Frenzy of Evil by Henry Kane

Originally published by Dell in 1962 and now republished by Stark House’s Gat Books in May 2018, Kane’s Frenzy of Evil pokes around under the surface of the well-to-do who live in resplendent mansions, people such as Jonathan Joseph Carson (62) and his young bride Dolores Zamora Carson (22). Jonathan Joseph (as he is referred throughout the book) could throw a brilliant party because “his close friends and neighbors were bright, wise, witty, clever, and quick; the older ones shamefully rich and riotously successful; the younger poised upon the glimmering brink of similar riches and similar successes.” And, “what stranger – nay, what intimate could possibly divine that beneath the stylish formal evening attire, beneath all and with only nine people present, there ran a vile and turgid undercurrent of hate, love, guilt, rape, adultery, madness, and murder.”

Jonathan Joseph and George Ross were the Carson and Ross of Carson, Ross, & Ross, a law firm ensconced at 1 Wall Street. They were college mates at Princeton. Ross was the quarterback, plotting the plays and calling the signals, while Jonathan Joseph carried the ball. Ross was the law man, the student, the digger but Carson was “a blazing, ruthless, shrewd and eloquent trial inquisitor.” He was a courtroom star. Carson was a super-luminary in a town of luminaries, “an eccentric, a fiery oddball, an ultra-character in a town of characters.” Outside of business, they were different. Ross married once and produced two children and lived happily ever after. Jonathan Joseph married thrice before he even met Dolores. First to a young, red-lipped, slim-hipped actress. Second, to a large, blonde, curvy specialty dancer. Then, a cold, haughty, society woman who died of cancer. The first two divorced him on grounds of cruelty. Sally the second wife suffered from a total concussion due to a blow to the head and a coma for two days. Once her face was smashed, including five teeth extracted twelve stitches inside the mouth, and a need for plastic restoration to the nose.

Indeed, as his friend Dr. Bernstein noted, Jonathan Joseph “functions in life as a sadist, an extreme sadist.” He is a great lawyer because he crushes the opposition. “He pulverizes the opposition and he revels in it.” Jonathan Joseph was not constantly cruel, but was generally charming, with flare-ups and a particular kind of frenzy during heavy drinking bouts.

And, dear reader, given these circumstances, what would be the situation do you think if word got out that the dazzling Dolores Zamora had taken a lover. What would Jonathan Joseph do and what would the consequences be?

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.

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.

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 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.

Bye Bye, Baby! by Russell R. 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’tFunny (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. Bye Bye, Baby! was published as the “A” side with Bob McKnight’s Murder Mutuel as the flip side novel.

This novel revolves around the newsroom of the Gazette and the big mystery is why editors are getting shot ten years apart. The latest casualty is one Herman Osgood, who, we are told, “was upset one Thursday over the troubles the next day might bring. Whatever their nature, these problems were insignificant in comparison with the fact that he was doomed to miss tomorrow’s breakfast, a possibility that he overlooked.” “Editors eventually die,” the narrative continues, “like all other people, but they aren’t shot as often as you would expect.” The previous casualty was Jeff Myler ten years earlier and Lanson thinks there is a connection and he is bound to find it. Lanson the star of this series of four novels is an investigative crime reporter for the only newspaper company in Creston, one that publishes both the morning and afternoon papers.

Winterbotham offers us a first-hand look inside a newsroom in this series. Here, he actually gets to ascend to the executive suite to meet with Colonel Tanner where one must first pass the executive secretary, Ruth Carpenter, “the prettiest thing on the fourth floor, maybe the prettiest in the building She’s the kind of girl you describe by talking about her figure — forty-eighteen-thirty-eight.” Putting aside the rather narrow waist, we learn that in the days before zero-tolerance in the office, Lanson feels free to pat Ms. Carpenter on the butt and ask her out repeatedly.

