Dead in Center Field

Dead in Center Field (1983) by Paul Engleman is the first book in a series of detective fiction novels featuring private eye Mark Renzler. Engleman’s debut novel, Dead in Center Field won the Private Eye Writers of America SHAMUS Award for best original softcover.

Renzler is a hard-bitten private eye in the tradition of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. He drinks, he smokes, he has an eye for the ladies. Set in the summer of 1961, Renzler and his sidekick, Nate Moore, are super fans of a fictional baseball team, the New York Gents, whose young player Marvin Wallace is on track to break Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record. As Wallace gets closer to that milestone, the stress piles up; it doesn’t help that midway through the season, baseball commissioner Ebel Chapman issues a ruling that Wallace would have to best Ruth’s record in the same 154 games Ruth played, in order to qualify for the history books, even though Wallace is playing in the era of an expanded 162-game season.

Engleman’s story is based in part on the real-life events of the summer of 1961, when Roger Maris of the New York Yankees broke the 60-hour run record Ruth had set as a Yankee in 1927. Engleman brings in actual events from Maris’s season, including the death threats and the stress that caused Maris’s hair to fall out, but he takes the story in an entirely different direction by making the owner of the Gents, Arthur Fielding, and the league commissioner, Chapman, complicit in an effort to murder Marvin Wallace to prevent him from breaking Ruth’s record—and to keep Fielding’s nebulous financial affairs from being exposed.



Engleman follows all the rules of the genre: Renzler has a sharp, sardonic wit, and Moore, a beefy, muscle-bound sidekick must often come to Renzler’s rescue. Renzler falls for red herrings and pays for his mistakes in blood, but his superior intellect and dogged determination eventually win the day. A former minor-league ballplayer who was hit in the face by a pitch and blinded, ending his career, Renzler has a business teetering on the brink of disaster. Renzler is also an ex-cop, whose two years on the force led him to regard all forms of authority with suspicion. During his investigation, he does encounter and befriend a few police officers while also encountering inept or corrupt ones. This is a standard trope of the genre: there is no line separating the good guys from the bad, no way to know who is on the right side of the law and who is not.

The novel begins as Marvin Wallace’s wife, Rita, using a fake name, hires Renzler to find the men who are trying to blackmail her with the threat of comprising pictures. She admits to having an affair but won’t say with whom. Renzler goes to the blackmailer’s rendezvous, arriving just in time to see a car fleeing the scene, leaving behind a man beaten to death with a baseball bat. The next day he gets a call from Fielding, the owner of the Gents, who wants to hire Renzler to investigate threats being made against Wallace that specifically refer to Babe Ruth’s record.

During his investigation, Renzler discovers Rita’s identity and that she and Fielding were having an affair. Through a complicated series of events and connections, Renzler further realizes that Fielding is in bad financial shape, having gotten in too deep with Anthony and Jack Russo, brothers with ties to the mob. The Russos are part of an illegal gambling ring which Renzler stumbles upon and nearly dies as a result.



Renzler also encounters a psychopathic millionaire, William Bosworth Tidwell, who is obsessed with Babe Ruth and the early New York Yankees. He has a team of housemen/thugs who look like and are dressed in the uniforms of famous Yankee players of that era including Joe DiMaggio and Lou Gehrig. One of Tidwell’s nephews turns out to be Perry Powers, the PR person for the Gents. Between Powers and a corrupt equipment manager, as Wallace gets closer and closer to Ruth’s record, Tidwell arranges to have Wallace receive a bat loaded with dynamite. Renzler steals a police car and makes a frenzied run to Yankee Stadium just in time to prevent Wallace’s murder. The equipment manager detonates the bat on himself in center field, becoming the dead man of the title.

Tidwell flees to Cuba; Renzler confronts Fielding with what he knows, agreeing to keep some of Fielding’s misdoings secret in exchange for reparations by Fielding to Wallace. Renzler testifies at a hearing for the attempted murder, held by the commissioner Chapman, confronting the commissioner and the crowd with some—but not all—of what he knows. The commissioner is disgraced for having taken money from Tidwell to change the rules around Babe Ruth’s record, and Powers is outed as Tidwell’s nephew and accomplice. Chapman pulls a gun on Renzler; Fielding tries to wrestle it away and is killed in the process.

Readers should be aware the novel sexualizes and objectifies women and uses homophobic language. These are standard ways in which the private eye is portrayed as a loner, functioning outside the rules of society. Engleman further continues in the tradition of detective fiction by creating grotesque characters, from a baseball player, Harry Harkness, with a penchant for hawking up phlegm everywhere he goes: “a yellowish green hairball the size of a nickel slid off the pink ridge of his tongue,” to a criminal conspirator, Roxanne West, whom Renzler identifies as “big fatty.” A man with acne is “Pizza Face,” and Renzler wonders how another Powers “managed to develop a full head of dandruff,” but was “polite enough not to ask.” These descriptions are consistent with another theme of the genre: the question of whether the insides of a person match the outside, whether an evil person looks evil and vice versa.



Engleman intermixes real baseball players with invented ones, some of whom have characteristics or traits that are reminiscent of other real players. The New York “Gents” puns on the names of the New York Mets and the (former) New York Giants. While some of these references are lighthearted, there is also an undercurrent of race/racism in the novel: Marvin Wallace’s race is never specified but it is strongly implied that Tidwell and Chapman, among others, want to protect the white Babe Ruth’s legacy in a paternalistic, potentially racist way, reflecting the way real-life black and other non-white players have faced challenges to their legitimacy and achievements, both subtly and overtly. The private eye is always on the side of the underdog, the little guy, and in making baseball’s newest record-breaker (potentially) non-white, Engleman would be giving Renzler the ultimate champion.

Additional novels featuring Renzler follow this one; Engleman also created another detective fiction series set in his native Chicago. In addition to his fiction writing, Engleman is an award-winning journalist.