Trailer Park Girls by Glen Canary

Originally published as Monarch # 248 in 1962, Canary’s Trailer Park Girls is a well-written caper story (or caper gone wrong story as so many of them are) combined with a sleaze-era nod toward the easy women of trailer parks (a popular theme of the era). There are six characters in the story and no one else matters at all. The three men are Burt Stone, Al Leeds, and Jack Cannon, all of who are sharing a trailer. The three women, Sally Talent, Marianne Nirvell, and Fran Novak also share a nearby trailer. Canary does an excellent job though of painting well-developed portraits of all six characters.

Stone, once was on his way to medical school, saving his inheritance, leaving cheaply so that the money would be there — until his brother nonchalantly stole his $10,000 inheritance and laughed and said go get a job. Having no choice, two weeks later, Stone enlisted and they re-enlisted again. On his very first leave, he went back to New York and clubbed his brother right in the mouth. Stone met Cannon and Leeds in the army. Stone now works as a bartender and is bitter. He figures he has ten thousand dollars coming to him and decided that, with his two buddies, he is going to rob a department store in Columbus, Ohio.

Cannon sold insurance “designed specifically to fit your personal needs now and in the future.” He was a big, overpowering man, proud of his body and his physical condition. He was one of the fortunate type who always seem to get just what they want by simply asking for it. His calendar started when he was fourteen an her name was Alice Rankin. He always got whoever he wanted by being direct and never treating the ones who said yes any differently than the ones who said no. Cannon was in on the robbery because it sounded like fun.

Leeds liked to race stock cars, rode a motorcycle, and reminded you of a tougher version of James Dean. “The only thing that kept Leeds from being strikingly handsome was that there was no compensating softness about him. He looked as if he ought to carry a gun and talk out of the side of his mouth.” Girls came easily to Leeds and he learned that girls came easily to hoods and therefore he thought he always knew the score. When his draft notice came, he didn’t want to go and listened when someone told him to eat soap before his physical so that the x-ray would show spots on his lungs, but that didn’t work. Stone and Cannon didn’t strike him as the type to pull a robbery. He thought of Cannon as a good-natured big cluck and Stone as someone who had something on his mind the whole time. One thing though he wasn’t going to spend the rest of his life selling televisions to middle-aged jerks.

They all viewed the trailer park as temporary, but did not like being looked down on as riff-raff.

The women too were all fully drawn in this novel. Sally was a junior at Ohio State and believed in love, but not in marriage. “Marriage was her mother and father. Love was naked woman, sitting up in bed, her hair around her shoulders.” He parents had both tramped around town and were not shy about it. Sally was bold and the first in her crowd to skinny-dip, sent to reformatory school, etc. “She didn’t bother much with men simply because she didn’t find many who excited her. She just wanted crowds and music and lights.”

Marianne was a nurse, a dedicated nurse, but as a teenager, a girl so beautiful that none of the guys would have the guts to ask her out. She would have liked to date them, but they never asked her.” She fell in love with an older man when she was seventeen. He was a college junior, planning to be a lawyer and a politician, blonde, and crew-cut, and they made love all summer till the usual happened and he forced her to get an abortion.

Each of these men ended up paired with one of these women as they are planning the heist of the local department store. The story is primarily about the men facing off against each other as they plan and the women getting involved. Canary writes well and the story flows well, perfectly paced, and full steam ahead toward its inevitable conclusion.

Strangers on a Friday by Harry Whittington

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.

Into the Night by Cornell Woolrich

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.

The Same Lie Twice by Ron Goulart

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.

If Dying Was All by Ron Goulart

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 by Day Keene

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.

Mrs. Homicide by Day Keene

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.

The Way We Die Now by Charles Willeford

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.

Sideswipe by Charles Willeford

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 by Charles Willeford

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.

Gang Girl/Sex Bum by Robert Silverberg writing as Don Elliott

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.

Neither story is necessarily great.

Heat Lightning by Wilene Shaw (Ace S-74)

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 by Emmett McDowell

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.

A Mystery, Crime & Noir Notebook by Gary Lovisi (2023)

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.

The Gilded Hideaway by Peter Twist

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.