The other executive in the suite besides Colonel Tanner is described in the funniest terms as “a sort of dignified weasel, whose main trouble was that he didn’t know what he was doing himself and couldn’t figure out why he did it.” We are told: “Anything new stumped him and decisions drove him crazy.” But don’t worry, Osgood doesn’t last long in this novel. Osgood’s widow, Hope Osgood, is a former flame of Lanson’s who tossed him aside when she saw cash registers opening at Osgood’s gaze. She tells Lanson that she “married Ozzie because [she] was tired of living on corn-pone and hog fat.” She comes to Lanson’s hotel room to seduce him after she has a few drinks, only to be turned away, and to call him hours later to report Osgood’s demise. Of course, this means that both Lanson and Hope are immediately suspects.

The novel has Lanson racing around trying to get the “scoop” before someone else does- difficult since there is no other news outlet in town.

THE THIN MAN BY DASHIELL HAMMETT

Hammett is one of the towering giants of crime fiction. Yet, he only published five full-length novels. At the time, most mysteries could be found in magazines and Hammett published some 82 short stories, many of which eventually made their way into collections.

The Thin Man (1934), originally published in a shorter version in Redbook, is one of Hammett’s only five novels, but strangely enough it is best known as the 1934 movie starring William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Moral Charles, a married couple consisting of a retired Pinkerton Detective and wealthy heiress, who banter and drink and solve mysteries. While the novel did not spawn sequels and was a change in direction in Hammett’s writing, which generally fit into the hard-boiled category, it did result in five movie sequels and a television series on NBC. Hammett wrote screenplays for the first three movies, The Thin Man, After the Thin Man, and Another Thin Man. Audiences apparently delighted in the banter between Nick and Nora and the appearance of their dog Asta.

Nick and Nora are a leisure couple during the great depression. Nick is a retired detective who, upon marrying the heiress, is usually content to manage her investments. The entire story takes place in New York City although Nick and Nora now live in San Francisco. They apparently can take weeks or even months off as they choose, a bit different than the working stiffs in 1934 when this was first published. When not politely teasing each other, Nick and Nora like to hang around speakeasies where they run into Dorothy Wynant, the now grown daughter of a former client, Clyde Wynant, a famous inventor, who Dorothy has not seen since her parent’s divorce. Dorothy is anxious to meet her father, but soon thereafter Wynant’s secretary and possible mistress Julia Wolf is found murdered in her apartment and Wynant disappears to work on his mad inventions. Wolf has several identities and some of them have been involved with criminal elements. Nick eventually solves the case of the thin man – the mystery being the murder of Julia – but not before he hears a whole lot of malarkey about this and that from Dorothy’s mother and her brother. Nick is not necessarily involved in a lot of private eye violence or detecting other than hanging out with wealthy friends and drinking in a speakeasy. He does take a bullet at one point, but does not suffer serious injury.

What is remarkable about the novel is not the mystery which eventually becomes clear when you realize who or what is missing from the story. Rather, what is remarkable is what a change in direction this is for Hammett from his Continental Op stories. It has a lighter, more humorous tint to it and obviously, from the films, found wide appeal.

The Getaway by Jim Thompson

First published in 1958, Thompson’s the Getaway spawned two blockbuster films of the same title, the 1927 Sam Peckinpah version starring Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw, and the remake in 1994 with Kim Basinger and Alec Baldwin.

The novel itself is one of the sleekest Thompson thrillers, a caper story reminiscent of caper novels that Westlake put out under the Richard Stark name and that Lionel White put out. It is obstensibly about a bank robbery, but as the title suggests, it is the getaway that is far more interesting than the actual robbery. That is, until you get to the last part of the novel, and all of a sudden, you realize the getaway has morphed into something twisted, no longer are Doc and Carol on the run, but as has been noted by others, they are actually descending through Dante’s Inferno, falling through one level of hell to the next, being buried alive in claustrophic pits, hidden for days under a pile of manure, and finally to a kingdom from which no one returns, not even the skeletons. Rather than have his characters find paradise at the end of the line, they literally have run so far that all their twisted sins have caught up with them.

