The Monkey’s Raincoat was published by Bantam in 1987, introducing Elvis Cole and Joe Pike — the partnership that would anchor thirteen novels over the next three decades and make Crais one of the most successful PI writers since Robert B. Parker.
Ellen Lang, a timid housewife, hires Cole to find her missing husband Mort, a small-time Hollywood agent. Mort has taken their ten-year-old son. The case leads Cole from the veneer of legitimate Hollywood through progressively darker layers: Mort was laundering money for a drug trafficker, the trafficker has Mort and the boy, and the LAPD’s handling of the case is compromised.
Cole is the wisecracker — he keeps a Pinocchio clock in his office, quotes Jiminy Cricket, and maintains a surface of California insouciance that masks genuine competence. Pike is his opposite: silent, deadly, a former Marine and ex-LAPD officer who wears mirrored sunglasses and never smiles. Their partnership — cerebral talker and lethal physical force — owes debts to Spenser/Hawk and Holmes/Watson but achieves its own identity through the warmth beneath Pike’s silence and the seriousness beneath Cole’s jokes.
Collecting The Monkey’s Raincoat
First edition (Bantam, New York, 1987): Paperback original.
Market values:
- First printing paperback, fine: $40–$100
- Signed: $100–$250
- First UK hardcover (Piatkus): $60–$150