Tears are for Angels by Paul Connelly (Gold Medal # 224) (Black Gat # 24)

Tears are for Angels (1952) is a masterpiece of noir and despair. It is the story of a man at the end of his rope with nothing left to live for except the bare possibility of slight revenge. Harry London has been living in a dilapidated shack in the country for three years, drinking jars of homemade swill and bits of bread. There is barely anything left to him at all. His one great love had been Lucy and she betrayed him with the local storeowner Casanova. In fact, London caught them in bed together and before he could blow this guy’s brains out, something happened. There was a struggle with the gun and Lucy ended up dead and the other man, Dick Stewart, gone. London could only claim suicide and let it go at that. He couldn’t stand the shame of having been cuckolded in his own bed.

Jean Cummings, a woman he has never seen before who claims she once knew Lucy in New York has arrived at his dirty shack and London, drunk, and dirty, rage at her and basically attacks her. She wants to know what really happened to Lucy and the suicide story won’t fly with her.

The story (and it comes out only in bits and pieces) is London and Cummings trying to come to terms with what happened to Lucy and exacting their revenge on Stewart who seems untouchable. Of course, all plans and those of desperate people, especially, go a bit awry.

Connolly offers us readers a top-notch story that is never more than a step from absolute despair and he holds your attention as London tries to piece his life back together.

Take Me As I Am by Darwin Teilhet (writing as William H. Fielding)

Darwin Teilhet wrote three books under the pen name William H. Fielding, The Unpossessed (1951), Take Me as I Am (1952), and Beautiful Humbug (1954). He wrote 22 novels under his own name. Take Me As I Am is a top-notch crime fiction tale which begins as a caper novel of the type Lionel White and later Richard Stark (Don Westlake) would write. The caper involves a carefully-planned heist of an armored car rumoured to be carrying more than half a million in cash. The caper has been planned down to the last detail and Teilhet does an excellent job of putting the reader in the thick of it, parsing out the action blow-by-blow as Monk and his accomplices take on the unsuspecting guards and make off with quite a bit cash less than expected. But, of course, as all caper novels go, there are some problems. After all, it wouldn’t necessarily be much of a story if the whole thing went off without a hitch, would it

What Teilhet does cleverly here is that he jumps from making Monk the centerpiece of his story to making blonde bimbo Alma the central character. Her role in the caper is simply to take the handoff of the goods and appear to be an innocent young college girl out for a Sunday drive. That way Monk and the others could be stopped but they would have nothing on them to tie them to the robbery. We do not get much background on Alma, just that her first young love was a neighbor boy Dale who her mother took out with a shotgun when they were in a delicate position.

Alma though is quick thinking in this situation and decides when she sees Bill Evans hitchhiking down the highway that she would appear even more innocent with this young kid with her. No one would be on the lookout for a pair of young lovers on the road, would they? Bill is as innocent and guileless as they come as Alma does not even give him a clue what is going on or that she is on the run from the law and the mob. Nevertheless, he suspects not all is right in the world as he sees blonde girls sort of resembling Alma being taken off the board along the way and she foolishly directs him to the wrong clothing store.

The story of their cross-country journey with neither knowing much about the other and Bill having not much of a clue about anything continues with the story finally turning to the question of whether Alma wants the money or Bill.

This is terrific short paperback with action filling it from cover to cover.

Any Man’s Girl by Basil Heatter

Originally published as Gold Medal # 1126 in 1961, and more recently republished by Stark House’s Black Gat imprint in September 2023, Heatter’s “Any Man’s Girl” with the haunting blonde woman on the cover is a tour-de-force of crime fiction.

The cover girl, Lucinda Perky, has a body that hypnotizes every man she meets and makes them do things that they really should not. She has been married to a young kid, Russ Perky, who took her from Chicago where she was a nightclub singer and set up shop at a fishing camp on Lake Okeechobee in Florida where she now feels trapped and at the end of life. He rents boats and fishing gear to men in the area. She sleeps half the day and answers the door in a barely-there negligee, trying to get attention from every man she meets. The desk sergeant who booked Russ says he had “never seen such a body on a woman.” He says she was so ripe that, even dead, there was a crowd at the morgue to see her.