There are four robbers involved in the plot. Carter “Doc” McCoy and his younger wife Carol are two. Doc is the brains of the operation. He has it planned to the last tiny detail. Carol is merely helping with one of the getaway cars. Doc is not what he appears. He appears to be an older businessman out about his business, living in a nice hotel that just happens to be across the street from the bank. In reality, he is out on parole and has to pay off the head of the parole board who Carol has been molding while Doc served his prison term. The other two rounding out the “gang” include Rudy Torrento, a mean and violent man. He is compared to a cornered rat or a snake with its head caught beneath a forked stick. He is the heavyweight, the enforcer. He has a pie-shaped head and is hard to hide in a crowd. The other, the kid, the punk, is Jackson.

It is a great play as Rudy and Jackson enter the bank before opening hour dressed as bank examiners with briefcases and homburg hats. The robbery itself is swift, merciless, and brutal. But, the interesting stuff takes place afterwards as Rudy and Doc size each other up, deciding one always meant to take the other out.

The interesting thing that Thompson does in this novel is he gets the reader to root for Doc and Carol and against Rudy, who is painted as a hard-to-beat-down villain who knows no rules, no laws, no morals. And is relentless as all get out. And, is not beyond seducing any civilian woman he can get his hands on no matter the consequences. From an objective perspective, Doc and Carol (but especially Doc) are no better and Doc leaves a trail of corpses in his wake as he escapes cross-country to San Diego and then to Mexico. He has no qualms about who he is leaving lifeless on his trail as long as he gets away with the loot. But, Thompson has us all rooting for Doc and Carol just as we root for Bonnie and Clyde as they weave across the west. There is something about the lone outsider or lone couple against the world that rings true to most readers.

And, like Bonnie and Clyde, Doc and Carol become cornered rats with their backs against the wall and no way out. We can sense their unease as they start running out of who to trust and, often, wonder if they can ever really trust each other.

This is one of Thompson’s gems.

The Grifters by Jim Thompson

In “The Grifters,” Thompson offers a tight story that isn’t filled with unnecessary excesses. It is a story about the angles and “There was one thing about playing the angles. If you played them long enough, you knew the other guy’s as well as you knew your own.” It sets three life-long grifters in a tight triangle facing off against each other, last survivor wins. Along the way in with all the card games, that dice, the punchboards, the twenties, the horse races, and more, Thompson throws in Carol Roberg, who survived Dachau sterilized by what they did to her at age eight and an Oedipal complex with Lilly Dillon offering herself to now-grown up Roy Dillon, anything cause she just had to have that cash.

There are three players in this game and none of the other clowns in this story matter one iota. They are just filler, stand-ins, extras as it were. First, there is Lilly Dillon, from a family of backwoods white trash who married at thirteen and widowed at fourteen, dumping little Roy off with her family until her father showed up with Roy under one arm and a horse whip in the other. Sticking Roy in boarding school, Lilly became increasingly useful as an employee until eventually she became someone who would make layoff bets on longshots around the country, protecting the syndicate’s money. 

She wanted to be something other than mom, to Roy, and he resented her until he turned seventeen when he left. Indeed, as he got into his teens, she softened her voice when she spoke to him and there was a suppressed hunger in her eyes. Roy eventually worked the short con across the country, settling in Los Angeles, where he could use his cover as a traveling salesman while he worked the fools he found everywhere.

Roy’s one distraction was Moira Langtry, with her own background in grifting. She could match him phrase for phrase as they sparred. Strangely, though, she resembled none other than his mother in stature and type. ”You couldn’t say that they actually looked like each other; they were both brunettes about the same size, but there was absolutely no facial resemblance. It was more a type similarity than a personal one. They were both members of the same flock; women who knew just what it took to preserve and enhance their natural attractiveness. Women who were either endowed with what it took, or spared no effort in getting it.”

