Whittington’s Strangers on a Friday (1959) follows the lone stranger in town theme. Mac Rivers was an engineer show specialized in planning cities and traffic patterns, but had thrown in the towel when his wife died and now wanders from town to town on whim, ending up taking the bus to Roxmount for no reason he could remember. He is picked up by a lovely woman on the bus, one who was very deft the way she put off his questions, told him nothing, not even her name. But, upon arriving, decides she wants him to accompany her for a drink and a night in a motel. An odd night since the nameless woman was lovely, but there was no thrill the way she stepped out of her clothes. “It was as if she had been doing this all her life with the same sense of excitement she got from washing and drying dishes.” The next morning she kissed him goodbye, “but there was goodbye in the kiss.” She was mysterious and vanished from his life.
But Mac’s life gets even more mysterious that morning when Sheriff Blake cruises by and arrests him for murdering a police officer, shooting him in the back in an alley. Mac’s only alibi was a nameless woman who might not even be a local. The sheriff spends all day trying to sweat a confession out of Mac, who decides to claim he had an appointment with the mystery woman in a bar that night and she could alibi him. And, lo and behold, in the bar, when Mac points to another woman and claims she is his alibi mystery woman, this second woman, who appeared to be upper-class, takes the alibi with all the embarrasment and humiliation it entailed. “She was dreamy, something I would have been pleased to have dreamed.” “If you ever saw her once, you never forgot.” “She looked like the vibrant-charged kind of female who could start a car just by walking toward it.”
Then, the whole thing, which we as the reader are viewing only through Mac’s jaded suspicious eyes, gets even more crazy when Helen Owlser drives him at reckless speeds to an abandoned house where her husband, Morgan, and three hoods are holed up and want to use Mac as a sacrificial lamb.
As always, Whittington’s writing is solid and moves the story along at a breakneck pace. The plot though has so many twists and turns that you are left just as confused as Mac until it is all spelled out and a tale of small-town corruption takes hold and the stranger who they wanted to use as a fall guy figures it out.
“Something’s Down There” (2003) was the final novel published in Spillane’s lifetime. “Hooker Mako” is a Tiger Mann- type character, a rough-and-tumble ex-CIA operative and former police officer who is now retired and living in the Carribean, spending his days on an old canvas chair on the deck of a fishing boat letting the sun bake him with his fishing partner, native Billy Bright. He was retired by mutual agreement from the Company, but with the understanding that no one is ever fully retired and, if duty ever called, he would be re-activated (kind of like a Terminator).
Being in the vicinity of the Bermuda Triangle is not necessarily a good idea and there’s something down in the depths that keeps coming up and biting giant holes in fishing boats, something on the level of a Leviathan of the deep, larger than any shark that modern-day man has ever known. The entire fishing fleet is up in arms about this supernatural beast. And the Company is sending a scientific expedition to look into it. Meanwhile, Hollywood approaches in the form of a film-shooting cruise line that goes wherever the party is and aims to get top-notch footage at whatever cost. Thing is, though, one of the people involved is an ex-mafioso that Hooker remembers. There is a lot going on here and it doesn’t necessarily fit together well in a Jaws meets James Bond kind of way.
Hooker is a great character that perhaps Spillane could have built an entire series around, a gruff retired take-no-prisoners ex-spook reactivated from retirement whenever the Company needs someone like him (and, of course, there is no one like him).
There are two female foils for Hooker. One is an old co-worker from the Company who once shot him, Chana Sterling. Their meet-up here is awkward and tense. When he spots Chana, he wishes he had been packing his .45 with the hammer back “so he could turn and shoot her guts right out of her beautiful belly and it would finally be over with for all time.” The other female foil is Judy Durant, a tall, lovely brunette, who inherited half a movie company from her father and plays the damsel in distress to Hooker’s Tiger Mann/Mike Hammer toughness.
Spillane shows how he can write almost any kind of novel with his awesome descriptions of the tip of an orange-red sun hovering over the edge of the horizon and the water’s surface rolling gently under soft two-foot swells.
Into the Night (orig. copyright 1987; republished by Hard Case Crime 2024) was not completed in Woolrich’s lifetime. It was first published twenty years later after Lawrence Block filled in some missing pages and completed the narrative. Now decades later, Into the Night has been republished with a dynamite cover and is sure to reach new audiences.
“Into the Night” is a dark guilt-ridden journey through angst and ennui. It opens with a shocking suicide attempt as Madeline Chalmers switches off the radio and sits “in the dark, and in the silence.” Normally, she kept the radio loud and the lights bright to keep her thoughts drowned out and to keep “the darkness safely at bay.” “But there came a time when you couldn’t do that anymore.” She essentially plays the world’s worst game of Russian Roullete, clicking on an empty chamber with the gun pointed at her head. “She put the barrel in her mouth, tasted metal on her tongue. Felt the trembling of the trigger.” Why? Simply because her life had no purpose. She just drifted along and had nothing to live for.
Nevertheless, Madeline succeeds in killing a bystander outside when she slams the gun down afterward. But, know this, tricky little Madeline though was not going to go to the pokey for murder, not even second-degree depraved heart murder. She races downstairs and cradles the dying Starr Bartlett and gets the biggest guilt trip this side of the Rockies. Rightfully so, one might add, since she caused Starr’s untimely demise and then covered up her involvement.
But, guilt being what it is, even if Madeline were not going to turn herself into the authorities, she gets a bit curious about who Starr was and visits her apartment, moving into her apartment, and wearing Starr’s clothes. Madeline creepily then visits Starr’s mother who somehow guesses who Madeline is and what her connection must be. Madeline then returns again to visit more and gather more intel on who Starr was.
Indeed, Madeline is going to right any wrongs done to Starr, to somehow assuage her conscience by doing some kind of good deeds for Starr. She tracks down the other woman who Starr’s husband left her for, a nightclub singer named Adelaide or Dell. Strangely enough, Madeline is drawn into Dell’s life as well until the police haul her in and question her.
And for her last act (at least in the book) Madeline tracks down Vick, Starr’s ex-husband to exact some twisted revenge for his leaving Starr all alone in the void of this world and discovers what it was that tore them apart.
Much of the novel is drawn through Madeline’s consciousness and seen through her eyes. Nevertheless, there are various points at which the careful reader might ask whether Madeline is an honest storyteller or whether she is far more devious than she lets on. Or is Madeline just a bit off-kilter, almost committing suicide, and then injecting herself into the crawlspaces of Dell’s life.
It is a brilliant compelling story despite its creepiness and a lesson of how far guilt can take someone.
Mansion of Evil (orig. publ. date Nov. 6, 1950) (gold medal # 129) gained fame as the very first graphic novel, essentially a book-length comic book about crime fiction. The rough plot is that one Beth Halliday, who works at an art gallery, is engaged to crack reporter Larry Brennan. Artist Maxwell Haines though, when preparing his exhibit, falls head over heels for the sexiness of Beth, thinking perhaps that she is his former wife Laura, and tricks her into coming to his — drumroll please- mansion of evil to pose for him. Haines has the pencil mustache of Rhett Butler and is thoroughly charming, at least at first, and apparently, even against her better judgment, can get Beth to do almost anything.