The reputation is that Lucinda has been with every man in driving distance of the fishing camp although you never really get to know her other than by hearsay. You only have hearsay now because the story that Russ tells to the sheriff is that he got so frustrated with her teasing him that he knocked her to the floor and raped her and headed out to fish. Unfortunately for him, as he tells it to the law, when he came back, she was extremely dead and he does not know who did it. This is a small Southern town and no one wants to hear his story after he admits to the violent rape of his unwilling wife and he is now on death row awaiting trial.

And every photograph of her in the local newspaper shows her sitting on a skiff with her legs apart and wearing only brief shorts and a skimpy halter. Even Dan, when he met Lucinda just that once, was mesmerized. She had come to the door wearing a yellow silk dressing gown “and he had been made immediately aware by the unfettered shape of her breasts and the amount of white skin exposed in the vee of the gown that she was naked under it.” She had a throaty voice like Marilyn Monroe and invites him in. As her yellow silk seemed to slip another inch and another, revealing her breasts, Dan found it hard to breathe and felt like a fool.

Heatter does not tell his crime novel through action-packed sequences or even man-on-the-run sequences. Rather, what he gives us readers here is a legal thriller after the action has already taken place. He offers us Marty and Dan Waxman, recently moved here from New York. Dan has retired and has ideas about technologically growing crops, wondering though if the rural South in the Jim Crow era is a place for a New York Jew, particularly when his wife, Marty, is a lady lawyer interested in taking on the death row case of poor guy who the whole town (that includes the entire jury pool) wants to put away.

Lucinda perhaps was an embarrassment to the town with the way she carried on and perhaps the town elders were all involved in her traps and want to quickly close the matter before their extramarital activities come to light. The only sort of witnesses are poor African-Americans who want to keep a low profile and not make waves in a matter that does not really concern them. This is not the kind of trouble they want anything to do with. Not when kerosene fires are set on the Waxman’s property.

The trial is told rather quickly, but Marty still represents Russ, hoping something will break before he runs out of appeals and sits in the electric chair. It is a race against time to find out the truth about this crime that the town – a seemingly backward town- wants swept under the rug quickly.

Heatter does not offer much in the way of action, but that does not mean that there is ever – even for a second- a let-up in the tension. He offers the reader everything a crime fiction reader could want – a tempting blonde bombshell, a violent murder, a town that does not want this crime explored too much, a pair of outsiders who keep digging up the town’s secrets that perhaps should be kept hidden, and a race against time to find some evidence to stop the execution. In short, this is a top-notch novel.

Murders in Silk by Asa Bordages (writing as Mike Teagle)

Asa Bordages wrote four novels, two under the Mike Teagle name. Stark House’s Black Gat Books has republished Murders in Silk (Black Gat # 45; April 2023), which had been a Lion paperback # 60 (1951; Lion) and apparently a hardcover book before that (1938; Hillman-Curl, Inc.).

Tiberius Bixby (known as Tie), whose father Zebediah Bixby (Zeb), had a thing about Romans and named his other two kids, Caligula and Messalina. They live on a big plot of land in “Scrafton” on Long Island. The story is told initially from Tie’s point of view and then about 75 percent of the way through Zeb picks up the narrative in first-person, which is a little confusing. Tie talks about his “pa” as if they were backwoods country folk although they live on Long Island (somewhere near Mineola we are told) and Tie works news in the city. Pa, we are told, didn’t leave his rambling old house a dozen times a year, spending his days with a bottle and his books in the library on the second floor, dreaming that he would re-edit Gibbons’ the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. At first, we readers are led to believe that Pa or Zeb is a bumbling old coot, but he later appears to be Sherlock to Tie’s Watson and the two joke a bit about playing such roles. The story is set in 1948, odd because it was first published in 1938.

This one begins with a murder on the train to Scraffton.Tie is merely on the train heading to his father’s home when he notices the girl in the red calot (“a brimless little hat that looks like half of around bombshell with the fuse sticking up on top”) and first notices that she “was an independent wench. She wore sheer black stockings and ignored the mirrors along the passageway to the Long Island Railroad level of the Pennsylvania Station.”

When there is a mysterious murder on board the train (Murder on the Orient Express, anyone?), everyone onboard is an instant suspect, but Tie knows the woman with the incredible legs and the hat is involved and, smitten as he is, he covers up for her. He doesn’t even know why he lied, but he keeps covering for her even when it starts to make it look as if he himself were the murderer who is nearly the first at the scene of two homicides, one committed with a souvenir knife from Tie’s family home and the other at the neighbor’s home.

