He should be. According to the cover blurbs, Cockey was a story analyst for American Playhouse, ABC and Hallmark Entertainment. He has promoted professional opera productions. He has edited books about how to get other people to give you money. One method, apparently, is to write a mystery novel based upon the exploits of an undertaker.

Though it involves regular contact with dead people, some no doubt murdered, you might have thought undertaking a particularly bloodless profession. Hitchcock Sewell (yup) quickly proves this assumption wrong, figuratively by lusting after a misplaced mourner in Parlour One of Sewell & Sons, and literally by taking a punch on the nose at a grave-side dust-up.

The trouble, or fun, begins when an attractive woman stumbles into Sewell's life to arrange her own funeral. The commitment is soon fulfilled by suicide, except the corpse is not the same woman Sewell all too warmly laid eyes upon a few days earlier. That's it. Cockey has the story and the reader wound up. He lets go.

Unfortunately, the spring winds down before the story does. Most of the action revolves around the mystery woman, not the protagonist. The plot is advanced in a series of realizations, discoveries and teary confessions related to Sewell after the fact. Hitchcock gets involved in some amusing asides and Cockey gooses things along with those funny one-liners, but all the really interesting stuff seems to happen off stage. The climax is spread over four chapters of explanation. Admittedly they're short paragraphs, but still.

This may satisfy cozy fans who enjoy the wit and offbeat characters without really caring who done what to whom. Devotees of the hard boil may find the decline in energy a bit disappointing.