But when she gets there she knows that it is a lonely gloomy spot with big nasty gates – not exactly a stairway to heaven – In fact, as they approach, she is told that she is the first outside to ever see this place or where it is located. “In an ecstasy of sheer terror, Beth is thrust out into the steel grasp of waiting hands! She looks into the faces of vast evil!” She awakens in a bedroom surrounded by iron bars as Haimes and his servants plot her death.
Meanwhile, we get some background on who Laura really was as Brennan the reporter plays detective. Beth is the spitting image of Laura Haimes. She resembles her to a T.
Beth awakens, knowing that they are planning to murder her because she resembles Laura. She declares that she will fight the murdering fiends to her last breath. And Beth fights back, slamming the housekeeper with what appears to be a handy mallet.
Slowly but surely Beth (who Haimes thinks is kind of like Laura) figures out what is going on as Haimes makes one confession after another.
The dialogue is so corny sometimes that it actually works. Haimes tells Beth that he has to destroy her loveliness so she could be his forever. She tells him though that he is a loathsome reptile and how dare he talk of love and that she will destroy him somehow if she lives long enough.
All in all, it is a corny over-the-top exciting adventure of insanity and murderous intentions and the bold intrepid reporter coming to the rescue of the poor damsel being held in an evil palace by a mad genius criminal. This is not to be missed!
Ron Goulart’s fourth and final entry to the John Easy private eye series, “One Grave Too Many,” published in 1974, contains cover art by Erin Fitzsimmons. There are a trio of repeat side characters who do not figure too large in this novel, including Jill Jeffers, the slender blonde heiress Easy had been tasked with finding in the second novel in the series and who is now his girlfriend, Nan, his thirty-six year old secretary who is always fiddling with the air conditioning, an Hagopian, a magazine editor who has the scoop on everyone who is anyone in Los Angeles, particularly all the dirt that is fit to find even if it is not fit to print.
Set in 1970’s Los Angeles, Easy serves as a one-man missing persons bureau, although this time he is not seeking to find a damsel in distress as is normally the case, but a missing man. Easy, we are told, is a “big wide-shouldered man” who is “Thirty-two, with mahogany-colored hair and dark knocked-about look.” Jill, who only appears in the first chapter, is heading to Spain to revive her acting career playing the female lead in a spaghetti western.
The missing man is Gay Holland’s brother, Guy Marks, an advertising executive. Holland does not want to call the police because she has an idea where her brother was last seen- with someone else’s wife. Holland, who Hagopian describes as Sophia Lorenesque, herself lives in an enormous mansion with an angling sprawling house and many arches, red tile roofs, and much twisted wrought-iron. The mystery deepens though when Marks’ cottage is found torn to pieces and marks on the walls seem to indicate that someone was beaten, probably Marks.
Danny Lane is the married woman in question and Hagopian informs Easy that she is a hand model because some women have nifty breasts and others have photogenic hands. He shows Easy a photograph of the redhead, telling Easy” that she has a smile which is half wistful and half bitchy. “Those are the kind of broads to avoid” and that she has sharp pointy breasts and that is “always a bad sign.”
In typical private eye manner, there are a pair of hoods causing havoc, but the key here, one Easy rescues the young man in distress, is that this novel has a maltese falcon chase going on as there is a secret treasure that everyone wants and everyone is willing to kill to get.
The action is well-paced. The story is well-written and gives off the atmosphere of the time. It is too bad that this was the end of the series, but Goulart apparently had other fish to fry and went on to write numerous other novels.
The Same Lie Twice is the third of four volumes in Goulart’s John Easy private investigator series, set in 1970’s Los Angeles. This one has a slight connection to the previous volume, Too Sweet to Die, as it opens with Easy skinny-dipping in a pool with Jill Jeffers, the missing girl from that novel. Having rescued the damsel in distress from heaven knows what perfidious fate, Easy apparently has captured the prize – with that being a long relationship with the slim blonde heiress. The connection is that her friend Joanna has now disappeared and Easy’s long-standing forte of rescuing lost girls comes into play once again.
Joanna and Jim Benning have an odd relationship. He is a struggling copywriter and she is a former model with a penchant for wandering off overnight or for a weekend and returning. Jim tells Easy that he makes $25,000 a year, but Joanna thinks he is worth “a hell of a lot less.”
This time though she went to San Ignacio, an imaginary town, to attend psychiatric sessions. The only clues are a number in her purse and checks made out to a Dr. Gill Jacobs, but signed as Joan St. John, but definitely in her handwriting. And, of course, to seal the lid on this troubled marriage – if it should still be labeled as such – a matchbook from a swapper’s club in San Ignacio.
Easy pokes around the psychiatric facility and finds that Joanna was friendly with one man there who “had a similar fouled-up childhood,” Phil Moseson. But, dear Phil was found dead the previous week. Easy finds that the pair had been at the swingers’ club. Things get odd still when Easy pays a visit to Phil’s surviving sister, Lana Moseson and her pet monkey. Lana was a “frail woman of forty” who tells Easy she has three problems, funny-looking, flat-chested, and drunk. She throws a six-pack literally at him and tells him to open his beer and that Joanna was the bitch who gave Phil the terrific ideas that got him killed.
It is as if you can scratch the surface and find that beneath the surface there are all these odd, off-kilter people drifting through life and Joanna is one of them, caught up in a backfiring blackmail scheme, and on the run to Mexico to escape three tough guys who want what they think she has.
The Same Lie Twice succeeds quite nicely as a fast-paced private eye story with the emphasis on what is hidden behind the doors of all the houses that line the seemingly placid streets of Southern California. It might be just be a bit of a rather tarnished golden dream at that.
Ron Goulart, who has an extensive bibliography including both science fiction (or do we now call that speculative fiction), action heroes, and mysteries for a total of 180 books, put out four books in his John Easy private eye series, including “If Dying Was All” (1971), “Too Sweet to Die” (1972), “The Same Lie Twice” (1973), and “One Grave Too Many” (1974). The original Ace editions contain cover art by Elaine Duillo is terrific, truly capturing the style of the early 70’s era, and the newer cover art of later editions can’t hold a candle to her artwork.
“Too Sweet to Die” opens with Easy, “a tall wide-shouldered man, two years over thirty” with “darkwood brown” hair and a face with “an outdoor, knocked-about look” and who has a private investigations office in Hollywood with all the usual street weirdos parading in front of his door. Easy is called onto a studio lot by commercial producer Marco Killespie who is trying to make a root beer commercial with his primary actress missing in action. His “jungle princess” has vanished, Killespie complains, and wants Easy to find her. “Jill Jeffers was a slim coltish blonde of twenty-five, freckled and faintly sad-looking even in her glossy smiling publicity photos.” Although looking at the publicity handouts, Easy wonders if Jill even existed before 1970, which makes him a bit curious particularly when he realizes that she is really Jillian Nordlin, daughter of the once-powerhouse State Senator Nordlin who has now retired to an estate in Carmel, but still wields power throughout the state.