You get inklings early on that she (Gretchen Jones) is a femme fatale with a black widow’s touch and he is a sucker who she can spin around like a top, particularly when she admits to the police detective that she dances in the chorus in a Greenwich Village nightclub, but their relationship is far more complicated.

Tie may play the full-on innocent amateur detective, thinking he can figure out this murder and the next quickly without the aid of the official law, but when the chips are down and he has to spring into action, he can brawl with the best of them. There are several great scenes with Tie going all out against hoodlums. Maybe he is not that innocent.

Tie’s other sort-of-romance is with Paula Wannerman, the daughter of a neighbor who is blown up in a laboratory fire. When Tie wanders around the house trying to ferret out clues like a good amateur, she drunkenly tries to seduce him and even hides him in her closet. She has a husky voice and drinks highballs while her father’s laboratory burns. Paula refers to Tie as her “Boy Scout” and sets out to seduce him at every opportunity except when she tries to claw his eyes out or threatens to shoot him. “Maybe I’m just plastered enough to like you,” she tells him. Tie refers to her in his narration as a “drunken hussy” with “half-closed lids.” She tells him that he is way over his head and he should get back into the shallow water before he drowns.

Ultimately, this turns out to be quite a good read, but it sometimes feels like the plot is overly complicated and the action is often a bit unevenly paced. Zeb is the one who solves this mystery and does the big reveal at the end.

Dr. Gatskill’s Blue Shoes (1952)by Paul Conant

Originally published in 1952 as Dell # 741 and now republished by Stark House’s Black Gat imprint # 44, Conant’s Dr. Gatskill’s Blue Shoes is one of only three novels Conant published, including The Little Killer (1952) (as Gene Paul) and Naked in the Dark (1953) (as Gene Paul). It is an unusual novel and it starts backwards after a crime has been committed and Police Lieutenant Peter Hanley has been whisked off to an insane asylum in order to prevent the district attorney from immediately bringing him to trial. Hanley does not know much about what happened on the fateful night or even what he did (if he did it). Amnesia was a popular subject in the 1950’s crime fiction and Conant uses it here quite skillfully.

Most of the story is told from Conant’s point of view and that is often a bit disconcerting because he is half out of his mind. He is quite learned for a beat cop and regularly quotes all manner of literature, often to the confusion of those around him. He knows there was a lady named Narcissa Maidstone and that she was a dangerous beauty like Beatrix in Thackery’s Henry Esmond. He quotes Carl Sandburg about the iron drag of long days. Did he strangle Narcissa Maidstone with her own lovely flaxen hair, he wonders, before quoting prose from John Keats.

The purpose of his being locked in at the clinic with the other crazies was to give him, with the aid of sodium amytal and other drugs and patient psychiatrists, a chance to remember what happened so that he can defend himself at the upcoming trial. It is a race against time because all the bigwigs think they know how it played out and they want it over with, an embarressment to the department.

Because of the format, this novel plays out a bit differently than most other murder novels. Neither we nor Hanley knows what happened or whether what is happening to him in the clinic is real or fantasy. Has he lost his mind? Will he ever get it back? Will the fair maiden’s murder ever be solved?

Night Boat to Paris by Richard Jessup

Originally published by Dell (#92) in 1956, Jessup’s Night Boat to Paris was republished as Gat Books # 56 in March 2024. Jessup wrote extensively in the 1950’s and 1960’s under both his own name and under the Richard Telfair psuedonym, often westerns. Best Known for The Cincinnati Kid, which later became a movie with Steve McQueen and Ann-Margaret.

Night Boat to Paris is not about a boat. It is a post-WWII espionage story set in England and France. Duncan Reece now runs a pub in London and in the ten years since the great war has tried to forget the ugly things that happened. But now he is called to do “dirty work” for Queen and Country. In fact, he is told to head for Paris the next day and put together a team. Reece has been a number of things since the war, including a blackmailer, a procurer, a petty thief, and a gambler, and it is many of those underworld skills which are required for what lies ahead. For Reece is not a high-tech well-dressed spy like Bond. Rather, he is the kind called upon to do the work in the shadows that no one wants to talk about and no one wants to admit complicity to.

