THEY FALL HARD

Gil Yates, the low-key private eye who never met a cliché he couldn’t mangle (Ship Shapely, 1999, etc.), revisits the case of a dead Sonny Liston look-alike on behalf of the boxer’s unacknowledged son.

Forty-four years ago, and ten years before his death at 38, officially of natural causes, heavyweight champ Buddy Benson, famed for his round-one knockouts, refused to come out for the seventh round against challenger Claudio Stone, universally dubbed The Mouth. In a rematch against the new champ, now calling himself Abu Hambali, Buddy, after training hard, went down even faster and more unexpectedly. Now that he’s dying of cancer, Richard Manley, the California property owner whose mother Buddy never married, wants the truth about his father. After working out a novel means of paying Gil’s hefty contingency fee, he turns him loose in a jungle of hangers-on with long memories—all except for Abu Hambali himself, now stricken with Alzheimer’s and unable even to follow the career of his prizefighting daughter. As Gil (who insists he doesn’t get all those clichés wrong: “I just customize them”) would say, it’s not exactly taking candy from a baboon. His assignment is to talk one-on-one with some 20 figures from Buddy’s past until eventually one of them tells him exactly what happened, sounding the final bell.

Beneath the unvaried series of dialogue scenes is some rudimentary mystery-mongering and an anticlimactic solution. Even Gil’s trademark malapropisms seem tired.