This means that Easy must hotfoot it up to northern California to find out if she visited her father -though rumor has it they’ve been estranged for years, but first he visits the friend Jill claims to have visited, chubby leather-clad Mitzi Levin, who runs an X-rated movie theater in San Francisco. That leads to one brush off after another and his trip to Carmel somewhat less fruitful considering the men who run Nordlin’s estate not only give him the brush-off, but beat him to a bloody pulp for not minding his own business. He does find that at one point she had been shipped off to a psychiatric facility which specialized in naked howling therapy, but he declines to participate.
Easy’s investigation leads him around the Monterey Peninsula and across the Golden Gate Bridge where he sees firsthand how cold and cruel the hippie-life has become with self-indulgent artists, parties where no one knows who has been there or when they left, motorcycle gangs, and other people. He knows he is on to something when he is run off the road and shot upon.
“Too Sweet to Die” is a fast-moving absorbing private eye tale, offering the reader a walk through the excesses of Seventies California where Life in the Fast Lane nearly proves too much for sweet little Jill.
Douglas Anne Munson, writing as Mercedes Lambert, published four novels and including El Nino which was published originally under the Munson name and a noir trilogy, Dogtown, Soultown, and Ghosttown (published posthumously) about Whitney Logan, a Los Angeles-based criminal defense lawyer who acts more like a private eye with an ex-prostitute Lupe Ramos dressed in miniskirts without typing skills as her secretary and sidekick. Logan does spend time in court and her court scenes include her getting assigned ludicrous defendants such as the one who wants her to go out to the courtroom and plead that it is part of her client’s religion for the Great One to have sex with men who give her money.
In Soultown, Lambert offers the reader a ride through 1991 post-riot Los Angeles, a polyglot arena where streets range from Koreatown to Hollywood’s Thai Town and psuedo-hip Silver Lake. This novel takes place almost immediately after the 1991 riots and Logan notes that she got her fair share of looting cases in arraignment court and that in some areas the gutted furniture and clothing stores had been leveled but the memory of smoke and burning plastics still hung in the air.
This is not the mean streets from classic detective fiction but a new version of Los Angeles just as dulled around the edges and a far cry from the image Hollywood beams to the world. In one scene, Logan drives two blocks from Koreatown, looking for what was once known as a pay phone, and realizes that she was now in an area where Guatemalan women sold mangoes on the corner an grilled corn on the cob on barbeques and strolling crowds of Mexican, Salvadoran, and Honduran shoppers welled in and out of cheap clothing stores pouring out Latin rhythms.
This novel concerns a killing witnessed by Logan who is present only to reassure the women present of the value of the Kye, a Korean community gathering of money, often used to let one of the members open a business. Members of the Kye contribute a fixed amount on a regular basis, and each member then receives the “pot” on a rotating basis until all members have received it. Here, however, the Kye has been stolen from its hiding place and everyone involved is suddenly a suspect.
Logan sort of bumbles her way through this mystery until the resolution at the end.
Ron Goulart, who has an extensive bibliography including both science fiction (or do we now call that speculative fiction), action heroes, and mysteries for a total of 180 books (!), put out four books in his John Easy private eye series, including “If Dying Was All” (1971), “Too Sweet to Die” (1972), “The Same Lie Twice” (1973), and “One Grave Too Many” (1974). The original Ace editions contain cover art by Elaine Duillo is terrific, truly capturing the style of the early 70’s era, and the newer cover art of later editions can’t hold a candle to her artwork.
Set in Hollywood, Malibu, and nearby environs in 1970, “If Dying Was All” casts John Easy as a sort of happy-go-lucky detective who out of nowhere gets a call from a wealthy retired movie producer with an estate in Beverly Hills, although he meets his client in a room that “was dark and sour.” Frederic McCleary was “a puffy, pale man in his middle sixties, with thinning white hair and a prickly moustache.” The backdrop to everything is the raging fires that are an annual part of Southern California life.
McCleary has been a retired recluse for five years since his twenty-year-old daughter, Jackie, who he had a difficult relationship with, seemingly committed suicide by jumping off a yacht out in Santa Monica Bay. She was on the yacht with her hippie-type partying friends. McCleary never wanted to believe Jackie died, particularly since her body was never recovered, although a suicide note was. McClearly has now – five years later – received two letters from his long-dead daughter. The first inviting him to meet her at a hotel in Manzana where she is registered under the name Hollis. The second apologizing for skedaddling before McCleary showed up. McCleary swears the handwriting and the style is none other than Jackie’s and that the hotel staff said Jackie had checked in and checked out. Easy doesn’t exactly believe the letters are authentic and tells the old man so, but gets hired anyway on the basis that he will find out who wrote the letter and if it turns out to be McCleary’s daughter than fine.
Easy does not wear a trenchcoat and a porkpie hat, but he is a laid-back 1970-style guy who cavorts with Marina Harley, who loves to stroll around her apartment sans clothing. We are told that Easy was “a tall wide-shouldered man, two years over thirty, dark and knocked-about looking. His hair was a mahogany brown, short cropped and yet shaggy.” His secretary in his sparse Hollywood office is Nan Alonzo, a “short, broad-shouldered, thirty-six-year old, blonde secretary.” His Hollywood though is not glamour-ville, but filled with silver-haired prostitutes in lavender bellbottoms and spike heel shoes, dwarves, female impersonators, and motorcycle riders.
As the name of the private eye, Easy, suggests this novel is a light and easy read, but captivating. It captures the essence of 1970 California and lets us know that, under all the lightness and sun worshippers on the beaches, there is a bit of darkness and tragedy. It is after all post-Manson Los Angeles only a year after the Tate and LaBianca murders. Although in substance Easy’s investigation appears no different than that of many other private eyes decades earlier, it has a different feel and a different sensibility to it.
Murder on the Side (1956) is the third selection in Stark House’s latest reprint of Day Keene novels. Murder on the Side is the story of a corporate executive Larry Hanson trapped in a humdrum marriage to Olga who throws it all away one night when his hot secretary Wanda Gale throws herself at him. He thinks about his mortality tables and the fact that he had nineteen more working years until he got a gold watch from Atlas Engineering but he feels his arteries hardening and that he is a rut of his own making. He married Olga, who was the file clerk at the office, after one rendevous at a drunken office party and her announcement of pregnancy some weeks later. Now he was “doomed to be a John Q. Doakes, a moderately successful money-making machine living in a typical upper-class Chicago suburb with the first girl he’d ever gotten in trouble.” Now they were barely intimate. He thinks: “The Russians were wrong. It wasn’t religion, it was marriage that was the narcotic of the masses. A man became accustomed to finding Liederkranz and Braunschweiger and boiled ham where he had every reason to find it.”
Into this humdrum life waltzes Wanda Gale on a week when Olga leaves to visit her sick mother, one who Hanson has never met. Wanda, though, when he shows up her apartment in the middle of the night has one problem, she thinks she has a naked corpse in her bed. She wants Hanson to take care of it because naturally that is part of his job responsibilities and as payment she tells him she has been madly in love with him since she first laid eyes on him. She claims this is her ex-boyfriend, newly out of prison, and that he wanted to ravish her again, but she clocked him with the heavy lamp and could Hanson pretty please dispose of the body because naturally the police would never believe a busy executive had not been putting to his gorgeous secretary and that Hanson had not killed the ex-con in a jealous rage. They’ve barely met. They’ve never touched and already she wants Hanson to do body disposal and clean up on aisle five for her.