The Reds (who became the new enemy once the Nazis were defeated) are working on a nuclear-supported space station (in the years before Sputnik was launched). The engineer’s blueprints have been microfilmed, but the microfilm was stolen and the thief had been willing to sell them to the British for a small fortune, but got killed while attempting the exchange in a Paris bordello. Mow am ex-Gestapo Colonel may have it and is ready to auction it off during a charity bazaar at a French estate. Reece’s mission, and he really has no choice but to accept it, is to put together a team of underworld characters and brazenly hold up the charity ball and make off with the microfilm and all the jewels the rich and famous would be parading around in. It is an odd job for a spy, but Reece is more of an underworld character than a spy really.

There are several catches including that the Reds want the microfilm themselves and are out to get it at any costs with a stable of endless agents to call upon. Moreover, Reece’s associates are to think of it merely as a criminal enterprise without being let in on the scheme. Thus, Reece has to look over his shoulder to see who is behind him and wonder constantly who he can trust among the handful of unsavory characters he enlists and trains for the big robbery.

The preparations and training take time, but the action is never slow as Reece is constantly being called upon to do wet work. And, the actual robbery, when it comes about, is quite action-packed as is the wild aftermath as the great escape is on.

Jessup’s writing is rock-solid and he captures quite realistically the characters and the action throughout. Considering everything that takes place, you often wonder if Reece is quite the good guy he says he is. He often wonders about what he is doing and how far patriotism should take him.

Jessup’s work includes The Cunning and the Haunted, A Rage to Die, Cry Passion, The Man in Charge, Cheyenne Saturday, Comanche Vengeance, Long Ride West, Lowdown, Texas Outlaw, The Deadly Duo, Sabadilla, Port Angelique, Wolf Cop, The Cincinnati Kid, The Recreation Hall, Sailor, Quiet Voyqge Home, The Hot Blue Sea, Threat, Wyoming Jones, Day of the Gun, Wyoming Jones for Hire, Secret of Apache Canyon, The Bloody Medallion, The Corpse that Talked, Sundance, Scream Bloody Murder, Good Luck Sucker, The Slavers, and Target for Tonight.

Return to Vikki by John Tomerlin

Originally published in as 1959 as Gold Medal # 900, and now republished as an e-book in March 2024 by Cutting Edge Books, Return to Vikki is a caper story of the heist to end all heists. Why rob a bank when you can simply take the whole damn bank with you? It seems that a bank is being moved from one spot in midtown Manhattan to another and that all the money is being trucked out at night in caravan of armored trucks with police escort. While it seems like an impossible caper, it is just too rich with loot to be passed up. You get the whole caper routine here from the meticulous planning to the way the brazen robbery is carried out to the differences between the conspirators to the problems they encounter along the way and any good caper story has lots of problems that must be dealt with.

It is also the story of a guy who thought he could leave the life of crime and go straight, but finds that leaving is often more difficult than one could ever have imagined. Frank Shelby thinks he left the life behind when he snuck out and settled in Blaine, Ohio, marrying Nancy, and carrying a briefcase to the office each day. But, as he soon learns, it does not matter how many years have gone by, they are not going to forget him. They are not going to leave him behind. Indeed, the story opens with a scene reminiscent of Dick Van Dyke coming home to Mary Tyler Moore — only Nancy kisses Frank and tells him that a friend of his showed up, a Mr. Benson. Frank pauses, something freezes inside him, realizing that after five long years the long arm of the crime boss has arrived. Thing is Arnold Benson knows all about Frank’s job, Frank’s wife, Frank’s house, and every little comment he makes seems like a threat.

Tomerlin does a great job of showing how shocked and unmoored Frank feels upon being discovered and how reluctantly he is lured back to the life. Apparently, Hanford (the boss) is convinced that no one can plan a job like Frank, no one has his talents. And, this incredible caper requires Frank’s presence whether he wants to join in or not.