Thompson pits these three at odds with each other, each pretending they were more on the level that they were, and each afraid of being called out. What makes this novel work so good is how tight Thompson’s writing is and how focused he is on the angles between these three characters, knowing that if you put them together and left them to their own devices, there would be fireworks.

SOUTH OF HEAVEN BY JIM THOMPSON

South of Heaven is one of the lesser known Jim Thompson novels. It has a different feel than many of his other novels. It is not a crazy fever-dream where you can’t figure out if the narrator is pulling a fast one on the reader. Rather, it is a straight-ahead story with the narrator (Tommy Burwell) being a fairly decent guy without even one hint of craziness. So leave the straightjackets at home when you read this one. 

Set amidst the Great Depression in a sparse dry world of Far West Texas, there is a major pipeline to be built an six hundred men “were jungled up while we waited for the pipeline to start.” ”[T]he men had been drifting in here all those weeks – jailbirds, mission stiffs, hoboes – and hardly a man-jack among ’em with more than an empty gut and raggedy-ass clothes he wore.” Tommy’s friend, “Fruit Jar,” “was on canned heat – about half the boes you saw out here were heat-heads. They eventually went blind from drinking it, and while they were getting that way even a very little light drove them crazy.” His other friend is “Four Trey Whitey,” who figures larger in the story than Fruit Jar ever does.

The story is partly drawn from Thompson’s life experiences and all the odd jobs he toiled at. He gives rather full descriptions of the various jobs that men worked on the pipeline and the distinctions between the ordinary working men and the specialists, the engineers. He tells us how badly the men were treated by the companies that were trying to save a buck. 

Four Trey is a bit of a philosopher and tells Tommy that the yellow days are gone and the birds are going to start singing and they are just South of Heaven, so damn close. Tommy is not so confident. He explains that when you are 21 you still believe you’re going to be a famous ballplayer or lawyer and that you’ll marry a beautiful wife and live in a beautiful house, but later on you realize that’s just fantasy. ”I suppose most of us aim a lot higher than the place we actually hit,” he explains.

Tommy’s first job on the pipeline working with Four Trey is working the dyno and he is not so sure he wants to. After all, when he was just a teenager, his grandfather used some dyno to clear a space for a latrine and since you can’t dig in the rock there, you use dynamite and you don’t think much more of a stick of dynamite than you do a stick of candy. He was about a half mile away when he heard the explosion and they didn’t look like people no more.

There’s a romance thrown in with Carol who sets up shop near the pipeline camp and Tommy goes for her in a big way, but can’t help wondering what a good-looking-woman like her was doing following a camp with six hundred men in it, waiting for payday to come around. 

Eventually, the story does work itself around to a caper that Tommy keeps circling around – even when he gets busted for committing a murder- and, unlike most Thompson lead characters, there isn’t any moral ambiguity when it comes to Tommy. This is actually a pretty well-written solid tale, but it is quite a bit different from the usual fare that Thompson dished out for so many years.

The Specialists by Lawrence Block

As Block notes in an afterward added to more recent editions, he originally conceived of the Specialists as a series, developing the characters with backstories, but later decided he did not want to write about them anymore and, thus, created a series consisting of one book. That’s too bad. This could well have continued as a terrific series of caper novels sort of in the tradition of Westlake’s Parker novels. Here, we get a bank robbery caper, but it is sort of an unusual caper in that it is bank operated by a hoodlum who already busted the bank with his own robbery team, collecting the proceeds and then the insurance money. Now, however, he can’t be heard to complain about another robbery, seeing as that would only draw the suspicion of auditors and investigators. As capers go, it, of course, goes wrong in ways that could easily have been predicted, but therein lies the suspense and the excitement. Anyone, after all, can work a 9-5 job, but only a few determined gambling souls who take these kinds of risks.

