Miller and Kelby Major Case Squad Files A Collection of Short Stories by Maxine Flam
Publisher: Chapeltown Books
Genre: Mystery/Suspense/Thriller, Historical
Rating: 3 Stars
Reviewed by Astilbe

Two Detectives, One City

The time: the late 1970sThe place: Los Angeles, California

Joseph (Joe) Miller and William (Bill) Kelby are detectives with the Major Case Squad. They get the hard-to-solve cases. And they solve them the old fashioned way with grit and determination, forensics, and help from the department psychologist.

Miller and Kelby are a dedicated detective team that Los Angeles turns to when there are unsolved murders in the city. And solving murders is their speciality. They put their lives on the line every day for the citizens of Los Angeles, a city that rarely sleeps.

Intuition is an underrated skill.

This was a varied look at life before the Internet existed. Everyone from nuns to serial killers to prostitutes were included, although the emphasis was on people on the margins of society for a variety of reasons. Joe and Bill needed to rely on their training and gut feelings about cases as doing any sort of research on the victims or suspects could be tedious and might not turn up anything new about them at all. Hunches aren’t proof, of course, but it was interesting to see how these characters found themselves proven right – or sometimes maybe not so right – once they’d gathered more facts.

While genre fiction is bound to have a certain amount of repetition of themes and plot twists, I did find myself wishing that this collection had branched out a little more from what typically happens in historical mysteries. The short lengths of these tales only highlighted those moments even more. This is something I’m saying as a reader who enjoys mysteries quite a bit and really wanted to choose a higher rating.

With that being said, the way these cases tended to blur into each other did mean that I was able to spend more time exploring Joe and Bill’s personalities as well as their relationship with one another as colleagues. They shared so much in common that it was refreshing to take note of the differences that existed between them and what each officer thought of their partner.

Miller and Kelby Major Case Squad Files A Collection of Short Stories made me feel as though I’d travelled back in time fifty years or so.