“Blue Moon,” a mystery set in 1963, starts right in with liberal name-dropping.

The fictional Philip Damon goes to a Broadway theater with first lady Jackie Kennedy, writers Truman Capote and George Plimpton, and columnist Joseph Kraft, then back to Mrs. Kennedy’s suite at the Carlyle Hotel for supper.

Philip Damon has the same initials as co-author Peter Duchin, and has a similar background. He’s a pianist and leader of a band popular at society galas.

Duchin, making his mystery writing debut, and John Morgan Wilson, author of a hard-boiled series about Benjamin Justice, have created a well-crafted mystery, never too simple or obvious, yet easy to follow. It has some twists and hairpin turns and a satisfying ending that also is not too simple.

Damon’s wife Diana was strangled in their New York apartment two years earlier. They had met in San Francisco and Damon hasn’t been able to return there since her death. His friends urge him to go back, and he does when he takes a job performing at the city’s Fairmont Hotel.

On opening night, while couples are dancing, the lights go out and somebody kills a wealthy man by stabbing him in the chest with an ice pick. There would seem to be no connection to Diana’s unsolved murder – but the murderer was heard to whisper, “This is for Diana.”

Damon and Charlene Statz, whose husband owns the hotel, team up as amateur sleuths. Damon is unpleasantly snippy to the policeman in charge of the case – perhaps Duchin didn’t want to make his alter ego too nice. Damon does something typical of amateur sleuths – he goes off alone into very probable danger.

There are interesting touches, including a woman with an uncanny resemblance to Diana and some valuable missing pearls. There are also pictures drawn of black-white working relationships in the early 1960s, as well as pictures of San Francisco’s beatniks, gay community and rock ‘n’ rollers.