The lure, of course, includes Vikki, the exotic dancer in Hanford’s new club who was Frank’s old flame and who he left behind five years earlier without so much as a goodbye, see you around. Vikki is all manner of sensuality and womanly perfection and Frank does not know from one second to the next whether Vikki has been pining for him all these years or is simply a tool of Hanford’s to seduce him back in. She does not make it easy for Frank either, alternately throwing herself at him and vengefully coming after him with her claws.

While there is nothing too complicated about the plot, it has all the right elements between the impossible caper, the reluctance of Frank to get involved, and the seductive siren call of sweet little Vikki to make it a first-class read.

KILL ME WITH KINDNESS (1959) BY TIMOTHY WINTERBOTHAM WRITING AS J. HARVEY BOND

Winterbotham was primarily a science fiction writer, though he wrote five novels under the pseudonym J. Harvey Bond, including four crime novels, all featuring the crime-investigating efforts of crack reporter Mike Lanson. Murder Isn’t Funny (1958) is the second of the four, followed by Bye Bye, Baby! (1958), Kill Me With Kindness (1959), and If Wishes Were Hearses (1961). All four were published as Ace Doubles with another author’s novel on the flip-side.

Kill Me With Kindness was published as an Ace Double (D-349) the Guilty Bystander by Leslie Frederick Brett (writing as Mike Brett). Like the other novels in this short series, Winterbotham uses a news reporter instead of a private eye. The plot revolves around a blackmail scheme and a do-gooder who is being used for twisted purposes. This plot has the hooker with the heart of gold as one of the main characters, although here Mabel McGuire was “a fourth-rate stripper the cops had hauled in the Block Buster bar on West Tenth.” Her stage name is Lucrezia and she is up to her eyeballs in the blackmail and political schemes and her only hope of getting out of it is a young reporter named Mike Lanson, who is not really sure at first what Mabel is up to with him even when she tells him that likes tall, skinny men and that he would make a good Gary Cooper if he were thirty years older. Mabel also writes poetry, which is often quoted in full in this story, often bawdy limericks about strippers who “bump and grind for the amusement of guys” and their “lecherous eyes.” This shows that there is perhaps more to her than perhaps meets the eye.

The actual blackmail scheme seems a bit complicated, but all you as the reader need to know is that there are hoodlums involved, one of whom operates a gambling club on the hill and has his claws locked into the district attorney’s back. Proost is the do-gooder who the paper is suspicious of. A wealthy couple, the Arkwrights, are involved too. Mrs. Martha Arkwright is small and bosomy and “[s]tacked like everything.” She complains to Lanson that she is bored most of the time and finds the idea of news reporting fascinating as she leaps into his arms and startles him by asking him to make love to her.

The hoods had their base at the Hilltop Club where Brick Lorchetto runs the show. Lanson’s foil at the police is one Lieutenant Clyde Guffy of the Creston Police Department, who seems for most of the novel to be following Lanson around, looking for him to goof up, but is nearly always around in the nick of time.

Kill Me With Kindness, a title which must of come right out of the file list for paperback titles with little relevance to anything else, is a pretty decent read with Lanson standing in for a private eye.

THE QUAKING WIDOW BY ROBERT COLBY

Originally published as Ace D-195 in 1956, Colby’s The Quaking Widow is a top-notch piece of paperback original fiction. Yes, on some ways it is a newer version of The Maltese Falcon with everyone and their grandmother after a secret unopenable box worth millions to someone who knows how to use it and perhaps $200,000 if turned over to the right man. Colby sets all the action on the Florida coast as corporate man Burt Keating recovers from his wife’s tragic death walking like a zombie through each day, that is, until he meets Alicia Shafton, a stunning widow three doors down from Keating’s apartment. What makes this novel tick so well is how tight Colby pulls the tension.

Colby opens this one with the narrator (Keating) telling us that a man get in a lot of trouble if he’s lonely and has time on his hands. He then offers us a typical droll domestic scene, although he does let on that Beverly was not one to turn your head about on the street and that their marriage was not wild or ecstatic, just comfortable and secure. It is almost as if when a big Buick skidded out of control and crushed dear little Beverly against a tree, Keating suddenly can come to life. Not that there was anything wrong with Beverly, she was just comfortable, not exciting, not thrilling, not erotic.