The joy in this one though comes in reading about the great characters Block develops. Albert Platt is the hoodlum so named and he looks a bit like a gorilla when naked. His hobby is pointing a loaded firearm at call girl’s foreheads and laughing at their reactions. Interestingly, though, she (Donna) is connected to a team of specialists who see the world in terms of good and evil and are now back from the jungles of Laos. In other words, they see their calling as sort of being like Robin Hood at least in terms of robbing the evil rich guys like this hoodlum. They are run by a Colonel Roger Cross (retired) who is sort of like the X-men’s Professor X down to the wheelchair and has everything figured out to the last detail. They were all good men and saw the same jungle whether in Laos or back in the States. ”All over the country were dirty men with money, men the law could never get close to, but once you took their money, it turned clean.” They were hard tough men to deal with, but after Laos that did not impress the team.

The team includes Corporal Edward J. Manso, Murdock, Simmons, Giordano, and Dehn. The Colonel required the men to have clean identities as far as income sources. For Simmons, that meant stamp collecting. Dehn sold encyclopedias. Giordano opened a travel agency in Phoenix. Etc.

This is a well-written novel and one could easily see how Block could have this team (or replacements as necessary) perform caper after caper against the odds and against dirty men who deserved to lose their money. But we have, as Block put it, a series of one. I guess we will survive.

THE TRANSGRESSORS BY JIM THOMPSON

First published in 1961 by Signet, Thompson, in part, reprises his Sheriff Lou Ford theme with his main character here being Deputy Sheriff Tom Lord, who came from a well-to-do old Texas family in fictional Big Sands, Texas, and had been at medical school, but had to return home and lost part of himself. Taking a job as a deputy, Lord had to do what he had to do to fit in and that often meant dumbing-down so no one knew just how smart he was. His story though as he tells it took a turn when one Aaron McBride acting as an agent for money folks swindled him out of the oil under his property. He never forgot and one day kicked McBride all over town until McBride was nothing more than a shadow of a man. 

The story opens some time thereafter as Deputy Lord takes a ride in his convertible with Joyce Lakewood, the local prostitute, who he likes, although she knows he will never marry her, no man would with her past. But Joyce is no fool. She knows Lord is not a rube even though he offers a lot of cornball talk. and sounds like a character in a third-rate movie. But that is part of the story how Lord is hiding inside this cornball outer shell and so little of him pokes out, “blindly, bitterly striking back at the world he could not change.” Lord knows it is too late to leave west Texas, but disliked his existence here. He felt as if he did not have the free will to leave.

One thing leads to another and McBride ends up rather dead. Lord did not mean to kill McBride and really is not sure if he did so. Joyce is almost the only witness and she jokes that they better get married because a woman can’t testify against her own husband and he jokes back that she can’t testify if she’s dead.

What makes the story so interesting is how odd Lord is out here under the far-west Texas sky and how he deals with things such as injecting McBride’s widow with something to knock her out and then dressing her in his mother’s negligee. The whole thing is so outside of normal. Lord might seem crazy to an outsider, but he had his own way of doing things and disarming people.

Thompson has a real knack for creating surprising characters who do not fit in with their outward personas and Deputy Lord is one of them. Thompson also quietly fills this novel with quite a bit of action and drama to be one of his more underrated novels. 

The Body Looks Familiar/ The Late Mrs. Five by Richard Wormser

“The Body Looks Familiar” (Dell, 1958; Orig. publ in a shorter version in Cosmopolitan, Sept. 1957, “The Frame”) and “The Late Mrs. Five” (Gold Medal, 1960) are republished by Stark House Press in a single volume (January 2018) together with a well-written introduction by Bill Crider. Wormser did a tremendous amount of work on Hollywood scripts and was well-known as an award-winning Western writer, was also an excellent crime fiction writer, as aptly demonstrated by these two novels.