Hanson naturally takes care of business when he realizes that the ex-boyfriend (Connors) is out, but not forever, and walks the guy in the drunken stupor out to his car with the help of a nearby police officer and then dumps the guy in the bushes with a bottle of booze to keep him warm and Hanson’s fingerprints all over the bottle. Thinking to protect Wanda, he put her up in a new apartment hotel and spends the best night of his life with her. He is so overwhelmed by her physical attentions that he wakes up and decides to ditch Olga and make a new life with Wanda.
But since a crime story is not much without a crime, it turns out that Connors never wakes up because someone tossed three bullets in his chest out in the bushes. Naturally Hanson and Wanda decide no one will ever believe they are innocent and decide to take off the next morning with a few thousand dollars. This amorous pair are now on the run across the country and headed toward Mexico except for a few moments of distrust.
None of this strikes this reader as believable, particularly when Hanson takes his own secret money out of the company safe to travel with, but leaves the entire payroll in cash sitting there. If you are going to go on the run for murder, what’s a little grand theft thrown in? Although all the plot elements are there, Keene was little bit off his game with this one in that you just never really buy in to these two characters (Hanson and Wanda), but nevertheless it is an exciting read.
Naked Fury (1952) is Keene’s novel about machine politics and small-town corruption with the only twist being that Big Dan Malloy, despite the graft and the favors, is a pretty decent guy who actually wants to do the right thing for his “people” living in tenements in the valley. When a crippled newspaper boy is run over and the real culprit covered up by the beating to death of the only witness, Stan Kozak, Malloy starts sticking his neck out and uncovering things he wished he had not. He would rather walk between Katie’s Bar and his other haunts in Phelpsburg putting out the good word for the machine’s candidate, Charles A. Reardon, based on Reardon’s promise to redevelop the tenements and put up parks and swimming pools even though Reardon was a “chinless jerk.” He tells Katie Bishop that he wants to retire and farm a small plantation and get away from it all, but she does not believe it will ever happen and no one else does either. Malloy has that magic quality that lets him be friends with everyone and he would only be half himself isolated on a small farm. What Katie does not like is Reardon’s” black-haired little bitch” of a wife Jane throwing herself at Malloy to seal the deal.
Keene does a fine job of portraying Big Dan Malloy and all the contradictions that are wrapped up in him. His Malloy is a machine-politician whose every other sentence is the “good word” on who to vote for and his every waking hour is spent in conference with his boys fixing this and fixing that for his people. The contradiction here is that Malloy, despite his power and influence, has never lost touch with the little people and still has their back. He plays here the role of the amateur detective trying to ferret out what really happened with the hit-and-run before more bodies pile up in town and the press turns on him finally.
This novel keeps a strong focus on the plot and has quite a bit of action with Malloy often not far from the action.
Stark House’s April 2024 collection of three Day Keene novels, Mrs. Homicide (1953) /Naked Fury (1952) /Murder on the Side (1956) reprises three of Keene’s novels from three different years, different original publishers, and different plots. They are unrelated other than they are Day Keene crime novels from the Fifties and they are all damn good.
Set in New York City, Mrs. Homicide has a title that refers to Connie, accused of murder and married to a homicide detective. This starts with a twist on the classic set-up of the innocent guy who wakes up in a room covered in blood with a corpse and the cops on the way to take in the scene. Generally, with this plot device, the innocent guy, through whose eyes the story is told, takes a leap out the window and down the fire escape and spends the rest of the story on the run trying to prove his innocence with no one willing to listen to him. Keene takes this well-worn plot and twists it a little bit, telling it through the eyes of Homicide Detective Herman Stone whose wife Connie is found naked and drunk in the apartment of the newly-deceased local playboy, Lyle Carey. What’s more is that it appears half the city has seen Connie out and about with Romeo for the last five or six months. Even the phone records support the theory that they have been having a torrid affair.
Detective Stone is the only one who believes in her – although he has his doubts from time to time since the evidence since the evidence is all lined up and he even spends the night in the arms of Myra the telephone operator while Connie spends her first night behind bars. What Keene does so well in this novel is he captures how tortured Stone is by what took place. That begins with the opening scene where he sees her in the precinct station and narrates that she cheated on him, but it did not show. “Her hair was just as red. Her eyes were just as blue. Both of us kept right on breathing. She was still the big beautiful doll I’d waltzed out of a dime-a-dance place when she was eighteen and I was the cop on the beat.”
His next thought though is that he ought to beat her face in. He is horror-struck and humiliated with everyone in the precinct house smirking at him, at the knowledge that she’d been stepping out on him and he would never live down the humiliation of being cuckolded. He thinks: “She wasn’t my wife anymore. She was just a dame in a jam. A red-haired dame who’d slept in my arms a long, long time ago – last night.”
Stone feels all alone and betrayed, but also understands how alone Connie feels among all these people in the precinct who knew her on a first-name basis and now saw her as the village joke and had seen her without her clothes, drunk, disheveled, and covered in blood.
Of course, the story is Stone sticking his neck out for Connie when no one thinks he should, determined to prove her innocence although nothing seems to support that theory. He looks like s a sucker to every guy in town who thinks he is being led around by her even when the proof of her adultery was laid out for all to see. Stone can’t lay off even when ordered to and eventually he is on his own, without his badge, and with every cop in town on the prowl for him.
Keene offers us a fast-paced, emotionally overwhelming, novel that is just too good to ignore.
Published in 2016 when most of you thought the whole mafia-tough guy thing had already been written to the nth degree and there was not much left to tell about that subject, Tommy Red is a fresh exciting take on the subject matter. The set up is that Quinlan King has retired from the organized crime division in New York, sporting a pot belly and gray hair. He has had it with his wife, but drops her off for a week at an island-based art institute in New Hampshire so she is at least out of his hair when lo and behold he spots a guy, Dominick Farese, who should not be there, a mobster who turned state’s evidence. Thinking perhaps his government pension is not enough, especially if he gets divorced, King offers up the rat to Gasper Cirelli, himself an old pot-bellied gray-haired head of a family. And then all hell breaks loose.
Getting someone in the witness protection program is a big deal, but a message has to be passed and Cirelli outsources it to a contract hitter, Tommy Dalton. Dalton has his own issues with a nasty divorce to a woman who decides she might as well tell his 22-year-old daughter that he kills people for a living and he, just wanting to be a stand-up guy and take care of his daughters. Dalton is as good as it gets, but he quickly learns that, even if the job gets done right without any fallback, he was always expendable as well as the old guy Doc who put the deal together. This thing is so damn hot that the Cirellis had a plan in motion to take out everyone who even came close to touching it before the deed was even done. And as the bodies start to pile up, law enforcement starts adding things up and there are just too many wiseguys getting offed to solve this simply.
