going to lie this although we have talked about it before on many occasions but her father Frank was such a crooked cop he needed somebody to help him put his pants on. Sheila idolized her father and either never knew or never wanted to know what Frank was really like. I knew him a little from guys I grew up with who had become lawyers in Boston who had to deal with him when they were looking for parking stickers. Those were supposed to be freely given when available for businesses and professionals who needed spaces on an on-going basis. Frank strong-armed his way to a thou per for the privilege of parking on the streets of Boston.

Sheila is really not going to like this but beyond the traditional graft and pay-offs from gangsters and others Frank had a little “collection” racket going. In the 1980s, the time of troubles in Ireland, many bars and other establishments in Irish neighborhoods like Southie and Dorchester would have a bowl or a box located in some prominent location but with no designation on it. Guys would stop by and throw a few dollars or whatever they had in and that was that. The cause was to aid the boyos in the North, the IRA guys, in their struggles against the bloody British. Frank would come on say late Friday afternoon and “skim” his share from the pile. Of course the owners weren’t going to squawk since he was “protecting” their various operations. If they had known though I bet more than a few longshoremen and other hefty types would have had their noses bent out of joint and done something about it. The late Frank Sharp was certainly not one of nature’s noblemen.)

Sheila when she told me the Doyle case mentioned that she had been having an affair with one of the Doyle sons, Richard. This is important because what happened was that he was target number one in what turned out to be an old-fashioned powerplay ethnic rivalry between the Irish and Italian bad guys who ran the various illegal operations in southern New England. The way she got involved was that this Richard was supposed to be out of the line of fire, was supposed to be kept clear of his family’s “businesses. Somebody broke what was essentially an armed truce by taking on Richard, a couple of his uncles Fritz and Freddie , a few of Desmond’s (his father) employees and assorted flak-catchers.

Nobody could figure out why until somebody told Sheila to look for the money trail, look to what the Doyles were spending their hard cash on to make even more cash. Naturally it turned up to be illegal, illegally gathering up every available stock of guns on the East Coast. For starters though guns were supposed to be under Italian control according to Richie Rizzo, the kingpin of that crowd (not Mafia but close). Still blowing away a bunch of Irish guys when some arrangement could be made didn’t stack up. Sheila sensed something more was at play-something that was superheating the ethnic rivalry thing. Of course this had to about women, about sex but in an odd way.      

Nobody can blame an Irish guy for not chasing the Irish colleens with their stiff white shirts, their rosary beads in hand and their Bible between their knees. What the tow bad ass Doyle brothers, Desmond and Freddie did though was fall, fall hard for a beautiful Italian dish and do something about it, at least one of them. That doing something about it meant having sex and having a child with that woman. An unknown child of sorts in that nobody knew that the kid had grown up to be a gangster with a serious grievance on his shoulders about being abandoned by his fucking Irish dad.  

Put guns and grievances together and you get a possible war without end-except here is where Sheila really did learn a few lessons at the police academy. If you want to roll up a hard ass gangster with a serious piece of weaponry in his hands then hire a hitman, hire Vinnie Morris if you can get him, can afford the gaff. He wasted the sullen kid without working up a sweat. Saved the day for Sheila and Richard too. Then it was up to Desmond and Rickie Rizzo to figure out the gun monopoly and go back to that armed truce that had held so long