“The Body Looks Familiar” is not a mystery, but is a crime fiction story. That is because Wormser lays it all out in the first chapter as to who did it and why. There is no mystery. Rather, the fun is in figuring out who is going to catch the blame and how. Chief Assistant District Attorney David Corday calmly waited in the victim’s apartment, drinking a good scotch and soda, lounging on the satin-covered bed. His purpose is getting revenge on Police Chief Jim Latson. Corday’s wife Elsa left him for Latson and then, spurned by Latson, when Corday would not take her back, ended up selling herself on the streets of Kansas City before ending up dead. Corday knows Latson has a mistress with the non-sexy name Hogan DeLisle who he sees when his wife is in Europe. 

DeLisle “was every man’s dream of physical perfection, in complexion, length of leg, depth of breast and fineness of hair; and she was dressed in a cocktail gown and short silk coat that showed she’d cashed in on what nature had given her.” However, once Corday acted, “[t]he girl’s dress was ruined, her face immediately drained of blood.”

This is DeLisle’s apartment and Corday takes Latson’s gun from him and empties it into the victim, knowing the frame-up is complete. Latson is tied up good. He just left a nightclub with the lady, pays her bills, and the fatal bullets (six of them) are all tied ballistically to his gun. In short, he is wrapped up like a pretty package, career over, and possibly facing the death penalty – or so Corday thinks.

But Corday had not counted on how crafty and clever Latson was. What follows then rather than just a neat frame-up where an innocent man is facing the penalty for a murder he did not commit is a cat-and-mouse game between two sparring opponents. What makes it so damn interesting though is that there is a capital murder one of them should be facing, either the one who did it or the one who is set up for it. But the investigation leads elsewhere and they are left to threaten each other, mutter under their breath, and concoct ways to destroy each other.

This novel is brilliantly crafted and mesmerizing to read. As said earlier, there is no mystery as to what happened and who did it, at least to the omniscient reader, although the public is unaware. 

“The Late Mrs. Five” is set in a small town, not a big city, and this one has the classic crime fiction theme of an innocent guy being blamed for a murder. And, the evidence looks so convincing that the reader can’t help but wonder at times if the reader is being set up perhaps by a false narrator who is leading the reader astray.

You don’t know where in the Midwest this story takes place, just that it is not Kansas or Indiana or Illinois. It is a farming town named Lowndesburg and you get to view through the eyes of farm equipment representative Paul Porter. He gets friendly with the local farm equipment dealer Otto McLane, who is also the town sheriff part-time, and his tall but rather attractive daughter, Andy, but recognizes his ex-wife Edith’s legs as they stroll through town. She was, he recalls, a beautiful, but lousy wife, cold, didn’t care for anything but money.

Porter doesn’t know it yet, but Edith found another sucker, the richest man in town, nicknamed Mr. John Hilliard the Fifth, nicknamed Mr. Five by the town. When Porter pays a visit to Mr. Five, not realizing who Edith married, no one comes to the door (because no one was alive to come to the door) and he goes about his business until Sheriff McLane arrests him for murdering his ex-wife. 

It is as good a set-up as could be. After all, what are the odds that someone else killed his ex-wife who had taken him to the cleaners and then some while he was in town for a few hours. He has motive and opportunity and the whole town is ready to turn out in a lynch mob to hang him. Poor Porter does not quite know what is up when he gets arrested and talks without a lawyer. 

As opposed to the set-up in The Body Looks Familiar, here the idea is that reader doesn’t quite know what to make of the situation. It looks like a set-up to frame Porter or the strangest of coincidences. But then things get even more hincky for him and he manages to look even guiltier – if that’s even possible.

Wormer’s other crime fiction includes: (1)The Man With the Wax Face (1934); (2) The Communist’s Corpse (1935); (3) All’s Fair (1937); (4) Pass Through Manhattan (1940); (5) The Hanging Heiress (1949; reprinted as The Woman Wore Red, 1958); (6) Drive East On 66 (1961); (7) Perfect Pigeon (1962); (8) A Nice Girl Like You (1963): (9) Pan Satyrus (1963); (11) The Takeover (1971); and (12) The Invader (1972).