Timothy Dalton is a great character and represents the lone wolf out on his own with no one to depend on and everyone against him from the Cirelli mob to the law enforcement officers who are putting two and two together and coming up with him. This contract shooting has blowback on everyone even a little bit involved and no one comes out without wounds – that is, those who survive to live another day.
This is without question a top-notch crime fiction tale.
Published in 1988, The Way We Die Now is the fourth entry in Willeford’s quirky police detective series, set in Miami in the 1980’s with a irascible frustrated 42-year-old premature-balding Hoke Moseley trying to get by in a society that seems to have left old dinosaurs like him behind. The primary action in this one is an undercover operation off the books where Hoke goes out to the farmlands and seeks employment as a down-and-out foreman who is so down he is willing to accept employment from anyone, even a guy who is suspected of burying migrant farmworkers in the Florida swamps. His task is to nose around the farm and see what he can turn up in the way of evidence. He regrets the assignment as he soon as he takes it because he has no gun, no badge, no money, nothing to rely on. Little does he know how bad it could get and how quickly and how much a fiasco he has to walk away from him, surviving with his life but not being able to tell anyone what really happened or his role in it.
The second sub-plot is when a parolee who Hoke thought was put away for life takes a plea deal when his murder charge is reversed on appeal and decides to rent the house directly across the street from where Hoke is living with his teenage daughters. This makes him nervous as one can quite imagine and then you get the odd scene where Ellita invites the parolee to dinner at the house and Hoke sits across the table from him glaring. Shades of Hoke lunching with Junior in Miami Blues comes to mind. And, this gets even odder as Ellita decides to go out and date the parolee.
This is a solidly-written, compelling crime story told in Willeford’s offbeat, quirky manner. Willeford passed away the same year (1988) this was published so it became the final book in the Hoke Moseley saga. It is not clear if that was what Willeford planned.
Girl In The Cockpit is one of the best of the Ed Noon books. It’s smoothly plotted, filled with action, and swimming in Avallone’s great descriptive prose. It marks the return of Noon from being the President’s secret agent to being just a plain d private eye in a tiny office, the mouse auditorium, where he continued his love affair with his secretary, Melissa.
The story involves a decades old promise, a lower east side gang (the Hawks) right out of West Side Story, a young fiery Sicilian woman with looks that would spin every man’s head around, a mobbed up guy running a nightclub, a vengeful Sicilian teenager, and a junkyard.
At the tail end of a long writing career, Willeford catapaulted to newfound fame with his four Hoke Moseley novels beginning with Miami Blues. What was it about this series that found new audiences for Willeford’s work? Lawrence Block in the introduction says that “Willeford wrote quirky books about quirky characters, and seems to have done so with a magnificent disregard for what anyone else thought.” Moseley is an odd hero for a police detective series. He is a prematurely-balding denture-wearing 43-year-old, divorced, and just has an odd lookout in life.
That odd lookout stands out quite clearly in “Sideswipe” which begins with Hoke having a nervous breakdown from dealing with too many cold cases, caring for his two teenage daughters who his ex-wife had shipped to him on the greyhound bus when she married a professional ballplayer who was not interested in having her kids around, and watching over his partner, Ellita Sanchez, who is on maternity leave and living with him and his daughters in a suburban house he managed to borrow from a possible murderess since he needed a stable homestead. This fine day Hoke wakes up, gets the paper, sits in his chair on the back patio, and does not get up or say a word for hours. When he is shipped off to Singer Island where his father, Frank Moseley lives with second wife Helen, Hoke decides maybe he has had enough of everything and wants to simplify his life. He decides he is never leaving the little barrier island, that he will buy two sets of coveralls, and not get a telephone. Simplify. Simplify. Simplify.
Willeford though offers us a parallel narrative with one Stanley Sinkiewicz in Riviera Beach, Florida, who had retired from the Ford Motor Plant’s assembly line where he hand-painted with a steady hand a stripe on the side of each car because a machine-ruled line lacked the raciness a hand-drawn line gives to a finished automobile. Maya, his wife, missed the cold slushy Detroit winters and her friends and family. Stanley just wanted to live his simple life on his pension and social security. But, unlike Hoke who rode the night train to simple life, Stanley’s life is about to turn upside down as he is unjustly accused of child molestation, makes pals with his cell mate until the complaint is withdrawn, and when his former cellmate who just happens to be a psychopathic killer, shows up at his now-bachelor pad in Florida, Stanley decides he will join in whatever his buddy Troy Louden is doing. That includes sending a threatening note to the guy Troy held up when he was hitchiking and joining Troy’s little quirky crime family which consists of Troy, a Barbadan painter, and a woman with a body that drew favorable looks from every man but a face destroyed so bad plastic surgery could never fix. It is an odd story about how Stanley, having no one else who seemed to care about him now that Maya had left him, throws in with this odd assortment of losers and psychopaths and plays his part in a violent affair that in retrospect seems a bit ill-planned and off-kilter.
But perhaps that is the magic that Willeford captured in the Hoke Moseley series in the 1980’s – the fact that, once you get to know people, you find out they are all a bit quirky and a bit off-kilter if given half a chance with nothing left to lose. Scratch the surface of the ticky-tacky suburban sprawl and you find that not all is peachy and that everyone you meet might just be treading water above a nervous breakdown.
New Hope for the Dead is the second book in Willeford’s Hoke Moseley series, which late in his writing career, propelled him into newfound fame. Miami Blues introduced the character of Detective Hoke Moseley, a balding, denture-wearing 52-year-old cynical divorcee living in a run-down hotel because his alimony/child support was sucking half his pay. These books are set in Miami at the time of Don Johnson’s Miami Vice and Al Pacino’s Scarface, but it offers a side of Miami bereft of glamour, money, and fame. Moseley is a cynical throwback to a man of a different era who grumbles about being partnered with a woman, doesn’t want a gay secretary, and hasn’t seen his children in ten years since his divorce. Moseley is old school to the max and it shows.
This novel, unlike Miami Vice, is not focused on one face-off between Hoke and his counterpart in the criminal underworld and is more focused on developing Hoke’s character than a single crime story. This is true even though the primary murder investigation involves one drug addict Jerry who overdosed and thousands of dollars seem to be missing from his room. Hoke thinks the death is a bit hincky, but not so hincky that he does not want to date Jerry’s ex-stepmother after the corpse is cleared from the house. After all, Hoke has not had sex in a while and Loretta is a fox.
Nevertheless, much of this novel is involved in Hoke’s life which has him now partnered with Ellita Sanchez working cold cases. Ellita has been thrown out of her father’s home since she is not a thirty-year-old pregnant and brought shame to the family. Hoke comes to her rescue. At the same time, the two daughters he has not seen in ten years show up on the greyhound bus with a suitcase as ex-wife Patsy has left for California with her ballplayer new husband and they do not fit in with her upscale life. Hoke does not know what to do with two teenage girls he barely recognizes, but sees the upside as not having to pay any more child support.
New Hope for the Dead is not action-packed and you never have a concern for Hoke’s safety. It is a slower-paced narrative offering more insight into his character and the solutions he comes up with for the vexing problems he finds in life.