As Keating narrates the story, he took an indefinite leave of absence from his hum-drum corporate life and hum-drum suburban routine and “went to Florida and moved like a zombie through the lush days and nights until [he] met Alicia Shafton.” She, of course, was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen and moved down the breezeway soundless, carefully stepping. “She came toward [him] in the soft-stepping manner of one who passes through a bedroom where someone is asleep, her white, crested sweater softly ballooned with the thrust of her breasts, the white sharkskin skirt tracing the slender hipline and flow of thighs to long tape of stockinged legs.”

You know at this point without reading further that Keating is hopelessly captured by her spell, locked in, full steam ahead, and that, if you have read any of these crime novels before, he had better make tracks and start running because even if she is Florence Nightingale and Joan of Arc all rolled together, she is trouble with a capital T. And that’s before Alicia opens her beautiful mouth and tells Keating that she is “the key to something so valuable that all the dishonest and maybe a few of the honest people in the country would be looking for [her] if they knew. And the ones who do not know would torture or murder me for it.”

Her dear husband, who apparently had lots and lots of secrets, left her an invaluable and impregnable box locked with keys and combinations and ready to explode if tampered with improperly. And everyone wants it. After her first assistant dies in gunfire on the Florida highway and Alicia narrowly escapes, she offers our hero $1,000 to go to the airport and retrieve the box, the holy grail. Maybe he wants the box himself and maybe he wants to keep this woman who has spellbound him, but we all know without even going further that getting anywhere near that box is trouble and that all hell is going to break loose for whoever gets their hands on it.

What Colby does so well here is ratchet up the tension over and over again until you are looking over your own shoulder as you are reading it, hoping no one has the jump on you. He absolutely nails the siren song that Keating falls for and the crazy chases that result. He does not make Keating anyone special or hold him in the highest regard. Keating would quickly cheat on Alicia when given the chance to get information on the box and its mysterious contents. This is one though that is hard to put down. It really is.

THE STEEL NOOSE BY ARNOLD DRAKE

The Steel Noose (1954) by Arnold Drake, originally published by Ace # S-83, a 25-cent book that was not a double novel. It may be his only mystery novel. Drake, however, is best known as a comic book writer and screenwriter, having co-created DC’s Deadman and Doom Patrol and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy. Drake is also known for co-authoring, It Rhymes with Lust, the first graphic novel in 1950. He is known for authoring Batman comics as well as runs of X-Men. In fact, he was so prolific as a comic writer that most bibiliographies of his work do not include The Steel Noose, although Stark House Press which re-issued The Steel Noose as one of its Black Gat books (expected publication April 12, 2024), offers enough of Drake’s biography that there is no question he is the same author.

Boyd McGee is the lead character and rather than be another private eye, Drake posits his hero as a gossip columnist with sources everywhere who prints a daily column. It is set in New York City, more specifically, in and around Greenwich Village, where McGee hangs out at the Flamingo Club, waiting for someone to approach him with one more item to close his column (Boyd’s Nest) for the night. At another club, he meets Maura Page and Calvin Stockton, who tells McGee a tale about a client whose wife is in Reno establishing residence for a divorce and who is looking to fool her into giving up her residency there.

As he arrives home, McGee meets one of his stool pigeons, a former tough guy who now drives a cab, Sam Baniff, who gives him a scoop on a tobacco king, Kingsley Benson, who is stepping around town with a “good-look broad” who “ain’t his wife.” Turns out though she (Karen Lamain) is the wife of Charlie Whipper, a blackmailer, who got run in for trying to knock over a Jersey City bank. It is not until the next day after McGee throws the juicy gossip about Benson and Lamain in this column that he realizes that Benson is Mr. Smith and Stockton is steaming. Not only that but half the hard types in town seem intent on forcing McGee to reveal his source because they all want a piece of Karen Lamain as her husband waltzed into prison only to avoid paying up a portion of the half a million dollars he raised in a blackmail scheme bankrolled by a guy who runs a gambling joint.

The whole scheme sounds a lot more complicated in summary than it does when Drake sets it out in an what feels like a fast-paced action-packed tight little novel that has McGee jumping around between the tough guys who want Lamain and the cops who want to know who is doing all the killings.

Drake can certainly write a terrific crime novel and perhaps if he had not been so successful in the comic book industry he would have left us more of this type of crime novel.