Set in 1973 with the advent of the designated hitter in baseball and, more importantly for this novel’s purposes, the explosion of the underground movie Deep Throat starring Linda Lovelace across movie screens, generally by means of bootleg copies funneled by the mafia to showing locations. As told in the introduction, Deep Throat was a movie idea pitched by a Queens hairdresser to a couple of New York wiseguys who fronted $25,000 to make it and would go on to earn more than $600 million, much of it a windfall to the mafia. Apparently, Lovelace only got $1,500 to $2,500 and lifelong notoriety for her part. It provides the backdrop for this ferocious crime novel set in Queens and Long Island of all places where the title-figure of John Albano, a two-time loser, who lost his five-hundred-dollar a week construction gig when he punched out the foreman and now earns some bucks counting heads at underground showings of the movie so as to match the take. When his predecessor nicknamed “Tommy Porno” disappears (and is later found in a dumpster), John is promoted to film distributor and money collector from head counter. Of course, to his everlasting regret, John is now nicknamed Johnny Porno, which he hates. And now John has a job bringing the money to the wiseguys after the filmings, armed though with the knowledge that the last guy who was caught skimming from the wiseguys ended up drinking the rest of his meals through a straw and there is of course the disappearance of Tommy Deluca (“Tommy Porno”) who was eventually found with his hands cut off.
The way he got this job though was when he walked into a bar bemoaning his inability to make his child support payments to Nancy (who is now about to end her third marriage to Nathan and still banging his first husband Louis, a compulsive gambler always on the hook to some shark or another). Thing was undercover officer Billy and his wife Kathleen would get their kicks when she came on to other guys and then left them hanging and John did not know she was married when he started hitting her up. When Billy came out of the backroom of the wiseguys’ bar and interfered, John let Billy have it. John’s payment for causing the ruckus was to work it off counting heads at the porno showings. Billy got busted from the force and now has it bad for John, so bad in fact he is ready to take John off the board forever. John, though, has apparently got a temper problem and also gets into it with another Italian in the same bar, one who won’t forget getting knocked down in front of his bosses, particularly Eddie Vento.
There are a lot of names at work in this novel and they all cross paths at one point or another with the focal point being the movie Deep Throat, John and the money he is collecting for the tough guys, John’s ex-wife and the trouble she causes, Nancy’s first ex, her current husband, crooked cops on the take, Vento’s girlfriend who unbeknownst to him is working off a bust and recording him….. The point is that for John you know if you have read any of these kind of crime novels no matter how hard he works it is all going to go wrong and he is always going to be owing big money to the wiseguys and always on the run and always being betrayed.
Stella captures so clearly and decisively the spirit of the early Seventies and the manic world John is swept up in.
Angel’s Flight was originally published in 1960 by Fawcett Gold Medal (# s1047) and reprinted by Black Gat in February 2017. While there were a number of books that came out around the same time purporting to offer a glimpse into the jazz lifestyle, Angel’s Flight, of course named for the funicular railway in Los Angeles between Hill and Olive Streets that still stands today, is told in bebop jazz vernacular and feels so damn authentic. The story plays out over several decades and the two main characters are Ben Parker, through whose eyes the story is told, and Johnny Angel, who represents the inauthentic, money-grubbing, self-absorbed characters found in the music and film businesses who are not necessarily world-burning talents, but rise to the top because they have no conscience and no feeling for those who they stepped on as they climbed to the top.
From the very first line, Cameron dips the reader full-on into the jazz vernacular: “First time I ever saw Johnny Angel was ‘way back in 1939 A.D. when I was still blowing bass with Daddy Halloway and his Hot Babies.” “We just blew ho. As hot as we knew how. And Daddy blew the hottest.” And, he tells us, “We had some good boys in that band. Daddy hired by ear. Didn’t matter your complexion or sex life to old Daddy as long as you blew good.” Cameron addresses color barriers so well with a comment here and there as well as any issues regarding sexual preference.
Don’t act surprised as Johnny pushes first one than another out of the big band and eventually takes control for himself. Don’t be surprised when Johnny makes Big Daddy’s daughter Blanche and tosses her aside as he gets contractual control even when she starts showing pregnant. When Blanche gives Johnny the news, he responds, “So I said I loved you. That’s the way the bit goes, chick. What in hell was I supposed to say, how’s about a little stuff, Blanche?” When Ben asks Johnny if he was fooling with Daddy’s kid, he simply says to Ben, “Since Pismo Beach, Dad. Why? You want some of it?”
Don’t be surprised when Johnny takes writing credit with ASCAP for every hit no matter who wrote it or throws even his nearest or dearest under the bus. We are told: “Angel was different from the beginning. He had an ice cold dedication, not to music, but to being a musician. There’s a difference. To Angel, music was a way to make money. Nothing else.” “That boy got no heart, Ben. That cat blow for cold cold cash.” We are told: “Angel is the kind of guy who’d murder his mother and father and ask the mercy of the court because he was an orphan.” And: “He just plain don’t give a damn! That boy’d climb in the feathers with a three day old corpse, if you made it worth his while. Male or female! He’s bad, Ben! Bad and cold. Only thing that boy queer for is money!” And, Johnny has no qualms about what he does. He says that people are slobs that can be conditioned for responses like Pavlov’s dog.
But what makes this novel so magical is that Cameron tells it like you are there hearing the music and every page is gold, solid gold.
Robert Silverberg, writing under the psuedonym Don Elliott and several other psuedonyms (Loren Beauchamp, David Challon, John Dexter, Dan Eliot, Marlene Longman, Ray McKnenzie, Gordon Mitchell, Mark Ryan, and Stan Vincent penned over 150 “softcore” novels during the late 1950’s early 1960’s when the market for science fiction magazine stories suddenly dried up. Silverberg penned the introduction to the Stark House double novel that reprises Gang Girl and Sex Bum and expresses no embaressment about his now-well known part in the softcore literary world. Indeed, he offers in his introduction an example of how he would write sex scenes now without editorial limits, using specific words for body parts rather than the quaint way he had to write these novels in 1959 and 1963. For five years, he wrote two novels a month on a manual typewriter, resulting in a bibliography that extends for page after page and the satisfaction that he earned a good living, paid a mortgage on a large house, and supported his family.
Back in the olden days before the internet, folks who wanted a taste of titillating, sexy, fiction combed the drugstore racks for titles like Gang Girl (1959, Nightstand Books). And, at that ancient time (in the fifties), people who would one day become world-renowned authors like Robert Silverberg wrote this stuff under pseudonyms. Many authors wrote this softcore, exploitative fiction because it paid and, strangely enough, they had to pay the rent and put food on the table until some publisher with a small bit of brains recognized their genius. Make no bones about it. Gang Girl is a cheap thrill. It is a tawdry, exploitative piece of juvenile delinquent fiction that was popular in some circles in the fifties. It was never intended to be discussed in ninth grade literature between Dickens and Melville.
So why read this? Well, it is a trip back into the time machine to see what was on the racks back then. But, it is also a very well written piece of tawdry dime store pulp. As the cover page shouts at the would-be reader, it is about “sex, drugs, and crime.” It begins: “Lora Menotti was five feet five of concentrated sex, one hundred twenty-five pounds of undiluted viciousness. She was eighteen. She was deadly. Her parents knew it and they were afraid of her.” Lora was a “deb” in the gang “The Scarlet Sinners,” but when her parents move the family to a new neighborhood, she has to make a new start. She finds the local gang at the local soda shop and wants in. Lora pushes her way into the gang and, when she wants one of the guys, she pushes another girl out, way out. Lora’s ambitious and she is going to be with the gang leader no matter who she has to step on in the way.
But don’t think these gangs are John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John singing ballads in “Grease.” These are vicious, criminal gangs and the infighting is deadly and has consequences and the rumbles are not just fights, but with knives, antennas, and anything else they can get their hands on. Not everyone comes out of a rumble singing and dancing. Some never walk again and some wish they were dead because they are so wounded and torn apart. Lora is like a femme fatale of detective stories, using her looks and voluptousness as a weapon to control the gang, wearing her tightest sweater when she is ready to make a move. She got her “greatest kick of all” by manipulation. She is tough and mean and pretty much as heartless as can be, particularly to the other girls in the gang who are in her way, one time organizing a gang rape of a deb who stood in her way. The other women are dealt with viciouslessly and Lora is not too popular among them.
The author does not glamorize gang life as other writers of juvenile delinquent literature have done. Instead, he shows the cold, hard world that these kids lived in, making the world of the Cougars gang realistic.
Sex Bum (1963; Midnight Readers) is more of a coming-of age story of a young punk (Johnny Price) in a small town who sees an in with the mob and believes someone with his skills is traveling in the fast lane to the top of the mob. Price uses his initiative to quickly get in with some local characters in a poolhall and, before he can blink, is in with them in their ranch house, collecting and threatening. Price is not satisfied being a gopher for very long and wants to climb over his local bosses (Mike Lurton and Ed Kloss) all the way to the top in a hurry and makes plans to do so with all deliberate speed. We are told: “Johnny Price had big plans for Johnny Price. They involved a lot of money being his, and girls with boobs like swollen melons, all the good things life had to offer.”
What perhaps separates this story from most coming-of-age mafioso stories is that, although the fight scenes are well executed, much of the story is filled with detailed descriptions of Price’s conquests of local girls (Beth) and the mob’s call girls, including the head honcho’s girl. He did not want the local farm girls like Beth except for a few hours and wanted “real women” like the ones he had seen walking on Fifth Avenue with high cheekbones and beautiful dresses and lovely legs.
So much of the book is involved with Price hopping in and out of bed with whoever he could get his hands on that the tough-guy mafia stuff often seems like a side-plot, but perhaps in the end Price should have concentrated all his attention on climbing his way to the top before enjoying the spoils of war.
Heat Lightning by Wilene Shaw (Ace S-74; 1954) was one of seven crime novels that Virginia Harrison wrote under the name Wilene Shaw for Ace. It is probably not apt to call it a crime novel as it is more of a backwoods noir tale of lust and desire and any crime in the story is more a result of the goings-on between the residents than any nefarious knife thrust or bullet hole. The setting is a small Southern town awash in poverty. Holly Reed is the lead character although Shaw often turns the narrative to the thoughts and experiences of other characters so the reader gets to know half the town quite intimately. Holly is poor, uneducated, and probably a bit of what we now call special needs. She walked around town in a shapeless sackcloth brown dress barefoot, doing odd jobs for her neighbors for a few bucks.
As the story opens, we are told that Monday is always a big night for Holly Reed because she liked to stand inside the general store and watch the big city bus pull up. Usually the only one to get off the bus was Babs Melchior as no one except Babs could afford to go to the city to shop for nice clothes. Holly would watch the bus and dream “with that strange hungry ache in her stomach, heavy and sick on her shoulders, she would press her face against the glass of the window.” None of the men bothered to look at Holly who at twenty is really starting to feel the pangs of womanly desire in her loins. But the men never looked at her and, if they did, they never saw her, not the way they looked at Babs or even Holly’s mother, Alice. “And they didn’t look at any woman the way they looked at Nellie Byrd.” “Every time the bus stopped she imagined herself walking out of the store and climbing up the steps, then setting herself in into a rear seat.” “That was when she would not be Holly Reed any longer but a woman searching or something – the something that was strange, foreign, and desirous to her though she couldn’t say what it was.”
As the story goes on, we find that half the town is hopping in and out of the other half’s beds and running off before their spouses (particularly the ones with shotguns loaded and ready) find out. It might help to make out a chart of who is sleeping with whom and who Preacher Tincher isn’t sleeping with. The natural order of stuff though is upset when a stranger walks into town, one Larry Carter, allegedly a landscape painter from the city, who Holly oodles over, but he has something going for Babs, something that started long before when Babs was a failed actress who sold her time by the hour to various men before a G.I. found her and took her back to the small town where she became the town beauty queen leaving her past behind.
This type of small-backwoods-town story was quite popular in the Fifties, but most of these, including this one don’t really stand the test of time. It is primarily a gossip-type backwoods story with a bit of Holly coming of age. Of the three stories collected in this trio of Aces, this would be this reviewer’s least favorite.
In at the Kill (Ace, 1960) is one of those crime stories featuring a rank amateur masquerading as a private eye. In this case, that rank bumbling amateur is one Joseph Knox, the sole auctioneer and chief proprietor of the Green Barn auction house in Louisville, Kentucky. “He was a tall, rangy man in his middle thirties, with a long prominent nose, a wide thin-lipped mouth that was as amiable as a bear trap.”
There, he runs an office with his assistant, Elly Watson, a feisty feminist who objects to Police Lieutenant Ben Hardin Helm pinching her behind so much that she applies a pliers to the lieutenant’s behind to his dismay and thereafter flees the office in fear of the lieutenant’s wrath. “She was a strikingly pretty brunette who radiated innocence and virginity – a rank deception since Elly was neither innocent nor a virgin. In fact, she had been married, divorced, and still regarded men with a jaundiced eye.”
The mystery here concerns why some workmen dug a ten foot hole in front of city hall and then filled it in. But, Knox, given his wide knowledge of things of value and the history of Louisville, thinks he knows what it is all about and sets out to gain the rights to what he thinks was dug up — seven bales of wastepaper.
Knox is prepared to go to quite a bit of trouble for those bales of wastepaper, including breaking into and entering and searching an apartment, but that endeavor gets him in hot water when he finds the proverbial body in the bathtub, has to club his way out of the apartment, and anonymously report the body to the police. Hoping no one is the wiser, Knox thereafter breaks into and searches another house, this time clubbing one rather unforgiving lieutenant on his way out through a side window. Knox is not exactly a man on the run for a crime he did not commit, but if the lieutenant ever puts two and two together he just might start believing Knox is guilty of murder, assault, battery, and all manner of thievery.
Indeed, before the story is over it seems that half the prominent citizens of Louisville think Knox is the chief of all blackmailers, too. And, when he sends his pretty young secretary out to investigate things and she calls for help, Knox is a bit of a bumbling knight in shining armor, busting in and assaulting the lady of the house quite by accident.
McDowell’s In at the Kill is quite an enjoyable amateur-turned-detective mystery and it is too bad McDowell did not see fit to involve Knox and Elly in further adventures.
Lovisi’s Mystery, Crime & Noir Notebook collects nearly fifty articles Lovisi has written on the subject over the years. The articles range from the general to the specific and are a must read for collectors of mystery, crime, & noir. Lovisi explains in his introduction that there are five major components that exemplify the classic “noir trap,” money, woman, love, sex and fame. He describes hard-boiled as “Attitude to the core” and truthful understanding that the world is a cruel place, not pleasant, not comforting, not cozy. It is “cold, hard truth,” not necessarily private eye fiction. Here we find articles about paperback collectibles, detailing the most important paperback original publishers and setting forth examples of highly collectible items from their catalogs. Another article addresses three groundbreaking female authors from the paperback era (Marijane Meaker, Ann Bannon, and Julie Ellis). Another article tells us about Lion Books, the small but mighty publisher, perhaps best known as Jim Thompson’s publisher and David Goodis’ publisher and tells us that such work offered the feel and mood of Lion’s paperbacks, depicting people on the skids facing nothing but despair and gloom. His article on One-Shot Wonders is a must read. The article on Falcon Books introduces the reader to a little-known today publisher of crime classics. And, we all are now looking desperately for copies of Georges Arnaud’s The Wages of Fear.
Warning: keep a pen and paper handy as you read through Lovisi’s articles. The list you will make of must-reads is going to grow and grow and grow. I just now grabbed a copy of Cameron’s Angel’s Flight, for instance, which Lovisi describes as being so good it was perfect, “a classic crime masterpiece of darkness set to a jazz and a be-bop beat.”
Other chapters or articles speak praises of James Hadley Chase and of 1960s sleaze softcore. And, the classic Marijuana Girl is discussed at length. You can read each chapter in order cover to cover or wander through at random finding chapters that interest you more than others. It is all worth reading an all worth coming back to. One of the more interesting thing about some of the articles or chapters is that Lovisi actually personally knew some of these writers like Bruno Fischer and CJ Henderson.
Stark House’s Three Aces (A Trio of Ace Books) contains three Ace novels, beginning with Peter Twist’s The Gilded Hideaway. Peter Twist only published this one novel. Told in the first person, you get the narrative from one Robert West, a man who has the easy life on Fairwater Road(aptly named) with Doris and a cushy job making FHA loans for remodeling projects in his uncle’s firm, one he may someday inherit. But, as happens so often in this novels, something is missing in West’s life that makes it feel incomplete. He is tired of going to work every day. He is bored with Doris, sending her off packing to her sister’s for the weekend while he gropes the bar server Greta in his car. West has read a news article about a guy who held up the bank manager, forcing him to the bank to withdraw everything. West has heard talk from a coworker Finlay about an operator in Mexico, Samtos, who, for the right fee, can buy off anyone. There is nothing wrong with his life on Fairwater Road, nothing that hundreds of guys wouldn’t jump at changing places with him, but there was something empty for him at the heart of the middle-class American dream in the suburbs in the ticky-tacky identical houses on perfectly measured lots.
West’s scheme comes together quickly when he realizes how little scrutiny banks were giving FHA loans since the government insured them. It really wasn’t the bank’s money at risk. All he had to do was submit loan documents to a series of banks and pocket the money. The first one made him real nervous, but after that, it became easy. West gives little thought to what will happen when he takes off, to his wife Doris, to his uncle’s firm, to the banks he did business with. He has no moral qualms. He just wants the money in cold hard cash to carry with him to Mexico where he will pay Santos to keep the feds from extraditing him from Mexico. He will then live down there for the rest of his days, carefree, easy, with nothing to every worry about it.
The heart of this novel really opens up once West gets to Mexico City with his suitcases filled with cash. Mexico in many of the crime novels at the time is the place everyone runs to, thinking a few tiny payoffs will secure a life of bliss, but often finding that they have put their lives in the hands of smooth operators who will require every penny of their fortunes and their souls to boot. Indeed, Santos tells him when they meet that the does what he does for money and he is unscrupulous. “It would not be difficult or me,” he tells West, “even now, to take everything you have. You are a stranger here. I could have you murdered before morning, and now would know!” West should consider himself forewarned.
This is precisely what West ultimately finds – that money corrupts – and that once he has his bundles of cash, there is no one he can trust even one iota who won’t betray him. Even the woman he falls for in Mexico- Mercedes Ruhl- tells him quite bluntly that the prime attraction is the bundles of cash and that, once it runs out, she does too: “I would leave you when the money was gone,” she tells him bluntly. “Life is short,” she says, and “All the things that please me can be bought. You’re money won’t last.”
And, West was certainly warned about her too: “She shot her husband. Terrible man. He was a client of mine too. Liked to be beaten with whips – wore a crown of thorns around the house. Naturally called it suicide.” “Being bored with life is a dangerous disease,” Mercedes tells West and he has a hard time seeing her, “beautiful, finely made, talking so calmly about her husband’s murder.” “She was dressed in polka dots and moonbeams and looked like a prom date.”
This is where it turns from an ordinary hum-drum crime novel into a noirish descent to somewhere in the depths of hell complete with sadomaschistic scenes of beatings and whippings. West finds himself helpless on a chicle plantation in the Yucatan where expatriates have gathered to drink and lose their inhibitions while their money is sucked out of them.
Ultimately, this novel succeeds in demonstrating just what West has traded his humdrum life in the suburbs for and what a world he has entered where he can trust no one – or at least can trust them until his stolen money runs out.
Love Trap (orig. pub. 1955; Signet) is the second book in Stark House’s double novel collection. It stands as unusual among White’s caper novels in that it is not the story of a caper gone wrong necessarily. The protagonist here is no hero and no crook. He is an ordinary man, one Harold Granville Wilkenson, age 36, an architect employed all his adult life by the McKenny-Fleckner Company, who, upon hearing that his company’s payroll is going to be held up, decides he hates his bosses and aids and abets the robbery.
But it is even crazier than that because the people robbing the payroll – the actual tough guys – don’t even know Wilkenson is aiding and abetting their scheme. They don’t know he is a disgruntled architect, condemned forever to be an office man who will never design anything and who resents his two bosses immensely even when one -Sam Fleckner – offers to set him up. Wilkensen resents the fact the Fleckner offer was repeated to his wife Marian, and feels humiliated by it. Wilkensen is the strangest protagonist White has ever created. He suffers from Oedipus complex and barely has the enthusiasm to go to bed with his wife or any other woman for that matter except perhaps the blonde enchantress who is involved in the robbery and, even then, Wilkensen’s conquest of Sari is odd and twisted.
Wilkenson gloms onto the robbers and chooses to aid them even though he stands to gain little from it. Then, he goes off his rocker pursuing them and trying to somehow join in with them. No one seems to like Wilkenson or stand with him (except maybe Sari a little bit), but then he has nothing to gain from anything he does and his motivation – vindictiveness and jealousy- seems oddly placed. Indeed, Wilkenson seems more like someone that Jim Thompson might create than a Lionel White character.
Pulp, Crime, & Mystery Books 